E-Book Overview
The analytic literature has heretofore been silent about the issues inherent in the nuclear threat. As a groundbreaking exploration of new psychological terrain, Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat will function as a source book for what, it is hoped, will be the continuing effort of analysts and other mental health professionals to explore and engage in-depth nuclear issues. This volume provides panoramic coverage of the dynamic and clinical considerations that follow from life in the nuclear age. Of special interest are chapters deling with the developmental consequences of the nuclear threat in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and those exploring the technical issues raised by the occurrence in analytic and psychotherapeutic hours of material related to the nuclear threat. Additional chapters bring a psychoanalytic perspective to bear on such issues as the need to have enemies; silence as the "real crime"; love, work, and survival in the nuclear age; the relationship of the nuclear threat to issues of "mourning and melancholia"; apocalyptic fantasies; the paranoid process; considerations of the possible impact of gender on the nuclear threat; and the application of psychoanalytic thinking to nuclear arms strategy. Finally, the volume includes the first case report in the English language - albeit a brief psychotherapy - involving the treatment of a Hiroshima survivor. A noteworthy event in psychoanalytic publishing, Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat betokens analytic engagement with the most pressing political and moral issue of our time, a cultivating of Freud's "soft voice of the intellect" in an area where it is desperately needed.
E-Book Content
PSYCHOANALYSIS and the NUCLEAR THREAT Clinical and Theoretical Studies
PSYCHOANALYSIS and the NUCLEAR THREAT Clinical and Theoretical Studies
Editors Howard B. Levine Daniel Jacobs Lowell J. Rubin
THE ANALYTIC PRESS 1988
Hillsdale, NJ
Hove and London
Copyright © 1988 by The Analytic Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. The Analytic Press. Distributed solely by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 365 Broadway Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642 Set in Garamond type by BookMasters, Ashland, OH Printed in the United States of America by Braun-Brumfield, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Psychoanalysis and the nuclear threat: clinical and theoretical studies / edited by Howard B. Levine, Daniel Jacobs, Lowell Rubin. Includes bibliography and indexes. ISBN 0-88163-062-4 1. Nuclear warfare--Psychological aspects. 2. Psychoanalysis. I. Levine, Howard B. II. Jacobs, Daniel. III. Rubin, Lowell. U263.P77 1988 355' .0217'0 19-tate as having positive and negative motives. "There is an element which is connected with love of home and family" (p.219). But he says later: No other organization arouses anything like the loyalty aroused by the national state. And the chief activity of the state is the preparation for
2.
SILENCE IS THE REAL CRIME
41
large-scale homicide. It is loyalty to this organization for death that causes man to endure the totalitarian state and to risk the destruction of home and children and our whole civilization {pp. 219-220}.
Groups also can be, and usually are, narcissistic, self-idealizing, and paranoid in relation to other groups. Conflict within the group and guilt about aggression can be dealt with by projection onto an outside group. In our private lives we have to contend with a superego that puts a check on destructiveness. If we invest the individual superego in a joint group superego, we can, without apparent guilt, perpetrate horrors th