Socio-ideological fantasy and the Northern Ireland conflict: The Other side

By Adrian Millar

Conducting a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former IRA members and loyalists, the author demonstrates through a careful examination of their slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions, that it is the unconscious dynamics of socio-ideological fantasy, i.e. the unconscious pleasure people find in suffering, domination, submission, ignorance, failure and rivalry over jouissance, that lead to the reproduction of antagonism between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. In the light of this, he concludes that traditional approaches to conflict resolution which overlook the unconscious are doomed to failure and that a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of socio-ideological fantasy has great potential for informing the way we understand and study all inter-religious and ethnic conflicts.

Whether you find yourself agreeing with the arguments in this book or not, you are sure to find it a welcome change from both the existing, mainly conservative, analyses of the Northern Ireland conflict and traditional approaches to conflict resolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847795878

Book preview

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Psychoanalytic theory

Introduction

Psychoanalysis plumbs the depths of how we imagine ourselves, how we establish worldviews and values, and how we relate out of these.¹ According to Anthony Elliott, psychoanalysis ‘powerfully accounts for the … essential and primary foundations of all human social activity’,² namely representation, fantasy, identification and pleasure. It ‘highlights the fantasmatic dimension of cultural practices, social institutions, political norms’.³ For this reason, Elliott is correct in his contention that one must consider the place of the psyche in our understanding of human subjectivity if one is to bring about social and political transformation.

For Elliott, the social world will never be the same again after reading Lacan because ‘his theories capture something of the strangeness that pervades the mundane and familiar in daily life’.⁴ Lacanian and post-Lacanian analyses have helped evaluate the self and society, connecting the self to political domination and exploitation. They have also focused on rethinking and deconstructing the possibilities for political emancipation and autonomy. The approaches of the Lacanian and Frankfurt Schools ‘highlight that modern social processes interconnect in complex and contradictory ways with unconscious experience and therefore with the self’.⁵ Unconscious processes affect social relationships, contemporary culture and all attempts at conceptualisation.

In light of the above, it would be hard to argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis has little to say about socio-ideological fantasy, the denial which it involves, and the conflict it gives rise to, a contention that is strengthened by Lacan’s remark that psychoanalysis ‘rests on a fundamental conflict, on an initial, radical drama’⁶ at the psychic level.

Lacanian psychoanalysis

⁷

For Lacan, conflict and domination are not marginal deviations from normality but part and parcel of society’s basic structure. There is no pre-established harmony. He understands the self, as constructed in the West, to be ‘an ideological construction which makes our whole civilization in a meaningful sense mentally ill’.⁸ The point of psychoanalysis for Lacan, however, is not primarily an explanatory one: it is change. Evidence the following:

Analysis is not a matter of discovering in a particular case the differential feature of the theory, and in doing so believe that one is explaining why your daughter is silent – for the point at issue is to get her to speak, and this effect proceeds from a type of intervention that has nothing to do with a differential feature.

Analysis consists precisely in getting her to speak.⁹

Add to this his development of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real orders,¹⁰ accounting for the fragmented ego and the centrality of aggressivity to this,¹¹ the constitution of the split subject caught up in the exigencies of the Other (otherwise the Lacanian unconscious, which is structured like language),¹² and rivalry over jouissance even when this involves suffering,¹³ and it becomes clear what it is that makes Lacanian analysis particularly relevant to a study of conflict and its resolution.

The Imaginary order is the realm of opposition, domination, oppression, alienation, images, mirrors, paranoia, perception, identifications with others, and identity. Paraphrasing Lacan, Fink characterises the Imaginary order as ‘the world of rivalry and war’.¹⁴ He notes that ‘[i]t is in a fundamental rivalry … that the constitution of the human world as such takes place.’¹⁵ Lacan believed that the basic natural state for mankind was that of aggression. Aggression is already present in the pre-verbal child born out of the narcissistic relation with the image and is linked to the structures of objectification that ‘characterize the formation of the ego’.¹⁶

