"Richard Koenigsberg's ideas on human violence and destructiveness are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. His ideas cut through conventional notions about culture and war, enabling us to understand human institutions in utterly new ways." —Professor Ruth Stein, New York University, author of For Love of the Father

Table of Contents Introduction

 

Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 68
Price: Paperback: $15.95
Trim Size: 6 X 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism

Richard A. Koenigsberg

Why do people identify so profoundly with nations? This monograph explores the sources of the power of the ideology of nationalism, and its relationship to racism, revolution and totalitarianism. How may we account for the persistence of a belief system that demonizes "the other" and leads to profound forms of violence? Koenigsberg shows how nationalism articulates shared fantasies performed on the stage of society.

Table of Contents
  1. The Country, the Mother and Infantile Narcissism
    1. Introduction
    2. The Country as Suffering Mother
    3. The Country as Omnipotent Mother
    4. The Country as a Projection of Infantile Narcissism
  2. The Country as a Living Organism
    1. Racism and Revolution as a Wish to Eliminate the "Disease" from Within the Body of the Nation
    2. The Disease Within the Nation as a Projection of Malignant Internal Objects
  3. Revolution as a Struggle against Passivity
    1. The Struggle Against Passivity: Hitler
    2. The Struggle Against Passivity: Lenin
    3. The Struggle Against Passivity: Aurobindo
  4. The Social Psychology of Nationalism
    1. The "National Community"
    2. Totalitarianism
    3. The Renunciation of Personal Gratification in the Name of a Devotion to the Collectivity

Praise for The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism:

“This is a truly bold and provocative treatise. The nation is seen as the symbolic embodiment of a communal ego, cleansed of the ‘badness’ introduced by a particular class of persons within a nation’s boundaries whose ‘removal’ by whatever means is easily rationalized if goodness is to be restored. The interpretations are intriguing and illuminating, the scholarship creative and careful. Koenigsberg provides a provocative account of the profound interplay of exceptional political commitments and psychopathology.” —Dan B. Thomas, Professor of Political Science in the journal Political Psychology