The Emotional Life of Nations
by Lloyd deMause

Chapter 5 (part 2) --
The Psychogenic Theory of History

This version was orignally in:
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997

"Trauma demands repetition."
-Selma Fraiberg

THE SOCIAL ALTER IN SMALL GROUPS
All groups, even small face-to-face groups, organize group-fantasies out of the pooled social alters of its members. Because even in small groups we feel vulnerable to the shame and humiliation that reminds us of our earlier helplessness, we defend ourselves by switching into our social alters and preparing ourselves for expected attacks. Although groups can also be used for utilitarian purposes, they more often form so that people can act out their persecutory social alters. When people construct a group-fantasy, they give up their idiosyncratic defensive fantasies and become entrained in the social trance. Group analysts have found that even small groups collude in delusional notions: that the group is like a disapproving mother, that the group is different from and superior to all other groups, that it has imaginary boundaries that can protect it, that it can provide endless sustenance to its members without their individual efforts, that its leader should be deified and should be in constant control of its members, that scapegoating is useful and sacrifice necessary for cleansing the group's emotions, that it is periodically besieged by monstrous enemies from without and stealthy enemies from within, that no individual is ever responsible for any of the group's actions and so on-all defensive structures organizing and restaging shared traumatic content. 157 Recruiters for cults, for instance, make use of the propensity for people to need groups to control them and act out their group-fantasies; in fact, over 20 million Americans belong to cults and cult-like groups that enable them to collude with idealizing and persecutory parts of other people's social alters. 158 Small groups, in fact, sometimes resemble religious cults psychodynamically-ritual restagings of early trauma are one of their goals, while utilitarian accomplishments are secondary and difficult to achieve. 159

It is not hard to see face-to-face group members become entrained and switch into their social alters, forming group-fantasies. As the group first gathers, people chat, laugh, argue and interact with other individuals from their central conscious selves. At a certain moment, however, "when the time comes for the group to form," individuals switch into their social alters, a social trance forms 160 and the group-fantasy takes over. Language and demeanor change, and people feel somehow detached, estranged from their usual range of feelings and deskilled of critical faculties. A leader is imagined to be "in control" even if he isn't actually present, group boundaries are imagined, work is thought able to be accomplished effortlessly, magical thinking spreads, enemies arise, factions form to act out splits, and empathy diminishes, since others are so full of the group's projections.

All this usually takes only a few minutes. It becomes acceptable to exploit and abuse others, as members were themselves once exploited and abused. Scapegoats volunteer for sacrifice, a group bible and group history and group spirit and other delusional group-fantasies form, and group life begins, seemingly a more emotionally vital life than everyday life, despite an omnipresent sleepiness common in groups that is a result of the social trance. When the group "ends," often with a trance-breaking clap of hands termed "applause," people wake up, break the entrainment, switch back to their central personalities and experience a tremendous emotional let-down as vital parts of themselves are lost, disoriented for a moment, and the group begins to mourn its own ending-in the same manner as multiple personalities often feel more connected to their real feelings when they are "in" their alters. Aristotle intuited the emotional importance of the social alter when he said man was a zoon politikon and was incomplete without his "political self," his social alter.

Even when small groups are formed to observe the emotional processes of their members, the group analyst usually misses the meaning of the switching of members into their social alters. Typical is a group analytic workshop held in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War as the group turned to a discussion of Saddam Hussein:

"D," our Arab member, suddenly changed before our eyes. The man, who had until then been distant...began a heated defense of Saddam Hussein: "He is the real Arab hero. He stands alone against the whole world and doesn't surrender. Saddam is fighting and representing Arab pride against the capitalistic interests of the West which are out to steal the Arab oil of Kuwait."

This long speech was so strong that it was immediately sensed as something truly crucial for D...it was as if D were moved by inner forces that strongly fought for expression, almost beyond the possibility of control. After a while he froze and didn't know how to go on. The outrage of other members was immediate. They pointed to the dark side of Saddam: the killer, the sadist, the oppressor of another country, the anti-Israeli aggressor who wants to destroy us physically. Now, D was like someone waking up from hypnosis. Slowly he regained his ability to speak. At first his speech was unclear but after awhile his ability to think and speak coherently returned. He tried to explain, unsuccessfully, why he was defending Saddam. In reality, he maintained, he, too, was afraid of the SCUD missiles; and he hated Saddam with all his heart, perhaps even more than any Jew, and would welcome news announcing his death. 161

The group analyst passed off the spectacle of the man clearly switching into and out of a social trance as without meaning for the group.

OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY IN A SOCIAL TRANCE
It is only when one realizes that we all carry around with us persecutory social alters that become manifest in groups that such unexplained experiments as those described in Stanley Milgram's classic study Obedience to Authority 162 become understandable. In this experiment, people were asked to be "teachers" and, whenever their "learners" made mistakes, to give them massive electric shocks. The "learners," who were only acting the part, were trained to give out pained cries even though the "electric shocks" were non-existent. Of the 40 "teachers," 65 percent delivered the maximum amount of shock even as they watched the "learners" scream out in pain and plead to be released, despite their having been told they didn't have to step up the shock level. The "teachers" often trembled, groaned and were extremely upset at having to inflict the painful shocks, but continued to do so nonetheless. That the "teachers" believed the shocks were real is confirmed by another version of the experiment in which real shocks were inflicted upon a little puppy, who howled in protest; the obedience statistics were similar. 163

Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's experiments, wondering why people were so easily talked into inflicting pain so gratuitously. The real explanation is that, by joining a group-the "university experiment"-they switched into their social alters and merged with their own sadistic internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to take responsibility for ordering pain inflicted upon others. Their "struggle with themselves" over whether to obey was really a struggle between their social alters and their main selves.

Although many subsequent experiments varied the conditions for obedience, 164 what Milgram did not do is try the experiment without the social trance. If he had not framed it as a group experience, if he had simply on his own authority walked up to each individual, alone, and, without alluding to a university or any other group, asked him or her to come to his home and give massive amounts of electric shock to punish someone, he would not have been obeyed, because they would not have switched into their social alters. The crucial element of the experiments was the existence of the group-as-terrifying-parent, the all-powerful university. Not surprisingly, when the experiment was repeated using children-who go into trance and switch into traumatized content more easily than adults-they were even more obedient in inflicting the maximum shock. 165 Subjects were even obedient when they themselves were the victims: 54 percent turned a dial upon command to the maximum limit when they had been told it was inflicting damage upon their ears that could lead to their own deafness, and 74 percent ate food they thought could harm them, thus confirming that they were truly in a dissociated state, not just "obeying" authority or trying to hurt others, and that it was actually an alternate self doing the hurting of the main self. 166 The only time they refused to obey was when experimenters pretended to act out a group rebellion, since the social trance was broken. 167

Milgram could also have tested whether it was simple obedience that was really being tested by asking his subjects to reach into their pockets and pay some money to the learners. They would have refused to do so, because they weren't "obeying" any old command, they were using the experimental situation to hurt scapegoats. It is the social trance itself and not "obedience to authority" that is effective in producing destructive obedience. Milgram's subjects, like all of us who participate in wars and social violence, lost their capacity for empathy with victims only when in a social trance. Those who continue to replicate Milgram's experiments and who are still puzzled as to why "the most banal and superficial of rationales...is enough to produce destructive behavior in human beings" 168 simply underestimate the amount of trauma most people have experienced and the effectiveness of the social trance in allowing them to restage these hurts.

