CHAPTER 7
continued
291 - 307

TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOUNDATIONS OF
PSYCHOHISTORY
by LLOYD DEMAUSE

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are often confused by moderns, but never by the people of archaic times. As Fraser and others have documented, when the group gets too polluted, the king often has to die-but it is the placental-king who must die so the fetus-king can be reborn: "Le roi placental est mort; vive le roi foetal." More often, of course, when the group imagines itself polluted, the king can consult some entrails or go off to sleep in a temple and dream an alter-native method of cleansing the group, such as hallucinating a god's com-mand to rebuild part of the temple or conduct a war of some sort.(178) But whatever the delusional solution to the group-fantasy of pollution, it is as representative of the placenta that every leader holds his divinity, his charisma, his "power."

As childrearing slowly improved during antiquity, overt placental representation in god and leader began to be supplanted by more phallic im-agery. Poisonous serpentine goddesses were replaced by more overtly phallic male gods, snake cults associated with mothers by phallic snake cults associated with fathers,(179) schizoid polytheism by more integrated monotheism, and religious purgation festivals by ethical systems and tragic drama. Many authors, from Briffault to Reik, Patai and Lederer, have documented the evolution of Judaism, for instance, from the rebirth rituals associated with blood-thirsty serpent-goddesses to those of monistic Yahweh worship.(180) But the supplanting of the sacrificial religious style was dependent upon the transformation of the infanticidal mode of childrearing into that of the "abandoning mode," a development which was to transform the sado-masochistic fetal drama of the ancient world into the new masochistic version of Christianity.

THE ABANDONING AND AMBIVALENT MODES: TRIUMPHANT MASOCHISM

The world of antiquity was filled with the cries of newborn babies dying in the fields and roads, where they had been exposed by their parents to be eaten by packs of hungry dogs. But as the Christian era approached, some Greek and Roman cities began to restrict somewhat the right of parents to kill their newborn, some requiring that the approval of five neighbors be obtained before killing them, some restricting the infanticide of firstborn males, and one, Thebes, according to Aelian, even making infanticide illegal altogether.(181) Those who had evolved beyond infanticidal childrearing formed the earliest Christian communities; as the Epistle to Diognetus observes:

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Christians are not different from other men in their accent or in their clothing: they follow local customs of eating and living. They marry like everybody else, they have children, but they do not practice the exposure of new-born babes.(182)

It was this ability to reduce the overt acting out of infanticidal wishes which was the accomplishment of the abandoning and ambivalent childrearing modes of the Christian era, substituting instead the sending of unwanted children to relations, to other families (fosterage) or to monasteries or nunneries (oblation). Christian parents were able to achieve closer, more consistent, more delegating relationship with their children, reducing the necessity for archaic splitting and massive projection into the growing child. As a result, rather than the "schizoid" personalities of the infanticidal mode, the Christian era produced what is now called "borderline" and "narcissistic" personalities, whose central anxiety was about abandonment, not death. Where the Egyptian prepared his whole life for dying, the Christian lived more in fear of "God's turning his face away from him." And rather than living, like the ancients, in a world of psychotic dream furniture, full of split-off internal objects, medieval man moved into and out of psychotic breaks precipitated mainly by threats of abandonment. It is against these fears of abandonment which the major institutions of feudalism and monastic life were constructed, both "clinging groups with severely hierarchical organizations full of sublimated homosexual submission rituals.

Because of the decrease in splitting in the Christian personality, boundaries between self and object could now be somewhat better established, so that even though desires for merging, with God and lord alike, were still paramount, at least a "personality" or cohesive self-image could be established for the first time in history, unlike the fragmented ego centers of antiquity, which didn't even have a word for an organized self.

In fact, it was the ability to form a grandiose self and an idealized parental image which was the main historical accomplishment of those Christians who were able to go beyond infanticidal childrearing. For only by being able to fantasize an idealized, caring parent (Christ), can the Christian solution of triumphant masochism be realized, for only in the presence of an imaginary caring parent can one dramatize one's masochistic sufferings and self-denials.(183) An archaic Egyptian would have considered the saying "the meek shall inherit the earth" unintelligible, for meekness and self-denial could have been expected to bring no pity from a sadistic serpent-goddess. The masochistic display of all those ascetic saints, of all those holy men fasting in the desert or scourging themselves with chains, of Christ himself hanging on the placental Holy Cross, required the presence of an observing parent whose pity could be counted upon.(184)

