Terror and Forgiveness: Two Faces of Monotheism

(2003). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 39:637-663Two Faces of Monotheism

Robert Karen, Ph.D. ONE WEEK after September 11, National Public Radio broadcast a

strained and solemn interview with three clergymen concerning theirreligion's response to terrorism that ended on the subject of forgiveness. Thethree men all favored it (“Christ forgave those who crucified him …”), theMuslim alone holding out for the necessity of punishment, but none expressinghis own hatred of the terrorists or their wishes for revenge. We areaccustomed to such bland acts of dissociation when the subject of forgivenesscomes up and usually take no notice (“That's just what clergymen do”). Butdissociation like this does harm to nuanced discourse, creating an apparentsplit between muscular realism and ineffectual do-goodism. It is not unrelatedto the dissociations, splitting, and quest for purity that we associate with themind-set of the terrorist.

Terrorists do it differently, of course. They dissociate from their humanconcern rather than their rage, which enables them to do terrible things tothose they perceive as enemies (Segal, 2003). They also view the world assplit into good and evil, which entitles them to a hatred and aggressionundiluted by doubt. Their passion and certainty, their woundedness andfixation on righteous revenge, can be contagious among people whoexperience themselves as downtrodden. The pious ideal of forgiveness, incontrast, has very little appeal to anyone, especially in times of strife, and isquietly dismissed as preachy and irrelevant. Bland compassion and piety areno match for paranoia and revenge, which are hard to beat in the best ofcircumstances. It's rare that a leader like Gandhi emerges who can eventemporarily turn this equation into something else.

Because forgiveness is almost always conceptualized in tame and piousterms, its fate since September 11 has not been a happy one: to be spokenabout in platitudes and tossed aside as wholly irrelevant to the sort of personone actually is, or to life as one actually lives it. And yet, the subject “Can weforgive?” does keep popping up in public discourse, as if there is an itch inthe body politic that needs a scratch. I think the itch is important, but theconceptualization is usually wrong.

The question is not “Can we forgive Osama bin Laden?” but how do

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we preserve our own wholeness and complexity? How do we keep fromsuccumbing to a traumatic environment, which by its very nature forcesdangerous splits and simplifications in which people cannot bare nuance,ambiguity, or doubt? If the ability to live with ambiguity and difference is akey marker of maturity in individuals, as Erikson held (1968), the samestandard seems to apply to groups. But as splitting and projection accelerate,this tolerance, never huge to begin with, rapidly erodes.

To rescue forgiveness from the magnetic pull of piety, we need tounderstand it not so much as a final act, where anger and resentment areerased and replaced by warm regard, but as a whole set of internal processes,states of mind, and creative measures that emanate from the secure self andthat form a resistance to splitting and projection. These capacities, far frompromoting a vapid do-goodism, are really the foundation of nuanced thinking.They enable one to keep one's head in the face of irrational hatred, tothoughtfully consider criticism, even hostile criticism, and to make positivegestures even when one feels unfairly afflicted. They represent the sort ofstrength and self-confidence we recognize in good parents and goodtherapists, both of whom need almost literally to clamp themselves together—keep their love and aggression from becoming dissociated—in the service ofmaintaining a connection with a child or patient who is consumed by rage.

Obviously, few of us want to forgive mass murderers. We want to catchthem, bring them to justice, see them dead. We are not particularly concernedabout them as people, at least not when they're on the loose. It would be goodand healthy if we could “recognize the humanity of the perpetrator[s],” asDesmond Tutu recommends (Simpkinson, 2001), but most of us cannothonestly do that. We make them into objects and we don't care, because of thedamage they've done and their capacity to do more. Talk of forgiving themwhen their crimes are still fresh and unpunished is revolting, not least of allbecause it interferes with the side of the self that's concerned with immediatesurvival, both psychic and physical, and the need to act efficaciously.(Splitting and dissociation do have positive uses.) But we are not just in thebusiness of catching criminals, but also of making friends and forgingalliances, and some of the—————————————

“Our political culture has functioned at the lowest possible level. One isoffered the limited choice of either identifying with a position or attacking aposition. Complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, considered confusion, heartfeltconflict, and genuine pluralism are not what is being presented” (Orbach,2002, p. 434). The candidate's dread of being crucified to his soundbitesand the judicial nominee's fear of having taken any position on aninflammatory issue, like the clergyman's need to be forgiving and pure,reflect this flight from nuance, which only quickens in traumatic times.

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friends we want to make are people who have some pretty nasty feelings andattitudes about us. If we are to beckon them out of those positions, we need tobe able to tolerate, to live with, to forgive that they've taken them. Otherwisewe become the insecure bully who will show the world what we can do topeople who don't like us.

Even with those like bin Laden, whose humanity is difficult to grasp, thisissue is not entirely irrelevant. If we imagine bin Laden in captivity, with allthat he represents no longer a threat, if we imagine him in a pitiful state orgoing through some sort of transformation or conversion that leaves himgenuinely repentant and weeping as he voluntarily donates all of his funds forthe reconstruction of lower Manhattan—we might alter how we view him.Just knowing this—that we are capable of splitting, of demonizing ourenemies, but that there is at least a jot of contingency to it, and that it is withinus to retract that demonization—represents both a preservation of complexityas well as a shift toward the forgiving end of the spectrum. In Kleinian terms,it suggests the ability to hold onto both the paranoid-schizoid and depressivestates of being, without having to throw in one's lot completely with either. Itsoftens our tendency to view the world in good-versus-evil terms and movesus, however slightly, toward a recognition of the humanity in those we fight,even if it's a humanity that at the moment we'd prefer to ignore. Such a shift,small as it is, has policy implications.

The ability to retain complexity would also enable us to resist spreadingthe demonization too widely—to refrain from equating all of al-Qaeda withits leadership, to feel concern for some of its young fighters and their families,to not equate all of fundamentalist Islam with al-Qaeda, to be on the alert forreceptivity and common ground in a population we might be too inclined tothink of as one hating mass. It would show up in how we conduct ourselves inconflict, in our treatment of prisoners, in attempts to reach out to those whocan be reached, in our willingness to think about our own wrongs, and, wherepossible, to rectify or apologize for them. Inhabiting this larger emotionalspace might improve our position in a world whose sympathy we owned onSeptember 11 and have largely squandered since.

Splitting and the Question of EvilThe people who planned and executed the attack on the World Trade

Center and the Pentagon appear to be governed by a paranoid-schizoid viewof their relationship to those they identify as powerful and oppressive.