At one point Milgram approached the insight that he was dealing with an alternate personality when he discusses what he terms the "agentic state," which is his term for the trance that his subjects were in. "Moved into the agentic state," Milgram wrote, "the person becomes something different from his former self, with new properties not easily traced to his usual personality." 169 Unfortunately, neither Milgram nor any of the others who have performed obedience experiments looked into the childhoods of their subjects to see if those who easily obeyed hurtful commands differed from the minority who refused to do so. 170

THE GROUP-FANTASIES OF NATIONS
Even though no group is too small to synchronize and act out the group-fantasies of its members, the larger the group the more deeply it can enter into the social trance and the more irrational the group-fantasies it can circulate and act out. The dissociated shame that is operative in small groups is equally there in nations, whether it is Kennedy nearly triggering a nuclear apocalypse in Cuba to revenge "his nose being rubbed in it" or Germany starting World War II to revenge "the shame of Versailles" (die Sham is often used in German for the genital area.) 171

That nations have a central persecutory task is a widely-denied truth. That nations are necessary for more rational enterprises than war and brutal domination of others is a wholly unproven assumption. In truth, most members of most nations participate in one way or another in the torture and killing of others and in economic and political domination. We only deny it by colluding in such delusions as that leaders are to blame, that suffering is deserved, that punishment reforms, that killing is moral, that some people are not human, that sacrifice brings renewal and that violence is liberating. Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad-the maddest of all being the historian's belief that it is sane.

It is only when we begin to recognize the ubiquity of these delusional historical group-fantasies that our personal responsibility begins to return to us-reading the newspaper, watching the nightly news and much of daily life becomes both more painful and more meaningful as empathy returns to our social lives. For some time now, for instance, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it-our real emotions are dissociated and therefore unavailable to us.

Nations, the most important group-fantasy constructions of our social alters, act out what seems to be a non-personal history because social events appear to exist in a separate reality and not to be a result of the intentions of individuals. Even when we find a leader to blame events on, we are helpless to explain why anyone followed him, imagining that the leader has the power to "hypnotize" his people. Hitler, for instance, is often assumed to be solely responsible for World War II, just like other wars are blamed upon single individuals-a truly preposterous assumption.

Since the emotional connections between society and self are cut off-nations are often said to behave sui generis-individuals can deny responsibility for what they do and social events can appear to be wholly without motivation. Soldiers who kill in wars are not personally called murderers and politicians who vote to withhold food from children are not personally termed child killers because these actions are imagined to be part of a different reality system, a dream-world that is somehow not really "us." Since people "in their right minds" do not gratuitiously kill others, it is only people "in their wrong minds"-in their other minds, in their social alters-that do.

It is therefore important for me to deny that there is any emotional connection between "Lloyd deMause" and "Corporal deMause with a rifle in Korea," just as there must be no connection made between separate alters of a multiple personality. In both cases there exists a radical splitting of the psyche. As "Lloyd deMause," I love and protect my children and all the children around me. As "Corporal deMause" I was prepared to kill Korean "enemies," even if they were children. As "a good American" today, I vote for my President and pay my taxes that are used to pay American soldiers who enforce an American embargo that murders a million Iraqi children, any more than I noticed America murdered several million Vietnamese children through the poisonous effects of Agent Orange. I do not feel responsible for genocide, even when it is pointed out that my country is killing the children. I have been thoroughly dissociated, switched into my social alter, as you have been, along with hundreds of millions of other "good Americans," just like the "good Germans" who participated in the Holocaust.

The social alter is the carrier of our hidden motivations, but seems to have no motives of its own. In his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara blames the death of three million innocent Asians on what he terms "the law of unintended consequences;" 172 i.e., it was all an inadvertent error, and no American had any motives whatsoever for killing them, certainly not himself, although it was once called "McNamara's war." Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, recognized this problem of massive denial when she wrote that the main problem in the Eichmann court was to get people to acknowledge that political actions are personal, that "soldiers" must be "transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings." 173

The concept of the social alter explains why guilt does not prevent people from killing others nor leaders from ordering men to their death. Getting soldiers to kill others is not easy; studies have shown that eighty percent of the soldiers in the wars of the twentieth century refused to shoot at the enemy, even when it meant they themselves might have died because of their refusal. 174 The task of the military is to condition the process of switching into the soldier's persecutory social alter so that he can be cut off from his normal empathic personality. Only when switched into his persecutory social alter can a soldier kill without overwhelming guilt; rarely will he later then connect enough to this killing to admit, as one veteran did, "It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now-I slaughtered those people. I murdered them." 175 Because soldiers in early wars fought up close so that they could more easily experience personal guilt, rarely more than a few hundred men were usually killed during a battle, 176 while modern wars, specializing in distancing, denial and trance induction training, 177 have in this century killed over 100 million people.

CHILDREARING AND THE SOCIAL TRANCE
Experimental evidence has shown that there is a direct correlation between traumatic childhood and the ability to go into trance. 178 The depersonalization made necessary by childhood trauma as a form of "hypnotic evasion" to avoid the painful impact of early trauma gets called into use as an adult. Thus, it is not surprising to find that a recent survey of political attitudes finds that there is a clear correlation between harsh childrearing and authoritarian political beliefs, the use of military force, belief in the death penalty, etc. 179

Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the rare individuals whose childrearing is less traumatic than that of the rest of their society or whose personal insights, through psychotherapy or other means, are beyond those of their neighbors. For instance, extensive interviews of people who were rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust in comparison to a control group of people who were either persecutors or just stood by and allowed the killing of Jews shows startling differences in childrearing. 180 While all other dimensions of the lives of the rescuers were similar to the control group religion, education, even political opinions what distinguished the rescuers from others was their childhood: their parents used reasoning in bringing them up, rather than the customary use by European parents early in the century of beating and kicking children to force obedience. The rescuers' parents were found to have invariably showed an unusual concern for equity, more love and respect for their children, more tolerance for their activities, and less emphasis on obedience, all allowing rescuers to remain in their empathic central personalities and not enter into social alters and dissociate their feelings for Jews as human beings. The rescuers risked their lives to save Jews not because they had some connection with Judaism or were politically radical, but because they remained in their compassionate personal selves rather than switching into the social trance constructed by the rest of their society.

THE DREAM WORLD OF THE SOCIAL TRANCE
Relatively few people are clinically diagnosed as having dissociated personalities. 181 Virtually all of those who are have experienced extreme early trauma: 85 percent were sexually abused, 75 percent were severely physically abused, 60 percent had been subject to extreme neglect, 40 percent had witnessed violent death, and a large number of them had been victims of extreme sadism, including torture, childhood prostitution, near-death experiences, being locked in cellars and trunks, and so on. 182 Dissociation scores in a randomized sample of the general population have shown that dissociative experiences of various sorts are quite common tens of millions of Americans have experienced dissociation during religious and other rituals and that dissociation is a continuum ranging from minor to major forms. 183 Yet most of us only massively dissociate when we are in our social alters, when we participate in the dream world of the group trance.

Social alters have a developmental history for each of us. They begin their independent existence in our earliest hours as protectors, then as persecutors and finally develop into the organized persecutory group-fantasies of adulthood, while retaining elements that betray their early origins. Thus the traumatic material of our earliest years, full of hellish wombs, hurt and abandoned children, terrifying mommies and violent daddies, is organized by fairy tales, movies, TV programs and schools, first into dragons and knights and eventually into Evil Empires and American Presidents fighting Star Wars. However disguised from their infantile origins, these adult political fantasies are organized into persecutory social alters, then made real by shared delusional visions of the world and trillion-dollar weapon systems, our group-fantasies made concrete.

SCAPEGOATS AS POISON CONTAINERS FOR TRAUMAS
That we can switch between our central selves and our social alters so easily without anyone noticing it is a testimony to the dissociated state of the social trance. Multiple personalities, too, existed long before they were clinically recognized-multiples were usually called "possessed" or "crazy"-and no one noticed that they were amnesic to the host personality. People in earlier societies spent much of their time in their social alters-a world of spirits and gods and magic-because they had badly damaged private selves due to their extraordinarily abusive and neglectful upbringing. Modern nations, of course, have their own group-fantasies, the dream world of politics, there being no psychodynamic difference between a tribal chief proclaiming how women's menstrual blood pollutes the tribe and a Nazi proclaiming how Jews pollute the German bloodstream.