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All the elements of the fetal drama continued to be present in the Christian group-fantasy, but each were transformed by the historical achievement of the masochistic personality. Christ, of course, was the Suffering Fetus, the fish, the sacrificial lamb whose birth ordeal and death on the Placental Cross (Tree of Life) and liberation from the tomb (womb) were the central fantasies of Christian ritual. (Peter makes the birth imagery concrete by asking to be crucified upside down, like a baby being born, saying while he was hanging on his cross upside down that "the form in which you now see me hanging is the representation of that man who first came to birth.")(185) So, too, the Eucharist repeated the cleansing of sin by the eating of the body and drinking of the blood of the god. But what a difference the Christian solution was from the sacrificial group-fantasy which dominated former times. The Placental Beast did not have to die, so it could be merged with the fetus, and the Son, who has accepted his death and homosexual surrender in an ecstatic identification with God, could be equal to God for the first time in history. No wonder when Paul put forth this new formula he was considered blasphemous. All one need do, he said, is repress one's aggression and sexuality, passively submit, incorporate the masochistic suffering Son on the Cross, and God will be compassionate, not infanticidal, and will help one triumph over all others, even over death itself. God as Poisonous Placenta now only required Christ to die once; man, by mystical union with his infanticidal death and rebirth, could live forever.

The degree to which the Christ-fetus was God was, of course, the subject of much controversy by Gnostic groups and others, for he had always to remain both mortal and divine for the Christian formula to work. Never-theless, there was an enormous difference in Christ's divinity from that of the pharoah's. While the pharoah could only wear the placental Red Crown and receive messages from the Gods, Christ himself had the powerful placental blood in him, so it could be drunk directly from him by the worshipper without the necessity of killing a sacrificial beast. Further, Christ needed to be killed and reborn historically, only once, not daily, and could sit at God's right hand as an equal, because he accepted God's sacrifice of himself in a triumphant masochistic surrender.

Once this masochistic solution to the fetal drama is recognized, the rest of the symbolism of Christianity becomes more intelligible. For instance, the strange concept of the Trinity, especially the identity of the Holy Ghost, is easier to understand when it is remembered that all "spirits," like Egyptian "kas," are placentas, and the Holy Ghost, the "spirit by which Christ was made incarnate in Mary," is the placenta too, as Hippolytus reveals in the following passage:

Grant Paradise . . . to be the womb; and this is a true assumption the Scripture will teach, when it utters the words, "I am he who forms thee in thy mother's womb." ... If, however, God forms man in his

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mother's womb - that is, in Paradise - as I have affirmed, let Paradise be the womb, and Edem the placenta, "a river flowing forth with Edem, for the purpose of irrigating Paradise," meaning by this the navel. This navel, he says, is separated into four principles; for on either side of the navel are situated two arteries, channels of spirit, and two veins, channels of blood. [When] the caul in which the fetus is enveloped grows into the fetus that is being formed in the vicinity of the . . . navel - these two veins through which the blood flows, and is conveyed from Edem, the placenta . . . nourish the fetus . . . And in this way the spirit, making its way through the ventricles to the heart, produces a movement of the fetus.(186)

Once this placental origin of the Holy Ghost is recognized, much of the imagery of Christian ritual becomes clarified. One is baptized "with the Holy Ghost" in a cleansing and rebirth ceremony which is almost identical to the annual purification festivals of archaic groups, for baptism, as John Chrysostom says, "represents death and burial, life and resurrection when we plunge our head into water as into a tomb, the old man is immersed, wholly buried; when we come out of the water, the new man appears at that moment."(187) And when liturgy says it is through "the will of the Holy Ghost" that Jesus lived "in three earthly dwellings: in the womb of the flesh, in the womb of the baptismal water, and in the somber caverns of the underworld,"(188) the hidden placenta is evoked in its original abode.

Yet it was the Holy Cross, more than the Holy Ghost, which inherited the placental imagery of antiquity. The Bible actually speaks of Christ being "hanged on a tree" (Acts 5, 30) and taken "down from the tree" (Acts 13, 29), and it was not until the fifth century that the Holy Cross rather than a Tree of Life was pictured. Even then, the Cross was often drawn in the form of an Egyptian placental ankh (as a cross with a circle on top) or had the pagan Tree of Life imposed upon its center-indeed, Byzantine liturgy still calls the Holy Cross "the tree of life planted on Calvary."(189) But no matter how represented, the placental Cross dominated Christian ritual, whether it was placed in homes for adoration while holding a string of umbilical rosary beads, or on the sacrificial altar of the basilica or cathedral-the very navel of the world, the Celestial Jerusalem where, under dim, womb-like vaults dominated by the placental disk of the glowing Rose Window the fetal drama of the sacrifice and rebirth of Christ is acted out.

