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Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal.

Studies 5: 211221 (2008)


Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies
Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5(3): 211221 (2008)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.164
Group Phantasy: Its Place in the
Psychology of Genocide
JAMES M. GLASS
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the leading role that ideas and beliefs can play in the formation
of groups and their political action, with particular reference to the psychology of
groups and movements involved in genocide. The paper asserts the notion of the Idea
as leader; thus moving away from Freuds more limited notion in Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego of the leader as a person, a charismatic gure generating
feelings of love and attachment. Alluding to the work of Bion, Neri and Anzieu, the
paper examines the political and psychological signicance the willed quality of
group phantasy in group-initiated mass murder, from Nazi genocide to the ideology
of radical Islamic terrorism. Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Key words: leaders, leadership, group, group behavior, skin ego, phantasy
INTRODUCTION: CULTURE AND BELIEF
Much of the literature on political leadership has been inuenced by Freud and
his argument in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud,
1921/1955). The conventional notion is that the leader, a person, leads, a group
or followers. And the inuence of the leader on this group leads to the action
of the followers. I would, however, like to submit that such a formulation may
be too mechanistic, that, in fact, sometimes ideas may lead groups, and ideolo-
gies can exercise as much inuence over groups, as do specic individuals. It is
also the case that what leads political leadership may not be the leader as such,
but a group of ideas or a group of civil associations whose beliefs, values and
perceptions may serve as a catalyst to an entire culture, for example the role of
medicine and science in Nazi Germany. It may be that the knowledge pushing
these associations becomes the true leader in any given culture. It is not that
knowledge replaces the leader, but the knowledge clusters coalescing as culture
and cultural artifact may create a belief-atmosphere, as it were, that stokes up a
society, regardless of class, social position, or institutional structure. In this
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Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008)
Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
respect, it could be argued that the idea leads the leader, and these ideas
manifest their power in the way groups formulate social attitude, social facts,
and intellectual and emotional gestalt.
The ability of cultures to wage mass murder depends on two fundamental
factors: rst, a willingness of the population to accept such behavior as legiti-
mate; and, second, the normalizing of mass murder as essential national policy.
Each of these factors in turn depends on the capacity of groups to internalize
the belief structure necessary for action and to reach consensus on the methods
necessary to implement beliefs. Psychoanalytic group theory brings us at least a
step closer to understanding how this process works. It is simply not enough to
argue that, in the case of Nazi Germany, it was Hitlers decision or the partys
madness, or with September 11 that it was bin Ladens charisma alone. In
each instance of mass murder the murder of European Jews, the deaths of
thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a group-
willed set of beliefs was essential for carrying out these policies. Masses of indi-
viduals, organized into collectives or groups, needed to hold these ends not as
just rational calculation but as willed belief. Group phantasy articulates the
perception; the very existence of individuals, their bodies, demands annihila-
tion, extermination, purication. In Germany, Jews and gypsies constitute this
hated, impure Other. For the al Qaeda network, despised otherness appears as
the Americans, Western values, the pleasures of the body. Where can we turn
in group-psychology theory for light that illuminates the causality behind these
actions?
Claudio Neri, an Italian psychoanalyst and a Professor of Group Psychology
at the University of Rome, offers provocative insights (Neri, 1998). Neri draws
inspiration from Didier Anzieu, a French psychoanalyst and theorist of group
behavior. Anzieu uses concepts like group illusion and the group as a container;
he introduces the concept of the Skin Ego, which I will return to in a moment.
Neri elaborates the idea that illusions tie groups together. And the group itself
acts as a container for powerful, explosive feelings and channels those feelings
into action. Neris own conclusions are derived from watching small groups in
action. But I believe we can use his theory to make certain generalizations about
large-group behavior or the behavior of what I call culture-groups loose
associations of various groups within a given cultural eld, united by an over-
riding ideological commitment. Neris small-group psychology offers a beginning
point from which to explain action and behavior on a larger scale. I should also
add that Neri draws from Wilfred Bion; but for my purposes, his theoretical
elaborations of Anzieu are more relevant to the kinds of political groups engaged
in ongoing activities of mass murder.