It is not difficult to see politicians switch back and forth between their central selves and their social alters, often using the royal "We" when speaking of themselves when in their social alters. For instance, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stood on the floor of Congress in 1996 and spoke with passionate intensity about the need for cutting all kinds of government aid for children (cut nutrition assistance for 14 million children, cut Social Security for 750,000 disabled children, cut Medicaid for 4 million children, plus slash aid to 9 million children benefiting from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Head Start, education grants, child health care, aid to homeless children, etc.) 184 Few helpless children in America would avoid the sacrificial ax. Then, in a blink of an eye, Gingrich switched from his persecutory social alter back to his real self and called for tax credits for poor children to buy laptop computers so they could access the Internet!

What had happened was this: Gingrich had been inaugurated as Speaker of the House, becoming world famous and appearing on the covers of the newsweeklies, and had received a book contract for $4.5 million. All this personal success made his hidden self, needy-baby Newt, son of a severely manic-depressive teenage mother and a battering father, 185 feel jealous and cry out "ME TOO! I NEED SOME LOVE!" His conscious self was threatened with being overwhelmed with the memories of deprivation, despair and dependency that he had so long repressed. The same process was happening to millions of other newly wealthy Americans who favored cutting welfare and child aid. Rather than Gingrich feeling his neediness, he dumped it into scapegoats, millions of needy American children, letting them feel his despair for him, saying they had to cut off their aid because it was making children "too dependent." What poor children had done wrong was to be dependent and helpless. Gingrich's social alter had the task of protecting him against the repetition of his early traumas by punishing stand-ins for himself for their dependency. He felt that his own helplessness was to blame for his being neglected by his mother; therefore helpless, dependent children, symbols of himself, had to be punished. Children must not be dependent, he declared; their neediness makes them bad. That he particularly singled out stopping aid to children of teenage mothers gave away the inner sources of his crusade, being himself a child of a teenage mother. And while Gingrich's individual traumatic history as a child of a teenage mother wasn't shared by the other Congressmen who voted the cuts in welfare into law nor by the President who signed the legislation, they and those Americans who supported them shared traumas of equal severity to collude in using the children as scapegoats. 186

Because so much of America at that time had become so prosperous the highest gross domestic product per person of any nation in history most of the nation colluded in considering Gingrich's delusional actions "social," not "personal." No one asked if his persecution of children of teenage mothers had anything to do with his being a child of an unwed teenage mother; obviously it wasn't a measure designed to reduce teenage pregnancies, the majority of which are the result of seduction or outright rape by men much older than the teenagers. 187 In fact, only 8 percent of welfare mothers were unwed teenagers; welfare actually reduces teenage pregnancies. 188 And two-thirds of teenage babies were made by fathers who were over 21, essentially raping the teen mother. 189 But these facts didn't deter the nation's convictions. No one asked why during a period of unparalleled prosperity the nation's most important agenda suddenly became to pass federal legislation that punished children, including one provision specifically prohibiting states from making any payments for baby diapers. 190

Nor was Gingrich alone in this group-fantasy of "bad children." Congressmen began calling children on welfare "bloodsuckers" and "alligators" and "wolves" who were preying on taxpayers. One even waved a sign on the floor of Congress that said, "Don't feed the alligators." 191 Presidential candidate Sen. Phil Gramm, introducing provisions into the welfare "reform" bill dubbed the "Home Alone" bill because it forced mothers of little children to go to work even when they had no day care 192 declared that if the government paid welfare to unwed mothers the nation would soon be flooded with illegitimate babies, predicting that "soon there will be more illegitimate babies in America than legitimate." 193 He seemed quite sincere in his fear of the specter of the U.S. swamped by an explosion of dependent, sinful bastards devouring his wealth, stating "the battle against welfare is a battle for civilization." 194

If helpless children of the poor were seen as bad babies and voracious alligators, then obviously they were all scapegoats who were "poison containers" needed by the nation to feel early memories of hunger and despair at being unloved and abused. Without poison containers, we would have to feel these feelings ourselves. Gingrich and Gramm knew that they were acting as delegates for millions of other Americans who, like themselves, had been feeling successful recently (corporate profits had just soared 40 percent, the stock market was up over 50 percent) and who now unconsciously needed poor children to feel their emotions for them. This psychohistorical "war on children" takes place whenever a nation experiences a prolonged period of peace and prosperity and turns from external to internal "enemies," as in the movement to cut benefits for "the undeserving poor" in the peaceful, prosperous periods of the 1840s, the 1890s and the 1920s. Gingrich's attack on needy children was identical, in fact, to what Ronald Reagan did when he became Governor of California. Reagan had received a $2 million gift from his political backers, disguised as a payment for some barren land he owned, and, like Gingrich, was feeling guilty about being rich and famous for the first time in his life. 195 To punish his greedy childhood self, Reagan cut out virtually all funds for the Needy Children's School Lunch Program, plus cut meal allowances for retarded children. His goal wasn't saving money; he actually doubled total expenses during his term. But his sacrifice of helpless children was simply a magical guilt-reducing device.

The scapegoating of children to silence the hurt child inside oneself is extremely effective in reducing intrapsychic anxiety. Even chimpanzees scapegoat infants when tense, seizing them from their mothers and flailing them against the ground, often killing them in "aggression-displays." 196 In 1996, America too was displaying aggression toward children, internal scapegoats in order to make us feel better. Millions of Americans watched Newt Gingrich on TV or readed about his speeches the next day in the paper had to deny that two very different Gingriches had spoken as he cut out welfare for children and in the next moment proposed giving them laptop computers. Some columnists acknowledged that providing laptop computers for ghetto kids while cutting off their food money was a "crazy" idea. One, whose column was headed "Newt to Poor: Let Them Eat Laptops," 197 pointed out that ghetto children don't have much use for tax credits since they usually don't pay taxes, but even he wasn't curious about how Gingrich could simultaneously champion both starvation and free computers for poor children. Like early observers of multiple personalities, he merely labeled the idea as "crazy," but never asked how and why and when Gingrich moved in and out of his "crazy" alternate personality.

RESTAGING EARLY TRAUMAS IN THE SOCIAL TRANCE
The childhood sources for Gingrich's political program are so overt they should be obvious to all, yet because we are in a social trance when we hear him we collude to deny them. The media widely reported, for instance, that Gingrich was a child of a teenage mother, but carefully didn't connect it with his speeches on how teenage mothers should be punished for having children. The traumatic events of his infancy had to be restaged and millions of children made to feel his despair because in his social alter the child feels responsible for his or her own abuse and neglect, and so a scapegoat for the child self must be punished. As always in politics, the social alter's primary identification is with the abuser.

That cutting out welfare for children was a reaction to prosperity, not really a way to save money, was admitted by many politicians. Senator Pat Moynihan pointed out even President Clinton bore responsibility for the success of Gingrich's campaign to "dump the children on the streets, " 198 since Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." "It is almost beyond imagining that we will do this," Moynihan said. "In the middle of the Great Depression, we provided a Federal guarantee of some provision for children, dependent children. In the middle of the roaring 90's, we're taking it away." 199 But the seeming contradiction is in fact the point: it is because the 90s were roaring we had to punish children, scapegoats for the "bad, needy" child alter in our heads. The Congressman who told the media, "It's time to tighten the belt on the bloated stomach of the Federal government" 200 himself had a very large stomach, but no one mentioned this as he voted to cut the lunch money for skinny little kids.

When the 61-year-old federal welfare program, the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, the benefits for disabled children and the food stamps guarantees were finally repealed with the backing of both parties and of the President, the sacrifice of America's children was complete. Many commentators and politicians said this would "prevent children from being dependent." It was useless to point out to people who are dissociated and in a social trance that children or other poison containers were helpless human beings who were the victims of their actions. Nor could one have made any impression pointing out that appearing to save a few billion dollars by depriving today's children would cost hundreds of billions in tomorrow's crimes. The children were full of our projections; they weren't real to us.