The Symbolic overwrites the Imaginary, subordinating Imaginary relations involving rivalry and aggressivity to symbolic relations that are ‘dominated by concerns with ideals, authority figures, the law, performance, achievement, guilt, and so on’.¹⁷ The Symbolic order situates the individual in culture, the world of metaphor and metonymy. A person’s thoughts are made within culture. Thus: ‘The subject does not speak, he is spoken by the symbolic structure.’¹⁸ The Symbolic thus inhabits the individual and dominates him or her, imposing its law on the desiring subject, both curtailing desire and propelling its motion. So, Turkle can write that for Lacan ‘[t]he individual and the social order are inextricably bound’.¹⁹

The Real is trauma, violence, a moment of excruciating pain, pure antagonism. People construct ‘reality’ out of the Real in part to protect themselves against its pure antagonism. They recreate ‘a harmony with the real’.²⁰ Lying outside the world of the signifier, the Real ‘governs our activities more than any other’.²¹ We repeat it without recognising it: ‘the real is that which comes back to the same place – to the place where the subject in so far as he thinks, where the res cogitans, does not meet it’.²² Nevertheless, one can say something about the Real from the way the unconscious speaks where there is pain, revealing truth, which Lacan views as a function of the unconscious. In Žižek’s words, truth ‘belongs to the order of contingency: we vegetate in our everyday life, deep into the universal lie that structures it, when, all of a sudden, some totally contingent encounter – a casual remark by a friend, an incident we witness – evokes the memory of untold repressed trauma and shatters our self-delusion’.²³ This is what tells us what is really going on, what people really desire.

The Imaginary order

The ego

For Lacan the point of departure for human subjectivity occurs at the pre-verbal ‘mirror stage’. Looking into a mirror the child is captivated or ‘captured’ by its image, seeing the image as reality and concluding ‘I am that’ and ‘That is me’. In effect, the subject collapses into its object, failing to distinguish itself from the Other. It is thus in the Other that the subject first lives and registers himself or herself. The individual is alienated from himself or herself because of his or her desire for the image. It is a relation of opposition because what is established is established on the basis of what is not, i.e. an Other. Thus, Imaginary relations always involve intimidation, aggression, aggressive competitiveness, superiority, jealousy, or resentment. Lacan says that with the ‘captation of the subject’²⁴ in the mirror we have a formula for ‘the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury’.²⁵

The mirror stage is rooted in the ‘fragmented body’ (‘corps morcelé’) fantasy. According to this fantasy, the individual has a sense of bodily disarray that feeds the desire for a secure, stagnant, frozen ‘I’. The ego is condemned to perpetual torment, caught as it is between a push towards integration and wholeness as imaged in the mirror and the disintegration of the ‘corps morcelé’, which is a reminder to the individual of its lack and incompleteness.

As a result of the mirror stage, all Imaginary relations are fixated on an idealisation and an illusion, and otherness in the form of oppositions persists throughout adult life. Others always appear to have the totality and stability that the individual desires. Pulled between the desire for autonomy or identity and the identification with a rival, the ego is in a constant paranoid relation with the Other. The ego’s desire to be the Other by dissolving its otherness in this gradually becomes a desire to control the Other through which it sees itself because any change in the Other would threaten its view of itself. This is the source of human conflict. Conflict for Lacan is not the innocuous, anodyne competition or disagreement that exists between individuals or groups. It is a matter of domination and oppression – forms of violence that may or may not have a physical expression. Lacan notes that the effects of aggressive intention are ‘more far-reaching than any act of brutality’.²⁶ This understanding of conflict makes Lacanian analysis relevant to situations of communal conflict where the threat of violence can paralyse a community.²⁷

According to Lacan, the ego has a paranoiac structure and is buttressed by denial. Violence, for Lacan, is the result of ‘paranoid justifications of our own insecurity, which we project as aggressivity emanating from the others we control’.²⁸ Feelings of persecution lead to anxiety and this in turn leads the ego to express itself through negative projections onto others, throwing its own disorder and bad feelings onto them and fearing their return in the form of paranoia. When someone says ‘They are out to get me’ what they are actually saying is ‘I am out to get them’. The term ‘projection’ has many usages in psychoanalysis but it always appears as a defence.²⁹ It is best understood for the purposes of the present study as the unconscious process whereby the individual attributes to another wishes, qualities or feelings ‘that the subject repudiates or refuses to recognise in himself’.³⁰ As pointed out by Freud, the ego projects what it finds too unpleasurable because of its intensity.³¹

Another important manoeuvre of the paranoiac ego is called splitting. Splitting is best understood as the process whereby the ego both takes account of reality and disavows it. The process of disavowal enables the ego to create a new, delusional reality. The fragile ego fears splitting because reality slips in.