Neri argues that groups perform binding functions, in the form of a projection
of a mother-image; others in the group provide critical fraternal links or bond-
ings. And the community of belief forged by these bondings looks to the external
world as the place where the group works. The groups purpose is to realize, to
bring-into-reality, the fraternal message (for example, destruction of the Other,
213 Group phantasy
Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008)
Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
annihilation of the enemy), and to construct a mother-image, that offers
the prospect of healing, a transcendence to a greater unity. External action
shores up fantasies of rescue and redemption for example, restoring a shattered
mother imago (held in the group unconscious) by striking out at the despised
Other.
Groups construct communication grids or networks; these networks maintain
a set of beliefs internalized by the group. This might be thought of as the group
matrix. S. H. Foulkes writes: The matrix is the common shared group which
ultimately determines the meaning and signicance of all events and upon
which all communications and interpretations, verbal and non-verbal, rest
(Foulkes, 1964: 292). The group matrix works on the level of belief, action and
cohesion; network and matrix reinforce one another. Communications regarding
belief and action are transmitted through a three-layer series of recognitions: the
basic matrix, the groups unifying substrate; the dynamic matrix, the groups
view of its own action imperatives; and the personal matrix, the relation
between the members of the group, and the group itself.
In considering the concept of matrix, Neri argues it is essential to look for
the constituent elements of the common space and of the group eld in sensorial
experiences. In addition to understanding group behavior, one must grasp its
terrain, where it works and operates (Neri, 1998: 27). How do we account for
linking action in the group space, a concept Neri calls group resonance? Consider
that group resonance may have something to do with beliefs, and in the political
group, with ideology and a group logic. In the case of Germany, the hatred of
the Jews, racist biological theory, and eugenics emerge as a group reason, a grand
explanation that spans all cultural practices.
Transpersonal phenomena in the group arise from common beliefs and shared
psychological and physical space. Shared psychological space appears in how the
group orients itself to thought, ideas, to prevailing opinion, for example, the
belief that the Jews were the innate carriers of typhus, or the radical Muslim
mullah teaching that all evil arises from the West and that Western culture is
the mortal enemy of the true believer in Islam. For the political or culture group
to work effectively, it must share psychological space that operates on both
conscious and unconscious levels conscious in the sense of guiding and orient-
ing group behavior (the construction of ghettos to contain Jewish contamina-
tion), and unconscious in the sense of provoking similar forms of identication
that forge the groups empathic connections. Group resonance emerges as the
sense within the group that its shared beliefs represent something special; that
its faith in what it believes to be right and just is unquestionably true in
Germany a set of virtues rationally congured by a racist biological, genetic and
medical science, and with al Qaeda, precepts enunciated through religious verse
and study of sacred pronouncements.
Glass 214
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Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
GROUP AS COMMUNITY
Neri offers intriguing categories of group psychological analysis. Take, for
example, the concepts of the emerging group state and the fraternal community
stage. He asks, when does the group become a functioning coherent unit? At
what point does it meld or blend together as a common actor? He argues that
every group is built around the idea of a messiah and the fascinating and
enthralling ideas that surround the messiah gure [a concept analogous to
Bions view of the group designating a leader to save it from imploding (Bion,
1989)]. The group nourishes itself with messianic hope, faith in the future, the
enrichment of ones life and life world. Further, the group surrounds itself in
illusion, which is a response to a desire for security, a desire to preserve a
threatened ego. And group illusion responds to the threat to individual narcis-
sism by setting up group narcissism (Neri, 1998: 41). The aim is to form a good
group, but the unconscious aims also involve forming bulwarks or defenses
against what the group most fears: its tendency to disintegrate, to fall apart. The
illusion of the good group is both a reaction to total anguish and bewilder-
ment and an initial condition for birth and development (Neri, 1998: 42).
Goodness is a quality dened by the groups inventory, its narrative of itself and
the world. And goodness, as an absolute, attaches itself to the groups authorita-
tive (or rational) explanations of itself, its belief-systems, the knowledge-claims
that validate its existence in the present, past, and future.