Examples of mass dissociation of perpetrators are legion. Lifton documents how Nazi doctors "double" themselves and create an "Auschwitz self" to divest themselves of responsibility toward those they experimented on. 201 The Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, when asked if the Jews he killed had deserved their fate, replied that "there was something unrealistic about such a question, because [we] had been living in an entirely different world," that is, the world of social alters. Jews weren't particularly personally hated. Their blood just had to flow in order to purify the blood of Germany. And America, in the 1990s, had to conduct a genocide of over a million Iraqi children through our embargo in a trance-in fact, no one noticed we were killing them! They weren't human because they weren't real. We were just punishing evil Iraqis. The Nazis used to say they were just cleansing Europe of Jewish pollution. How could one ask if Jewish children deserved to be killed? "It never even occurred to us," Höss said. 202 We were just "good Germans" and "good Americans" when we killed millions of children. The most important psychodynamic of history is people's ability to switch deep into their social alter, identify with the perpetrator and periodically persecute helpless people who represent ones' own childhood self. It is the social alter's duty to remove bad, sinful children. As one German policeman ended his description of his execution of Jewish children:

...while leaving the execution site, the other comrades laughed at me, because pieces of the child's brains had spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked, why are you laughing, whereupon Koch, pointing to the brains on my sidearm, said: That's from mine, he has stopped twitching. He said this in an obviously boastful tone... 203

The psychohistorian asks: "Did he wonder incredulously what could possibly justify his blowing a vulnerable little girl's brains out? Do Americans wonder why they must gratuitously kill a million innocent, helpless Iraqi children?" The answer is that it is precisely because children are innocent and helpless that they must be obliterated, to punish them for our own imagined sinfulness.

MERGING WITH THE PERPETRATOR
Ultimately our social alters merge with the perpetrator of early traumas. In wars, we initially hallucinate that children are being hurt (in the Gulf War, we imagine them hurt by Saddam Hussein, claiming he killed babies in incubators), but of course the result of the war and the embargo was for Americans to kill millions of children. In group-fantasy, we merge with the aggressor in order to avoid feeling helpless and then inflict damage upon child-scapegoats under the guise of "saving children."

We see this merging with the perpetrator in every scapegoating group-fantasy. When anti-Semites persecute Jews, they are merged with the abusing parent and punishing the abused child. Jews must be persecuted, says St. John Chrysostom, for their "lewd grossness and extremes of gluttony"-betraying the sexual seduction and constant hunger experienced by children of his time; Jews are "murderers of the Lord"-and must be punished for the murderous rage children felt toward their abusers, their Lords, their caretakers. 204 Adult events, political and economic history, usually provide only proximate causes of scapegoating group-fantasies; their ultimate cause lies in earlier traumatic events.

FUNCTIONS OF SOCIAL ALTERS
Social alters are a product of the evolution of the human brain. The evidence we will shortly examine suggests our species began with little more private selves than chimpanzees, controlled mainly by our unconscious thalamo-amygdalan memory systems and living with little self-consciousness or empathy. Humans only began being able to form more fully conscious selves as the acquisition of language and the evolution of childrearing produced a major epigenetic (additional to genetic) evolution of our psyche. By splitting off and then sharing the feelings in our social alters, we have become able to remain "sane" some of the time and get about the daily business of living our lives, while walling off in a separate part of our psyches our most painful traumas and deepest feelings.

Our social alters contain early levels of our unbearable hurts ("Why didn't mommy want me?" "Why did daddy hit me?"), restaged as fairy tales ("Are there witches?" "Will the monster kill me?") and then as social questions ("Shall we take children away from teenage mothers?" "Is Saddam Hussein a new Hitler who will blow up the world?"). The adaptive function of social alters is that they allow people to go about their daily business without being overwhelmed by traumatic memories and resulting despair-as "crazy" people are overwhelmed. By dissociating early persecutors into our social alters and then identifying with these persecutors in our social lives, human beings manage to live more sane daily lives, while warding off unseen but felt dangers by "feeding" victims of society to terrifying religious, political and economic divinities. So important to our sanity is the social alter that when a poison container for a group-fantasy is removed, tremendous anxiety is aroused that has to be defended against by creating a replacement. For instance, the disappearance of the Evil Soviet Empire in 1989 unexpectedly led to an outbreak of enormous shared anxieties by Russians, other Europeans and Americans alike, anxieties that were then defended against by constructing new internal enemies like immigrants, minorities, welfare mothers and children to replace the missing external enemy. 205

INDUCING THE SOCIAL TRANCE
Earlier societies were so deep into the social trance that although they often had excellent intellectual knowledge about the world, based upon experience, they nevertheless shared the most bizarre magical beliefs imaginable while in their social alters. Adaptationist evolutionary theories flounder on the ubiquity of these bizarre and patently nonadaptive cultural traits. There is nothing adaptive in maintaining a belief that if you put a stick into a cowrie shell and it falls to the side, someone will soon die, 206 or the belief that wars restore the potency of men and societies. Most of culture consists of behaviors like these, which become explainable by developmental psychology, not by theories of adaptation to environments. Because early societies had so little development of private self in childhood, they lived most of their lives in their social alters in a "Dreamtime" world of malevolent witches, ghosts and other persecutory spirits. Both devouring witches and the helpful animal familiars of shamans, for instance, have been shown to be actual alters which are first constructed in childhood as imaginary companions 207 i.e., they are first protective alters created by the child to help handle trauma and only in adulthood do they become persecutory social alters. Whether you are a New Guinea cannibal, an ancient Greek mother, a Balinese trancer or a Nazi antisemite, you first form an alter in your head of a devouring, bloodthirsty demon, using traumatic memories going all the way back to the poisonous placenta, and then you collude with others to project this image onto that of a horrible witch, a devouring Striga, a bloodthirsty leyak spirit or a poisonous Jew in order to relieve your intrapsychic stress.

Our political beliefs today are often no less magical than the religious beliefs of earlier times. The belief that killing and burning Jews can cleanse German blood is based on the same kind of trance logic as earlier beliefs that killing and burning children in sacrifices to gods will assure better crops. Both depend upon social alters to keep their real selves sane. Only after switching into their social alters can normally peaceful people become persecutors, don frightful masks or swastika uniforms and chop enemy's heads off or gas Jews. Then, their traumas restaged, they can go home, remove their masks and alters and have dinner with their families.

Every known society has trance rituals designed to help switch members into their social alters, entrain their group-fantasies and prepare them for social action designed to relieve emotional distress. Bourguignon counts 437 societies out of 488 studied that have formal trance rituals, 208 but she uses a very narrow definition of what constitutes a trance. In fact, no society lacks its trance rituals. Apparently being dissociated from your social alter for any length of time leaves you feeling that you have lost an important part of your self your hurt self. As the !Kung bushman said when asked why he had to join a trance dance ritual every week, "I can really become myself again." 209 Many cultures even have a special word for the depression one feels when a social event ends, 210 the "social hangover" that feels, they say, as if someone has died the loss of their social alter, a vital part of themselves.

Anthropologists often watch their subjects enter into their social alters, but are trained to apply the dogma of cultural relativism to what they are seeing in order to deprive it of meaning. They regularly encounter local populations who are usually friendly to them and others, but who periodically go off into violent frenzies and chop off men's heads or girl's genitals. Rather than posing a question as to why their subjects seem to have two distinctly different personalities, they instead say that the violent personality was merely "learned cultural behavior"-i.e., that it had no meaning or motivation. Historians do the same with their subjects' behaviors during wars and genocides.

The anthropology and neurobiology of ritual trances has been extensively studied. 211 The time-honored techniques of formal trance induction are well known: fasting, rapid breathing, inhalation of smoke and ingestion of drugs, infliction of pain, and the use of drumming, pulsing music and dancing all "driving behaviors" designed to reproduce the pain, hypoxia and shock of early trauma and entrain the biological rhythms of the group. Neurobiologically, the amygdaloid-hippocampal balance plays a pivotal role in trance states, with an increase in theta-wave rhythm in the hippocampus, indicating increased attentional activity to early amygdalan-centered memories, allowing access to dissociated traumatic experience. 212 The motivations for going into the group trance, however, have remain unstudied.

