Abstract
Fundamentalism is typically characterised by an absolute stance, based on a simplification and homogenisation of beliefs, a strident rejection of evidence that does not support these beliefs, a literalism in the understanding of texts taken to be sacred (whether religious or not) and the branding of others as enemies if they do not adhere to the same beliefs. One major consequence of this absolutist mentality is the rapid move to action, which can be physical or verbal and otherwise demonstrative. In any event, actions assault others who oppose the fundamentalist. These opponents are to be punished and forced to confirm to the absolutism of the fundamentalists, who press any wavering in their own positions into the (now) enemy by projective identification. This chapter takes up an additional, elemental current beneath these features of fundamentalism. It argues that a distortion of reality sets the scene for the creation of an enemy against which action is taken with a kind of logical necessity; indeed, the action is part of this creation. This tight, ‘rational’ connection between belief and action makes it difficult to understand fundamentalist motivation, to enter into dialogue with it and to achieve any reconciliation. It is appropriate to call it delusional. Drawing this common theme from two very different cases – an attack on the home of a paediatrician and Nazi-informed antisemitism – supports this thesis.
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Notes
- 1.
Fundamentalism is better embedded in language, but as an ‘ism,’ it runs easily into abstraction and expansion beyond any representational function.
- 2.
I compare the feeling of certainty in finding the truth empirically and with conceptual clarity, as opposed to a certainty that is asserted in place of evidence and the search for truth, in Figlio (2017b). In that paper, I am concerned with the role of doubt in facilitating a search for truth and an absence of doubt in the claim of certainty.
- 3.
Freud (1910, p. 173) points out that the Oedipus complex is a phantasy of fulfilling the wish, not just to replace father as mother’s sexual partner, but father himself. In my view, the neurotic conflict with father in the Oedipus complex covers the psychotic, omnipotent phantasy of self-creation, in which the mother is only the vehicle (Figlio 2017a, pp. 83–87).
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- 5.
- 6.
In my argument, the Volksgemeinschaft also stoked an idealisation of a people ‘working towards the Führer’ (Kershaw 1999), drawn towards merger with the group ego ideal in a delusional phantasy of oneness. It should be understood, along with its historical embeddedness, as psychotic: not marginalised as a psychopathy with no relevance to historical scholarship, but as a mechanism of social and individual existence in a created alternative to external, perceptual reality: a factitious reality in which ‘empirical’ data, such as small differences, are delusionally fabricated in order to annihilate them in a continuous renovation of the Volksgemeinschaft.
- 7.
There has been substantial criticism of Freud’s model of the nascent ego, in its state of primary narcissism. I will not review this literature here. I will only note that, from the ego’s ‘point of view,’ such a state is not only credible, it is the starting point of a model of psychic functioning, and it is the model I am adopting. As an anchor point in this debate, one might consider Winnicott’s (1956) view of a not-yet-present ego, not yet able to experience an external reality that therefore is an impingement that destroys the sense of continuity of the ego.
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Figlio, K. (2018). Fundamentalism and the Delusional Creation of an Enemy. 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_8
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