It goes without saying that it requires far greater self control and instinctual renunciation - and therefore more parental care and discipline - to live a Christian life even relatively cleansed and free from sin - that is, sex-less and aggressiveless - than to live the impulse-filled, periodically cleansed life of ancient man. Therefore the masochistic ideal of Christian

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asceticism is attained by few on earth, even among the clergy. Yet masochistic, homosexual surrender to Christ, priest and lord for the purposes of absorbing their phallic power could be the life-style of every man. The pattern which was set in childhood was reinforced in adolescence. Roving gangs of "youths" were common in medieval times, which practiced homosexual submission to the older among them, and which also practiced nightly collective raping attacks on unprotected women. These homosexual raping gangs would "force the doors of a woman's house and, without concealing their identity and mixing brutality with blandishments, threats, and insults, would rape their prey on the spot, often in the presence of two or three terrified witnesses. Sometimes they would drag the victim through the streets, eventually pulling her into a house whose keepers were accessories to the plot, where they would do as they pleased, all night long. "(190) The youth, which included sons of leaders of the community, would rarely be fined, while the victims of the brutal rape attacks were considered disgraced, were thrown out by their husbands, and were often forced into prostitution. Historians have found cities where these gangs constituted the majority of the city's youth and where gang rape made up 80 percent of all sexual assaults, and have concluded that violent gang rape actually "constituted a veritable rite of initiation or virilization" for much of medieval youth.

This triumphant absorption of phallic power through masochistic homosexual submission to a grandiose leader gives the medieval period its characteristic mixture of submissive piety and psychopathic violence. When priest and king both ordered, when the phallic absorption was at its height, all of Europe could march off to Palestine on a Holy Crusade, under placental banners of crosses and serpents, and sacrifice some Moslems or Jews, receiving a cleansing of one's sins as a reward. This cleansing is often experienced as coming from a divine heart, usually shown as drinking the blood spouting from the vaginal wounds of Jesus, or, later, from the wound of the placental Sacred Heart of Jesus, pictured as glowing with life and divine love.

During the late medieval period, as the abandoning mode of childrearing began to evolve into the ambivalent mode and previously normal persecutory schizoid lifestyles became unacceptable, overt paranoid episodes began to be increasingly termed "insanity" and "madness" rather than being integrated into normal religious ritual activities.(191) For instance, the catatonic who "believed that he is lying in his coffin, thinking himself a dead man," who previously might have been integrated into an Egyptian mortuary ritual, now was diagnosed by physicians as a "melancholic."(192) The "holy man" of early Christianity who constantly wounded himself now was usually simply termed "mad." The reason that scholars have found that "paranoid schizophrenia [was] the major form of insanity during these several centuries"(193) was because the most advanced psychoclasses, brought up by adults who were beyond the infanticidal

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parenting mode, now shared group-fantasies and constructed group rituals which no longer were designed to handle the defensive needs of schizoid personalities. This less advanced schizoid psychoclass, stripped of its group defenses, would often be forced to "fall ill" with idiosyncratic paranoid symptoms similar to those which in antiquity would have been shared by all in the group. This is just one illustration of the general principle that each historical period robs their less advanced psychoclasses of group defenses, and drives into "insanity" people who previously were considered "normal" because they could use group defenses to prevent regression.

This same principle of psychoclass conflict is the cause of the much-discussed abrupt rise and fall of witch-hunting in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries. The accusations against witches were actually identical to the fetal fears about the Poisonous Placenta which have been discussed in this essay. For witches only did exactly what all monstrous goddesses and menstruating women always did; as the infamous 1488 Bull of Pope Inno-cent VIII states, they "have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of trees [and] hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving. "(194) That Satan, whom witches were ac-cused of consorting with, was also the Poisonous Placenta can be seen from his beastial horns, red color and serpentine umbilical tail. And that Christianity, like every group-fantasy, was engaged in a never-ending struggle against the placental Satan was hardly new to these centuries. What was new in the Reformation was advances in childrearing among a minority which produced a psychoclass conflict powerful enough to "turn the world upside down" and strip the European psyche of many of its most basic defensive group-fantasies and rituals. This collapse of the Christian group-fantasy in the sixteenth century by a more advanced psychoclass plunged the less advanced psychoclasses into terrible anxieties about repressed wishes previously bound by medieval Christian beliefs and rituals. As psychohistorian William Saffady puts it: "The abandonment of religious ceremonies . . . would produce, they implied, a danger in personality of a Christian man, transforming him into a beast" who might even break out into a mass incestual and patricidal acts once traditional ritual was dropped or changed. (195) For instance, once transubstantiation (the concrete reality of the eating of Christ's body and drinking of his blood during the Eucharist) began to be questioned, the oral cannibalistic desires released from this group-fantasy then had to be projected into the "cannibalistic" witch, who was believed to eat babies at nocturnal meetings which parodied the Eucharist.(196) So, too, many group-fantasy defenses-against fetal, oral, anal, or phallic material-which were removed from Christian ritual and belief by the minority, then led to terrible anxieties and regressive behavior in the majority.