The leader of any group is a delegate for the group's trance induction needs. Freud, following LeBon, noticed the resemblance of group fascination to a hypnotic trance. Hitler confirmed his insight:

I have been reproached for making the masses fanatic...But what you tell the people in the mass, in a receptive state of fanatic devotion, will remain like words received under an hypnotic influence, ineradicable, and impervious to every reasonable explanation. 213

That recapturing and then restaging early trauma are the goals of the social trances is suggested by the discovery by Hilgard of the correlation between the severity of childhood punishment and ability to go into a hypnotic trance. 214 Although many small groups admit that the goal of their trance rituals is an attempt to heal trauma, we tend to deny this today. Yet when the rationalizations of our trance rituals are stripped away and their hidden rhythms and embedded messages are revealed to analysis, their traumatic bases are made convincingly evident.

FANTASY ANALYSIS
I have developed and tested over the past two decades a technique I call fantasy analysis of revealing the hidden messages embedded within seemingly bland and boring speeches and press conferences of leaders as well as other verbal and non-verbal political material. 215 The purpose of fantasy analysis is to capture how it feels to be part of a nation's shared emotional life. Other psychohistorians have confirmed that doing a fantasy analysis of political material can be a Rosetta Stone that can uncover new dimensions to our group-fantasies and can even be used to try to forecast future political behavior. 216 Just as experimental psychologists have shown that visual stimuli subliminally presented tachistoscopically for a hundredth of a second register in the unconscious and in dreams while bypassing consciousness, 217 so too subliminal messages are embedded in speeches and in the media by their choice of certain metaphors, similes and emotional images rather than others. A fantasy analysis of a speech or other historical document will remove the defensive posturing and locate the emotionally powerful fantasy words that contain the embedded real message, decoding the hidden content through the relationships of the imagery. The rules for fantasy analysis are simple:

1. Record all strong feeling words, even when they occur in innocuous contexts, such as "kill the bill in Congress or "cut the budget." Be abstemious; recording mild anxiety words simply clutters the analysis, although it rarely changes the emotional content of the hidden message.
2. Record all metaphors, similes and gratuitously repeated words.
3. Record all family terms, such as mother, father, children.
4. Eliminate negatives, since "we don't want war" still is about war and could have been phrased "we want peace."
5. Rewrite the fantasy words in sentences to reveal the hidden messages.

My books and articles over the past two decades have contained extensive fantasy analyses of Presidential speeches and press conferences, and can be consulted as examples of how the process reveals the group-fantasies of the nation at specific historical moments. 218 The following analysis of President Ronald Reagan's Acceptance Speech for re-election will give an example the fantasy analysis technique, plus it will illustrate the process of trance induction, the search for traumatic content and the leader's unconscious pact with the nation on what should be done.

Most political meetings are usually held not to make decisions but to deepen the social trance, to switch into social alters and to entrain the group's unconscious emotional strategies for handling the inner emotional problems of its "hidden world." The following speech was given by Ronald Reagan at the 1984 Republican Convention. Political conventions are similar to the "carnival gatherings" of chimpanzees, where they "dash about in excited, nonaggressive display, which acts to relieve tensions" 219 or the "trance dances" of !Kung bushmen, which accomplish ritual cleansing of depression. Even before political speeches begin, important trance induction conditions are established. The audience is usually immobilized in crowded seats, recapturing the helplessness of infancy. In the 1984 Republican Convention, a special film was shown to the delegates on a huge television screen above the podium before Reagan began speaking. It was so boring-mainly his giant face, as though he were a huge mother and the delegates were infants-that the audience already began to dissociate. As hypnotherapist Milton Erickson writes, being very boring is one of the most powerful trance induction techniques, since the conscious mind soon loses reality anchors. 220 The only persons the audience could focus upon were cadres of young Republicans pumping their arms in the air and shouting rhythmically, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" as though they were !Kung trance drummers. 221

Reagan began the trance induction part of his speech at heartbeat speed that is, with accents at about 70 beats per minute, although normal speaking rates are usually above 120 beats per minute. Almost all politicians speak at this abnormally slow rate of 70 beats per minute, even when microphones make their words clear to a large audience. This is the rate of the mother's heart beat one first heard in the womb. Other trance inducers-priests and hypnotists-also instinctively slow down to 70 beats per minute, entraining their audiences to a mother's heartbeat. To emphasize this regression to the warmth of the womb, Reagan's first fantasy words (put in bold type) to his audience and to the nation watching on TV are (read this to yourself very slowly to feel its dissociative effect):

Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice President, delegates to this convention, and fellow citizens. In 75 days, I hope we enjoy a victory that is the size of the heart of Texas. Nancy and I extend our deep thanks to the Lone Star State and the "Big D," the city of Dallas, for all their warmth and hospitality.

After these womb-like words, Reagan begins to speak baby language, as though he were talking to an audience of three-year-olds-a technique also used by the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson to induce trances through age regression and mind-splitting boring content. Erickson usually tells parables, in baby language, often about animals; Reagan does the same (again, read very slowly and watch your eyelids begin to feel heavy):

Four years ago I didn't know precisely every duty of this office, and not too long ago, I learned about some new ones from the first graders of Corpus Christi School in Chambersburg, Pa. Little Leah Kline was asked by her teacher to describe my duties. She said: "The President goes to meetings. He helps the animals. The President gets frustrated. He talks to other Presidents."

What is most astonishing isn't just that the leader of the most powerful nation on earth-faced with soaring deficits because of his huge military buildup and threatening a war with a neighboring state-should begin his explanation of his plans for the nation for the next four years with baby talk. What is surprising is that no one noticed anything strange! The speech seemed "normal politics," Reagan was called a "master speaker." We are all quite used to leaders speaking boring baby language to us at an exaggeratedly slow pace. We periodically ask our leaders to put us into a trance so we can switch into our social alters and coordinate our fantasies. Reality is quite beside the point.

Reagan repeats more "heart" words (which I will skip to save space) and then begins to further dissociate the conscious mind from the unconscious with repeated splitting words, in much the same way that a hypnotist splits your attention by telling you to watch one of your arms rise while the other one falls:

The choices this year are not just between two different personalities or between two different visions of the future, two fundamentally different ways of governing-their government of pessimism, fear and limits, or ours of hope, confidence, and growth. Their government-their government sees people only as members of groups. Ours serves all the people of America as individuals. Theirs lives in the past, seeking to apply the old and failed policies to an era that has passed them by. Ours learns from the past and strives to change by boldly charting a new course for the future. Theirs lives by promises, the bigger, the better. We offer proven, workable answers.

The final induction technique is age regression:

Our opponents began this campaign hoping that America has a poor memory. Well, let's take them on a little stroll down memory lane...

The social trance is now becoming effective, and the group has switched into their social alters. The audience has become biologically entrained with the speaker and with each other; they are moving subtly together, though no one has thought it important to measure this in political meetings other than such obvious entrainments as synchronized flag movements or mass Nazi salutes. This entrainment itself evokes early memories, since it recalls how babies entrain to the voices of the adults around them within minutes of birth (and possibly even in utero,) 222 swaying and moving their head, arms, body and fingers to the sounds of adults.

After the trance induction, Reagan then begins what Erickson terms the unconscious search, attempting to locate what feelings are bothering the audience and nation at this particular historical moment. (I will from here on only reproduce sentences with fantasy words to save space.) Here is what Reagan says is bothering the nation at the end of 1984:

Inflation was not some plague borne on the wind...they were devastated by a wrong-headed grain embargo...Farmers have to fight insects, weather, and the marketplace-they shouldn't have to fight their own Government...Under their policies tax rates have gone up three times as much for families with children as they have for everyone else...Some who spoke so loudly in San Francisco of fairness were among those who brought about the biggest single individual tax increase in our history...Well, they received some relief in 1983 when our across-the-board tax cut was fully in place...Would that really hurt the rich?...