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They see the U.S. government and perhaps the American people as demonicand worthy of destruction (Frontline, 2001). Getting even can then becomethe just revenge of the wounded. When Osama bin Laden giggles over thedestruction and loss of life at the World Trade Center, as he was seen to do ina notorious videotape, he is not only revealing a horrifying contempt forhuman life, but also, I think, a sense of persecution by a force so large and sobad that all aggressive acts against it are justified and all wounds inflicted,even including the deaths of 2800 civilians, a source of delight. (For anexploration of the psychology of the terrorist see Stein, 2002.) This position,in which hatred and persecutory rage are condensed into a cool state ofideological disregard for life, has been described by many commentators as“evil” (Frontline, 2002).

The word “evil” in this context seems perfectly apt; but it becomesproblematic when used as a blanket adjective for individuals. Colloquially,and in our rage, bin Laden, like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein,are the embodiment of evil. But the stamp of evil, when applied to a person ora group, is a kind of excommunication from the human race. It bends us backtoward the sorting process of infancy in which the universe is composed ofpure, uncomplicated forces of good and bad, where those who associatethemselves with the good jettison all responsibility to look at their ownfailings or even to know that they, too, have it within them to do bad.

The reluctance to name a person or a group “evil” has in recent years beenquestioned by those who are concerned that psychoanalysis and other forcesfor moral relativism have stripped society of its ability to call a crime a crimeand punish wrongdoing accordingly (see, for example, Menninger, 1973;Rosenbaum, 2002). But this concern is in danger of creating its owndistortions, implying, for instance, that a concern for complexity and nuance isno more than social masochism (as in the 1960s parody of the guilty liberalwho apologizes after being mugged). It makes sense to say the terrorist attackon the World Trade Center was an evil act, but once we name bin Laden oral-Qaeda as evil, we trivialize the concept. Repeatedly referring to bin Ladenas “the evil one,” as President Bush did for a time, had this trivializing, evenpuerile, feel to it.

Labeling someone evil also makes the error of locating in one placesomething that is essentially and forever unlocatable and dispersed. To locateit in another person partakes of the same hubris traditionally associated withdeclaring oneself saved or pure or incapable of error. But worst of all, bylabeling someone “evil” we have entered the terrorist mind-set, where certainpeople are no longer people.

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Nevertheless, the tendency to think this way is inherent in humanpsychology. The binary, black-and-white mentality is a huge and constanttemptation. Under splitting's sheltering simplicity, there are good behaviors,bad behaviors, good people, bad people, right-thinking, wrong thinking,righteous nations, wicked nations—an “axis of evil.” The potential to livethere is not only never lost, it represents a significant part of our psychic life,for many people the most significant part. It is associated with blaming andrevenge-seeking and bedevils the conflicts of daily life. It gathers force ingroup functioning in the form of political correctness, scapegoating,xenophobia, warmongering, witch-hunting, the draconian treatment ofprisoners, ethnic cleansing, and, ultimately, genocide. It's also at work in idolworship, cult phenomena, and religions of the one true faith, typicallymonotheistic religions, which presents a paradox I address shortly.

Excessive splitting undermines the health of the self, in part through theimpoverishment of mourning. Carrying a torch for a hated enemy can divertone from experiencing and honoring one's losses, and if losses are notadequately attended to, the individual is never made whole. Much ofpsychotherapy consists of helping the patient to mourn early losses that weretoo much for him to process as a child and instead became incorporated asdepression, defenses against it, repetition, and all the means by which we turnunsuffered suffering into a way of life.

When mourning fails, as it often does, it is usually because too manybarriers stand in the way. One is too angry or too full of guilt or too unable todeal with one's own ambivalence toward those who have been lost to gothrough all the necessary feelings and arrive at a true sadness and then astable love. A ready solution is available, however, in the form ofidealization: My dead wife was an angel; the terrorist who blew up the busshe was on is a monster whom I will hate and pursue and feel persecuted byforever. But, ironically, if this is the direction my psychic energies take me, Iend up internally enmeshed with the killer, while the love of my wife is lost tome.

Because it requires a working through and acceptance of ambivalence,mourning is an important element of the building and retention of complexityand, in that sense, can be seen as a bulwark against states of splitting and rigiddefenses, like obsession with revenge.

In the U.S. since September 11—since the day New York Mayor RudolphGuiliani warned compassionately that the losses may be greater than we canbare—there have not been enough efforts to make sense of the wound that thefour planes ripped into us. Not just the loss of life,

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not just about how bad it feels to be so hated and so savagely attacked, butabout the loss that we feel, as citizens of this nation, of our sense of powerand invulnerability. If we were more committed to absorbing this, then theterrorist attacks would open up a broader public discussion: about how tominister to ourselves in the wake of this trauma; about how to adapt to thenew world it reflects—a world in which we are both more insecure and lessable to ignore it; about how to live maturely with our heightened sense ofvulnerability and with the images and expectations others have of us. Thealternative is to try to deny the loss, to try to retain our sense of omnipotence,to believe we can crush the demon it its nests. No one is going to threaten us,no one is going to make us know that we are dependent and vulnerable, no oneis going to make us question who we are or where we stand.

The Child's MonotheismAt an early age—Klein (1957) believed in the second or third month—it

begins to dawn on the child that the mom he loves is the same person as themom he hates, and as he awakens to this, he experiences the crises thatrepresent a preliminary push toward maturity and what I will callmonotheism. If the witch he wants to destroy is the very person he loves andneeds beyond measure, he has made a error that could cost him everything.Thus Klein proposed the “depressive position,” characterized by guilt andremorse, and, inevitably, a wish to repair the damage one feels one has done.If all goes well, repeated experiences of such anguish and efforts to repairand—if parents are receptive—success in repair, gradually lift the child outof this depressive state. They help usher him into another state of being wherehe takes people in in a new way. To the extent that he is able to perceive goodand bad in the same person simultaneously, his love is a different thing than itwas before.

Positive experiences with the depressive position constitute the child'sfirst encounters with a number of critical psychological processes, some ofwhich will, ideally, endure into old age. They include mourning (not justregarding the damage he may have done, but also over the loss of—————————————

Judith Butler (2003) makes a similar point: by acknowledging ourvulnerability we become more humble, more human, more accepting of ourphysical dependency on others, more tied to those whose vulnerability is fargreater than ours. She sees mourning—i.e., “mind-fulness of vulnerability”(p. 18)—as the basis for a broader sense of community and hence fornonmilitary solutions.

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the idealized parents, the idealized self, the Eden that they had inhabited);separation (in the sense of having internalized the loving relationship with theparents, which confers the security to explore the world on one's own); thetaking back of negative projections and thereby knowing oneself and others ina more complex, nuanced way; taking responsibility, which is a corollary tothis knowledge; and letting go of grandiosity and omnipotence. All of theseaspects of maturity are relevant to the political process.