In some groups, members habitually experience a loss of the boundaries of
self, through feelings of fear, uncertainty, anxiety-ridden perceptions of the
outside; the group illusion deects this phenomenon and contains what are
powerfully entropic feelings in the unconscious. Feelings of insecurity and loss
of boundary, then, are no longer localized but, according to Neri, diffused and
spread across a common or shared space. Belief in this respect may appear as
a dream or phantasy that Neri likens to the excitement of people caught up in
a party. With their momentary at-one-ness they may be unied with the group,
but they still retain a memory of their previous position, that is, their position
of isolation and detachment or depersonalization. The group sweeps them up
and makes them feel whole, part of a greater unity far superior to the position
of individuality or aloneness. He calls this process forging a common mental
state. Moments of depersonalization may become psychological transit points
towards other psychical conditions such as closer afnity with the group idea
or to even, tragically, more isolation, a condition of paralysis where thinking is
impossible, a disassembly of the individual position (Neri, 1998: 43).
Emerging group states oscillate between positions of coherence and dis-
integration, assembly and disassembly. The group illusion contributes mightily
towards the integrative process precisely the function in Nazi Germany of the
ideas of race hegemony and the phobic biological properties attached to Jews.
These ideas (defenses against disintegration phantasies) ght the feelings of dis-
assembly; the nervousness of the self in the group. In addition, illusion coalescing
215 Group phantasy
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Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
as ideology welds the emerging group state into a mental and psychological unity,
and accounts, as well, for the creation of the fraternal, communal bond. It is at
this stage that the group becomes identiable as a collective subject speaking
with one political voice, a cohesiveness enabling action.
To support his thesis of group cohesion Neri draws from the existential
phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, 1984/1991). According to Sartre, the
fusion of the group leads individuals to emerge from isolation, alienation and
impotence (Sartre, 1984/1991: 47). Emergence from individual passivity signals
the joining of a group; and in concert, individuals begin to act on the world.
No longer facing the world alone, the self merges with others to act towards
achieving common goals. This reciprocity of relationship enables change to
develop. Each individual has a right in relationship to the group, but the holder
of the right is not each individual isolated to himself, but each member of the
group in relation to the group itself, insofar as he is a part of the fraternal
Community (Sartre, 1984/1991: 48). Rousseaus concept of the General Will
runs through this formulation, at least in my reading of Neri, it appears to do
so. Each member, unreservedly, gives the self to the community and in return
receives back, from the community or the group, emotional life, sustenance and
meaning. Rousseaus comments in The Social Contract on the binding character
of civil religion suggest not tolerance and individual detachment, but the oppo-
site: the fervor of intolerance, and enthusiastic participation in an Idea greater
than oneself (Rousseau, 1950).
This is especially true in the context of Nazi Germany, because the fraternal
community understood itself in terms of a general will drawn from the ideol-
ogy of race belief. To be a member of the group, to hold a right in relation to
the group, meant that the group enacted or carried the fantasies of each member
of the group fantasies including the cleansing and purication of the blood,
the removal of infection from the world, and the purging through re of a con-
taminated racial and biological environment. What this fraternal culture group
creates is a common psychological space that allows for the construction of col-
lective forms of thought which both create the world and drive away uncon-
scious demons in the groups members, a kind of resonance initiated and
maintained by the groups psychological/perceptual afnity. But this common
space is also mental or conscious, bounded by prevailing knowledge-claims and
practices that provide authoritative justication. Anzieu: . . . the psychical space
brings about transformations of sensory qualities into elements of phantasies,
suppressed thoughts, which in conscious form may resemble rational argument,
scientic proof, cultural practice and professional standards (Anzieu, 1984:
230). Knowledge-claims coming out of the group environment bolster the psychi-
cal envelope, enrich the skin of explanation, and offer a reassuring language,
words heard weav[ing] a symbolic skin (Anzieu, 1984: 230). Never underesti-
mate, Anzieu warns, the power of language to construct the world; the written
[and it should be added, the spoken] word has the power to function as a skin
(Anzieu, 1984: 231). So this psychical universe a bundle of perceptions fertile
Glass 216
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with linguistic authority, imagination and feeling, refers not necessarily to physi-
cal space, but to the space existing between individuals forming a group, that
is to say, individuals bound one to another . . . by the many things which they
have in common . . . [Group resonance means the] feeling of belonging and . . . a
distinction between what the group is and what it is not (Anzieu, 1984: 49).
