223

I make a habit of doing a Fantasy Analysis of the nightly television news coverage by recording the images that appear on the NBC Nightly News. (I always turn off the sound in order to do television Fantasy Analysis, and I ignore all images of people merely talking, recording only those scenes that directly reflect the body images that carry the fantasy content.) On September 21st, while Carter was still considering whether to "abandon" Lance, the nightly news opened with some solemn statement by Carter on the affair, and then moved to its group-fantasy meaning later in the show, in the "Section Three" portion, which is supposed to contain "lighter" content, but which I have usually found is used to convey hidden group-fantasy messages about the opening news event. On this particular day it showed a mother gorilla giving birth to a premature baby, and kept zooming the camera in on her as she picked up the baby, considered whether she should nurse it, and then put it down again. Wondering at the ease with which we all accept the notion that millions of television dollars are spent to take pictures of nursing gorillas which are then transmitted to tens of millions of people as "entertainment," I waited expectantly for the next day's decision by Carter. It came in the morning paper-Carter had dropped Lance, and was shown crying on the front page of The New York Times (up until now photos of Carter on the front page were always "strong"). Eager to see what the group-fantasy message would be, I turned on the NBC Nightly News, and again watched "Section Three." Sure enough, a long segment was devoted to separation-this time, the separation of two Siamese-twin babies who had been joined at the hip. The images clearly represented Carter and Lance as well as the relation of fantasy-leader and group. The cameras focused in on the nurse who showed us all how the babies were quiet when together but tearful when separated.

At this point, the beginning of "collapse" imagery appeared in the media. Both Newsweek and Time independently came out, the same week, with identical cover cartoons of a perfect collapse symbol: eggs smashing, with Bert Lance as Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall. The New York Review of Books described Carter's near-collapse" under the headline "CARTER LANCED." The Gallup Poll, taken before the decision on Lance, showed that 67 percent of the country thought that Lance should go as against only 21 percent who felt that he should stay, so the decision was certainly a popular one. Lance was, of course, both a symbol of the abandonment and a scapegoat for the rage deflected from the fantasy-leader. The cartoons showed him as a sacrificial victim, being

224

Illustration 8 - Jimmy Carter in "Cracking" Stage

pushed off a cliff (Illustration 9), in exactly the same way that Nixon had been showing pushing his associates off a cliff (Illustration 3)

Illustration 9 - Lance Pushed Off Sacrificial Cliff

225

Although the abandonment drama was demanded by the country, the sadness surrounding the whole incident was what remained after it was over. Joseph Icraft wondered why the Lance Affair was blown "way out of proportion," but couldn't figure out why it all seemed so sad. Most importantly, Carter's confidence polls started to plunge. As a Fantasy Analysis of the U.S. News article on "Carter's Woes" put it (under a cartoon of Carter drowning in a swamp):

11/7/77: bogged down... swamp... struggling... slump... eroded... damaged... grasped... flexed... deluge... floundering... in the dark... water

Under the headline "Cracks in the Senate Floor," the Washington Post said the "carefully structured facade of the Senate was shattered."(85) Evans and Novak, calling Carter "the political incompetent of 1977," said his "shattered" image left the presidency in a "dangerously weakened state,"(86) and the New Republic's TRB noticed that he "hadn't seen editorial writers and columnists so patronizing and condescending to a President since Harry Truman."(87) Carter himself began to use phrases like "the world economy may collapse" (if his energy legislation wasn't passed), and on November 8th gave a special television address on energy, the fantasy content of which was full of typical collapse stage imagery: "come to grips... final stage... pressures... sacrifice... crucial... crucial... drain... hurts... pushes... pressures... act."(88) U.S. News projectively announced a "Coming Crisis in Russia,"(89) and by the beginning of 1978 the media kept urging Carter to "launch an all-out attack" on unemployment, on inflation, on energy, on something or someone.

Carter's March 8, 1978 Presidential News Conference reflected this "collapse" stage imagery even more clearly, and transmitted the coun-try's cry for action to relieve the "tremendous pressure," as shown in the Fantasy Analysis of the press conference:

Q: deterioration... collapse?
A: deterioration.... rapidly increasing... rapidly increasing... deterioration
A: deadlock
Q: Dead?
Q: strains?
A: over-armed to the teeth... tensions... linked
Q: action... action?
A: act... act immediately... tremendous pressure... crisis

Images of the country and of Carter strangling predominated in cartoons and headlines, with Carter shown as being strangled by ape-like Com-