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Thus what Trevor-Roper calls "the general crisis of the seventeenth century,"(197) from its religious and political wars to its persecution of witches, is the result of severe psychoclass conflict. New childrearing modes by a minority produced modern personality types which changed traditional group-fantasies, threatening the majority of less-advanced psychoclasses with being overwhelmed by fears and wishes which could now only be projected into heretics, revolutionaries and witches. It was not until the invention of a new group-fantasy, "national sovereignty" - a new "womb-surround" which could bind the conflicts of the personality - that the religious wars and witch-hunts of the early modern period could be ended. Proof that the group-fantasy of nationalism - which of course most groups today still share - is based on a modern version of the fetal drama will be the task of the remainder of this essay.

INTRUSIVE AND SOCIALIZING MODES: MODERN NATIONALISM AS A FETAL DRAMA

The establishment of the intrusive mode of childrearing, with its closer, more consistent parenting based mainly on psychological rather than physical control devices, enabled early modern men and women to achieve for the first time what Melanie Klein has termed "the depressive position,"(198) a reduction of persecution and splitting sufficient to allow the individual to unite good and bad parental images and to begin to handle guilt and reparative feelings. This new personality could then begin to in-vent modern science in the intellectual sphere, the industrial revolution in the technological sphere and married love in the personal sphere.

Each of the advances of the modern personality, however, was only accomplished by evolving out of a matrix of fetal fantasy in which it had previously been embedded. We have seen how early religious systems contained fetal fantasies of a geographical system centered on an umbilical cen-tral world axis (axis mundi) or navel (omphalos), complete with megalithic astronomical sighting systems and serpentine geodetic forces. (199) It was out of such fetal fantasy, full of mythological struggles with world dragons and death-and-rebirth solar imagery, which the first astronomers had to construct their early scientific systems. So, too, the first chemists had to invent their science out of a long tradition of alchemy, which was everywhere composed of elements of the fetal drama. The alchemist "saw alchemical vessels as wombs [where] the foetus grows" from such elements as "Dragon's Blood," and after nine months gives birth to a "Royal Child" sitting in a Tree of Life, a "Philosopher's Stone" which was born from lower metals in the alchemist's vessel.(200) Early scientists such as Newton and Boyle were certain they saw such images present and such fetal dramas going on in their labs, and it took several centuries before the distinction between alchemy and chemistry was made clear.

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Modern politics, too, was invented out of a matrix of earlier fetal symbolism. As the locus of the fantasy of placental power began to shift from the monarch to the "nation," early modern political theorists invented an "intencio populi [which] is the center of the mystical body of the realm . . . the heart from which is transmitted into the . . . members of the body as its nourishing blood stream the political provision for the well-being of the people."(201) This mystical central heart, this new placenta which nourishes each person of the realm, this corpus mysticum of the embryo, as Fortescue termed it, might be located either in the leader or in a small representative group, but it represented the realm, and sustained and controlled the realm through its nourishing blood.

It is when the placental imagery began to be shifted from the monarch as holder of power to the "nation" that the modern group-fantasy of na-tionalism could be born, with its emphasis on contiguous national boun-daries, racial purity, and mystical participation of each citizen in the national fetal drama - especially war. The leaders of the nation periodically consult this mystical central "heart of the realm," exactly as did the pharoah when he went off to a temple to dream the placental god's message, only now it was known as "the will of the people." This "nation's will" which is consulted (when, say, Congress meets on whether to go to war over the Gulf of Tonkin "Crisis") involves the same fantasy as the pharoah's consulting "the will of the gods" in his dream-temple; it is deter-mining the condition of the group-fantasy as to how polluted the group feels, how much collapse of ego boundaries the group is experiencing, and how much rage it is feeling against its "central heart." As we will see in the final section of this essay, the leaders of modern nations very often go off to a symbolic dream-temple to consult their placental god when choosing an enemy at the end of each "collapse" stage (FS3).

The evidence for the four-stage fetal cycle in modern national politics is contained in my previous work on group-fantasy, as summarized in the opening pages of this essay. Because the majority of people in modern nations were raised in the intrusive and socializing modes, the nationalist group-fantasy within which we enact the fetal drama today consists of the worship of a "national will," as interpreted by elected leaders, inevitable growing pollution of this "national life-blood," a collapse of national will, and a sacrificial battle against a bestial enemy, often another nation, to cleanse the national bloodstream and accomplish the rebirth of national vitality. Americans today, like Paleolithic men 15,000 years ago, still worship a Poisonous Placenta in the form of a dangerous Great Bear, filling our magazines with its pictures and devoting much of our energies to its killing - only now it is a Russian bear which we are hunting. We elect leaders and hope they have the power to hold off the dangerous beast - which is why America has never gone to war in the first year of any president's

