Fifth Global Conference

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Session 13a: Death, Contagion and Aggression
Chair: Laura Di Prete

Revisiting the Death Drive: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Evil and the
Erotics of Destruction
Susanne Chassay
MFT, Menlo Park, California, USA

With the events of 911, the word «evil» entered the public discourse with an urgency bordering on the counterphobic in the cry to exorcise evil wherever it may be hiding. But it seems that evil, like some obscure object of desire, is everywhere, moving always just beyond our grasp. In our contemporary world where the reach of Western power extends without restraint, the virus of evil, now made synonymous with terrorism, permeates everywhere, as if shadowing the limitless expansion of global power.
The US reign as sole superpower, having vanquished the "evil empire" of communism, has given rise to a kind of "hegemony of the good", a voracious positivity and omnipotence which triumphs over the negative, even over death itself. So that death, wearing its mask of evil, now returns with ubiquitous force, incarnated in the spectral and illusive form of the suicide bomber.
The current pervasive ideology of consumption fuels a narcissistic fantasy of deadly self-sufficiency in which everything is accessible and for sale. Our malls become our temples, in which the presence of surplus becomes a magical negation of scarcity or lack. Image displaces the interiority of imagination, blurring the boundary between fantasy and reality. Desire mutates into demand that preys upon world resources, and lack becomes equated with inferiority and projected onto the disenfranchised, from whose midst the haunting presence of evil and virulent death emerges.
The wound of inscribed absence that defines the contours of psychic space at birth is the opening that generates desire and the possibility of true creative expression. The trajectory of affluence, with guilt and anxiety as its disavowed counterpart, attempts to seal over this opening with the illusion that nothing is missing, that everything is within the realm of omnipotent control. Drawing on Freud's controversial theory of the death drive, this paper will explore evil as an outgrowth of the lure of destructive omnipotence. Using examples from individuals and culture, it will examine the vital significance of the experience of lack and the catastrophic consequences of its denial.

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Antecedents of Evil: Dissociative Contagion and the Collapse of Psychic Space
Karen Peoples
Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, San Francisco, CA

The fall from routine, productive communal life into unthinking, paranoid rationalization can be astonishingly swift and extreme, exposing the frailty of both identity and moral foundation. Such precipitous drops are not the terrain of “monsters,” but often of ordinary citizens who come to sanction random and barbaric acts of evil. In the last three decades, national borders across several continents have become enormously fluid and unstable, inflaming pre-existing “historical trauma” within and between ethnic, religious and national groups, and destabilizing cultural identity. When the forms and structures of ordinary life that anchor a person to the family, the community, a nation begin to waver, the psyche itself begins to slip.
The psychic capacity for ethical reflection tends to rapidly collapse, triggered by a regressive slide into states of mind that are rife with defensive processes of dissociation and dehumanization. In macabre fashion, distorted mental states co-exist alongside the semblance of routinely stable functioning. How does this collapse occur?
Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic studies of extreme destructiveness, this paper traces the trajectory down which the individual psyche -- and the minds of large groups -- slide into the progressive dismantling of the subjectivity of the “other.” As social disturbances erupt, individuals and groups lose their internal cohesion. Traumatic dissociative reactions and manic defenses against them oscillate contagiously, and groups and individuals rapidly regress into primitive modes of functioning. Leaders are then sought who display predictable signs of malignant narcissism, providing an illusion of security or a channel for atavistic eruptions of violence.
These patterns signal the collapse of psychic “space” both individually and culturally. Flexibility of thinking, empathic understanding, tolerance for ambiguity and the capacity to mourn are flattened by an increasingly concrete, simplistic, rationalistic and paranoid search for “answers” -- i.e., the illusion of safety. This paper explores the evolution of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on this loss of psychic space, and on the psychodynamic forces that give rise to some of the modern world's most heinous evils: that of socially sanctioned violence.

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Klein and Melville: Psychic Aggressions
Dan Turner
University of Santa Cruz , California, USA

Melanie Klein's theory of “projective identification” shows the locus of fear and anxiety concerning external threats to be the inner world of the psyche itself. Internal “phantasies” of aggression directed towards the absent object of desire (prototypically understood as the mother's breast) are projected outward, externalized onto a “bad” object. This results in the return persecution of the psyche—and the “good” object with which it identifies—by the psyche's very own libidinally charged aggressive phantasy. “Projective identification” may then cast new light on the discussion of evil, placing it within the realm of intra-psychic phantasy, as opposed to it existing as a mere event or action of an external other. Both the internal inception, as well as the capacity for external manifestation, of evil—understood in its most extreme social incarnation as genocide—is delimited by Kleinian psychoanalytic theory.
To further elucidate and give credence to the value of a practical application of Klein's theory I will provide a Kleinian reading of Herman Melville's short story Benito Cereno. It is in reference to Alford's discussion of Klein's theory of “reparative reason” as a lesson on how to read and interpret texts, that I will engage Melville. This tale recounts the failed attempt of a slave revolt on the San Dominic ship. The brutal reprisals of the slaves serve as a terrifying reminder of the capacity of “damaged victims” to engage in morally reprehensible acts of retributive violence. However, if we engage this story on the level of Kleinian analysis we can understand the violent aggressions of the slaves to be none other than the prosecutorial return of externalized aggressive phantasy. Furthermore, it is the very experiencing of anxiety as the threat of retributive persecution by a damaged victim that makes an evil such as genocide thinkable. The ultimate reality of external threats—real to the extent that they exist as one's own aggressive phantasy—if left unchecked, may result in the rationalized annihilation of the “bad” externalized object as a protective measure of the psyche itself.