226

munists, strangled by dragons of various sorts marked "Inflation," and as having established a Department of Energy that had been "STRANGLED AT BIRTH."(90) To relieve this strangled feeling, the country kept asking Carter to get mad at someone, as in one columnist's article which asked - under the headline "If Only Poor Carter Would Get Mad" - that he be " 'born again' once moore, this time as a tough, decisive President."(91)

The unreality and emotional dissonance of group-fantasy at this point deepened, as the unconscious group feelings of turmoil, chaos, rage and pollution were more and more experienced as a complete contrast to the actual condition of the country-which was at the highest levels of Gross National Product and personal income in its history, with the lowest number of people below the poverty line, and with no war or internal riots. As the Wall Street Journal summed up the feeling of this moment:

We've all had the experience one time or another. Everything's fine at home, the family's healthy, the children are doing well at school, the job prospers. Yet we awake in the night with an uneasy feeling that something bad is about to happen. Psychologists call it "free floating anxiety"...(92)

By the summer, with Carter's polls having dropped from 67 to 39 percent approval in one year, the lowest rating at this point in term since Truman, his need to find something heroic to accomplish was at its height But when a foreign affairs incident came along which might have been amenable to U.S. military involvement - - the Katangan invasion of Zaire - - Carter held back. The media called for immediate action, running cartoons of Carter punching Brezhnev in the face, and stating that we are on the verge of our most serious confrontations with the Soviets since the early 1970s when we had eyeball to eyeball crises over Berlin and the sneaky Soviet emplacement of offensive missiles in Cuba."(93) Yet Carter's language still stressed "constraint," as in his news conference in the midst of the Zaire events:

5/26/78: violence... killing... deadly attack... burden... constraint... constraints... constraints... constraints... constraints... hurting... heat up... blow... heart... hands are tied... ties hands... constraint(94)

The question of why Carter did not move in some way militarily at this time is an important one. (In our book, Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy, I forecast that group-fantasy would reach extreme collapse stage at this time, and therefore it was likely that Carter might succumb

227

to unconscious national pressures to find some military confrontation.) The first point to note is that this minor attack in an obscure African squabble was not really a very adequate projective object for national rage. Carter attempted to make it appear that a substantial enemy, Cuba, was heavily involved, but the best he could do was to release a statement that "Cuba had known of the Katanga plans to invade and obviously had done nothing to restrain them from crossing the border" - at best, hardly a war - like non-act. Secondly, it appears possible, according to 1. F. Stone,(95), that Carter did in fact try to involve the U.S. militarily, but ran up against the Clark-Tunney amendment forbidding direct or in-direct involvement in Angola without express Congressional authorization. He then is reported to have approached both Senator Clark and Senator Birch Bayh, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and tried to get sufficient approval so he could say he had cleared the intervention with Congress. Clark and Bayh both refused to go along, which may have been the source of Carter's continuous use of the fan-tasy terms "constraints... hands are tied... constraints" in his Zaire news conference quoted above. When the whole thing blew over as the thoroughly unimportant matter it really was, Carter then gave a major speech, on June 7th, warning the Soviets they must "end confrontation tactics" or risk "graver" strains with America - a speech so obviously full of projections that even the Soviets found it "strange."(96)

In any case, the opportunity for heroic action slipped by and Carter's polls dropped to new lows. The country did not forgive Carter his lost moment; he was attacked on all sides for extreme weakness. As one commentator summed up the mood of the nation at the end of June:

CARTER, THE FLIP-FLOP PRESIDENT

President Carter is a weak president. Pinned on to the wall of the office of one of his advisers is a graphic illustration of his weakness, a chart on which his standing in the opinion polls is plotted against that of other presidents over an equivalent period of office. Sixteen months in the White House and he had established a new record, below Harry Truman and Jerry Ford.
Few in Washington dispute the President's weakness. His cabinet officers and his aides know it to be a fact. On Capitol Hill party friend and foe alike take account of it. The pollsters measure it; the press, for the most part, revels in it; and the Russians, or so it is feared, take advantage of it.