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term.(202) But the growing pollution of national life-blood is irresistible, the collapse of group defenses inevitable, and national sacrifice and rebirth painful. As Hitler said to an aide on the eve of his invasion of Poland, as they both watched the red glow of the northern lights, "This looks like lots of blood. This time things won't go without force."(203)

Since all our "greatest" leaders - from Caesar and Napolean to Churchill and Roosevelt - were sacrificial priests with the blood of millions on their hands, we must take very seriously this central ritual, as seriously as, say, the Aztecs took their periodic ritual sacrifice of youth to their god. When our magazines show an America bristling with atomic missiles pointed at a Russian bear, a psychohistorian must learn to take the image as an accurate rendering of what current American group-fantasy feels like. For an examination of the most recent sacrificial crisis in American group-fantasy, I will now turn to an examination of the group-fantasies and events surrounding the Carter presidency and the so-called Iranian "Crisis."

III. THE FETAL DRAMA IN AMERICAN GROUP-FANTASY

It is my strong belief that psychohistory is a science, and that it is the task of a psychohistorian to form testable hypotheses and make clear predictions based on these hypotheses, so that by disproving portions of them new theory can be formulated. Accordingly, after I first proposed the four-stage model of historical group-fantasies, I made a series of predictions at the beginning of Jimmy Carter's presidency about the future events which would take place if the theory were correct.(203) These predictions were:

1. That by 1979 American confidence in Carter would collapse,
2. That this collapse would be accompanied by powerful group-fantasy images of both Carter and the nation disintegrating, strangling and dying,
3. That the nation would by the end of 1979 ask Carter to find a "humiliating other" upon which their rage could be projected,
4. That this new enemy would likely be located in the Middle East, and
5. That Carter would be encouraged to "get tough" with this enemy, and would respond with military action which would be likely to lead to war.

The remainder of this essay will be devoted to showing that the first four of these predictions were proved correct, with what was called the Iranian "Crisis" actually being a well-motivated solution to the "collapse" stage, and that the fifth prediction was partly correct and partly wrong, since U.S. military action in Iran was "aborted" short of war. But before moving to

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an examination of these events, I first want to note the reaction of readers to my first efforts at psychohistorical prediction, as a revealing lesson in the powerful anxieties aroused by our new science.

I have long been used to the outrage of most of the scholarly profession in reaction to my psychohistorical work, and have often tried to ascertain the reasons behind this reaction. But my brief 20-page article in our Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy book - probably because it was the first time I had written about current group-fantasies - produced a storm of rage beyond anything I had yet experienced. Reviewers seemed particularly incensed about any claims to scientific methodology. Garry Wills, in an article headlined "PSYCHOHISTORY IS BUNK," called me a "snake-oil salesman of our 'scientific age,' " a person who had a "Mickey deMause method" which might drive the readers "bonkers."(205) Others deplored my "outrageous" nerve in making predictions,(206) my "determinist" methods,(207) my "insolence of a science major,"(208) and my pretentions at writing what the Wall Street Journal termed "science fiction."(209) Publishers Weekly called me a "feeble oracle,"(210) the New York Post said I was a "revisionist" who wrote "gobbledygook,"(212) and The Atlanta Constitution thought my predictions "psychobabble . . . pure trash . . . gunk . . . hogwash."(212)

My fellow psychohistorians proved even more upset at my attempt to make predictions: The Psychohistory Review termed them all only my own excited fantasies;("213) Peter Loewenberg told a reporter my predictions were "irresponsible sensationalism" since "both history and psychoanalysis deal [only] with postdiction, with reconstructing casuality in the past;"(214) John Fitzpatrick said that "psychohistorians don't have the ability to make very discrete predictions about what a president will do; "(215) another psychohistorian told a reporter "I don't like to air all psychohistory's dirty linen in public, but deMause's insistence on the 'scientific' nature of his evidence has caused a lot of rancor;"(216) Robert Coles told Newsweek "Some people mark up walls with ugly words, other people do psychohistory;"(217) The Chronicle of Higher Education termed my work "a cancer that is metastasizing through the whole body of the historical profession;"(218) and John Demos said "somehow we have got to apply some brakes" to this kind of psychohistory.(219)

That "applying some brakes" to my "cancerous" writing in fact implied action as well as words soon became apparent, as scholarly journals refused to review the book, scholarly associations turned down my membership ap-plication "because of the controversial nature of your work,"(220) graduate students using my theories were denied their doctoral degrees because of their association with me,(221) undergraduates were told to drop their work for my journal or else they would be refused entry into graduate school,(222) and one of my co-authors of the Carter book was threatened with the loss of his tenured professorship in connection with his association with the book.(223)

