Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Deep Trance
"It was the nation as a master group-fantasy that organized and contained both the new faith in progress and its sacrificial wars, acted out in periodic cycles
of innovative, depressive, manic, and war stages. In each stage, nations follow a different psychoclass style.
In the innovative stage, the neurotic psychoclass provides new social, political, and economic progress; in the depressive stage, the depressive psychoclass is followed into economic depression; in the manic stage, narcissists take over
with their grandiose projects; and in the war stage nations follow self-destructive masochists and paranoid schizoids into violence.
Choosing earlier psychoclasses--psychological fossils--as leaders has become a constant practice in modern nations, only masked by the idealization of the public switched into their social alters. To realize that we willingly delegate to a handful of men sitting in a deep trance in the Oval Office the power to blow up much of the world depending whether they think they feel humiliated--as in the Cuban Missile Crisis--is to realize the bizarre extent of the dissociation between
fantasy and reality that continues to pervade our modern psyches."
--from The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
of innovative, depressive, manic, and war stages. In each stage, nations follow a different psychoclass style.
In the innovative stage, the neurotic psychoclass provides new social, political, and economic progress; in the depressive stage, the depressive psychoclass is followed into economic depression; in the manic stage, narcissists take over
with their grandiose projects; and in the war stage nations follow self-destructive masochists and paranoid schizoids into violence.
Choosing earlier psychoclasses--psychological fossils--as leaders has become a constant practice in modern nations, only masked by the idealization of the public switched into their social alters. To realize that we willingly delegate to a handful of men sitting in a deep trance in the Oval Office the power to blow up much of the world depending whether they think they feel humiliated--as in the Cuban Missile Crisis--is to realize the bizarre extent of the dissociation between
fantasy and reality that continues to pervade our modern psyches."
--from The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
