Abstract
Political violence is a manifestation of the human disposition towards in-group cooperation for out-group conflict. We can best understand this disposition by combining a Darwinian account of group conflict with psychoanalytic group psychology as developed by Freud and Bion. In this perspective we can see the disposition towards group conflict as having evolved together with the mechanisms of identification and projection – mechanisms that we can also see as fostering this disposition, with identification supporting in-group cooperation and projection supporting out-group conflict. We thus see group conflict as a social manifestation of the individual emotional conflicts that are expressed in dreams and phantasy, that give rise to mental disorder, and from which we seek relief in the identifications and projections that sustain human group activity.
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Notes
- 1.
For further discussion of confirmation see Hopkins (2015) on psychoanalysis, evolution, attachment, and neuroscience, and Hopkins (2016) on the integration of Freudian and free energy neuroscience in the complexity theory of dreaming and mental disorder. Versions of these articles are available at www.jimhopkins.org
- 2.
This holistic interpretive integration of the data of free association is discussed in some detail in Hopkins (1999). Although other forms of investigation of the emotional functions of dreaming increasingly acknowledge the evidential importance of the dreamer’s associations and memories (e.g. Malinowski and Horton 2015), no mode of study apart from psychoanalysis has taken them so thoroughly into account. If as argued below dreaming functions as part of the emotional synthesis of long-term memory, then progress in understanding both dreaming and memory will partly depend upon other disciplines following this lead.
- 3.
While still a medical student Freud was invited by the celebrated physiologist Ernst Brücke to conduct neurological research in his laboratory. Prior to practicing as a psychiatrist he published over 100 papers, as well as monographs, on disorders of movement and childhood cerebral palsy that established him as an expert in these fields.
- 4.
Approachable introductions to this new paradigm – described variously as predictive coding, predictive processing, the predictive brain, and the predictive mind – now include books by Hohwy (2013) and Clark (2016), as well as a recent collection of essays edited by Metzinger and Weise (2017). The relation to psychoanalysis is discussed in detail in Hopkins (2016; see also 2012, 2015, 2018a, b).
- 5.
LeDoux (2015) describes these systems are as ‘survival circuits’ and other investigators have given them other names. The most detailed recent delineation is Panksepp’s (1998), which has been updated for therapists and general readers in Bivens and Panksepp (2011). Damasio and Carvalho (2013) give a succinct and informative introduction to interoception and emotion, but without focus on infancy or the prototype systems. Alcaro and Panksepp (2011) describe the innately conflicting patterns of the prototype systems, and Alcaro et al. (2017) relate them to the self as described by Jung and Freud.
- 6.
This is the neurological underpinning of the dialectic that Bion (1963, p. 30) describes phenomenologically as follows:
The infant suffers pangs of hunger and feels it’s dying; racked by guilt and anxiety and impelled by greed, it messes itself and cries. The mother picks it up, feeds it and comforts it and eventually the infant sleeps. In forming the model to represent the feelings of the infant, we have the following version: the infant, filled with painful lumps of faeces, guilt, fears of impending death, chunks of greed, meanness and urine, evacuated these bad objects into the breast that is not there. As it does so, the good object turns the no-breast (mouth) into a breast, the faeces and urine into milk, the fears of impending death and anxiety into validity and confidence, the greed and meanness into feelings of love and generosity; and the infant sucks in its bad property, now translated into goodness, back again.
- 7.
The phrase is Hegel’s, but the mechanisms of identification and projection give it a deeper and more empirical meaning, which fills out Hegel’s framework. As can be inferred below, something like Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is instantiated in human infancy, with infants and parents in both roles, and crucially mediated by mutual recognition.
- 8.
As noted in Hopkins (2015), the efforts to alienate parental affections that seem visible in troubled sleep seem to be continued in forms of Oedipal behaviour discernible in insecure attachment, as well as clinical examples like the one briefly considered below.
- 9.
The main developments occur in and between the ‘what’ and ‘where’ object-processing pathways (Wilcox and Biondi 2015), with an early representation of an identified object as lasting while unobserved perhaps signaled at six months by gamma wave activation in the right temporal cortex (Kaufman et al. 2005; see also Leung et al. 2017).
This is consistent with an experimental tradition that at first focused on the mother as object of perception, but later concentrated on other (emotionally less significant) objects. Thus Bower (1977) reported an experiment with mirrors (discussed in Hopkins 1987) that cohered with Klein’s dating of the depressive position.
If one presents the infant with multiple images of its mother – say three ‘mothers’ – the infant of less than five months is not disturbed at all but will in fact interact with all three ‘mothers’ in turn. If the setup provides one mother and two strangers, the infant will preferentially interact with its mother and still show no signs of disturbance. However, past the age of five months (after the coordination of place and movement) the sight of three ‘mothers’ becomes very disturbing to the infant. At this same age a setup of one mother and two strangers has no effect. I would contend that this in fact shows that the young infant (less than five months old) thinks it has a multiplicity of mothers, whereas the older infant knows it has only one. (p. 217)
Although this experiment has not been repeated in contemporary conditions, it was consistent with experiments on occlusion (e.g. Baillargeon et al. 1985; Wilcox 1999) and eye-tracking (Johnson et al. 2003) done afterwards. Later work (Baillargeon et al. 2012) has clarified how the infant initially uses parameters of shape and then others as the ability to individuate and track objects is refined.
- 10.
As Klein (1952/1972, p. 54) writes: ‘There are in fact very few people in the young infant’s life, but he feels them to be a multitude of objects because they appear to him in different aspects. … The picture of the parents in the patient’s mind has in varying degrees undergone distortion through the infantile processes of projection and idealization, and has often retained much of its phantastic nature.’
- 11.
Thus as reported in (Campos et al. 1983), a three-month infant made angry by someone using her hand to impede movement will express anger at the impeding hand. By contrast a seven-month infant made angry in the same way expresses anger not at the hand, but at the face. Apparently at three months the infant has not, whereas by seven months it has, integrated episodic experiences with the mother into an image of an anatomically whole and enduring person. Also by seven months, as reported by Stenberg et al. (1983) this infant’s anger is regulated by experience of the persons she knows. If the infant is annoyed twice by mother, or again twice by a stranger, the infant is angry both times. But an infant annoyed first by a stranger and then by mother is especially angry, indicating that the infant’s expectation that mother will comfort her after intrusions by a stranger has been betrayed.
- 12.
Hence also the lethal struggles for disputed territory – for example for the ‘mother country’ – that we see in in-group cooperation for out-group conflict have mirroring precursors in the evolutionarily structured and unconsciously motivated strategies for control of the mother’s body that are part of parent-offspring conflict, sibling rivalry, and sexual conflict. In these, as illustrated below, the mother’s body is often phantasied as the locus of a struggle for mastery between the infant or the infant-mother couple on the one hand and the father and siblings on the other.
- 13.
This phantasy used the metaphor of heat, as described in Hopkins (2002), to express Richard’s infantile rage and lust (and in this it was continuous with his phantasy of scalding the tramp in the bedroom). Richard seems here to have been using ‘sun’ as a switch-word for ‘son.’ Later he did the same, in drawing a picture of himself as the submarine Sunfish, whose periscope was poking into a ship of which he said with surprise ‘But that is Mummy.’
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Hopkins, J. (2018). Darwin, Freud, and Group Conflict. In: Krüger, S., Figlio, K., Richards, B. (eds) Fomenting Political Violence. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_11
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