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Obviously what happens when psychohistorical interpretations are made about current rather than past group-fantasies is that the group which shares the fantasies responds in the same way as does a patient when his psychoanalyst makes a premature interpretation - with deep feelings of humiliation and rage. The infantile content I wrote about could not have come from the group-fantasies they believed in-so it must be coming from my own infantile "excited fantasies," and I myself must be infantile, a childish "Mickey deMause" who publishes his fantasies in a journal which is "an adult comic book."(223) As Bion once put it, groups do not appreciate the investigation of "the characteristics of the deity whose cult is at the time flourishing."(225) The only favorable response the Carter book received was in Germany;(226) in America, psychohistorians are more acceptable when they write about Hitler and the Germans.

THE COLLAPSE STAGE OF CARTER'S GROUP-FANTASY

The collapse stage of Jimmy Carter's presidency took place during the year 1979. America, the richest and freest nation in history, at the peak of its prosperity with the largest Gross National Product and the smallest number of people under the poverty line in its history, with no war or internal turmoil for the first time in decades, began to share a group-fantasy of total collapse of its potency. After a brief rise in Carter's confidence polls following his success at the Camp David Middle Fast peace negotiations (for a Fantasy Analysis of which see my "Historical Group-Fantasies").(227) American confidence in him rapidly declined throughout the first eight months of the year. Time magazine's "State of the Nation" poll in April was headlined "The Trouble Is Serious;" reporters began asking Carter at news conferences why he was "exhibiting weakness and impotency;" George Will in Newsweek said Carter was now on "a downward crumbling path [as] America's decline accelerates;" the Washington Star headlined America's "SLIPPING TOWARD IMPOTENCE ACROSS THE GLOBE;" the New York Times one day carried two articles, the first ask-ing Carter to resign as "the weakest and most incompetent president since Martin Van Buren" and the second by a psychiatrist saying that Carter needed psychiatric treatment; and a nationwide poll for the "most out-standing incompetent" in history elected Carter hands down.(228) Speculations about Carter's sanity multiplied; one day, when Carter simply delayed a speech he was to give to the press, "the unexplained cancellation caused world-wide speculation that Carter had gone bonkers," and his appointments secretary had to assure newsmen that "Carter was sane and in charge and knew what he was doing."(229)

Cartoons during that period showing Carter falling, disintegrating or dy-

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mg (see Illustration 7), feelings which we both wished upon him and shared ourselves, since ultimately it was the American people who were sharing the group-fantasy of collapse and disintegration. But the group rage at having a placental leader who was failing, weak and strangling soon


Illustration 7 - Carter Falling and Disintegrating

began to be shown in cartoons of placental octopuses strangling Carter or ourselves (Illustration 8) - suddenly the Poisonous Placenta appeared


Illustration 8 - Carter Being Strangled by a Poisonous Placenta

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everywhere in cartoons, strangling us, as OPEC, as inflation, as governmental red tape, as junk mail, all cutting off our oxygen. (These two car-toons are typical of over 400 showing strangulation, falling and disintegration in my files for these months, whereas I could only find a dozen, all showing milder "falling" feelings, from earlier months.) Death wishes toward the placental leader proliferated. Carter began being called "a terminal political case," "among the political 'walking dead,' "and "buried politically,"(230) and one major newspaper even featured the following in-terview with a labor leader as their front page lead:

"Is there any way the President can redeem himself
in your eyes?"
"Yes, there's one way he can do it."
"What's that?"
"Die."(231)

Since America imagined it both depended on its leader for life-giving blood and wanted him to die, the enormous ambivalence during the summer of 1979 began to make people feel like they were in danger of going mad. In an article headlined "THE SUMMER MADNESS," James Reston announced that "Washington was having a nervous breakdown," several magazines that summer ran front cover headlines simply entitled "SUMMER MADNESS," and Rosalynn Carter was sent on a cross-country speaking tour, according to one newspaper, "to defend her hus-band's mental ... health."(232)

Carter did what every placental leader must do when faced with a group going mad with feelings of collapse, pollution and disintegration: he went "up on a mountaintop" to a dream temple (Camp David) and consulted with the gods as to how to end the pollution. He himself was so polluted, he was taboo - like a menstruating woman, he was so dangerous he had to be isolated. For two weeks a parade of advisors and others visited him on the mountain, and when he came down he pronounced his discovery: we were going through a "crisis of confidence ... that strikes at the very heart, soul and spirit of our national will and is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America."