That the first fantasy word of the unconscious search for shared feelings should be plague warns us of serious emotional disturbance, since this has been the code-word for paranoid fantasies of group pollution from the delusional apocalyptic plagues of antiquity to "the Jewish plague" of modern antisemitism. What could be the source of the feelings of a plague and of a devastated society? Perhaps something to do with fight and children who are loudly cut and hurt? Maybe hurt children are too loud? The search continues (I now only record the fantasy words to save space):

pushed...creep...out of control...control...control.... control... tightening...strangling...misery...misery...misery ...dropping...births...relief...shrinking...shrink...fell...fallen ...children...controlling...children...grandchildren...immoral...

Feelings of strangling, being pushed and general misery seem to be the problem. All this misery is blamed on out of control, immoral children. As usual, we blame our own "out of control" growing childhood selves for our troubles. (The immorality of children is confirmed later in the convention by the Christian Right attack on teenage sex.)

What can be done to stop these immoral children? In the main section of his speech, Reagan now tells what should be done, thus giving a posthypnotic command to the nation and concluding a "trance pact" between the leader and his people:

sell out...betray...fear...wars...strong...warlike...students... crushing...genocide...young men lost their lives...sacrifice ...murderous...students...war...cut...cut...violence...burial ...children...buried...drunken...war...war...children...ridding the earth...threat...

Rewriting these fantasy words in complete sentences, we find that the audience, the nation and Reagan have made the following trance pact:

We will sell out and betray to fear in wars strong warlike students. In a crushing genocide young men will have lost their lives in a sacrifice that will be murderous. Students in the war will be cut, cut with such violence we will have a burial of children. They will be buried in a drunken war. The war on children will accomplish ridding the earth of the threat in our heads.

The central project of Reagan's second term of office-going to war against Nicaragua-is now a posthypnotic command, a pact with that part of the nation which has become entranced with him (entered the social trance). Only those Americans who were not in the social trance-more recent psychoclasses whose childhoods were better than the majority-ended up opposing Reagan's push in the next three years toward a Central American war, which was then only narrowly avoided.

The speech ends with the audience switching out of their social alters back to their main personalities, accomplished by images of peace, warmth and, again, "heart":

peace...cradle...peace...torch...torch...torch...torch... torch...bloodlines...torch...torch...torch...torch...lamp... children...heart

The people in the audience then hit their hands together in order to awaken themselves from the deep social trance-for ten full minutes. The nation, watching, now knows what they should be trying to do for the next four years: sacrificing young men to end the plague of out-of-control, immoral children. Reagan went on to be re-elected by an overwhelming majority of the nation, who agreed it would satisfy their persecutory social alters if they could sell out immoral children who could be buried in a drunken war.

Confirmation of the group-fantasy in the leader's message can be obtained by watching the political cartoons appearing at the same time showing the nation's hidden feelings in visual, pre-verbal form. At the end of 1984, for the first time in Reagan's presidency, cartoons appeared of children being sacrificed, supposedly to "Deficits" or "Abortions" or "Anti-Abortion Terrorism" or "Mother Russia," but really to our needs for child sacrifice.

Other psychohistorians and students using the fantasy analysis technique have often begun with the feeling that the choice of fantasy words and the meaning ascribed to them in my books and articles seem arbitrary. But though when they tried to analyze historical material in this manner themselves, they usually found that their choices and interpretations came very close to mine. Many of these fantasy analyses have been published in The Journal of Psychohistory over the past three decades. 223

GROWTH PANIC AND MATERNAL ENGULFMENT
One of the most thoroughly documented results of the past three decades of study of group-fantasies is that they are inexorably tied into the person of the leader. Since political feelings are so much a defense against growth panic and resulting fears of abandonment by early love-objects, groups organize and entrain their fantasies about how it feels to be part of the group at any particular historical time more around feelings about the leader than any actual historical events.

The central fantasy function of the leader of any group, small or large, is to defend against repetitions of early trauma and abandonment, along with handling wishes for merging with the terrifying mother. Leaders are usually imagined as male protectors against maternal engulfment fears. Group analyst Didier Anzieu describes the small groups he studies as follows:

The group is a mouth...essentially female and maternal....One of the most active, or rather paralyzing, unconscious group representations is that of a Hydra: the group is felt to be a single body with a dozen arms at the ends of which are heads and mouths...ready to devour one another if they are not satisfied. 224

When the leader is imagined to be strong, he can successfully defend against the group's engulfment fears; when the leader appears to weaken, all growth is dangerous, and desires for merging and fears of maternal engulfment increase, so the leader must somehow act to defend against the growth panic. Extensive studies by Gibbard and Hartman of fantasies of small groups have found that

groups center on the largely unconscious fantasy that the group-as-a-whole is a maternal entity, or some facet of a maternal entity....The fantasy offers some assurance that the more frightening, enveloping or destructive aspects of the group-as-mother will be held in check...a major function of the group leader is to ward off envelopment by the group-as-mother...the group leader is imagined to have mastered the group-as-mother and thus to have gained some of her mana for himself. This makes him a threat as well as a protector... 225

The reason small groups and nations are unconsciously experienced as destructive mothers is that group development requires an increase in independence and individuation, as members grow, respond to new challenges and try to change their patterns of behavior. This independence revives earlier feelings of maternal abandonment, when the mother-herself having experienced a traumatic childhood-was threatened by the child's independence, as seen in this case related by Masterson:

She seemed to be overwhelmingly threatened by her child's emerging individuality, which sounded as a warning that he [her child] was destined to leave her...she was unable to support the child's efforts to separate from her and express his own self through play and exploration of the world...Consequently, she was unable to respond to the child's unfolding individuality...the child became afraid of being taken over or engulfed [and] feared abandonment, giving up further individuation. 226

Thus all groups from bands to nations experience growth, progress and social development with fears of maternal engulfment and abandonment. The worse the childrearing, the more growth panic is triggered by individuation and self assertion. The course of cultural evolution is determined by the reduction of this growth panic through the evolution of more supportive childrearing. Since this childhood evolution is very uneven, more advanced psychoclasses cause "too much" social progress for the majority of society. Old defenses become unavailable and people cannot dominate various scapegoats-wives, slaves, servants, minorities- in quite the same way as before. These less advanced psychoclasses-the majority of society-begin to experience tremendous growth panic, and new ways to handle their anxiety must be invented. For them, change is everywhere; things seem to be "getting out of control." This is why growth and self assertion, whatever it is called-hubris, chutzpah, original sin, human desire itself-are proscribed by the religious and political systems of most societies. Societies whose institutions progress beyond their average childrearing mode become the most fearful and most violent, since their growth panic depends upon both the amount of early trauma and the amount of social progress. Thus unaccustomed Weimar freedoms lead directly to Auschwitz in a Germany formed by brutal childrearing.

The violence resulting from the fear of maternal engulfment has, in fact, been empirically found to be related to the mother's actual engulfing behavior. For instance, Ember and Ebmer 227 found in their cross-cultural studies that where the mother sleeps closer to the baby than to the father, and therefore tends to use the baby as a substitute spouse, there is more homicide and assault, and there is also a higher frequency of war, both correlations as predicted by the psychogenic theory.