Now here is where ideology enters the picture with the large culture-group
or association (for example, groups considered part of the fabric of civil society).
Psychological space is contained or held together to prevent disintegration
through what Neri calls a mental skin. The group takes over all psychological
boundary functions through the provision of a mental skin (belief systems) that
literally adhere to the psychological self. And like Anzieus notion of a skin ego,
this mental skin is the protective casing that holds individuals together
(Anzieu, 1984: 50). It works both on the conscious level of reason (knowledge,
the professions, social practices), and unconsciously as the affective glue adher-
ing group identications and symbols. Boundaries, both rational and psychologi-
cal, become membranes or barriers; membranes holding in the collective anxiety;
barriers in the sense of keeping out poisonous thoughts, toxins in the environ-
ment, defects in the gene pool, polluted esh. The mental skin of the group
functions as a transpersonal container and keeps inside those values essential
to the belief structure of the group and outside, those values and others the
group hates (tainted Jewish blood; in the case of the al Qaeda network, corrupt
Western culture). This mental skin provides symbols of identication that will
enable members of the group to resist temptation or tendencies to transgress
mental and physical boundaries (in Germany sexual relations with Jews; for the
September 11 terrorists the ability to live in Western cultural environments and
to remain immune to temptation and evil).
What is important here is that the group is united by a psychological and
not necessarily a physical space. In Germany these interpersonal containers were
provided by race theory in its practices, in medical care, art, entertainment,
literature, and in the day-to-day group life of civil society probably the most
dramatic embodiment of these containers.
Bion refers to this in his concept of the binding quality of unconscious phan-
tasies (Bion, 1987). In the case of Germany, the unconscious phantasy of puri-
cation (and the elimination of lth) received sanction through social and cultural
practices reinforcing the boundary that keeps out the bad, and strengthening
the ideologys mental skin (the transpersonal pool of feelings, emotions and
ideas). Some of these mental forms might be thought of as psychotic cysts split
off from the normal function of the group. However, in the case of what I am
calling the culture-group, there are no psychotic cysts in the group itself or
what the group would call psychotic. In Germany in 1938, the murder of schizo-
phrenics, for example, is seen as a normal and necessary part of the culture-
groups transpersonal container. The euthanasia program of the late 1930s
classied a number of different groups as infectious (either biologically or geneti-
cally) and therefore subject to extermination on the grounds of being a danger
217 Group phantasy
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to the nations (or communitys) health. From the internal point of view that
is, from the groups consciousness outwards nothing of their action was per-
ceived to be psychotic. Psychotic aspects of the personality are literally normal-
ized by the group; for example, we would regard the phantasy of ploughing a
jumbo jet into the World Trade Center as crazy, but not for the September 11
terrorists. The phantasy had been normalized and realized through their group,
or more specically, through the resilient mental skin that contained the ter-
rorists thoughts, phantasies and fears. This eld of the mental state transforms
into a eld of hate. Thus, the groups mental skin denes itself through the
imagery and symbology of hated objects and through the group imperative, to
act to rid the world of the hated unclean objects.
GROUP ODOR: A SUGGESTIVE METAPHOR
Neri notes the observation by Metter regarding group odors (Metter, 1994). I
think this is interesting as a representation of group cohesion and resonance, a
kind of olfactory accompaniment to the more visual mental skin. Metter (1994)
writes that in certain environments public lavatories, breweries, stations an
odor has been deposited, so specic and characteristic that even though the
rooms have been thoroughly aired, we continue to perceive that this odor has
pervaded the environment. Similarly, going into certain groups, we feel, for
example, a sense of longstanding rancor, or of gloom and boredom, that cannot
be removed. Going into other groups, we have a sense of mental openness and
lightness. If the group produces certain mental elds, these can permeate what
Correale has dened as historical eld, giving origin to a quality of culture, of
belonging to this certain group, which cannot easily be modied and trans-
formed (Correale, 1991: 160). Bions proto-mental systems, primitive mentality,
the group at a more archaic level of organization, are other ways of expressing
this sense of a group odor (Bion, 1962). It is akin to an automatic or compulsory
communication that occurs at the proto-mental level of understanding and
therefore is sensed as being there, even though it is not readily denable. This
sense of being there, of being in the right place, is a psychological space, dis-
tinguished by the intensity of imminent communication. Neri refers to emotive
constellations, unconscious thoughts evolving and being picked up by others . . .
a constellation that is still being formed and dened (Neri, 1998: 105). In politi-
cal terms, the group as self-object knows itself through the mirroring effect of
group ideology.