Returning to the depressive position repeatedly in life acts as acounterweight to one's inevitable narcissism and callousness about thefeelings of others and also as a spur to the deepening of the personality—or ofsociety (consider the soul-searching of many white Americans in response tothe civil rights movement).

Depressive experience also signals the birth of the forgiving self (Karen,2001) for it represents the ability to accept the difficult, sometimes troublingambiguity that is life, where frailty and error, even betrayal and cruelty, can insome sense be tolerated and recognized as human. The child still experiencesa full range of negative feelings toward his parent, including fury and hatred.But now something different has become possible: I'm hurt because I loveyou. I criticize you because I love you. I hate you because I love you. Thenegative feelings are able to exist within an envelope of love.

An emotional monotheism has developed: All things, good and bad, arepossible in this unified world, where people can be securely connectedwithout idealization. But it is a fragile state that is easily lost and one mayrequire considerable effort (and frequently help) to regain it.

What we normally think of as monotheism—the institutional monotheism oforganized religions—arose for many purposes, some of them political, relatedto group cohesion, the establishment of law, the maintenance of authority, andnation building. Monotheistic religions have been the most pernicious in theirbehavior toward nonbelievers, in the past a tool of conquest, today the battleshroud of the terrorist.

But monotheism has a spiritual core that has also inspired great good. I usethe metaphor of monotheism (which, for me, is only a metaphor) because ofits implication that God is one, God is love, God runs through and emanatesfrom all people, whether they are believers or not, whether they behave badlyor not, whether they are one of us or not. From this perspective, it is radicallyegalitarian and radically forgiving. It is, in fact, very like the envelope of lovebetween parent and child mentioned

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earlier, an envelope that can contain all that is within us no matter how bad ornegative it is or seems to be. A people's spiritual attainment of monotheism—that is, as a concept that is widely grasped and advocated—might therefore befairly understood as a significant milestone in the development of the humanspirit, even if that attainment is only partial and inconsistent. It strikes me asparallel and perhaps related to the individual's capacity to love in thepresence of ambivalence.

The temptations and necessities of splitting are great, however, both withinus as individuals and among us in the form of those whose psychologiesrequire such simple divisions or those who have something to gain by creatingor exploiting them. “Let's not forget our vulnerability, let's not forget wherewe came from (we were once slaves in Egypt), let's not forget thevulnerability of others less fortunate than we” is not an easy position to takeor to hold. One experiences an almost irresistible urge to dissociate andforget. Blaming or refusing to see the victim is a necessary corollary, oftenyielding to the smug entitlement of the comfortable.

So at the inception of monotheism we find not only universalism butexclusion, and both going by the same name. In monotheistic religions,believers or those with a particular vision may set themselves up as closer toGod than others. Nonbelievers, wrongdoers, and those with a threateningpoint of view have been demonized, and the concept of the devil has beenused to suggest a dark other, a pure evil, and those who do his work. In thisnegative monotheism, the container is broken and there now exists a realmoutside of humanity, outside of God's creation, outside the envelope of lovewhere the not-us reside (the first-born males of Egypt). This position has itsown logic and appeal and makes possible certain cohesions and compromises(a selective monotheism) that the human psyche demands.

Transitions from a universalist to an exclusionary monotheism are smoothand seamless. Note, for instance, how “the temptations of splitting,” which Ieluded to earlier, can be assimilated to the metaphor of the devil: The deviltempts us toward a black-and-white view. He is the source of all splitting. Hecreates divisions; he sows conflict. Those who succumb to his way ofthinking are in his sway. They are dangerous and must be denounced oreradicated. And suddenly the split is recreated in the name of its opposite. It'shard to be sure at times where the splitting lies. Is it in your hatred? Or is itmy hatred of you for your hatred? Locating responsibility for splitting is, attimes, like trying to locate Moses's

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grave, which according to Biblical legend always shifted positions when onetried to approach it. A truly spiritual monotheism, therefore, implies ahumility, an openness to the possibility of error, the ability to move forwardwhile holding at least a seed of doubt about one's stances.

But it is an inherently unstable concept—oscillating much as the individualdoes between Klein's positions of paranoia and concern—and it transmutesinto its opposite, the negative monotheism of superiority and intolerance,when it is overly certain of itself. This mutation usually takes place bypolitical or military design or for defensive reasons, when some combinationof psychic forces pushes one toward the needed comfort of feeling victimized,self-righteous, grandiose, chosen. In the words of orthodox rabbi BradHirschfield, vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning andLeadership, “If you really think you're in contact with a God who speaks toyou, you'd better be very careful … because where are the correctives?”(Frontline, 2002).

The ease with which the universalist aspect of monotheism is lost isapparent in the contagiousness of paranoia. When you are hurt by me becauseof something cruel or selfish I've done and experience me suddenly as anenemy, I am drawn to hate you back in the same black-and-white way. Likeyou, I now forget any goodness in our connection. Suddenly, and with crazedconviction, I experience you as an enemy as well, and I want to kill.

We are all prone to this paranoiac contagion, although to different degrees.The more strongly monotheistic integration has been established in uspsychologically, the less susceptible we are to the paranoia and projectionsof others and the better able we are to hold on to our connectedness, even inthe face of a hatred that stirs in us a persecutory rage. But no one is everperfect at this, and perhaps only a very few are very good.

What I've called monotheistic integration might be considered the core ofthe secure or the forgiving self and is related to other well-known processesand states of being that have become understood as signposts of healthyemotional development: Erikson's “basic trust,” Bowlby and Ainsworth's“secure attachment,” Klein's “internalization of the good breast” andresolution of the depressive crisis in childhood (Karen, 1998). (In Kleinianthinking the term “depressive position” is used to describe a—————————————

Even the idea of chosen has been understood in two ways: chosen tospread the word and chosen in the sense of being superior or being favoredwith a direct line to God, either of which, of course, would contradict theword.

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truly depressed place, where one feels guilty and overcome with a loss thatdoes not seem reparable. Unfortunately, the same term is used to describe theresolution of that condition. What does one emerge into when depressivefunctioning has taken a successful course? The felt sense of secure attachment,where one is able to maintain the love of one's inner objects while in contactwith one's goodness and badness, captures one aspect of the expandedpsychic space one finds oneself in. The related idea of monotheism, with itsimplication of an elevated human spirit—including freedom, tolerance, arespect for the subjectivity of others, and some degree of ease with bothconflict and ambiguity—captures another. Both suggest a link between theprocessing and resolving of depressive crises, on the one hand, and therelational creativity, including parental creativity that emerges from that, onthe other.)