Because growth revives the fears of the earliest pre-verbal period of life, the growing growth panic of groups and nations is also often felt as loss of body parts or as loss of blood. Masterson says, "Many patients describe this in graphic physical terms, such as losing an arm or leg, being deprived of oxygen, or being drained of blood." 228 The fears reach all the way back into the womb, when growth could produce deprivation of oxygen and insufficient blood from the placenta. This is why periods of peace, prosperity and social progress in nations with poor childrearing often lead to growing paranoia about enemies who are about to invade, tear one's nation apart, deny one's Lebensraum and drain off the national life-blood. Behind all these paranoid fears is a growth panic and resulting fear of engulfment, a panic and a fear that originated first in relation to the earliest caretaker, the mother. 229

Maternal engulfment fears can also be handled by merging with the engulfing mother in fantasy and then sacrificing oneself or a substitute for oneself to the engulfing mother. Many early religions feature a female beast that is worshipped and to whom human sacrifices are made. The Mayans, for instance, sacrificed human hearts torn out of a living victim's chest to jaguar gods and even handed over their children to living jaguars to be eaten, while in one section of India sharks were until recently worshipped and "both men and women went into a state of ecstasy and offered themselves to the sharks [by entering] the sea up to their breasts and are very soon seized and devoured [by the sharks.]" 230 Maternal engulfment fantasies are very often acted out in concrete form in social rituals whether religious or military. Initiation ceremonies usually feature men in animal masks who "devour" initiates, and battlefields are often pictured as "devouring mouths" engulfing soldiers "sent into their maw" to sacrifice themselves "for their motherland."

If there ever were a society where parents really helped their children to individuate, it would be a society without growth panics, without engulfment fears and without delusional enemies. The enemy is a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the problems of an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their growth panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our childhood desires for growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are imagined to be guilty of the pejorative form of every one of our desires: "greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual desire); "pushiness" (our striving) and so on. It isn't even necessary that the enemy really exist. Simple societies imagine that witches, ancestors and spirits are relentlessly persecuting enemies, and some nations-including Japan today-can even imagine Jews as bloodsucking national enemies when there are virtually no Jews in their country. 231

LEADERSHIP AND DEFENSES AGAINST GROWTH PANIC
Political leaders are intuitively aware that their main function is to provide grandiose manic antidotes to growth panic. Every society acknowledges somehow its function as a defense against maternal engulfment. Most Melanesian societies openly admit that the main function of their rituals is to counter the disastrous effects of polluted menstrual blood. 232 Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies were constructed around rituals that countered their panic about succumbing to chaos, constantly fearing female "chaos-monsters [who] drank people's blood and devoured their flesh." 233 Many Western political theorists, such as Machiavelli, have also seen political authority as necessary to combat "feminine chaos." My psychogenic theory only differs in ascribing this fear of maternal abandonment to fantasy, not reality to childhood family life, not adult social life.

The more primitive the dominant childrearing mode of a society, the more growth panic must be defended against. New Guinea fathers are often so certain their boys are going to be engulfed by poisonous menstrual blood and eaten up by witches that they cut themselves to get their own "strong" male blood and feed it to the boys to strengthen them. 234 Most sacrificial rites are performed to ward off dangerous "blood pollution." 235 Political leaders regularly go to war over fears of the enemy's polluting dangers, such as Hitler's fears of "foreign blood introduced into our people's body." 236 Wars are said to be particularly useful in "scrubbing clean national arteries clogged with wealth and ease." 237 Indeed, poison-cleansing is a central purpose of all social rituals, whether the cleansing is accomplished by wars, religious sacrifices or depressions, all of which have been said to cleanse the body politic of sinful pleasures and freedoms. 238 Those leaders who, like Franklin Roosevelt, can reign during both a war and a depression are, of course, the greatest leaders of all.

The fears of abandonment that are triggered by social progress are felt by nations to be dramatized in their relationship with their leader, who is felt to be growing more and more distant and less and less able to provide grandiose manic projects to defend against their growing growth panic. The increasing impotence and weakness of the leader can be seen in the much-watched "ratings" he gets in his public opinion polls, which, after starting at a peak, usually decline during his term, unless revived by some particularly effective defensive manic action that the leader engages in. 239 This is just the opposite of what one would rationally expect, which is that as a nation gets more and more evidence of what the leader can accomplish, should become more confident in his capacities. But leaders instead usually are imagined to weaken in office, because growing growth panic makes them seem more distant, less potent.

Ancient societies knew this feeling of weakening of leadership very well, and regularly set up some of their most important rituals to revitalize the powers of their kings. The earliest of these rituals were held annually, climaxing in rituals of purgation, whereby the community rids itself of pollution; rituals of mortification and sacrifice, whereby fasts and other punishments were undergone to purge people of their dreaded desires; and rituals of combat, whereby battles were fought with projected forces of evil. 240 Later, divine kings provided defenses against maternal pollution, and were held to be intimately connected with the health of the crops, animals and people. Early Greek kings reigned for eight years, and were thought to have weakened so badly during this time that they either were killed themselves, found a substitute (sometimes the eldest son) or had to go through regeneration rituals. To be regenerated, the king would go first through a humiliation ritual-be slapped on the face to repeat the people's childhood humiliations-and might even go through the ritual process of dying and being born again. 241 Thus the phrase: "The King is dead; long live the King!" Or, as Robespierre declared in 1792, "Louis must die because the patrie must live." 242

In modern democratic nations, we usually don't actually kill our leaders; we periodically throw them out of office and replace them with revitalized substitutes. But the decline in potency of the leader his inexorable abandonment of us as we grow still is felt today. This is because the leader is less a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who tells us to do what we tell him we want done, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated social alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are regularly sacrificed when the leader is under attack.

This leadership task of being the delegate of irrational desires of the people makes leaders experts in masochism, rather than sadistim, as traditional power theory requires. This explains why Janus found in his study of Washington D.C. prostitutes that powerful politicians got their sexual thrills by playing masochistic, not sadistic, sexual roles, finding that "By far the most common service politicians demand from call girls is to be beaten," hiring women to pretend to inflict upon them "torture and mortification of the flesh...and mutilation of their genitals." 243

Only by being our delegates by carefully following our unconscious commands-are leaders followed. We might follow them into war and lay down our lives to combat an enemy they alone designated, but the moment they try to ignore the group-fantasy and avoid our hidden commands, pelople simply do not hear them. For instance, Kaiser Wilhelm II, when caught up by the Germans' need for an enemy in order to justify the paranoia that accompanied their growing prosperity, sent excessive demands to Serbia, hoping they would be rejected. When Serbia agreed to virtually everything he wanted, he announced that "every reason for war drops away," and gave orders to stop military movements. His subordinates simply acted as though they had not heard what he said, and the war began without him. 244 As soon as he didn't carry out the emotional needs of the nation, which required war to offset progress, he was ignored.

The notion that leaders really lead, not follow, is as much a group-fantasy as the leader's charismatic power to command the sun's rise and fall. 245 A leader is a single individual sitting at a desk in one corner of one city. The power we conditionally delegate to him resides in the group-fantasy, since the leader's function is to act as a poison container for our group-fantasies. If he should unexpectedly die, the container disappears and our fears return to us in a rush. Even if he has been a totally incompetent leader, we panic. Small-scale societies often erupt into a fury of witch fears following the death of a leader; 246 early societies often accompanied the death of the king with the slaughter of hundreds of victims; 247 Yugoslavia embarked on a paroxysm of rape and killing following Tito's death. The leader is seen as omnipotent only because he must appear strong enough to contain our projections. But this strength is purely magical and has nothing to do with real accomplishments. The Maoris often renew their vigor by crawling through their leader's legs and touching his powerful penis, and rich Americans have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to touch the President in the White House. 248 But the charisma of leaders is purely a defensive grandiosity of our own, compensating for our feelings of childhood helplessness. Thus a leader's strength seems inevitably to decay.

THE FOUR PHASES OF LEADERSHIP
Fantasy analyses I have done of magazine covers and cartoons over the past two decades 249 reveal that there are four phases of group-fantasies about leaders, as they become less and less able to provide grandiose manic solutions to the nation's growing growth panic. Since group anxieties are embedded in a fetal matrix, these four phases of group-fantasy parallel the four phases of birth. 250 The four leadership phases are: (1) strong, (2) cracking, (3) collapse and (4) upheaval.