Neri addresses the issue of the passage of emotions, thoughts and phantasies
from the individual to the group, and for our purposes in understanding political
action, the other way around: from the group to the individual. This passage is
facilitated by what he calls effective narration. Ideology may be thought of as
an effective narration that comes to life and takes its place within the living
fabric of the groups thought. These narratives in the case of Germany evolved
through research and practice in professions charged with administering and
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disciplining the body and self (medicine, psychiatry, education), organizing the
public space (bureaucracy and regime), building and constructing (engineering)
and creating and disseminating new ideas and concepts (the arts and sciences).
Groups become fertile, but this fertility, birth of action and idea, a movement
from sterility to regeneration, nds itself nurtured by social and cultural prac-
tices. It is groups and civil associations that stimulate the phantasy of being
cured, the projection of the bad outside, and rid the psychological and physical
universe of that polluted outside. But groups also develop the strategies, mecha-
nisms, technologies and institutions that embody and carry out whatever psy-
chological imperatives push the construction of group phantasies. Indeed, the
agent of the group phantasy emerges as the cultures practices, particularly as
those practices affect the body, its internal and external regulation, its admin-
istration and discipline.
THE SKIN EGO
Anzieu speaks of the imaginary skin, which covers the ego (Anzieu, 1989). It
may become a poisoned tunic, suffocating, burning, disintegrating. Groups go
to considerable lengths to put out this kind of re, this toxicity. A toxic skin
ego means the group-community fears for its life, thus the drive for regeneration
and purication. And in the group that drive appears as ideology, circulating
through public representation, and stimulating the dread of being touched, the
fear of contact, the phobic relation of the self to the object, the fear of contagion.
The prohibition on touching contributes to the establishment of a frontier, an
interface, between the Ego and the Id (Anzieu, 1989: 123). We crave the touch
of the familiar; we are scared mightily by the presence, particularly the physical
presence, of the strange, the foreign, the horrible, or what the group projects as
the horrible. Anzieu writes:
To exist at all the group needs an overarching agency [skin ego] that envelops it. Thus
the group is organized around the same agencies as the individuals composing it. . . . The
unconscious and conscious functioning of the group will differ depending upon the
agency that serves as envelope to the group psychical apparatus; the enveloping agency
also affects the behavior of the group, the goals and attitudes towards external reality.
(Anzieu, 1984: 101)
The group defends against its narcissistic wounds, it resists the impact of feelings
like fragmentation anxiety, dismemberment. And the phanticized reality of
the group, its protective envelope, is the messianic hope of being cured.
The group itself becomes the curative agent and simultaneously, the curative
process. . . . [T]he group reality is a product of collective phantasies and
their symbolic representations (Anzieu, 1984: 101102). For example, in
Germany, draconian race and marriage laws may be understood against the
backdrop of the skin ego, and the impenetrable membrane constructed to keep
out those seen to be lthy, contaminated and biologically and genetically impure.
219 Group phantasy
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These laws (the membrane taking political form), instituted in 1935, legislated
extreme punishment for race mixing, particularly in the realm of sexual contact
between German and Jew. Punishments for Jews, for any sexual contact with a
German, could be death. For Germans it could mean imprisonment and/or
nes.
CONCLUSION
The issue here is how to explain the workings of political and cultural groups
and their relation to mass murder; therefore to draw from small-group theory to
explain these kinds of public phenomena may present analytical difculties. To
see the small group as a laboratory sufcient to explain the action of large culture
groups ignores the place of ideology as a group container and thoroughly over-
looks the political signicance of group resonance. It may not be the leader that
drives and denes action; rather, the signicant motivator may be the resonances
carried and shared by the groups psychological space. Stanley Milgrams labora-
tory at Yale lacked sufcient historical and physical scope to explain the mass
murdering of Jews during the Holocaust (Milgram, 1974). It ignored the impact
of ideology, cultural practice and group phantasy. While Christopher Brownings
Ordinary Men presents credible evidence for the ordinary Germans complicity
in mass murder, Browning subverts his argument by relying, heavily, on Milgrams
experiments (Browning, 1992).
