Post by Admin on Jul 26, 2021 16:31:22 GMT
“I shall argue that it is possible to be both a liberal believing in a parliamentary world and yet capable of developing Fascist state of mind." Bollas's compelling paper on Fascist states of mind, and how they are much closer to home than we might expect:
"Like Wilhelm Reich and Hannah Arendt, I shall argue that there is a Fascist in each of us and that there is indeed a highly identifiable psychic profile for this personal state. I term it the Fascist state of mind, by playing on the double meaning of the word ‘state’.
Kleinian psychoanalysts frequently refer in the literature to the ‘killing off’ of those parts of the self, thereby emphasising the factor of murder as an ordinary feature of intrapsychic life. Rosenfeld describes an aggressive aspect of the narcissistic self state achieve by ‘killing their loving dependent self and identifying themselves almost entirely with the destructive narcissistic parts of the self which provides them with a sense of superiority and self admiration’.
The core element in the Fascist state of mind (in the individual or the group) is the presence of an ideology that maintains its certainty through the operation of specific mental mechanisms aimed at eliminating all opposition.
To achieve such totality, the mind (or group) can entertain no doubt.
Doubt, uncertainty, self-interrogation, are equivalent to weakness and must be expelled from the mind or maintain ideological certainty.
Doubts and counter-views are expelled, and the mind ceases to be complex, achieving a simplicity held together initially by bindings around the signs of the ideology (political slogans, ideological maxims, material icons such as the flag etc).
To accomplish this transfer, the Fascist mind transforms a human other into a disposable nonentity, a bizarre mirror transference of what has already occurred in the Fascist’s self experience. As the negation of the qualities of the other [e.g., doubt, scepticism, opposition] are destroyed via the annihilation of the other, a delusional grandiosity forms in the Fascistically stated mind.
It is at this point that the process of annihilation is idealised in order to supply the Fascist mind with the qualities essential to delusional narcissism. Mental contents are now regarded as contaminates, and the Fascist mind idealises the process of purging itself of what it has contained. The cleansing of the self suggests the possible birth of a new, forever empty self to be born with no contact with others, with no past (which is severed), and with a future entirely of its own creation." - Christopher Bollas
Bollas is particularly acute in noting the language that routinely accompanies and helps define these fascistic states of mind, often focussing on issues of pollution and purity - both in terms of the content of the state of mind and its form - and its need to eradicate or cleanse its mind of any doubting or dissenting voices. We see this dynamic in so many contemporary discussions, from cancel culture to cultural fixations with notions of purity - whether ‘pure science’, ‘pure objectivity’, or ‘pure Christianity’, he notes. “Such a state of mind extols the virtue of being pure, uncontaminated because nothing is taken into the self ... a mind that idealises itself as a cleaning process”. It is the psychic equivalent perhaps of the Mexican wall. The 'othering' of fascism is often, he disturbingly suggests, itself a contemporary fascist manoeuvre - a closing down of debate and engagement, in the pursuit of a narcissistic “sense of superiority and self admiration.”
www.ccc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2020-12/Christopher%20Bollas%2C%20The%20Fascist%20State%20of%20Mind_0.pdf
"Like Wilhelm Reich and Hannah Arendt, I shall argue that there is a Fascist in each of us and that there is indeed a highly identifiable psychic profile for this personal state. I term it the Fascist state of mind, by playing on the double meaning of the word ‘state’.
Kleinian psychoanalysts frequently refer in the literature to the ‘killing off’ of those parts of the self, thereby emphasising the factor of murder as an ordinary feature of intrapsychic life. Rosenfeld describes an aggressive aspect of the narcissistic self state achieve by ‘killing their loving dependent self and identifying themselves almost entirely with the destructive narcissistic parts of the self which provides them with a sense of superiority and self admiration’.
The core element in the Fascist state of mind (in the individual or the group) is the presence of an ideology that maintains its certainty through the operation of specific mental mechanisms aimed at eliminating all opposition.
To achieve such totality, the mind (or group) can entertain no doubt.
Doubt, uncertainty, self-interrogation, are equivalent to weakness and must be expelled from the mind or maintain ideological certainty.
Doubts and counter-views are expelled, and the mind ceases to be complex, achieving a simplicity held together initially by bindings around the signs of the ideology (political slogans, ideological maxims, material icons such as the flag etc).
To accomplish this transfer, the Fascist mind transforms a human other into a disposable nonentity, a bizarre mirror transference of what has already occurred in the Fascist’s self experience. As the negation of the qualities of the other [e.g., doubt, scepticism, opposition] are destroyed via the annihilation of the other, a delusional grandiosity forms in the Fascistically stated mind.
It is at this point that the process of annihilation is idealised in order to supply the Fascist mind with the qualities essential to delusional narcissism. Mental contents are now regarded as contaminates, and the Fascist mind idealises the process of purging itself of what it has contained. The cleansing of the self suggests the possible birth of a new, forever empty self to be born with no contact with others, with no past (which is severed), and with a future entirely of its own creation." - Christopher Bollas
Bollas is particularly acute in noting the language that routinely accompanies and helps define these fascistic states of mind, often focussing on issues of pollution and purity - both in terms of the content of the state of mind and its form - and its need to eradicate or cleanse its mind of any doubting or dissenting voices. We see this dynamic in so many contemporary discussions, from cancel culture to cultural fixations with notions of purity - whether ‘pure science’, ‘pure objectivity’, or ‘pure Christianity’, he notes. “Such a state of mind extols the virtue of being pure, uncontaminated because nothing is taken into the self ... a mind that idealises itself as a cleaning process”. It is the psychic equivalent perhaps of the Mexican wall. The 'othering' of fascism is often, he disturbingly suggests, itself a contemporary fascist manoeuvre - a closing down of debate and engagement, in the pursuit of a narcissistic “sense of superiority and self admiration.”
www.ccc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2020-12/Christopher%20Bollas%2C%20The%20Fascist%20State%20of%20Mind_0.pdf