In the first year or so of his term of office, the leader is portrayed as grandiose, phallic and invincible, able to hold all forces of evil at bay and able to contain the unconscious anxieties of the nation. Photos of the leader appearing on magazine covers and in newspapers are mainly taken from the level of a small child, making him seem like a strong parent. International political crises occurring in this strong phase are rarely seen as dangerous or as requiring an active response; wars are rarely started in the first year of leadership. 251 The strong phase is actually as unrealistic as later phases, since people imagine that their private emotional lives will be magically much better simply because yet another savior sits in an office somewhere, not because they plan to devote themselves to real change.

In the next year or more, the leader's deification begins to fail, and he is shown as weakening, often appearing in cartoons with actual cracks in him as he is seen as increasingly impotent and unable to handle the emotional burdens of the nation. The media spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing whether this or that minor event might make the leader weaker. While the nation responds to solid economic growth through more and more manic overinvestment and overproduction, fears of growth are increasingly expressed, as "things seem to be about to get out of control"-i.e., the nation's real progress begins to stir up abandonment fears. The nation engages in an increasing number of economic and political manic projects to ward off their abandonment depression. Evil monsters are depicted in cartoons as starting to pursue the leader, and the group's boundaries are felt to be cracking, with images of leaking water and crumbling walls predominating, as though the nation's womb-surround is cracking. Complaints of being crowded, hungry and breathless begin, enemies start to proliferate and become more threatening.

The third group-fantasy phase of leadership, the collapse phase, also lasts one year or more and expresses the nation's extreme anxieties about its dangerous progress. Pressures are shown as inexorably building up inside a collapsed, poisonous world, as memories of childhood humiliations and fears flood back into consciousness as floating anxieties awaiting external poison containers. Images of devouring mouths and dangerous, engulfing women proliferate. As the growth panic reaches its peak, manic political projects and troop movements begin to anticipate attack, while the leader seems powerless to end the nation's feelings of pollution and sinfulness, as shown by images of choking, falling, abandonment, disintegration, poisoning, death and rebirth. People feel alone, helpless and humiliated, and become hypervigalent to attack.

The leader and various delegate-groups are expected to voice and take some grandiose manic action to relieve those feelings, restaging the imagined threat rather than remaining hypervigalent and paranoid forever. Nations react to foreign policy crises more belligerantly in their collapse phases than in their strong phases. 252 Even before an "enemy" is chosen, the government often takes some economic measures to "stop things from getting out of control," making more and more "mistakes" in economic policy that are unconsciously designed to slow progress, such as deflationary monetary policies. The nation also conducts "purity crusades" to put an end to the sexual and other liberties supposedly responsible for the nation's moral collapse. 253 Troops are often scurried around the world to meet minor emergencies or to prepare for action. Free-floating paranoid fantasies multiply of poisonous enemies, who are often pictured as envious of the nation's progress and about to strike, so that "preemptive action" against them seems necessary.

The collapse phase ends with a hypervigilant paranoid "search for a humiliating other"-an enemy who, in a moment of group-psychotic insight, can be identified as the concrete source of the nation's distress The leader begins the upheaval phase pictured as a wimp, overwhelmed by poisonous forces, impotent to ward off disaster, which is often depicted as a dangerous water-beast (poisonous placenta) along with images of floods, whirlpools and devouring mouths-media magery similar to medieval depictions of Hell as a Devouring Demon. 254 Anti-children crusades multiply, attacking people's projected inner child for being spoiled, sinful, greedy and out of control. When the growth panic is at a peak, "poison alerts" are declared and fears of maternal abandonment and wishes for maternal engulfment and rebirth proliferate. Political cartoons and popular movies contain more and more apocalyptic upheaval birth fantasies, full of vaginal tunnels and exploding pressures. Rational national progress seems to be unimportant, group-delusions and group-trance projects are at a peak, and action becomes rresistible as the nation searches for some magical restoration of potency. 255 This restoration, rebirth or revitalization wish turns into a group ritual that at times can take one or more of three forms:

(1) Regicidal Solution If the leader fails to find an appropriate enemy, he himself can be designated as the enemy of the nation, and a ritual slaying is enacted, either by actual regicide or by throwing him out of office. Should he be reelected at the end of his first term, a symbolic death and rebirth ritual is enacted, and the leader has more time to find a solution to the growth panic.

(2) Martial Solution-If an external enemy can be found who will co-operate by humiliating the nation as they felt humiliated by their parents during childhood, this enemy can now be seen as the source of all their fears, and military action can be taken by the now-heroic leader in order to clear out the pollution and produce a rebirth of national strength and purpose. Wars are often preceded by apocalyptic growth panic movements, "Great Awakenings" and other end-of-the-world group-fantasies. 256 The leader is split into two parts, and the "poison" part is projected into the "enemy" leader, who agrees to engage in a mutual humiliation ritual and then fight the cosmic battle between good and evil and "flush out" the nation's fears.

The nation feels often enormous relief by the designation of the enemy, rather than being fearful of war's destructiveness. The finding of an external enemy as a poison container produces a burst of dopamine-filled euphoria. As Churchill wrote his wife in 1914, as England prepared for war, "Everything tends toward catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy." Similarly, on the day President Truman decided to send U.S. troops to Korea one American wrote from Washington, D.C. that "Never before...have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through this city...When the President's statement was read in the House, the entire chamber rose to cheer." 257 The sending off of the nation's youth to be killed in wars becomes a scapegoating of one's own vital self, the blood shed is felt to be a purging of the polluted blood infecting the nation's arteries and the identification with the nation's grandiose military leaders is felt to be a magical restoration of potency. Genocidal wars are the most extreme example of cleansing group-fantasies. They are most often engaged in by nations with especially poor childrearing compared to their neighbors, at times when they are attempting to make a leap into modernity, so that the unaccustomed freedom creates an intense growth panic which can only be cleansed by a sacrifice of millions of helpless scapegoats, representatives of the nation's "polluted" aggressive and sexual wishes.

(3) Internal Sacrifice Solution-If the leader cannot find an external enemy with whom to engage in a sacrificial war, he often turns to an internal sacrifice, either a violent revolution or an economic downturn. At the end of the 1920s, for instance, as economic and social progress seemed to have gotten "out of control," world bankers-chief sacrificial priests of modern nations-pursued deflationary economic policies, trade barriers were erected and many other "mistakes" were made that were motivated to produce the Great Depression that sacrificed so much of the wealth of the world. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon said in 1929 as the Federal Reserve pushed the world into the Great Depression, "It will purge the rottenness out of the system." 258 Business cycles, as William K. Joseph has shown, are driven by the manic and depressive cycles of group-fantasy, 259 as manic defenses against growth panic are followed by depressive collapses into emotional despair and inaction. Indeed, most death rates car crashes, homicides, cancer, pneumonia, heart and liver diseases rise during prosperous, manic times and are lower during depressions and recessions. 260 Only suicide internal sacrifice rises during economic declines, reacting to the prevailing group-fantasy need for internal sacrifice.

Depressions and recessions are thus not due to "the Invisible Hand" of economics but are motivated sacrifices that often kill more people than wars do, halting dangerous prosperity and social progress that seem to be getting "out of control." That growing wealth often produces anxieties rather than happiness can be shown empirically. From 1957 to 1995, Americans doubled their income in real dollars, but the proportion of those telling pollsters that they are "very happy" declined from 35 to 29 percent. 261 Periodic economic downturns are the antidotes administered by sacrificial priests for the disease of "greed." Cartoons prior to economic downturns often portray greedy people being sacrificed on altars or children being pushed off cliffs, 262 scapegoats for "greedy" childhood selves felt to be responsible for the trauma once experienced. Like Aztec human sacrifices, 263 recessions and depressions are accompanied by national sermons, "cautionary tales," about how sacrifices are necessary to purge the world of human sinfulness.

The choice between these different solutions to growth panic follows cyclical patterns, wars and depressions alternating in group-fantasy cycles of varying lengths. The empirical historical investigation of these "long cycles" of group-fantasy will be examined in detail in the next chapter, "War and Cycles of Violence."

| Ch 5 Part 1 | Ch 5 Part 2 | Ch 5 Citations |

This version was orignally in:
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997