Where there is oppositional identification one automatically finds the source of the Master–Slave struggle for recognition that binds the ego as Master and the Other as Slave one to another. The Other/Slave is pacified by the ego/Master, which directs its aggression and negative feelings towards it. The Other/Slave remains dependent on the image the Master gives it.³² For all this, the ego/Master also needs the recognition of the Other/Slave. So the Master needs the Slave as much as the other way around. In this sense, the ego is itself in the position of Slave in so far as its identification with the Other entails an acceptance or rejection of a code of values defined by the Other.

The Symbolic order

The Symbolic is an experience of aliénation. ‘By mediating himself in his discourse, the subject in effect destroys the immediate relation of self to self and constructs himself in language … as he wishes to see himself, as he wishes to be seen, and thereby alienates himself in language.’³³ The subject, then, is radically divided, ‘[f]or in this labour which he undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another’.³⁴ Thus, as Žižek puts this, a personal narrative ‘is a bricolage of ultimately failed attempts to come to terms with some trauma; a social edifice is an ultimately failed attempt to displace/obfuscate its constitutive antagonism’.³⁵ A political identity likewise is an attempt at cover-up, an inauthentic act that strives for fullness. There is, then, a split between the subject and the ‘I’, subject and Other, and the subject and the world. The subject is the subject of desire from which it is alienated, not of reflexive consciousness.³⁶ Lacan summarises subjectivity in two propositions that play on Cartesian philosophy and give expression to the effects of this split in the subject: ‘I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.’³⁷ For Lacan, the key to the subject is therefore to be found in the unconscious, not the conscious.

When the subject realises how the Other is in itself inconsistent or deprived of the thing that he/she desires, the subject experiences separation from the Other. This is what leads to fantasies of wholeness – the attempt to (re)constitute the consistency of the Other and deal with the anxiety of separation. Fantasies help people to ‘forget or misrecognize satisfaction, to explain it away or not take responsibility for it’.³⁸ Homer writes: ‘The object of desire is always an unattainable object and it is fantasy that designates a subject’s impossible relation to a’,³⁹ i.e. to the Real. Fantasy renders the individual prone to all the alienation and lies of group life and of culture because in order to refer to self, desire or life, individuals need language and this is never direct or immediate. Speech is already one step removed from the Real.

Desire

Split by language, which therefore blocks the construction of identity rather than establishes it, the subject does not know what it wants, which simply adds to its sense of inner conflict, rivalry, aggressive intention and lack. Desire desires whatever the Other desires. In some cases, desires are ‘based on nothing more than the fact that the thing in question has been forbidden you’.⁴⁰ Desire seeks transgression. Thus, whatever it is unconscious desire represses is the very thing upon which unconscious desire is dependent. As a result, as Fink remarks,⁴¹ people are actually dependent upon the very thing they rebel against.

Speech

The everyday events of speech, the medium of desire, within which the subject lives, affecting and being affected by others through language, is at the heart of Lacan’s understanding of the human person. The external world is populated above all by speaking subjects. In our everyday reality people ‘address each other and affect each other by what they say … say what they mean and what they don’t mean simultaneously; whatever they get they always want more, or something different; and at any one moment they are consciously aware of only some of what they want’.⁴² What is literal, meaning, which is of the Imaginary order, ‘is always ambiguous, polyvalent, betraying something one wanted to remain hidden, hiding something one intended to express’.⁴³ There is always a difference between what a person consciously means to say and what words actually say (or reveal) because words are linked to groups of meanings. Signifiers, then, can mean more than what the individual intends and the individual can have very little conscious access to their meaning. They carry meanings beyond our understanding and control. What people mean or intend to mean is irrelevant. What people mean and what they say are different. Lacan is interested in what people say, and why they say it one way rather than another. He is not interested in meaning and communication but the failure of meaning and the failure of communication. In this sense, although Lacanian analytic theory takes Saussurean linguistics as a starting-point, it is not interested in linguistics or how language hooks up with reality. The Symbolic is not reducible to verbal language but to all signifying systems.⁴⁴

