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Thank you for your kind invitation to speak to you here. What I
am presenting today is the third in a series of papers which all
look at group leadership and its attendant conflicts, both in
the realms of social, political and economic life as well as in
the specific setting of our clinical work:
To begin with, I shall recapitulate and
review my thoughts up till now. In a talk which I gave in London
on the ‘Aesthetics of the Political and….The Wider Scope of
Group Analysis” as a Foulkes Lecture in the year 2000, I
touched on the question of the quality of good leadership. I
will quote the passage:
“We are reminded of Plato’s dialogue The
Statesman in which the “Eleatic Stranger” argues that true
or ideal statesmanship is the wise judgment of each particular
situation and therefore transcends all common law. If true
statesmanship rejects law, he adds, then it is neither a craft
nor a technique, since these depend on commonly accepted laws.
The Stranger points out that the ideal city does not exist,
nevertheless the true statesman is not concerned with
legislating for the actual city - the search is on for a
genuine statesman who is devoted to a kind of truth-seeking
wisdom independent of the current affairs of the Polis.”
This combination of requirements:
the wise judgment of each particular situation with the devotion
to a kind of truth-seeking wisdom independent of current
affairs, is one which we would wish equally to apply to
ourselves in our clinical work with groups as to the President
of the USA and his work with his group, or groups, over there.
The three following papers I
wrote on this topic were:
1)
‘Tyrannophobia – Group Leadership and the Crisis of
Democracy’, a lecture in Melbourne, Australia in January 2001,
shortly after the previous Bush – Al Gore US elections had been
fought. I will come to summarize briefly the chief points I was
trying to make there about the inherent crisis in democratic
systems, how it affects leadership qualities and how leadership
can try to manage it.
2)
The second paper was ‘The Return of the Warlords’, which
I read in Istanbul, Turkey, in August 2003, in the aftermath of
the Iraq war. One of my chief concerns there was to bring in the
question of violent conflict and to correlate the political and
economic consequences of the fall of the Taliban-regime in
Afghanistan, the fall of Saddam in Iraq, and the fall of the
communist system in Russia and E. Europe – consequences such as
increased violence, splitting processes, mafia-like procedures
often using a tribal basis – with my own experiences with
leadership problems in experiential didactic groups in very
differing societies. I am talking about training groups here,
especially about large group and institutional phenomena.
3)
The third is today’s lecture, or ‘Further Thoughts’ as
the title implies. But the title, or subtitle, should better
read: “The Mass Media as a Virtual Group Phantasma”. Here I want
to discuss how the way in which we read the media might
influence our view on how we see and conduct our groups, what
basic assumptions, shared unconscious group phantasies, modes of
publication, alternative currents and channels we may detect
there, and to consider our own role in ‘mediating the media’ in
the group, making interpretations which might be of help.
But first let me summarize my
first two papers. In ‘Tyrannophobia’ I started out from Th.
Hobbes’ invention of this term in his book Leviathan,
where he criticizes Democracy – calling on Aristotle, a
philosopher to a Royal Court, as his testimony – because it
breeds Tyranny, since it allows unscrupulous demagogues to sway
the will of the people and seize absolute power. How far-sighted
! In Hobbes’ view, and the British and the Dutch agree till
today on this point, legitimate hereditary Monarchies are of
course a permanent protection against such abuse of the highest
power.
Here I should add that Vienna,
the city of Freud, is a special case, still feeling sick 90
years after an overdose of Imperialism that led blindly into the
1st World War. Together with Germany, Austria used
the defeat to kick out their ruling houses and establish shaky
democracies, which in turn bred tyranny and led to the 2nd
World War. Nevertheless, in the democratic period between the
two wars, Germany and Austria produced not only dictators and
tyrants, but also some remarkable statesmen, such as Walther
Rathenau or Otto Bauer.
So there is a pattern suggested
here of inherent weakness in democracy, a form of government
which was originally created in Athens in order to eliminate the
rule of tyrants and yet constantly lives in fear of them, even
produces them, since this unconscious fear is always connected
to a wish. This is why I compare Tyrannophobia with Homophobia.
If I have a basic distrust of homosexuals, I probably can’t
admit that I’m one myself, inside. If I am obsessed with my
distrust of tyrants, maybe it is because I fear that I wish
inside that I might need one, or need to be one.
The Athenians progressed from
oligarchies to tyranny. The tyrant Peisistratos was a farsighted
and respected ruler, whose time in power was often later looked
on as a ‘golden age’. When democracy was finally established, it
too led to a golden age. Perikles, a democratically elected
governor, embodied a wisdom and benevolence beyond that of
Peisistratos. It is worth noting that both did a lot for public
works. There is a connection here between Tyranny and Democracy,
they are both interested in public works, for different reasons
maybe (such as why Hitler built the ‘autobahn’). But Oligarchies
– the technocratic and commercial corporate oligarchies of today
– have no interest at all in public works, except to privatize
them and make money out of them.
