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Cycles of Group-Fantasies
- Including graph of American
Group-Fantasy Cycles

From Nuclear War as an Anti-Sexual Group Fantasy
Lloyd deMause Un-published paper.

1. Innovative Phase: A new psychoclass comes of age, and introduces new inventions, new social arrangements and new prosperity, producing a Belle Epoque, with warmer personal relationships and less scapegoating of women and minorities.

2. Depressive Phase: The older psychoclasses become depressed by guilt over the prosperity and anxiety from the new social arrangements. The world seems out of control, as childhood traumas press for repetition, and the nation regresses, goes on Purity Crusades and fears of women, and creates an economic depression.

3. Manic Phase: As economic recovery threatens fresh anxiety, group-fantasies of threatening monsters, punitive mommies, polluted blood streams, suicidal imagery and poisonous foreigners proliferate. The nation reacts with a manic defense against its depression, engaging in speculative investment, wasteful military buildups, monetary and credit explosions, foreign belligerence and other grandiose attempts to demonstrate omnipotent control of love supplies.

4. War Phase: When a cooperative Enemy is found who can provide a guilt-free reason to go to war, the nation sends its youth to be killed in a perverse homosexual ritual wherein they stick things into other men and are punished, as poison containers for the nation's guilt. Images of restored virility and rebirth of the world predominate, and the nation returns to a new innovative phase after the sacrifice.

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