Lacan considers the signifier as comprising metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is the mechanism that allows for some other meaning than what is being said to arise by the substitution of one word for another. In metonymy the word comes to signify something ‘quite other than what it says’.⁴⁵ Lacan writes:

What is important is to understand what one is saying. And in order to understand what one is saying it’s important to see its lining, its other side, its resonances, its significant superimpositions. Whatever they may be – and we can include every misconstrual – there is no element of chance … Language entirely operates within ambiguity, and most of the time you know absolutely nothing about what you are saying. In your most ordinary conversations language has a purely fictional character, you give the other the feeling that you are always there, that is to say, that you are capable of producing the expected response, which bears no relation to anything whatsoever that is susceptible to being pursued any further. Nine-tenths of discourses that have effectively taken place are completely fictional in this respect.⁴⁶

The unconscious

As a result of the split the subject experiences because of language, the unconscious quickly comes into being to house that which is lived or experienced but not voiced.⁴⁷ By its nature thought represses and overlooks its own faults as people attempt to rationalise a lived experience. Repression is intentional. Laplanche describes this as ‘an operation whereby the subject attempts to repel, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, images, memories) which are bound to an instinct’.⁴⁸ The unconscious is ‘lacuna, cut, rupture inscribed in a certain lack’.⁴⁹ It is ‘the memory of those things he [i.e. the subject] forgets’.⁵⁰ And the individual arranges everything so as to forget these things that Lacan describes as the ‘stench and corruption that always yawn like an abyss’.⁵¹ At such times the satisfaction of the instinct is considered to lead to pain because it does not fit in with one’s view of oneself or with one’s moral principles and is thus avoided.

The repressed thing may make its way into consciousness on condition that it is denied. In this way the subject removes the repression but does not actually accept what is repressed. It is an intellectual acceptance of the repressed thing. This is called ‘negation’. The subject presents him/herself or some reality as what is in the mode of not being what one or something is. The repressed thing can also return inversely. Thus a repressed love can return in the form of an apparent anger or hatred or a repressed hatred can return as love.

Failing an expression of conscious negation, the revelation of the unconscious is mainly dependent upon a variety of linguistic phenomena such as ‘slips, memory disturbances, dreams, and the phenomenon of jokes’⁵² or mistakes, distortions, absentmindedness, a personal meaning given to an otherwise anodyne word, obsessional repetitions, verbal inability, interruptions, silence and ambiguity. The subject’s desire only ever comes to the surface in language through distortion. The unconscious reveals itself ‘at the level of the subject of the enunciation … in an interjection, in an imperative, in an invocation, even in a hesitation’.⁵³ It appears in ‘[i]mpediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles.’⁵⁴ ‘Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon – discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.’⁵⁵ Finding the truth, then, requires one to go to the unconscious. ‘At the level of the unconscious, the subject lies. And this lying is his way of telling the truth of the matter.’⁵⁶ Lacanian truth tells us what is at the root of our lack, loss and confusion and provides us with measures for limiting these. The analyst must go in search of that ‘liberating truth’.⁵⁷ He/she must express ‘ethical witness’.⁵⁸ Thus, ‘the status of the unconscious is ethical’.⁵⁹

Rationalisation

Conscious thought for Lacan is little more than rationalisation. It is also alienating because in so far as it is comprised of language, it is someone else’s language people use to speak of themselves. Thus, Lacan describes the ego as a ‘means of the speech addressed to you from the subject’s unconscious, a weapon to resist its recognition’.⁶⁰ It is a set of conscious defences. The defences block or reject the unconscious in an effort to produce order where the subject experiences lack and fragmentation. The characteristic modes of the agency of the ego in dialogue are ‘reactions of opposition, negation, ostentation, and lying’.⁶¹ The ego is rigid and resists the truth at all costs. It will invent in order to appear complete or coherent to itself and others. Lacan recommends therefore that the analyst approach statements of belief, understanding, feeling and thinking with a critical ear.

Rationalisation serves, then, to camouflage what the ego wants to defend, namely its ideal self-image and it works to create explanations that are in keeping with this by covering up the slips of the unconscious. The being that results from rationalisation is therefore false or fake because it overlooks the unconscious. So, according to Lacanian analysis, it is important to examine conscious ego thought in order to unravel its unconscious motivations. What is important in rationalisation in the context of analysis is to bring to light what a rational explanation for a particular behaviour neglects to say about certain unconscious motives. These are what the ego defends against.