With no other foreign action in sight to use for projection, the only stage on which Carter could now perform his messianic role was that of the

228

Middle East peace negotiations. Although the major initiative throughout the negotiations was Sadat's, when the agreement was finally made, the American press treated it as a messianic triumph for Carter. Newsweek's cover had Carter with a giant grin and the headline "BORN AGAIN!";

Illustration 10 - Jimmy Carter's Premature Rebirth

Time had a similar picture of Carter, with his polls shown turning up, headlined "CARTER'S BREAKTHROUGH." The New Republic summed up the messianic feeling of the Camp David meeting: "Carter worked at Camp David, hour by hour, night and day, urging, cajoling, persuading. Punch-drunk reporters began to get a sense of the thing. Yes, it is real. The Red Sea has parted. Jimmy Carter is leading them through... "(98) The country, too, was punch-drunk in the month following. Carter's Gallup poll jumped 11 points, Newsweek's George Will said "the summit's effect on Washington was like that of pure oxygen on dying embers, [like] a flare of euphoria," and Newsweek entitled their story on the summit "CAN THE MAGIC LAST?"(99)

229

The magic, of course, did not last, the fate of all magical solutions to emotional problems. The polls began to plummet again. Surprisingly, Carter found that a second peace triumph did nothing for him; the actual signing of the peace treaty in early 1979 was seen as negative, not positive-Joseph Kraft's column about the event was headlined, "Carter's Mideast Triumph Points Out U.S. Weakness."(100) Predictably, at this point of time in writing (March 1979), the fantasy language has returned to pre-Camp David collapse and rage levels, Carter's polls have dropped to 36 per cent, below the pre-Camp David point, editorials predict his "abdication," and cartoons such as the three shown in Illustration II picture Carter standing by helpless, as a giant-who represents our own gigantic rage, however labeled-screams uncontrollably.

The heroic peacekeeper role apparently provided only a momentary pause in the movement of group-fantasy. Writing now, in early 1979, I cannot predict how or when the current rage will be worked off. Perhaps Carter can find a relatively safe military intervention in Latin America, Africa or the Middle East. Or perhaps he will follow the path of Nixon, and somehow commit political suicide. By the time you read this, you may already know how the paranoid collapse of 1979 will be resolved and who will be the scapegoat for our national rage.

230

Illustration 11 Images of American Rage, Early 1979

THE EIGHTEEN MAJOR AMERICAN HISTORICAL GROUP-FANTASY CYCLES

History is like an extended psychoanalytic treatment. One can take the short view, as I have done so far in this essay, and follow the month-by-month fluctuations in group anxiety and rage, including all wars, confrontations and minor recoveries of confidence. Or one can take the long view, ignore all the non-violent confrontations and removals of leaders, and only look at the major wars and revolutions, the most important purification rituals, the violent group-delusions that provide enough of a purge of national rage to guarantee a peaceful breathing spell for at least a few years. In this final section of the paper, I will provide a brief over-view of the eighteen major group-fantasy cycles in American history since its founding, including a review of some of the major paranoid episodes which preceded each violent group-delusion.

231

The study of cycles of violence in the history of nations is one just beginning to be developed, but already many regularities are well established. The latest research into the periodic upswing in the level of national violence, that of Denton and Phillips(101), which is in turn based on original statistics covering the period 1480-1900 and collected by the pioneer of war studies, Quincy Wright, confirm previous country-by-country studies that there exists a 25-year cycle in major violence. The 17 major American wars shown in the chart (Illustration 9), covering a period of 365 years, produce an average 21-year cycle, somewhat more frequent than the world 25-year average. Periods of peace in America have lasted from a minimum of four years at the end of the 18th century to a maximum of 34 years at the beginning of our history as colonies. Still, on the average, once every 21 years, just as each now generation reaches fighting age, the young men of America have been thrown into the mouth of Moloch as sacrifices to the national need for group purification.

That major paranoid episodes precede wars and revolutions is a notion that is only now beginning to reach the edge of awareness among those historians who are opening their thinking to psychoanalytic influence. The earliest of these historians, Richard Hofstadter, outlined over a decade ago what he termed "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and he described how paranoid "movements of suspicious discontent... come in waves of different intensity" throughout much of American history.(102) Although Hofstadter only gave a few instances of these movements, and did not tie them in to war and revolution, his wry dissec-tion of the repetitive use of typical paranoid imagery in political life is a good starting point for the psychohistorian studying the subject.

But the most interesting recent development among American historians is the slow growth of awareness among traditional researchers of the paranoid dimensions within their own specialties. American historians, for instance, have long considered absurd the conspiratorial theories held by leaders of the American Revolution. It was not difficult for them to disprove empirically the colonies' notions that they were victims of a "constant, unremitted, uniform" British conspiracy - but historians who believed that the RRevolutionary leaders were reasonable people tended to ignore such paranoid theories. When Bernard Bailyn wrote a series of books suggesting that historians should take these conspiracy theories seriously, that they were "real fears, real anxieties," and that much of colonial ideology was "morbid, pathological, paranoiac,"(103) he created a revolution of his own in American historiography. Historians such as Jack Greene, Richard Bushman and Gordon Wood tried to give rational reasons for the existence of these conspiracy theories, but the show was finally given away when a young historian, James Hutson,