For the developing child, monotheistic integration makes new thingspossible in relationships, which may be metaphorically likened torelationships between and within groups. He can now say “You hurt me,Mommy,” or “I hate you, Daddy,” without feeling that he will lose their love.And he can grow up to be a person who can hear such pronouncements fromhis children and others—even when these pronouncements are loaded withvictim's rage, which can feel horribly victimizing in itself— without beingjarred out of his love, at least not for too long. In this we see the emergence ofboth healthy, confident protest and the ability to take in and work creativelywith protest even in its less mature forms.

But again, it's never perfect and often not that good, which means thatevery life is a crazy quilt of splitting and paranoia, of terrible feelings of guiltand badness that seem as if they cannot be dispelled, of hopelessness over theprospect of repair, of idealization and escapist fantasies of perfection, but,hopefully, also of the monotheism that enables one to stay in the zone ofcreativity, nuance, and connectedness with oneself and others, a force forkeeping relationships intact.

At its apex, monotheism allows the greatest of all freedoms, the freedom tobe. It implies a capacity for intersubjective relating—“commensal” relating inBion's system—where one is able to “bear and to learn from experience,” tothink emotional thoughts and to experiment with their expression, and to be acatalyst for the expansion of these trends (Billow, 2003, p. 118). Along withthis comes the suppleness that allows us to tolerate and forgive what bothersor afflicts us in others and to beckon them, when necessary, away fromsplitting and acting out by empathically responding to their primitive,unvoiced needs.

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BeckoningChild development gives us a useful window through which to see and

understand much of what is at stake emotionally in dealing with terroristatrocities and the psychological responses to them. The metaphor of the parentand child is always strained as it moves farther from that context, and yet itmay be useful when describing the relationship between a great power andthose who are in a state of demonizing rage against it. We all have it within usto slip into this state, and the steadfastness of the good-enough parent (orpsychotherapist) provides a model for what to look for in ourselves and ourleaders when facing it in others. By saying this I do not mean to infantalize theenemies of the United States. Rather, I am talking about terrorism and theresponses to it, both of which often contain an infantile component. Indeed,parents themselves are frequently infantile, especially when dealing with achild's rage. The beckoning aspect of monotheistic creativity, what Bion(1959) discussed in terms of containment and what has been culturallyrecognized as an aspect of sensitive maturity, can emerge from either side in aconflictual relationship. Everyone needs this type of empathic containment attimes.

In childhood the development of a healthy, integrated monotheism dependson the parent's mature love. The parent invites the child away from splittingand toward monotheism, not by preaching or hammering, but by livingmonotheistically with the child, by demonstrating and reestablishing anacceptance of complexity and ambiguity, that all feelings are allowed, evenhateful feelings, that they don't destroy love, that the two can coexist. Thishelps the child develop some ease with aggression, his own and others, whichleads to both mastery and modulation.

Parents need access to their aggression, but their use of it must betempered by concern and empathy. When a parent is too neglectful, scary, orrejecting, the child has a hard time holding onto a monotheistic integration. Heis unable to see mom as a combination of good and bad because her badnessis too much for him to cope with and integrate into a larger picture ofsomeone he loves—a risk with obvious parallels for a powerful nation facingthose who feel oppressed by it. Like parents, psychotherapists must deal withirrational hatred and aggression, and they, too, must have the strength andcreativity to protect themselves when under assault without losing themessage of the patient's hatred or denying the possibility—no matter howirrational the patient's accusations

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may be—of their own role in the conflict. Perhaps most important, they mustnot be so overcome with their own inflamed reactions that they abandon theirrole as a guardian of the underlying connection.

As a nation, we may need to pursue our interests in ways that others findegregious at times, but we need to be sensitive and concerned, lest othersexperience us, in all our power, as uncaring, omnipotent bulldozers. We havemuch good to offer, but in our relations to people who already havegrievances and already feel subjugated or ignored, we can easily encourage asplitting such that it becomes hard for them to remember the good that is in us.

Alongside defensive and military responses, there also needs to be a kindof openness: What is the message in al-Qaeda's hatred? Can we understandwhat makes so many young Muslims attracted to it and to the other terroristgroups arrayed against us? Can we grasp what it means to be angry andenvious, to feel overpowered and lacking in options, to feel that one's culturalheritage is being trampled by the happy-go-lucky tank of American socialfreedoms, cultural exports, financial and military muscle? Can we allowourselves to understand whatever it is that one group or another is offendedby in us without feeling as if we are losing our legitimacy as a people,condoning crimes against us, or becoming paralyzed in response to them?

When George Bush gave his address to the nation two months after theterror attacks of September 11 he asked, why do they hate us? And heresponded, “They hate us because of what you see here.… They hate ourfreedoms,” and so on. It was a lost opportunity to seed a more complex viewby acknowledging that there are some in the Islamic world withunderstandable gripes against us, that we need perhaps to better understandwhat they are, that a fraction of that vast and complex population feels soenraged and powerless that they are drawn to a camp of malignant and violenthaters, and that we will make it our business to reach out to the disaffectedeven as we pursue and disable those who attack us. Many in the Islamicworld who heard what Bush did say that night felt bitterly misunderstood(see, for example, Ford, 2001).

Projective IdentificationThere is a kind of magic at work in the parent's beckoning and eliciting

from the child. By acting as if it is already so, the parent brings into beingaspects of the child that were not quite there before, or only present in

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nascent or minimally developed form. A similar process can take placebetween analyst and patient and in other relationships. We may notice thiscapacity in people we consider to be mentors, who bring out qualities in uswhen we relate to them that we didn't know we had, or in certainextraordinary people who, by expecting the best of others and behavinghonorably toward them, elicit an honorableness that they might not otherwisehave exhibited. This was one of the principles that guided Gandhi in hisdealings with the British, even as he applied pressure through nonviolentassaults. It's fair to assume that some of the respect the British accorded him,often despite concomitant reactions of hatred or contempt, came aboutbecause he behaved respectfully toward them and acted as if they would dothe same. He was able to elicit something from his antagonists by acting as ifit was there all along, almost as if he had put it into them. In psychoanalysisthis magnetic transmission, this eliciting of a nascent quality, is recognized asan aspect of projective identification.