The Athenian democracy did not
collapse under outside attack, but due to internal intrigues, to
the duplicities of Alcibiades, and to the resurgence of the
oligarchies, it was sundered from within. Then at last it fell
to Sparta, which proved victorious in the end. Sparta,
intriguingly, had a system of dual kingship, and the Romans
later adopted a system of two Consuls who stood above the
assembly and the senate, which later paved the way to Empire. I
sometimes wonder whether for certain psychotherapeutic training
institutes some kind of traditionalized dual king- or queenship
might not be a better system of government than too much
democracy, which often ends in envy, intrigue and the
over-influence of certain oligarchies.
So we shall try to delineate
further the crisis innate in democracy:
As Freud attempted to show in
Totem and Taboo, his psychoanalytic myth on the origins of
democracy and the development of the moral sense in society,
envy must break out among the primal horde of brothers, once the
tyrant king has been dethroned, castrated and eaten in a
ceremonial feast. The authority of the dead tyrant, needed to
prevent rampant sibling rivalry from now turning into
internecine war, is duly reinstated as a taboo, the precursor of
a common rule of law which all agree to respect. Envy is a
deadly force, and thus tyrannophobia will lead to the democratic
election, on the whole, of weak leaders, whom their rivals do
not have to envy too much or can more easily manipulate to their
own ends. Only in times when the whole group seems threatened
will it elect a stronger-willed leader, for better or for worse.
Envy and rivalry always tend to lead back to the rule of
oligarchies, sometimes more or less invisible ones, jockeying
for power and contributing to further weakening of the leader.
In the main, all this can often be containable within the checks
and balances of a legal constitution that is generally accepted.
Sometimes however a gifted demagogue can use a crisis to ally
himself with special interest groups and make a populist bid for
power ‘to save the people’s freedom from the power of the
mysterious oligarchies’ and we are on the road to tyranny and
fascism again.
Further problems may occur in
weakened democracies, which can contribute to this state of
affairs. The voting systems may be suspect, open to manipulation
and ultimately too self-contradictory to satisfy public opinion.
Thus in the previous US elections, Bush had half a million less
of the people’s votes than Gore, but because of highly dubious
electoral practices in the swing state of Florida governed by
his brother, the Supreme Court was involved to decide which
votes, if at all, deserved to be recounted. It finally came up
with a questionable decision that left Bush as victor, thus
serving to destabilize a common belief in the fundamental
neutrality of the courts, of the judiciary framework
I have also tried to demonstrate
how the populist demagogue Jörg Haider in Austria inverts, or
perverts, the workings of democracy, by declaring that the
official constitutional legalities are themselves instruments of
tyrannical repression and posing as a kind of Robin Hood rebel,
who will depose the mighty and give free hand-outs to all who
are on his side. One of the chief tasks and achievements of his
right-wing Freedom Party was to attack and directly influence
and injure the impartiality of the judicial system and the
constitutional framework of government. Haider too would have a
‘Patriot Act’ passed, if he could.
These are attacks on the
democratic setting. They are comparable in our clinical work to
situations where the group therapy setting is threatened by
outside forces, such as financial pressures, managed care
systems or hospital authorities, or by internal factionalism,
splitting, subgrouping, and acting out in ‘borderline’ fashion
in regard to the setting. This is where we need to define and
maintain the borders and parameters of the setting, where good
governance means protecting the group setting from external or
internal attack, by adequately patrolling the boundaries.
One task of democratic leadership
might be to manage the social dialectics of Envy in a skilful
enough fashion, so that a gradual redistribution of wealth might
take place through common activity, such as in public works.
Pericles’ monumental building and rebuilding programmes in the
Athens of his day not only provided sufficient employment but
involved all the different social classes in the same projects.
In my second paper, ‘The Return
of the Warlords,’ I discussed problems of subgroup violence
becoming deeply entrenched in the unconscious matrix in a
trans-generational mode, always ready to surface. When combined
with territorialism it can lead to ‘ethnic cleansing’ or even
genocide. The warlords have reappeared in Afghanistan, and may
be seen to emerge in Iraq, or any place where a strong
tyrannical central government has been deposed from outside. In
E. Europe the fall of communism in the Soviet states due to
internal and external pressure created a power vacuum which was
quickly filled by mafia-style oligarchs and their clans, out
only to line their own pockets.