In research into the Northern Ireland conflict researchers frequently point out the relative unreliability of interviewee material but rarely approach it from a subversive perspective to get to the bottom of what is really happening. The problem does not lie in the quality of interviewee material but the quality of the reading. There is always more going on than meets the eye, which it is the job of the ego to conceal. The aim of the present research is to help reveal those unconscious aspects of republican and loyalist identities that reproduce the conflict. I do this by identifying rationalisations and the unconscious dynamics shaping them.

The Real order

Socio-ideological fantasy

Slavoj Žižek has written extensively on the relevance of the Real to how the political field is constituted and articulated. He argues that it is the Real that propels the subject to identify with ideological meanings as the internal trauma of the subject is displaced on to the symbolical field. The primordial repression of an antagonism is constitutive of ‘reality’, reality being ‘the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to sustain the horror of the Real’⁶² or a ‘fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire’.⁶³ According to Žižek, the job of psychoanalysis is to provide an ethics of the Real that undermines the social-ideological fantasy of a cohesive society, confronting us with the lack or traumatic kernel not covered by any ‘ideal’. He also points out that the tendency of social and political scientists to externalise the cause of conflict onto social conditions is an avoidance of the unacknowledged desire of the subject.⁶⁴ This could also be said of some conflict resolution theorists. The present study looks for signs of fantasy and assesses their effects on the management of conflict.

For Žižek specific ideologies work ‘not through conscious processes of manipulation and the successful interpellation of subjects, but through unconscious fantasies and the failure of interpellation’.⁶⁵ Therefore, following Lacan, ideology ‘has to be read as a ciphered formation of the unconscious’.⁶⁶ It works in a form of misrecognition at the level of social reality. People overlook the illusion that structures their relationship to reality by means of the ‘ideological practice of disidentification’.⁶⁷ They believe the illusion that they are not identical to the ideological identification, which they accept has a hold on them. They say to themselves, ‘I’m not merely a direct embodiment of …; beneath this ideological mask, there lurks a warm human person with his small sorrows and joys which have nothing to do with big ideological issues … .‘⁶⁸ According to Žižek, it is precisely this stance that makes war, violence, conflict or whatever acceptable. This warm human person appeal or an appeal to solidarity, justice, community or whatever is the trans-ideological kernel of ideology. They are appeals to something other than the political. Fantasies of an ideological nature often operate in such a way as to keep people from becoming politicised. Thus, Žižzek writes that ‘the political gesture par excellence, at its purest, is precisely the gesture of separating the Political from the non-Political, of excluding some domains from the Political’.⁶⁹

Žižzek notes other features of the social-ideological fantasy that sustain antagonism. As the swing between attraction and repulsion is constitutive of human desire, fantasy too displays this tendency. The resolution of this conundrum is to make the concrete Other occupy the place of the sublime image. In conflict resolution this means one has to see people as they really are. He also notes that whatever we desire in fantasy becomes unsustainable in reality. In other words, fantasies do not work out in reality: what you get is not what you want. Furthermore, identification with a fantasy is not sustained by big things but by small things because the nature of antagonisms are such that small differences become big issues. People will also accept lies, big lies, for the good of the Other. A further trait of fantasy is that it tries to relive the point where things started to go wrong for the subject or subjects. This is a fantasmic point that exists simply to allow subjects to rationalise whatever it is they find unpleasurable. Žižek also stresses that some discourses only exist through the denial of their libidinal foundation. In other words, they exist on the basis of self-censorship. Self-censorship is used to enhance the power discourse because it veils what otherwise might abhor people and thus keeps people on board while sustaining repressed racism, homosexuality, etc. Jokes disclose what is publicly unacknowledged or censored. Likewise, appearances, a type of fantasmic support, are also a crucial hallmark of mainstream ideologico-political discourse as it wishes to appear tolerant etc. Appearances give the illusion of freedom or tolerance, but unwritten rules actually forbid certain things from happening. In this sense, these very appearances and the unwritten rules that sustain them are what guarantee the fantasy of freedom from prejudice