Western Civilization: The Age of Perversion A Psychoanalytic Perspective Stephen Rittenberg, M.D.
https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/
Part I
Civilization vs. Barbarism
Scholars have illuminated the historical, political, economic, sociological and religious sources of antisemitism. Almost none were prepared for its raw eruption on October 7, 2023 in our post Holocaust world. It was generally believed that education, historical knowledge provided by Holocaust museums, and the miracle of Israel’s post WWII founding would foreclose forever (“never again”) murderous and organized Jew hatred. Milder forms of antisemitism were thought to be legally manageable by laws against hate crimes. However, human nature doesn’t change and something deep in the psyche motivates murderous Jew hatred. Our hypothesis is a simple one: the quest for pleasure, the ‘pleasure principle’ is mankind’s prime motivator. Sado-masochistic acts provide intense pleasure, especially in the form of rape combined with murder. The urge to destroy, to annihilate while discharging sexual drives is what motivates Jihadists. Hitler’s einsatzgruppen killers reappeared as Hamas’s slaughterers—this time, exhibitionistically recording snuff pornography for millions. Jews are ideal scapegoat targets of sadistic pleasure for all the reasons cited by scholars. Ultimately Moses’s 10 commandments brought unwelcome restrictions on pleasure and Jews are forever hated for doing so. Civilization brought it discontent. Hamas and Islamo Nazism are attacking Western civilization at its roots.
The clinical setting of psychoanalysis provides a powerful psychosexual lens for observing human nature- up close and personal. I have employed that closeup lens for 60+ years to help suffering patients, driven by a need to understand themselves, Every one of them has revealed the conflict novelists like Conrad and Solzhenitsyn describe between the forces of light and darkness, life and death.
“Outside the civil garden of every day of love/there crouches a wild passion to destroy and be destroyed..”—W.H. Auden.
For example: a charming, intelligent woman in her forties came for treatment. She felt chronically guilty for not contributing financially to her otherwise happy marriage. As a child her younger sister was a behavior problem who consumed her parents’ attention. My patient became the “good girl” who caused no problems and therefore got little parental interest. She worked hard to keep the family intact, did well at school and was regarded as a ‘perfect’ child. Yet at night, in the privacy of her room she made a list of people she hated and would brutally murder, her “kill list.” She reveled in ways of torturing these ‘enemies’, including her sister and her parents. Now as an adult, she lived a seemingly healthy normal life— but was riddled with guilt and unexpressed longings to pursue the life of an artist—a wish she experienced in early childhood that was mocked by her parents. As analysis unfolded and her aggressive drives could be acknowledged they found their outlook as she pursued her childhood ambition to be an artist and began to receive recognition for her work. Animating her work was the desire to triumph over her sister and prove her parents wrong for dismissing her artistic talents as a mere ‘hobby.’ She was able to feel and tolerate the desires to violently destroy those she loved, to realize what Solzhenitsyn realized.
Most of us handle the conflict between what Freud called Eros and Thanatos, between the urge to create life and the urge to destroy in adaptive ways that permit civilized life. Some, for example become surgeons, cutting people open to help them. Some become comedians transmuting rage into humor. The conflicts never go away and there is no final ‘resolution.’ Ways of managing conflict, however, can change. October 7th gave the world a green light for the direct acting out of unmodified destructive urges. No need to deprive oneself of pleasure or transmute it into anything life enhancing.
The October 7 massacre first produced shock at the sadistic horrors recorded on GoPros. Within a day, cheering ensued and not just amongst Gazans. World wide hatred of Israel and celebrations of Hamas’s ‘resistance’ erupted. Rape and murder, far from being condemned, were ‘explained’ by many as provoked by the victims, and delighted in by others who felt ‘exhilarated.’ Proud calls home to parents by killers were recorded. Jews were targeted around the world. Woke professors led the way arguing that Israel, a Western oppressor state, got what it deserved. Desperate efforts were made by rational, ‘sane’ people to play down the obvious erotomanic pleasure derived vicariously by millions. The cheering crowds in Gaza were quickly transformed by Western media and frightened politicians into peace loving victims, innocents who felt no delight in the rapes and murders by their fellow Gazans. The more sadistic Hamas showed itself to be, for example by deliberately torturing hostages, the more the West insisted that Islam is a peaceful religion. An invented, non existent phobia, “Islamophobia”, was used to silence any criticism of fanatic Islamic Jew haters. Denial prevailed, and still does, in a widespread refusal to see Islamic fundamentalism for what it is, a Sadeian reversal of the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Western civilization and a rejection of reality. Reality based on experience dictates that one should believe fanatics when they tell you they want to kill you, and proceed to do so by flying planes into buildings and beheading ‘infidels’. However, pointing out this reality will get you condemned as an ‘islamophobe.’ Meanwhile genocidal maniacs call those who fight against them’ genocidal.’ In a particularly bizarre turn, Islamic fanatics are joined by LGBTQI activists. Why? Because like the Islamists they too reject Western reality in favor of a new reality wherein men can be women, and biologically determined sex can be dismissed and replaced by a new fluid reality, “gender.” Not for them the distinction between men and women of the opening of the Old Testament. Like Satan in Paradise Lost radical islamists scorn and seek to annihilate that God, the bringer of order, and replace it with a deity of chaos and death who gives carnal rewards in paradise. They offer instead the pleasures of sado-masochism and the satisfactions derived from tearing down reality. This is a powerful recruiting tool for Western youth. Many in our affluent countries are alienated, lonely, living in collapsing, increasingly barren cultures, increasingly alone in an alternate reality served up by their digital devices. Give them the promise of a great cause that generates erotomanic pleasure and they will be willing recruits.