“The Return of The Warlords”,
this quasi-mythological trope of social fragmentation anxieties,
is nowhere stronger than in the vast state of China. To maintain
the balance between central government, delegated authorities,
nomadic border tribesmen, was always the chief concern of
Chinese civilization, probably the oldest continuously
developing one in the world. In Classical Chinese antiquity the
time of the ‘Warring States’ is remembered by historians as
anarchy, terror, flight and disorder. A firm central government
with a clear hierarchical system was essential for the stability
of the country, for its culture to flourish. Permanent
vigilance was required in patrolling the borders and dealing
with internal insurgencies and feudal vendettas.
Ang Lee’s extraordinary film
‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ appears on its surface to be a
magical fairy-tale of lovers and warriors with unfathomable
skills, flying up walls and rooftops and performing intricately
choreographed erotic scenes of attempted or successful murder.
The almost ‘trashy’ use of special effects and popular
mythopoeisis masks an underlying preoccupation with the question
of good governance. We are shown exceptionally free-spirited
individuals who can display their heroic talents at best in
allegiance to a central legal authority which can guarantee some
kind of reliable justice. The main trouble is rooted in the
stifling arrogance and deviousness of provincial governors and
their retinues, with their lack of allegiance to the central
authority. And at the other end of the spectrum there are
charismatic wild nomadic tribes from the wastes of Sinkiang, in
a romantic mode of freedom and ethnic difference, which also
have to be dealt with. Ang Lee is making observations not only
about the deep conflicts in Chinese society today as in the
past, which the central government has always had to deal with,
but also on our own inner romantic resistances to an all too
sober and ordered world. As the Austrian writer Robert Musil put
it: “Jede Ordnung geht irgendwann in Totschlag über” – every
system of order ultimately turns into manslaughter.
There is an inherent social
conflict in the equal demands for freedom and justice, which
democracy, or any other social system, needs to address. Freedom
and Justice limit each other, make demands on each other. A
democracy that thinks only to bring us freedom, will bring us
more injustice. A democracy that purports to bring us to
justice, will end up curtailing our liberties. This is a
paradoxical element which requires of the democratic leader the
use of skilful means.
I looked at how all this material
cropped up in my work with small and large training groups for
candidates abroad, in different cultures and social systems.
This work was also helping to construct local training
institutes in the countries involved, so there were always real
issues of future power and influence in these institutes, who
would take over when the foreign investors, governors and
trainer-teachers in such ‘joint ventures’ finally returned home
and the new institute got down to work ? Would there be good
leadership ? Would the usual oligarchies start carving out their
territories ? Could the mafia, or some dictator, suddenly take
over the whole thing ? These were important phantasies to deal
with, before the reality set in.
In general it becomes visible how
much of this is a defence against mourning what has gone, what
has been lost, first and foremost of course always a Loss of
Innocence. This refusal to mourn, to do what Freud called the ‘Trauerarbeit’,
the mourning process, is known to us at home from the time after
World War II. Alexander Mitscherlich wrote a book called ‘Die
Unfähigkeit zu Trauern”, about the inability to mourn after the
death of the tyrant. One cannot even begin to mourn the victims
of the tyranny, because of difficulty in mourning the death of
the tyrant-father as an idealized phantasma. The Germans could
not mourn the Jews because they were unable to mourn their own
idealization of Hitler and its final collapse. We might think of
the creation of the RAF terrorist groups in the Germany of the
70s as a consequence. Since the mourning process is one of re-membering,
it must try to put back together extremely violent and
destructive events which can be acted out in a repetition
compulsion and throw the whole process (of confrontation,
containment, reflection) out of function and back to the
beginning again.
In my experience up to now,
whenever the in-fighting of professional politics, lobbies,
power-bids in psychotherapy institutes starts to get the upper
hand, there is always a refusal to mourn, to share a doubtful,
often heavily-conflicted past history with one another and to
relinquish one’s idealizations, of oneself and of others, to
look for the common goal. Self-idealization and the idealization
of others is what, above all, is so painful to give up in the
mourning process, which means looking at all our self-deceits
and failures of judgment.
What is there, that is refusing
to be mourned, and why ? It is always vital to involve the whole
group as much as possible into this question, as the helpful
insights often come from an unexpected quarter. This phenomenon
of warlords carving out their respective territories may require
in group therapy sessions a kind of leadership technique where
direct confrontation is not always the best option and may only
aggravate the paranoid aspect in the splitting processes. It
often helps to get into the unmourned history, by sharing the
different perspectives on a mutual, yet individual,
trans-generational past, where strong emotional turbulence may
be aroused. When the group is threatened, or feeling threatened,
whether in therapy or in politics, leadership needs to use the
different resources of the whole group in order to mediate the
crisis. In no-win situations such as the current problem in Iraq
and the long-standing but nonetheless ever-dangerous
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a US President will need a much
stronger emotional link to his potential peacebrokers in the UN,
in Europe, Asia, Africa, wherever, who could help to contain
these devastating developments.