Projective identification is, of course, more commonly recognized as aprimitive defense, both unconscious and pernicious. For Klein, it is anessential ingredient of the infant's primitive fantasy life, the infant's way ofridding itself of anxiety and badness, metaphorically equivalent to the body'sridding itself of uncomfortable contents through excretion. What's more, thebaby lives its projective fantasies in such a away that the mother often comesto feel these unwanted things that the baby seemingly puts into her. Projectiveidentification thus has an uncanny, potentially very disturbing quality to it, asif, somehow, a real transfusion has taken place, which is partly what canmake dealing with psychotic and borderline patients, who lean heavily on thisdefense, so potentially unnerving. Insofar as the baby projects harmful parts ofitself into the mother, the mother then becomes identified in the baby's mindwith the bad parts of the baby—just as doctors, policeman, spouses,passersby can come to represent terrifying elements of the psychotic's mind oras an enemy people or an oppressed population can be seen as representingaspects of humanity—cruelty, savagery, irrationality, animality—that one'sown group refuses to recognize in itself.

The terrorist's use of projective identification is linked with a good-versus-evil division of the world. All badness, including the badness onefeels unconsciously to exist in oneself, is exported to the other and reactedagainst: The enemy is arrogant, the enemy is power-hungry, the enemy isviolent, the enemy has no concern for me or my people—but

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I remain a good-hearted person who only kills in self-defense. Although I amengaged in killing, I am not a killer. He is the killer. And because I identifyhim now with the scariest and most ruthless parts of myself, he becomes asource of dread. But this way of thinking is not the sole province ofmegalomaniacs.

In 1982, Brad Hirschfield, a young American Jew, moved to Hebron, acritical town on the West Bank, which until the occupation, was closed toJews. In a remarkable testimony, a version of which first appeared on PBS'sFrontline, Hirschfield relates his own absorption in the manic feelings ofexultation and omnipotence that can accompany group identification andsplitting.

“Hebron is traditionally understood to be one of the four holiest cities inthe land of Israel,” says Hirschfield.

It's the burial place of the matriarchs and the patriarchs—ofAbraham and Isaac and Jacob and Sarah and Rebecca and Leah.…To be able to go back to a place where, in 1929, Jews were run outof town in a pogrom is unbelievable. To be able to say, at the age ofeighteen or nineteen, “This is where I belong,”; is intoxicating afterthousands of years of exile.… It's like you get drunk on messianism.You believe anything is possible, because you have all the answers.… I don't think I thought for a minute about the impact of my beliefson other human beings who didn't share them.… I don't know if itwould have changed for me if it hadn't gotten so out of control that itled to a Jewish underground that committed murder. I don't knowthat I would have noticed. No. I know I didn't notice when it was atthe level of intimation or beatings.… You lose any reference pointexcept your own internal world, and my own internal world was thewhole world.… The worst part of it is until it rose to the level ofmurder, I don't think I thought of it as violence. That's why there areno easy answers about what those guys did in those airplanes. Youhave to imagine being in a place where what other people see asviolent behavior, you don't. You actually see it as redemptive.[Frontline, 2002]

Hirschfield says he does not believe there is a moral equivalence betweenthe extremist Jewish settlers and the September 11 hijackers. “It's just thatwhen I look at those terrorists, I don't see something wholly other, because Iknow from my own life experience what it means to allow your most deeplyfelt beliefs to motivate you to do violent things to other people” (Frontline,2002).

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Projective identification seems to take hold more readily and moreextremely under the influence of group identifications. In a classic study of thenursing service of a general hospital, Isabel Menzies Lyth (1959) describeshow nurses, in an unconscious effort to defeat anxiety, subtly adapt their owndefenses to those commonly used by others in the institution, thereby taking onthe institution's values, its projections, its scape-goating, its prejudices (oftenparanoid) about patients, patients' families, doctors, and so forth. Under theinfluence of group-think, a person's psychology can thus acquire a rigidity thatis more extreme than what he might exhibit on his own, and his capacity tothink for himself is impoverished. The group defenses are incorporated byeach individual and projected back into the group in a kind of endlessfeedback loop, which progressively erodes complexity and difference. Theseintensified defenses, Menzies Lyth writes, “inhibit the capacity for creative,symbolic thought, for abstract thought, and for conceptualization. They inhibitthe full development of the individual's understanding, knowledge and skillsthat enable reality to be handled effectively and pathological anxietymastered” (pp. 74-75).

Bion (1961) famously argued that groups often operate at a psychicallyprimitive level, with primitive fantasies and psychotic anxieties similar towhat is experienced in early infancy. He saw irrational group processes aswrapped around certain “basic assumptions.” Of these, the basic assumptionof fight-flight is dominated by concerns about loyalty and treachery and atendency toward idealization and demonization. Bion believed that suchprocesses can have an adaptive value. But the political maturity needed tomanage a largely healthy mobilization is rare.

Indeed, where there is a state of aggravated conflict, groups are capable ofdescending rapidly to astonishingly primitive levels of information processingwhere extreme people, statements, and actions from within the adversarygroup are reacted to with paranoia, as if representative of the whole.Conversely, angry threats or characterizations meant for a certain element arepicked up by and enrage the entire world of which that element is a part. And,again, individuals within the group are sucked along almost helplessly. Theyget caught up in the fear for their survival; there are plenty of Iagos to makethe most of treacherous interpretations, and anyone with a contrary view risksbeing denounced as soft on the enemy, now seen as a monster withoutcomplexity, without differences among its individuals.

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Runaway SplittingOne of the anxieties that group identification and merger protects the

individual from is anxiety over expulsion, abandonment, excommunication.For the infant, excommunication means annihilation, the most primitiveanxiety and one which no one is ever entirely free of. And groups doexcommunicate, engaging in purges and splits whenever internal dissent isexperienced as threatening to the majority. If one's fellow countryman doesnot agree that a particular enemy is evil, if he holds out for a more nuancedview, then there is something suspect about him, and perhaps he partakes ofthat evil. Not only does one project into the enemy the violence and hatredone cannot countenance in oneself, one projects into one's compatriot one'sown doubts, regrets, and internal warnings and turns him into the enemywithin.

The paranoid instincts and the capacity to detach from the feelings ofothers that characterizes states of splitting are most useful in the life-and-death struggles of the battlefield. But they can be like a pestilence in morecomplex situations, subtly infusing a social condition that had previously beenone of substantial warmth and solidarity. During and just after the destructionof the World Trade Center there was an outpouring of selflessness,generosity, and altruism, not only at the site, where ordinary people becameheroes, but all over the country. The flags we hung and the candlelight vigilswe attended were meant to express solidarity with the dead, with those theyleft behind, with each other in a time of loss. But the half-dozen sticker flagspasted on the mirror in my building lobby by a superintendent who oftenexhibited a narrow, bullying character, did not feel like an act of mourning orsolidarity. It felt more like the middle finger of revenge stuck high in the air.And yet it was difficult for anyone to suggest that they be taken down. Theblithe acceptance of splitting and the fear of opposing it came into playquickly and with force. One can imagine the pressures the average person feltin Yugoslavia after Tito's death, when opportunists were denouncing andspreading panic about the intentions of other ethnic groups, or in 1930sGermany, where brown shirts stood ready to crush anyone who questionedtheir treatment of the Jews.