What may provoke groups to engage in mass murder may entail more than
obedience to authority, a kind of mindless acquiescence to the commands of
superiors. Browning argues that there is precious little evidence showing that
ordinary German soldiers or irregulars were punished for refusing to shoot Jews.
If the inclination was there to exercise restraint, it could have been done without
fear of reprisal; but in his study very few soldiers refused to engage in rounding
up and killing Jews. The evidence suggests more than carrying out the wishes
of authority. Such action took on a willed quality, with many participants exhib-
iting enthusiasm at their task of killing. Similarly, with the September 11 attack
on the World Trade Center. No evidence, at least so far, demonstrates that par-
ticipants were coerced into the plan. It appears to be the opposite: a great joy
at being able to accomplish the destruction. Therefore, to assume that deference
to authority explains group-initiated mass murder ignores the critical factor of
group belief, the culturally internalized narratives pushing both individual and
group, and the circulation of phantasies providing adhesive identications in the
group itself.
Likewise, the articial Tavistock group, the weekend experiment of strangers
sitting in small rooms, is not sufcient to explain why intelligent, educated men
smash airlines into 110-story buildings. There needs to be a new language of
interpretation for political groups whose singular purpose is murdering, and for
those groups in civil society that support this political logic. This interpretative
language may require drawing data from the role of the professions and the
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function of knowledge and religious belief in performing leadership guidance for
groups.
I want to stress here the notion of the Idea as leader; thus moving away from
Freuds more limited notion in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
of the leader as a person, a charismatic gure generating feelings of love and
attachment (Freud, 1921/1955). Why not consider a charismatic form of
Knowledge? Ideologies in this respect become shared fantasies, psychological
spaces where forbidden wishes may be deposited or displaced. In Anzieus terms
the group illusion constructs a collective defense against potentially lethal per-
secution anxiety. And these illusions, understood politically, may transform into
ideology. He speaks of ego ideal, ideal ego, and super ego; ideology functions
more like the groups ego ideal. It protects against fragmentation anxiety and
fragmentation fantasies. And the professions through their authority, inuence
on cultural practice, and knowledge-claims contribute to the construction of
these ideological defenses. Anzieu also speaks of phantasy resonance, or ideas
that grip an audience through unconscious associations and connection (analo-
gous to Metters notion of the group odor), and he notes the power of the circula-
tion of phantasies shared by a group as an implicit understanding of the world
(Anzieu, 1984).
Phantasy enables a group to split its containing functions into persecution
and idealization. Idealizing the groups rescue functions, its curative ego ideal,
and persecuting the hated Other, keeps group boundaries intact. Indeed, both
functions may need to occur simultaneously to keep the group from splitting
apart. It is a case where with the culture-group ideology becomes leader, with a
set of informal leaders (in the professions), as opposed to the more narrow
Freudian view of one singular leader. Bion refers to ideology as bible making,
an interesting analogy because the scriptures of the bible contain unvarnished
and undisputed truth (Bion, 1987: 80). The groups psychical envelope becomes
this truth. It is inviolate, and it energizes, it points the way, provides the justi-
cation and facilitates the action. Jews are the evil, or the radical Islamic declara-
tion that Western culture contaminates the world.
For too long group psychology has been under the impression that it is the
leader who denes the goals. Bion, Anzieu and Neri demonstrate that it is often
the group itself that shows the leader what to proclaim and declaim, that the
group denes its parameters through ideology. Group leadership then may have
as much to do with articulating the groups underlying proto-mental system (its
odor, if you will), as it does with the thoroughly mistaken idea that it is the
leader who drags the group along willy-nilly. Nothing in the case of Nazi
Germany and the al Qaeda Network could be further from the truth. For the
actors in both these mass-murdering environments, action comes from the faith
in belief and ideology, as much as it does from the orders of the leader.
221 Group phantasy
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Sartre J-P. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vols. I & II. London: Verso Editions, 1984/1991.
James M Glass PhD
Department of Government and Politics
University of Maryland, College Park, Md. USA
jglass@gvpt.umd.edu

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