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The splitting processes we have
observed in US society have caused great concern in internet
discussions among group therapists. I will quote one private
communication from Robert Lipgar:
“….We see so many covert and
overt acts that threaten our democracy and our environments and
widen the gap between rich and poor, powerful and those with
little power, between greed and compassion , that we must speak
up. The government is about to be taken over by the extreme
right wing so-called conservatives, by a cult, by a cabal even
more than it already has been. The courts (judicial system) and
especially the Supreme Court and its independence (even relative
independence) ….is about to be politicized even further than it
has been already. We are on the edge of a disaster such as
occurred in Germany in the early 1930s. We are on the edge of a
new kind of fascism which is beyond authoritarianism in
government.”
In case this seems like
overreacting, let us remember the article which Henry Wallace,
then the acting Vice-President of the US, wrote in the year 1944
in the New York Times, describing how fascism could actually
come to America. American fascists, according to Mr. Wallace,
would espouse democracy and freedom, but would put corporate
interests above the public welfare. They would lie to the
people to obtain power, and the corporate-owned media would
spread the lies. To quote him directly: “They claim to be
super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty allowed by
the constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the
spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final
objective, towards which all their deceit is directed, is to
capture political power so that, using the power of the state
and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the
common man in eternal subjection.”
Turning now to the media, I am
not going to elaborate a sociological or psychoanalytic
discussion or deconstruction. Rather I want to pose one simple
question, in looking at our clinical work in groups and in
looking at our outside worlds: Are the media in control ?
Of course it is an ambiguous
question which can be read in two ways, 1) do the media in fact
control everything ? or 2) are the media capable of even
controlling themselves ?
We can look at experiences in
groups which remind us of this question. If we look at what is
going on in our groups, those we conduct and those others that
we live and work in, it sometimes helps to look through the
spectacles of the media, to consider the media-event quality of
what may be (virtually) going on, when the group members seem
out of genuine contact with one another. The phantasmata take
over, we switch channels in the group between, say, watching a
confrontational debate between a Bush and a Kerry, to a deluge
of advertisements, sometimes of the crudest ideological,
sentimental or brutally commercial type, that constitute a kind
of virtual attempt to ‘brainwash the group’.
Then again some members of the
group will publicize or act out whole telenovelas of their
romantic histories, attachments and separations. Others will
try for a more dispassionate view of the facts, to the point of
seeming almost totally bloodless. Most members, in between,
will be trying to sell some kind of product or other to the
group. Historical documentaries can be very moving and
insightful, nature films and holiday travelogues are more of a
pleasant distraction, ‘late-night’ movies take on more
explicitly sexual or violent aspects. There may even be a little
religion here and there, or a disconcerting amount of it in a
messianic-apocalyptic mode, if one or more of the group members
has tuned into the God channel and got stuck there.
Sometimes the group is envious of who gets
‘media space’ and allows only ‘sound-bites’ to be broadcast,
sometimes long confessionals are encouraged by a largely
passive-aggressive silent audience, in the style of certain
talk-shows, in order to establish more convincingly who are the
victims and who the perpetrators in life.
There are the elitist sub-groups,
the arte-viewers, or the compulsive DVD-renters, to which I also
belong, who secretively indulge their private tragic passions
and bittersweet comedies. There are the avant-garde sub-groups
cultivating their own alternative communication channels to
react to the situation, usually in a spirit of dissent and
offering spontaneous improvisational techniques. Depending on
how the group decides – or is free to decide – on which channels
it prefers to operate, there will be occasional inputs of minor
or of vast human catastrophes, or even a constant barrage of
them which causes overwhelming strains on compassion and can
lead the group or the leader to want to just turn off the set.
In Israel, where such catastrophic terror acts abound, the
country seems more or less divided between those who will be
constantly watching the TV and others who simply cannot watch it
any more and keep their set switched off in the hope of getting
a better life.
I am suggesting in this way that
the mass media constitute a paradigm in group therapy for
considering ‘virtual’, as opposed to real, actual channels of
communication, for considering what is being openly and
subliminally propagated in the group, and in whose interests
this is happening. The group – the therapy group, if it is
working according to the principle of abstinence and is not a
support or self-help group – is in itself a phantasma. In
reality such a group is nothing more than a number of
individuals gathered together to learn from shared or solitary
experiences in the group process.