Whatever evil is, it seems to gather strength in the presence of splitting.And as splitting gathers strength, it has several characteristic effects. Itunleashes tremendous rage, giving every victim a cause and every bully atarget; it cows internal opposition, inducing fear, silence, acquiescence,

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and conformity; and it engenders more splitting, drawing to it those who getcaught in its web or who relish its power. In certain contexts, like theparanoid atmosphere in revolutionary France, the splitting and projectiveidentification can cause a people to devour itself.

The Communist party of Stalin's era typified this process. As purges andsplits grew ever more extreme, people were excommunicated or murdered forall sorts of “deviations,” while split-off groups like the Trotskyists devisedtheir own splinters, deviations, and excommunications. With each split, newdemons were manufactured. In the late twenties and early thirties, when Stalinordered the dissolution of the popular front, the Communists denounced theSocialists, their former comrades, as “social fascists” and in New York andelsewhere violently attacked and broke up their meetings. In Germany, wherethe popular front had included not only political unity among the left-winggroups, but shared social institutions as well, a new cry went up among theGerman party members: “Kick the little social fascists out of thekindergarten!” In Spain, militarized party members systematicallyassassinated their anarchist allies, helping to pave the way for Franco'svictory (Orwell, 1962). While this represented a cold calculation on Stalin'spart (everyone was his enemy), many party members believed that they wereperforming a necessary purge of elements that would be dangerous to theworkers' future. As Menzies Lyth's research suggests, they were in some sensepowerless to think otherwise.

In the U.S. in the fifties, we witnessed a similar self-devouringphenomenon in response to Stalin, as rightists accused liberals of being “softon Communism.” People who opposed McCarthy, even including PresidentEisenhower, were termed “witting or unwitting tools” of the Communistconspiracy.

The more one has participated in such acts of bad faith—the name-calling,the infighting, the excommunications—the more one becomes committed to thelogic of polarization. There can be no room for trust, mutual respect, commonground with those who do not toe the line. We face some of that danger now.As Joan Didion (2003) reported, people who have tried to make sense of theterrorist attacks in terms of what motivates such hatred against the U.S. orwho have questioned a predominantly military response have been referred toas the “Blame America First crowd.” They've been charged with lacking“moral clarity” (William Bennett), dismissed as part of “the liberal lefttendency to “rationalize”; the aggression of September 11” (ChristopherHitchens), even likened to

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a potential “fifth column” (Andrew Sullivan). This corruption of dialogue canbe difficult to reverse, partly because of the kinds of responses it elicits, untila national debate deteriorates to a point where all that is heard are extremestatements.

What I earlier called paranoiac contagion can be understood in terms ofthe play of projective identification. Clinical experience has confirmed againand again that projective identification is powerful not only because of theeffect it has on the person making the projections, but because it works on thetarget person as well. The radiant love of the infant has the capacity to lift andswell the parent's sense of himself, much as the adulation of the crowd swellsthe performer or the dictator. While the angry accusations of the four-year-oldreduce the parent to his worst image of himself.

One's identity as a member of a group, as an American, is also susceptible.We can absorb the negative projections directed at us to the extent that theycorrupt our view of who we are as a people. This is most obviously the casewith downtrodden groups whose identities become colored by the unflatteringprojections of their oppressors. But it is a problem for the powerful as well.Denounced rationally and irrationally, viciously attacked, we Americans may,involuntarily and without conscious awareness, experience our Americannessas hateful and bad, feel compelled to deny the badness, and counterattack withour own splitting and projections, such that we now see ourselves as a whollygood, with nothing to apologize for in our behavior, while we see theterrorists, their sympathizers, and anyone who raises a critical word aswholly bad, with no cause for grievance or anger against us. This very way ofbeing is not only terrifying to others, it depletes and debilitates the self (in thiscase, the metaphorical group self), emptying it out of complexity and vitality.Meanwhile, each side, in its self-righteous certainty, behaves in ways so as toconfirm the negative caricature held by the other. Projective identification canthus become like a virus growing in strength as it is passed back and forthbetween hosts.

Once violence enters the picture, there's almost no way to brake thiscontagious migration to the extremes. We've seen such polarization betweenCatholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, between Hindu and Muslim onthe subcontinent. How do you argue with someone who's child had beenkilled by the IRA and wants to see all Catholic activists put to death? Israelisand Palestinians were within inches of a landmark settlement a few years agowhen Israel elected Ehud Barak prime minister;

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but after monstrous acts on both sides, majorities now seem wedded to theviews of their most bellicose leaders.

Where there is demonization there is usually idealization as well. That isinherent in splitting, even if it seems fantastic in the current crisis. Any worldsuperpower, but perhaps especially the United States, given its history ofdemocracy, individual freedom, opportunity, good deeds, and the hope it hasrepresented to the world, is prone to idealization. In some respects, those whodemonize us, who see us as pure evil, may also unconsciously be waiting forus to drop Mephistopheles' mask and become who we really are—not anation with selfish interests, humanitarian and bullying impulses, wishes to dowell combined with blindness and insensitivities about the outside world—but solely a force for freedom, human dignity, and the righting of all wrongs.This, too, is an aspect of splitting that needs to be appreciated if we are not tosink further into a simplified view of ourselves and others.

Whether a nation's leaders are able to dampen chauvinist splitting in timesof crisis and promote a more nuanced approach to real or potentialadversaries is often, at least to some extent, a matter of luck. South Africawas lucky to have F. W. de Klerk, the last white president, who began thedismantling of the apartheid regime, and the shockingly reconciliatory NelsonMandela as its first black president. It could have had much worse. TheUnited States was lucky to have had Lincoln beckoning the nation to heal, toforgive, to think more deeply and spiritually about what it had gone through,and was unlucky to have lost him.

But, of course, it is not just luck, and we could improve our luck in anycase by making a deeper understanding of psychological processes a part ofour national consciousness. The discoveries of two great fields—psychoanalysis and social psychology—about how human nature works,about the primitive and irrational mechanisms that often rule us and ourcapacity to attenuate and transform them through comprehension, attention,and concern, have been sequestered in professional circles. They should bepart of our education for citizenship, taught to children from the earliestgrades. That teaching could be both an aid to independent thinking and at leasta partial inoculation against the dangers of splitting, of group-think, ofdemagoguery, and of the many forms of mass manipulation to which moderndemocracies are susceptible. It would also give political leaders moreoptions when trying to move a populace toward repair.