232

published a recent article on "The American Revolution; The Triumph of a Delusion?":

Intellectual historians are constrained from admitting that ideas under their examination are pathological, for once they concede this, they risk losing control of their subject matter to the psychologist. [Also,] since the American nation is the product of the American Revolution, theories which discredit the revolution seem to impugn the American experience. Was the Revolution caused by a pandemic of persecutory delusions? Then, the United States was conceived, not in liberty, as Lincoln would have it, but in madness, an idea which strikes most American historians as more or less blasphemous.(104)

Similarly, when another young historian, George Forgie, recently published his book Parricide in The House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age,(105) accurately depicting the American Civil War as a displaced fratricidal ritual in which the "good" brothers killed the "bad" brothers as scapegoats, he thought he had discovered something unique to the period, attributable to a special need to overthrow "Founding Fathers," rather than an instance of a group-fantasy dynamic generic to all of history. Even with this limitation, Forgie's book skillfully explains some of the psychodynamics behind both Northern and Southern conspiracy theories and Lincoln's own peculiar conspiracy theory, which was central to his political thought, and which Forgie calls "an object of puzzlement and even embarrassment to scholars, because it seems to have so little to do with the events it purported to explain."(106)

Although some historians may now be open to the concept that paranoid feelings may appear in history, they are a long way from the possibility that all wars and revolutions are preceded by-and in fact represent restitutional attempts to handle emotions produced by - paranoid periods. I will not attempt in this paper to present my year-by-year evidence for the major American group-fantasy cycles listed in Illustration 12, a task which I will have to defer to my next book, A Psychohistory of The West. What I can do here is to suggest some of the varieties of paranoid collapse episodes which have produced the seven-teen major American wars and revolutions.

The earliest paranoid collapse periods which concerned the American colonists were centered, of course, on English political and religious developments. They began with widespread fears of Papist conspiracies in the army and the Court, which fueled the London mob in 1640, and eventually led to the violence of the English Civil War in 1642. As men-

233

tioned earlier, apocalyptic millenarian doctrines were widespread both in England and the colonies at the time, and later such groups as the Fifth Monarchists were delegated to express paranoid fears of the impending disasters and upheavals expected to accompany the "shaking of Heaven and Earth," following the execution of King Charles.(107) Even without using the tool of Fantasy Analysis, anyone reading the pre-Civil War pamphlets, speeches and sermons cannot fail to be impressed by the pervasiveness of paranoid collapse imagery, and American colonists shared the group-fantasies of their English brethren at each step. This British focus was the rule until American independence. The internal excitement produced by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was worked off by the colonists by attacking Canada in what was termed King William's War; the European War of the Spanish Succession at the turn of the century was acted out in America as Queen Anne's War in the southern colonies; and so on.

Although the paranoid collapse fears of these earliest periods were connected to English political conditions, the long period of peace under George I and II from 1714-38 produced an enormous buildup of emo-tional tensions in the colonies. These climaxed in such a complete collapse of old values, that historians have called this period America's First Great Awakening. Beginning with widespread personal conversion experiences in the 1720s, it expanded into massive revival meetings throughout the colonies by the 1730s, whereby a "collapse of all old values" and a "revolt against the fathers' ways" led to "deep Fears of Approaching Death and Judgement,"(108) and the traumatic loss of self boundaries which are typical of all intense conversion experiences It is most interesting to note in examining the chart (Illustration 9), that all three of America's Great Awakenings occurred at the end of long periods of peace: the First after 24 years of peace (1714-38) under the Georges, the Second after 30 years of peace (1815-45) beginning with Madison and Monroe, and the Third after 31 years of peace (1866-97) following the Civil War. All three included typical paranoid collapse group-fantasies, whether more centered in personal conversion experiences (First), perfec-tionist sinfulness and nationalist political action (Second), or social reformism (Third). Whether long periods of peace always precede na-tional Great Awakening movements is an interesting question for further comparative psychohistorical study, but certainly one can say that in America this seems to be the case.