The diagnosis was perfect: the "national heart" was indeed stricken and dying. But what sacrifice could possibly satisfy the monstrous polluting Poisonous Placenta? Carter first tried what Time termed a little "bloodletting... a temple cleansing...Three days down from his meditations at Camp David, Jimmy Carter embarked last week on a purge as complete and bloody as any in recent Presidential history - an upheaval that swept away nearly half his Cabinet in 24 hours."(233) The bloody sacrifice was dismissed by the gods, the people, as insufficient: it was termed "like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic."(234) The ship of state continued to sink

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in its polluted waters, and Carter's polls fell to the lowest figure for any president in American history. What was to be done?

It should be remembered that at some level every group and every leader knows that finding an external enemy to blame will relieve feelings of group pollution and weakness and will unify the group. After all, psychohistory merely makes conscious what is unconsciously shared and communicated all the time by historical groups. Despite Carter's sincere election promises to end American reliance on military solutions to its problems, despite his appointing the nonmilitant Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, he nevertheless acknowledged the eventual probability that he would be asked to "get tough" with some enemy by appointing as his foreign policy advisor the well-known hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, according to what one White Rouse advisor told Newsweek, seemed well aware of the necessary solution to the collapse of confidence in Carter: "At a meeting with Congressional staffers last year, he [Brezezinski] agreed with the suggestion. . . that a 'small war' might be useful to prove the President's toughness. "(235)

Accordingly, during the fall of 1979, Brzezinski and Carter suddenly rediscovered a brigade of Russian troops in Cuba. Admist a storm of furious protest and calls for action in Congress, Carter proclaimed a new Cuban "Crisis," asked the nation to "remain calm," and announced that "I will not be satisfied with maintenance of the status quo."(236) Yet, short of shooting Russians, it soon became obvious that there was no sacrificial scapegoat in Cuba this time, and so the "search for the humiliating other" went on.

THE GROUP-PSYCHOTIC INSIGHT: SACRIFICING HOSTAGES IN IRAN

A nation's foreign policy is primarily conducted for the purpose of keeping enough pots boiling around the world to enable its leader to find a sacrificial crisis on foreign soil when the nation needs one. Although no really useful enemy which could play the role of bestial Poisonous Placenta was available during the fall of 1979, there was one pot that had been boiling hot during the previous months which might provide the needed group-psychotic insight" and act as the humiliating enemy which was responsible for America's feelings of pollution and strangulation: Iran. Since the beginning of the year, Iranian revolutionaries had been grabbing Americans in Teheran, tearing down flags, and chanting "Death to the Americans" in mass rallies which periodically would attack American installations and personnel.(237) Despite continuous pleas by Americans in Iran to remove personnel and equipment to safety, to tighten security (as had been done effectively in Afghanistan), and to take other prudent

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measures against possible attack by the revolutionaries, despite clear warnings from the American military of the possible consequences (one American general asked "How many Americans will have to die before we do anything?)"(238) Washington refused all actions but one. This one action proved symbolic of the sacrificial nature of leaving the Americans defenseless. After 100,000 Iranians attacked the American compound on May 25th and tore down the American flag, precautions were quickly taken to protect the flag, by covering the flagpole with pig grease and putting a barrier 20 feet from its top to discourage climbers.(239) The unconscious message was clear: protect the placental flag, protect "national honor," sacrifice the personnel.

But the Iranians did not get the message clearly enough for them to take decisive action. Something obviously had to be done overtly by American leadership to produce the sacrificial victims. For months, the obvious provocation which could move the Iranians against the Americans in Teheran was at hand: the ousted Shah of Iran had been asking to enter the U.S. Despite efforts by Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and others to "save our national honor" and let the Shah in, clear reports from U.S. advisors and from the C.I.A. stated strongly that "if the Shah were admitted to the United States, the American Embassy would be taken and it would be a threat to American lives."(240) Over and over again as mobs attacked them, American Embassy officials asked for substantially more guards and stronger protection; there were continually refused. By August, as the Brzezinski group pushing for the admittance of the Shah grew larger, a Top Secret message was sent from Iran to Washington saying: "The danger of hostages being taken in Tehran will persist. We should make no move toward admitting the Shah until we have obtained and tested more effective guard force from the embassy."(241) Still no substantial new guards were provided and no personnel removed. The sacrifice was being prepared: if the Embassy were attacked, and Americans killed, America would have its bestial enemy, and the group-fantasy crisis could be solved through military invasion.

There was one remaining difficulty to resolve: both Carter and Lance stubbornly opposed letting the Shah in. Once, in late summer, when Brzezinski and Mondale pressed Carter to let him in, Carter blew up: "Blank the Shah! [Carter used the word "Blank" in retelling the event.] I'm not going to welcome him here when he has other places to go where he'll be safe."(242) This resistance by Carter to the group-fantasy demands to "get tough" and "save national honor" by letting in the Shah came from personal strengths and a determination not to involve America in war risks for trivial reasons. It was Carter's personal strength which I had obviously misjudged in making the last of the five predictions which I had made earlier-primarily, I think, due to the sketchiness of our information on his childhood and personality, so that I had assumed he would react more like

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Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon than like Dwight Eisenhower to col-lapse anxieties.(243) In addition, I should have invented a quantified "Rage Index" of the comparative violence contained in group-fantasy during col-lapse stages, so that the strength of the pressures toward violent action could have been more accurately forecast. In any case, Carter remained strong (for which he was called "weak"), and continued to refuse to admit the Shah.