We observe ourselves in a setting
where we not only tell each other our dreams – which may be more
like the ‘art works’ of the group than the basic daily media
stuff – but also the whole group development becomes (along with
the blatant and sometimes banal reality of common experience) a
sort of dream unfolding with nightmarish, passionate, violent,
tender or humorous twists, something we are living through
together on a more preconscious level, something which we cannot
share or develop in this way in our ordinary daily life.
Our danger with such groups is of
course the perpetual groupies, those who will wander from group
to group, or cling interminably to the group that they have
found, or has found them - remember the film “Fight Club”?
These are the ‘hungry ghosts’ of Buddhist tradition, always
trying something new, or something age-old, always unsatisfied.
They have their counterpart in the ‘jealous gods’, elevated
beings like potential warlords, rife with arrogance, envy, using
the group for splitting and projection. Emancipation from group
life seems to be very difficult. What would we know of this? We
who have chosen to work with groups have possibly never
ourselves completely achieved this.
I will think back at this stage
to my own past and to my contemporaries from the 1960s when the
medium first became the message. Our Gurus ranged from thinkers
such as Herbert Marcuse, Ronald Laing, Marshall McLuhan,
Buckminster Fuller, to activists on a spectrum from Eldridge
Cleaver of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, to Gandhi and
Vinobha Bhave in India. I think perhaps McLuhan was one of the
more prophetic voices. In those days I edited an alternative
newspaper from London, International Times, also known as IT,
which propagated and disseminated what we considered to be a
‘counter-culture.’ At the time I had intense visits with
colleagues in Amsterdam – I will mention the names Simon
Vinkenoog, Willem de Ridder, Bill Levy – who created media or
used existing ones in creative, original ways. And I also think
of the left-wing and hippy communities in the American
South-West, in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, who created
alternative media channels to listen to their own music and
spread their own message. Ironically, today those alternative
media are for the most part in the hands of extreme right-wing
or Christian fundamentalist groups who broadcast an overt hatred
of blacks, Moslems, Jews, homosexuals etc. in a way that would
be illegal in most European countries. In the USA the
constitution is extremely liberal on the issue of freedom of
speech.
I will come back, finally, to the
present, to the matter in hand, to our own group work. We have
discussed the necessity of looking more closely at the kinds of
surreptitious self-publication, discreet or blatant
brainwashing, or attempts at factual representation which are
occurring in the group process. How is the group dealing with
the various phantasmata on offer – such as the ‘perfect
marriage’, the ‘ideal’ child or parent, with the images of
starvation, exhaustion, exile, warfare, persecution, with the
longing for social harmony, or with sacrifices one is expected
to make for this goal ?
What are we as group conductors
to do with all this? Foulkes’ suggestion, in line with classical
Freudian technique, was to analyze the resistances. Where is the
libido of the group hiding behind, where is it up against rigid
defences which can lead to auto-aggressive or self-destructive
behaviour ? We are trying to follow the underlying libido when
we analyze resistance, we try for a more tolerant super-ego and
for more freedom for the libido, so that the group can become
more collectively aware of what really interests its members. We
are on the side of Eros against Thanatos, of the common pursuit
of our desires as opposed to a general call to order, which
tends to end in warfare and destruction.
Now that my own words are
beginning to fail me, I will bring my remarks toward a close by
quoting the Dalai Lama. This is someone, whatever we think of
his culture or religious beliefs, who has shown remarkable
long-term qualities as a wise and circumspect political leader,
with a good grasp of the media. More than just this, he has
taken on with the Tibetan people a mythic task, of leading a
people through exile, as Moses had to do with the Jews, of
keeping the group together, retaining and differentiating its
traditions and talents in a modern world.
I quote: “Hatred and malice are
the greatest dangers to peace and happiness. In order to prevent
hatred and anger from taking root in ourselves, we must first of
all avoid discontent, for it is the root of hatred and malice.”
Dis-content? Remember Freud’s
book, Civilization and its Discontents? One such
‘Unbehagen in der Kultur’ of our day is the power of the mass
media to create and form, rather than to reflect, social
reality. ‘Dis-contented’ may mean that we have lost our content,
have no connection to our content, we are just form, just media
blur without real content, lost in replays of virtual group
phantasmata. Contentment, or even being contentious, means going
beyond the virtual representations of various kinds of media
hype toward the immediacy of being here and now with one
another in this situation and what we can do about it, what we
can do with it. Good leadership may then consist
simply, as the Chinese sages of antiquity thought, in keeping
the bellies of the people full, and keeping their minds empty,
or open………
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