The problem comes, of course, in defining what degree of emotional upheaval must be present to constitute an Awakening, since in my psychogenic theory of historical group-fantasies all paranoid collapse periods show evidence of "Awakening" fantasies, overt or hidden. Thus, when one historian studies the period prior to the French and Indian Wars, and finds overwhelming evidence for what he calls

234

ILLUSTRATION 12 -
THE 18 MAJOR AMERICAN GROUP - FANTASY CYCLES

235

"American civil millennialism,"(109) he tries hard to separate these apocalyptic millennial group-fantasies from those of the First Great Awakening a decade earlier, which, he says, had "died out" by then. But paranoid collapse fantasies are not diseases which "die out" or "flare up"; they are periodic shared emotional states. When Americans imagined a "Gaelic peril" in the 1750s whereby, as John Mellen put it, their "land may be given to the beast, the inhabitants to the sword, the righteous to the fire of martyrdom, our wives to ravishment, and our sons and daughters to death and torture,"(110) they are voicing projected cyclical paranoid fantasies common to many periods of American history, even though couched here in the millennial language of the colonial period. Similarly, when the Stamp Act crisis came shortly after this, and historians conclude that "what is remarkable about the ministers' response both to the Stamp Act and to the attempt to create an American bishopric is their application of the compelling ideology of civil millennialism" from the 1750s, what they are really noticing is the similarity of paranoid collapse imagery in both periods, the grandiose apocalyptic sense of being God's elect living in the end times and fighting the Antichrist in a cosmic war between good and evil. Only the delusional object changed. What was earlier seen as the destruction of the Antichrist in fighting the French, became an apocalyptic fight against Satan's conspiracy against American liberties at the time of the Revolution.

As mentioned previously, traditional historians keep finding that the path of their investigations leads them toward a psychological explana-tion for these wars and revolutions, but they always stop short when faced with the evidence their research has uncovered. In the case of the American Revolution, Esmond Wright, leading historian of the period, concludes his study of the period(112) with the question "What then caused the American Revolution?", and concludes that it was not caused by taxes, nor by lack of Parliamentary representation-which few colonists wanted-nor by planter indebtedness, nor by colonial desires for a voice in decision-making, nor by any British policies on a whole range of issues. He admits that he is perplexed, and concludes that the Revolution ''is due primarily not to 'causes' at all but to ''executive weakness," not to tyranny but its opposite, collapse of authority: But governmental weakness and collapse is a description of a historical condition, not an explanation for it. It is only when James Hutson finally wonders if what he terms the "spread of paranoid delusional ideas" in the Revolution should not be called a "folie collective"(113) that anyone comes close to my own concept of historical group-fantasies.
Most of the remainder of the paranoid collapse episodes listed in the chart (Illustration 12) are thoroughly familiar to any student of American history. There is no need to again go over the paranoid content of the II-

236

luminati Conspiracy, the X-Y-Z Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts prior to the undeclared naval war with France in 1799, the "war fever" prior to the War of 1812 - which at times seemed to be indifferent as to whether England or France should be attacked "for national glory"(114) - or the similar war fevers preceding the Mexican War of 1846 and the "splendid little war," as John Hay termed it, with Spain in 1898. Likewise, by now enough has been written about the rhetoric of abolitionism, filled with feelings of personal sin and guilt, the collapse of feeling of national unity, the many paranoid conspiracy theories, and what Lincoln himself termed the need for "national blood atonement,"(115) to make one suspect that the American Civil War was a delusional purification crusade. Similarly, one might even speculate with psychohistorian Michael Paul Rogin on the scapegoating function of the violent subjection of the American Indian - especially under Andrew Jackson, who was obsessed by images of "infants butchered, mangled, murdered and torn to pieces" by lndians(116) - and the role of these scapegoats in "draining" paranoid violence during the long period of peace between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.

But in the end it is the two World Wars in which America fought - particularly the Second World War-which seem most to challenge my theory of internal group-fantasy sources for wars and revolutions. Both wars seemed to be "good" American crusades to save European liberties, and our emotional investment in this image is so great that I am reluctant, in the space available here, to even begin to touch on the sensitive question of the group-fantasy sources for America's entry. (My associate David Beisel is now engaged in precisely this task in his psychohistory of the origins of World War II.) So within the scope of this paper, I will only claim that the theory seems capable of application to most American wars, but that its full application to all wars must remain "non liquet" until further research has been done.

There is one further section of the chart in Illustration 12 which deserves mention before ending this essay on historical group-fantasies. In the first column, I have listed "Major Group-Fantasies" of each period in American history. These terms are explained further in Illustration 13. While, once again, I will have to defer full discussion of these broad historical categories until the appearance of my book A Psychohistory of the West, it seems useful at this point to outline the major ways group-fantasies have been organized in each historical period.

Until antiquity, infanticidal childrearing produced a schizoid personality, which regularly used primitive splitting and massive projection into gods, ghosts and magical objects. When they formed groups, their fantasies were centered around a system of Kinship Magic, against which infanticidal memories are constantly defended, through sacrificial rituals of various types, replaying and then undoing over and over again the

by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024

To report errors in this electronic
transcription please contact:
[email protected]