Psychoanalysis of the Coward
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This text came from Les Mobiles Inconscients de la Violence Poltico-Sociale Chronique en Haiti (ang., "The Unconscious Motives of the Politico-Social Anarchy in Haiti"). I invite you to visit this folder in MA PAGE UNIVERSITAIRE. This is number 3 of the BIBLIOTHEQUE
Confronted to authoritarianism, to absolutism, to fascism or to tyranny, the coward moves back and abdicate, abandoning his/her individuality and diluting his/her personality in the group. Giving up the responsibility of his/her acts, he/she becomes the model of the group and the chief's stooge. Furthermore, his feelings of hostility driven back into his/her preconscious hide those of dependence-guilt and inferiority-superiority ones, then more deeply buried in his/her subconscious. These, forming ties between themselves and with other preconceived ideas, will crystallize into complex. Stuck there, these complex, accumulating energy, finish to burst outside of the field of his/her unconscious and pour into the conscious their excess of energy. The opening valve is the mechanism of the displacement that allows the coward to find an alibi and a scapegoat. This is, often, the one (those) who is (are) designated, directly or indirectly, by the chief or by the group (the community, the crowd, etc.). It is like that prejudices take birth.
Thus, one can explain the assassination of three posters of the R.D.N. P. under the ephemeral dictatorship of the general Prosper April, that of the pastor Sylvio Claude, the regretted leader of the P.D.C.H. and a fierce critic of the Duvaliers, that of the lawyer Lafontant Joseph, a defender of the individual liberty, under the government of the cruel Namphy, and that of the judge Malary, under the military government of C�dras. One cannot either forget the burned victims (Father Lebrun") of the Haitian anarchists and those killed by militiamen on November 29, 1986. All these crimes were acts of pure cowardice, unworthy of the brave citizen.
In opposite to other individuals who look for, in the group, the support or/and the intimacy all human beings need, the coward comes there to enlarge the undemocratic or antipluralistic forces. The ultimate objective of these is to close all dialectics inside the group and to arrive to the hegemonism. Man, being a sociable animal, has a natural tendency to form groups and to come together to form families, parties, tribes, villages, nations, international organizations, etc.. However, one won't forget that if the adherence to a group has, certainly, many advantages, it can be born some intentions and behaviors that will put its existence in peril and that of other groups. Let us remember the holocaust of the Jews, the brutal enslavement of the Africans and the genocide of the Amerindians of Central America. All have been achieved by groups that one can identify either as nations, or as armies or as races.