Only a fraction of the population will ever grasp the meaning of projective

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identification or the implications of monotheism, and we will always havefundamentalists pushing debate toward the primitive end. But we know inindividual psychology that a person's reflective capacity, his ability to thinkmeaningfully about something that has been largely unconscious before—Bion's “alpha functioning,” Fonagy's (1991) “mentalization”—is catalytic initself and alleviates the extremes of infantile, unconsciously motivatedbehavior. Analogously, we are in a better position as a political culture if asignificant fraction of educated people recognize primitive group processingand its antidotes and know they will be understood by some if they speakabout these concepts publicly.

The contribution that creative political leadership can offer in a crisis likeours is to help the nation preserve the complexity of its thinking, somethingalong the lines of what Bion envisioned as the role of the group therapist—tointerest the group in seeing itself in more complexity and depth (Billow,2003). In a volatile environment, someone needs to make the case that each ofus is more than we imagine; that hate and love can operate independently ofeach other; that anger and aggressive acts may contain the wish for deeperconnection; that flaws, limitations, and bad behavior are universal; that repairis possible. It is particularly important, I think, to try not only to beckon ourown society toward a greater monotheism (in the psychological sense), but toteach it about the processes by which monotheism is instilled and lost and, inparticular, the role that a more powerful society can play in dealing with thegrievances of those enraged against it. When such guidance is not providedadequately by the president and other elected officials, it falls more heavilyon psychologists, social scientists, writers, and others.—————————————

Jessica Benjamin (2002) analyzes the polarization of groups caught up inretaliatory violence, what I've been discussing in terms of splitting andprojective identification, through the lens of intersubjectivity, which isrelated to what I've called monotheism. In hostile encounters, neither side isable to recognize the subjectivity of the other as having its own validity, andthey, therefore, both fall into what she calls a “reversible complementarity,”the “doer-done-to” mentality, in which each experiences the need to vilifyand attempt to control the other, which generates more hatred and violence.In her view, the way out of such cycles of accusation and revenge is theintervention of a “third” to create intersubjectivity, whether the third is anactual person or an internal “third space.” Hence: “It is only possible tosimultaneously accept the truth in the other's view while maintaining one'sown by entering the space of the third” (p. 479). My argument, moregrounded in Kleinian thought, is not inconsistent with the idea of a third inits various manifestations or with the importance of an internalized thirdspace that can maintain and promote bonds and connections. (Bion saw theuse or creation of a third as an aspect of containment.) But, for the most part,I emphasize other things. First, that the way out of splitting is fundamentallythrough mourning. Second, that the decline of splitting is further mediated bythe opportunity for full expression and a sense of having been heard on oneside, and the ability to contain hatred on the other without withdrawing, or atleast not too much or for too long, from the connection. And, finally, thatsplitting is ameliorated by acts of repair, like acknowledgments of theother's suffering and an expression of one's own responsibility and remorse,that are not masochistic, that come from the strength to have a nonidealizedview of the self, and that are (therefore) not contingent on complementarity.

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Containment and RepairBion argued that the mother acts as a “container” for the baby's

projections, that she is able to tolerate feelings, like the fear of death, that thebaby cannot and, unless her own psychology is too compromised, rather thandeny entry to her child's projections or fling them back, she works with whatthe small child has put into her and returns it in a way he can use it(Hinshelwood, 1989). Bion also observed that some mothers cannot toleratethe child's projections, tend to dissociate in such a way as to not notice themor, worse, criticize or reject the child for its irritability or neediness, therebycompounding the child's distress and escalating its projective efforts (Bion,1959).

Bion's idea of the parent as container and transformer of the child'sprojections suggests creative possibilities in dealing with the spitting andprojections of aggrieved populations. The key thing is not passivity or piety,but operating out of a self that hasn't lost itself—that is, hasn't succumbed toprojections and counterprojections. It's a self that's cognizant of thepsychological forces acting on it, that's able to read beneath the angry wordsand act without discarding complexity. They may be enraged at us, they maywant to kill us, we may be stirred to counterdemonization and murderous fury,but none of this is the whole story of who they are, who we are, or who weare to each other.

Part of the creativity of parenthood is the ability to handle beingexperienced by one's child as bad. If that is too threatening, if it destabilizesthe parent's own sense of goodness, then the child is put in an untenableposition. Not only is he thwarted in his efforts to use projective identificationand get help managing his anxieties, but his tendency to idealize and demonizeis reinforced. Parents may be stirred to hatred and defensiveness and the wishto attack, but there's usually some resistance to surrendering to destructiveresponses, more so at least than among political groups or people in almostany other relationship. Indeed, in political groups, responsibility is oftenviewed as exactly the opposite of this—to narrow one's focus to defense,self-congratulation, and retaliation. And yet it's fair to say that the parent'striumph of creativity over reactivity is applicable to group relationships, andthat a great power can't be great

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without it. The capacity to tolerate being criticized, condemned, evendemonized would certainly be helpful in dealing with enraged elements of theArab and Muslim worlds.

No matter what we do as a nation, some will remained hardened againstus. Many of them have been brought up in schools that teach our demonization.We have to use every bit of muscle and arm-twisting to prevent the funding ofsuch institutions. Military steps and police work need to be undertaken totrack down actual terrorists. Bin Laden, fused to his megalomania andfrightening moral positions, and others like him have too much at stake to bereached by any kind of working out of grievances. But they swim in a worldthat supplies them with power, and much of that world may be reachable.Many there do not yet have personal reasons to be committed to revenge.Their hearts have not yet been rent; their hands are not yet bloody.

An important aspect of monotheism is its loss. No one is monotheistic allthe time; it's not human. There is a constant coming and going from it thatneeds to be honored—both with a readiness to repair and to welcome repair,as well as a healthy degree of self-doubt that keeps one open to criticism andcomplaints. Much of the ability to do this has its roots in childhood,particularly in the grace with which parents handle their own transgressions,and is codified in religion through concepts like forgiveness and atonement.

Repair is inherent in the new monotheism of the developing child'semotional life. It can be seen as the beginnings of both forgiveness andapology. Throughout our lives we eject people from the loving circle, slipinto paranoid and exclusionary states, and then, in forgiving, apologizing,owning up, or just reconnecting with our own connectedness, our hearts go outto them. Each return to depressive functioning, if it includes some successfulmourning, has the capacity to shrink our dependency on idealization anddemonization and thus to both replenish and enlarge our monotheism. Theconfidence to repair and to believe that our efforts will be accepted imparts aknowledge that even at our worst, even after we have lost faith and returnedto a binary state, we still have a right to love and to feel okay about ourselvesand to know that if we make amends our love will be accepted and returned.