Yet the fact remained that the commands of the "national will" poured into the White House from all over America: "Get tough, find us an enemy, we can't stand the strangulation, we can't stand hating you so much!" The group around Carter had no choice: they had to lie to him to get his consent. Despite consistent medical advice to Carter's staff that the Shah was in no immediate medical danger and that his medical problems could be easily taken care of elsewhere,(244) Carter was told that the Shah was "at the point of death" and that he needed treatment which could only be obtained in New York. Carter, according to the report of one person present, asked, "When the Iranians take our people in Teheran hostage, what will you advise me then?"(245) and, according to another, that we "would likely be faced with a situation where a group of fanatics grab Americans."(246) Despite these clear dangers, Carter agreed to let the Shah in. There was only one crucial condition, one important omission, which accompanied his decision, and this was obviously Carter's main contribu-tion to the cave-in to group-fantasy: the Americans in Teheran must remain unprotected. As the New York Times reporter put it, "One option that, curiously, was never seriously examined was the evacuation of embassy per-sonnel prior to admitting the Shah. "(247) The next day, the Shah had his gall bladder removed in New York, and nine days later, exactly as predicted by everyone, Iranian revolutionaries took the Americans hostage.

"UPHEAVAL" STAGE F54: THE IRANIAN "CRISIS"

As should be obvious by now, what was called the Iranian "Crisis" was not an external crisis at all, but in fact the wished - for and carefully- manipulated solution to the earlier real crisis of collapse of group-fantasy. The rage against Carter was now split off and projected into the Ayatollah Khomeini and his jeering mobs of demonstrators, who - having found their own solution to the collapse of their revolutionary group-fantasy - were happy to contribute to America's humiliation by parading bound hostages before TV cameras and hanging Carter in effigy. Instantly, all "collapse" imagery disappeared from the American press. As the New Yorker observ-ed, "President Carter's rating of approval.. doubled during the crisis. The public's sudden rush of affection for its country seems to have included its country's President.' '(248) By splitting off his Poisonous Placenta image,

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Carter was now transformed into a Fighting Fetus, a representative of every American fighting against the bestial humiliating enemy. All of America projected their personal rages into the group-delusional solution. When I asked over 800 people who attended several speeches I gave during the first week of the crisis how they felt now, most said "It feels good... we feel unified... we can't be pushed around any longer... it is good to be an American again... my personal life and disappointments don't seem so important any more." The nation began the fourth fetal stage of "upheaval" with the leader's designation of the humiliating enemy. Former President Ford called Iran "more serious than any crisis the U.S. has faced since the end of the World War II," and tens of thousands took to the streets to vent their anger, burn Iranian flags, insult Iranian students studying at American colleges, throw rocks through windows of local Arab bakeries, parade posters of actor John Wayne "as a symbol of two-fisted nationalism," and shout "Send in the Marines" and "Nuke the Ayatollah."(249)

America felt good again. One columnist put it bluntly. In his article "Why The Ayatollah Deserves Our Thanks," he explained: "The Ayatollah and the street mobs that pass for government in that backward, chaotic land, have done this country a hell of a favor. And I don't mean by practically guaranteeing the reelection of Jimmy Carter. The Iranians' contribution lies in prodding the United States into a renaissance of national pride and unity we feared had evaporated... "(250)

Even when Russia invaded Afghanistan, Americans could feel good about their strength. Carter, calling the Russian move "the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War,"(251) could easily end detente, begin "the new Cold War," and threaten "military force" in the Persian Gulf as though his earlier promises of military restraint were never made.(252) With the adoption of the delusional solution, the world made sense once more. The mood of the nation at the beginning of 1980 was one of calm pride:

What's it like in Washington now? Breathtaking. Let's begin with President Carter. Crisis everywhere... He looks calm. He invites in small groups of reporters and answers questions off the record with such low-keyed candor that they find themselves, in spite of themselves, feeling protective... Carter is an impressive figure... Carter looks calm... (253)

The cartoon in Illustration 9 shows the delusional solution which produced this strength and calmness. The ambivalent leader was now split into two parts. The good leader, now young, strong and determined, wrapped in a

FOUNDATIONS OF
PSYCHOHISTORY
TABLE OF CONTENTS

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


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