Freud in Civilization and its Discontents pointed out that civilized life requires inhibition of the pleasure offered through discharge of aggression. Moses’s ten commandments were internalized as Western civilization’s superego, prohibiting full pleasurable discharge of aggression while inflicting guilt for such behavior. This will always make Jews the object of hatred. Love becomes possible only with inhibition of sexual aggression. Rape and sexual murder therefore constitute rejections of Western civilization.There have been psychoanalysts and psychiatrists since Freud who have argued the sacrifice is too great and is the cause of neurosis. From Wilhelm Reich to Frantz Fanon they have advocated for revolutionary violence to destroy repressive Western institutions, as a way to recover mental health. Like Jews who ally with their enemies, psychoanalysis has produced its own anti-analysts. Especially popular among young ‘60s revolutionaries was Erik Erickson who became one of the first to teach that the Jewish state, Israel, was a crucial obstacle to utopian progress.
Part II
The Assault on Reality
The French psychoanalyst, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel* in her study of sexual perversions described the core of the conflict between creative and destructive urges in all human beings. She expanded the understanding of perversion to include not just disorders of sexual behavior but as a dimension of the human psyche, a universal desire to overthrow reality. There is a ‘perverse core’ in everyone that can be activated at any time especially at times of historical revolution. Creativity and Perversion are conflicted aspects of human beings.
Chasseguet-Smirgel wrote in Creativity and Perversion=:
“It has become a banality to connect the advent of Nazism with dissolute sexual behavior, to the extent that several films show the proliferation of transvestite cabarets, just before Hitler’s assumption of power…’Cabaret’, ‘The Serpent’s Egg’, ‘The Damned’…” She adds that Dostoevski’s descriptions of rape and murder in his novel The Devils and the writings of the Marquis de Sade are contemporary with the French Revolution.
De Sade may well have foretold our age, an age in which confusion between the sexes and the generations is palpable, where an invented idea, ‘gender’, claims reality over and displaces biology, where transsexualism becomes a political cause while rape and murder are proudly defended. This is where revolutions merge the political and the personal. It should not surprise that transsexual advocates unite with Hamas, as they both assault and undermine the ground of reality—biology. Chasseguet-Smirgel asserts that revolutions, historical ruptures may go hand in hand with an attempt at destroying sexual reality and truth. This is the essence of perversion, the assault on reality. That assault may be on thinking, on the meaning of words, on the very concept of truth. Orwell showed how reality and truth can be undermined by simply changing the meaning of the words we use. Transsexual revolutionaries do the same, while asserting victimhood.
As we have indicated in essays on utopian thinking, Western civilization has its roots in the Old Testament. This is true for believers and nonbelievers. Reality is based on separation—light from dark, earth from heaven, water from dry land, species of animals from one another, male from female and the generations from one another. Without difference there is chaos. The Hamas attack was not just an attack on Israel. It was a violent assault on Western civilizational reality, an eruption of pure Sadeian chaos. Will it prevail? Not if we, like the God of the psalmists, “neither slumber nor sleep”. It is time to wake up and stand firmly with reality.
Most commentary at present is focused on Israel, Gaza, antisemitism and geopolitical conflict. However a transcendent and ancient human struggle is at work, a struggle between civilization (requiring renunciation of pleasure),and perversion; between the life instinct (Eros) and the death drive (thanatos). The stakes are high, the outcome uncertain. Our weapon against disorder, chaos and death is a hard won and precious strength-reason- which can provide the light to oppose the satanic forces of darkness.
“How high that highest candle lights the dark.”-Wallace Stevens
*Janine Chasseguet Smirgel was in my judgment the most original and profound psychoanalytic social observer since Freud.
Comments are closed.