We do see facets of monotheistic repair at times in group functioning. Ournation has its own proud history of repair in the form of the help we havegiven defeated nations in rebuilding, where we have had to retract ourdemonizations in order to accept former enemy peoples in a

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new light. Some of the most striking recent examples of group repair are anumber of social experiments, many pioneered by Israeli psychologist DanBar-On (1999), where victim and perpetrator are brought face to face in aneffort to enable each to move beyond frozen positions that are unhealthy forthem and for the larger social milieu. The most ambitious recent example maybe the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where thosewhose family members had been slain and those responsible were able toconfront each other in open court (Reid & Hoffman, 2000). Results weremixed, but something of emotional value took place, a much-neededopportunity to express one's rage or regret in some cases, and at times asoftening, such that there was a greater ability on each side to see humanity onthe other.

Child therapists are often aware of this desperate human need forexpression, which is so evident in the child's craving to voice his rage at hisparents. It is one of the enduring frustrations and hurts of childhood that thisneed is so frequently squashed. In clinical situations, where parent and childare brought together, much can be accomplished simply by allowing the childto have his voice no matter how outrageous it may sound. There is somethingto the ache that the child needs to express, that he needs to feel heard about,and that he needs the parent to comprehend.

If we as a nation wished to encourage such expression, we might inviteMuslim leaders from disparate communities and schools of thought, includingthose we don't like, to express their disappointments, their longings, their rageand to explain why they feel as they do. It could show that we are willing tolearn; that we are willing to get beyond our prejudices, our ignorance, oursimplifications, and our prior lack of concern. It would give them anopportunity to bomb us with words; it could create opportunities forunderstanding on both sides. It could also be a great propaganda tool for us ifwe use it wisely. Other efforts might include working with moderate Muslimclergy worldwide to combat the extremist message and enlisting our own(strangely quiet) Muslim population to speak out more forcefully on the sametheme.

Apology is another aspect of both propaganda and repair. Even the simpleacknowledgment or the expression of concern about previous insensitivity orharm done can be a powerful tool in reaching out to disaffected people. But itis a rare phenomenon in politics, linked as it inevitably is to loss (of face, ofpurity), to pain (guilt, shame, identification with the injured), and to thenecessity for mourning. Pope John-Paul's

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apology to the Jews for centuries of persecution was certainly inadequate. Hetook no institutional responsibility for Catholic anti-Semitism, attributing itsolely to the behavior of errant individuals. He was under substantialpressure from within the Vatican to not go even as far as he went, for fear thathe would tarnish the Church's image, a fear that would no doubt restrain anAmerican president from speaking openly of such things as our misguidedsupport of the Shah in Iran or our abandonment of the Shi'ites who roseagainst Saddam in 1991 at our urging.

But even the Pope's insufficient apology had a softening effect on manyJews who harbored an abiding hatred for the church. President Clinton'sapology to the victims of the infamous Tuskeegee experiment (in whichfederal health officials intentionally allowed poor black sharecroppers withsyphilis to go untreated for decades in order to study the effects) had a similarimpact on many of the survivors and their families.

Even the grown child who feels no conscious love for a parent mayunconsciously harbor the fantasy that the parent will at last be able to take inhis protests, be affected by them, and direct toward the hardened child aloving sorrow and concern. In such fantasies, when drawn out in therapy, thestory may end (much to the grown child's own surprise) with an outpouring oftears and love on both sides. This does not mean anything quite like that willever happen in real life, but the buried passion that the child has for the parentseems to be metaphorically related to hidden wells of attraction and interestwithin hostile populations.

In the Muslim world at the current time there is enough sense of grievancetoward the United States, enough feeling of persecution, real and imagined, tohave created the conditions where large numbers are susceptible to thedemonizing trends, feverishly promoted by some well-funded fundamentalistgroups, that feed the impulse toward terror among the powerless. Ideally, thismight cause us to ask certain questions that emanate from a matureconsciousness: Can we engage in the beckoning process that seeks to make thebest of a difficult situation? Can we demonstrate a concern for what we'vedone in the past and what we continue to do that causes understandableresentments against us?

But even if enough critical mass of political and intellectual interestgathered around such questions, they are not easily answered and they raiseother, more difficult questions. To cite one of the most obvious: In a maturesociety, some can be counted on to understand that apologizing, even for thegrossest insensitivities and exploitations, is not equivalent to self-denigrationor groveling. To have been too much for ourselves, to have looked the otherway when others suffered, to have

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carelessly caused suffering, are aspects of the corruption of power to whichall people and peoples are susceptible and prone. To acknowledge it is not tobe masochistic or bad, but human and sorry. But how can an Americanpresident acknowledge past insensitivities to the Muslim world without beingaccused of desecrating the dead of September 11 and risking a public-relations debacle that could destroy him? How does he defuse thedestructiveness of such accusations without getting drawn into a new vortexof splitting and projective identification? How does he show respect to thosewho revert to splitting and the desire for revenge as a necessary defense andcomfort in traumatic circumstances, even as he opposes turning their pain intopolicy?

And these are just the first of the challenges, internal and external, thatwould confront him.

Gandhi's model may still teach us a lot. He was able to work withprojective identification in two of its major facets: First by helping hiscountrymen to resist negative British projections that had compromised theirsense of who they were, and second, by eliciting a more positive responsefrom the British themselves (Erikson, 1969). But his was a strategy for thedowntrodden, not the powerful, and, although it brilliantly dampened thepotential for demonizing and polarizing between English and Indian, it did notprevent the splitting between Hindu and Muslim that tore his country apart. Itis possible to envision a powerful nation exhibiting some of the wisdom thatGandhi displayed in insurgency. It is possible to envision an America—Ithink it's instructive to do so—that like the good-enough parent, can containprojections, repair and welcome repair, and encourage a healthy monotheism.But how to move a nation to depressive functioning when basic assumptionsprevail, and what qualities of leadership are needed? How to present amonotheistic face to the world without suppressing or denying or inflaminginternal divisions? How to develop a consciousness that acts as acounterforce to primitive defenses, the longing for omnipotence, the naturalresistance to mourning, the grieving widow bent on revenge, and those whowould ride to power on her grief? This challenge, which stands before us likethe Himalayas, may require a new contingent of Gandhis to map and to scaleit.

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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]Karen, R. (2003). Two Faces of Monotheism. Contemp. Psychoanal.,

39:637-663


http://www.pep-web.org/search.php?whocitedthis=cps.039.0637a

Terror and Forgiveness: Two Faces of Monotheism

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