A war of narcissists
By Váno Krueger
Originally appeared @Krytyka
War is a disease that isn't localized on the front. As syphilis ultimately infects the entire body, not just the initially affected area, war infects all of society. War aggravates and lays bare everything that is hidden and imperceptible in peacetime.
From the outset, individual psychology is also social psychology.
Sigmund Freud
I
World War One was initially called the Great War because when it ended, no one anticipated there'd be a Second. Military analysts, in particular Nikolay Mitrokhin, are already writing about the similarities between the Great World War, that is the First, and the Russo-Ukrainian War that is going on right now. And obviously they'll keep writing: the long line of the front which barely moves and only with great effort, the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, who obviously didn't want to die, the fields of fresh graves in cemeteries stretching out to the horizon.
But war is a disease that isn't localized on the front. As syphilis ultimately infects the entire body, not just the initially affected area, war infects all of society. War aggravates and lays bare everything that is hidden and imperceptible in peacetime. War makes visible everything the conflicting parties would prefer to conceal — and rather successfully do conceal — during times of peace. War is always dirt, suffering, blood, sweat, rot, wounds, mutilation, and death — of bodies and psyches. This applies to both sides of the conflict, the victims and the aggressors.
Death knows no moral metaphysics any more than syphilis does, equally infecting both the experienced seducer and the girl, until yesterday healthy and chaste, who sincerely loves him; equally infecting the experienced prostitute and the schoolboy, until yesterday chaste and healthy.
It was the Great War that convinced Sigmund Freud once and for all of the existence — and ultimately the unconquerable victory — of the death drive. Even distancing yourself as much as possible from the atmosphere of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the transference of one's own impressions of it onto the person and writing of Sigmund Freud, comparing, say, his Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the earlier The Interpretation of Dreams, it becomes clear that, despite maintaining his brilliant, easy style, it was hard for him to write.
It was also hard for me to write this essay. And I know how hard it will be to read.
II
Freud's pleasure principle [Lustprinzip] was initially called the unpleasure principle [Unlustprinzip] since it was about relieving stress from the individual's psyche; more specifically, it was about the increase in stress from irritants and the mental discharge that relieves it and restores mental comfort to the individual. The reality principle does not so much oppose the pleasure principle as control it, [temporarily] reconciling the individual's psyche with the stress, teaching and forcing it to [temporarily] endure discomfort.
This is why I'm writing this essay: connection with Reality is important and Reality is always uncomfortable.
But I urge everyone who, in accordance with the pleasure principle, instantly registers all discomfort as enemy PSYOP, the toxic equating of the executioner with the victim, manipulation, the devaluation of suffering, and so on and thereby instantly relieves their mental strain, to simply flip through these pages without reading them.
III
Until now, I have been writing about Reality, but I will now divide this single concept into two: Reality-1 — How-It-Actually-Is — traumatic and uncomfortable, a source of constant strain, irritation, discontent for the individual's psyche; and Reality-2 — comfortable and convenient, constructed by the individual's psyche in order to replace Reality-1. Reality-2 can approach Reality-1, which is the situation of a strong, healthy psyche, or it can, on the contrary, move away from Reality-1 — the situation of a weak, sick psyche. In the case of extreme mental pathology, Reality-1 and Reality-2 lose practically all resemblance; it's a state of psychosis.
I want to emphasize that Reality-2 will never fully coincide with Reality-1 for anyone, since Reality-1 is moreover always much more complex than any individual's notions of it (much less the collective notions of individuals), than any interpretive framework that an individual or group of individuals superimpose on it. In the strict sense, Reality-1 is always unknowable, which, however, does not mean that one should refuse to attempt to know it. Rather the opposite: knowing Reality-1 demands special responsibility of the individual.
Knowing [= drawing Reality-2 closer to] Reality-1 also requires special courage. After all, as I have already pointed out, one way or another Reality-1 is always uncomfortable and traumatic for the individual's psyche.
Knowing necessarily presupposes the deconstruction of the [protective constructs] of Reality-2, disentangling [them], demonstrating the fiction of Reality-2. Ergo: knowing necessarily presupposes differentiation — the function of thinking.
Knowing, deconstruction, and differentiation are countered by excessive generalization — the function of mythological thinking that is precisely what creates the protective constructs of Reality-2 and thus distances it from Reality-1.
It is for this reason that μέθοδος, methodos, is not just a way, but a way through, a pro-cess [μετά + ὁδός], a trespass, a necessary transgression. And this is why Sapere aude!, as Immanuel Kant called it in his essay "What Is Enlightenment?", was also Sigmund Freud's slogan. Or as Jacques Lacan put it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, "Desidero is the Freudian cogito" (emphasis added).[1]
IV
In his diary, Sigmund Freud twice recorded his failure to win the Nobel Prize: the first time seemingly neutrally, but actually quite bitterly, on October 31, 1929: "Passed over for the Nobel Prize," and with yet more bitterness the second time, on November 6, 1930: "Conclusively passed over for Nobel Prize."
For the prize is given not to the best, but to the most conventional, and these two [almost] never coincide. The prize is given to those who reproduce a comfortable and convenient Reality-2, not those who come the closest to the traumatic and uncomfortable Reality-1.
And this is precisely why there's no point in fetishizing any prize, even the Nobel.
Despite all the bitterness of his entries, Freud understood this. Back in 1916 in the thick of the Great World War, he wrote to Ferenczi, "But it would be absurd to expect a sign of recognition, when one has 7/8 of the world against one." [2]
It was the Romantic Hans Christian Andersen who, in his "The Emperor's New Clothes," fantasized about a crowd whose eyes are opened by a young boy who says that the emperor is naked. Sigmund Freud perfectly understands that touching collective narcissism means dooming oneself to ostracism during life and after death.
V
According to popular belief, narcissism is excessive love for oneself. As is [almost] always the case with popular beliefs, it is wrong, as far from Reality-1 as possible. Narcissists love not themselves, but their reflections — the unachievable Ego Ideal. Even more, they love their reflections precisely because they are incapable of loving themselves. And hence, they are not capable of loving anyone at all.
A mass phenomenon is rooted in this critical self-doubt, in this critical inability to love [oneself first of all, and therefore, anyone at all]: the narcissism of minor differences. For truly, it's not the Completely different, but the Slightly different that floods the critically insecure Ego with doubt, the Ego with a sense of inferiority — therefore the actually inferior Ego of the narcissist. For the inferior Ego of the narcissist constantly perceives the Slightly different as a better version of the Ego, more deserving of love and attention — originally maternal, but in adult life broader — any attention and any resources.
It is for this reason that the Slightly different is a constant source of doubt, anxiety, irritation, of constant dissatisfaction for the inferior Ego of the narcissist — and those irritants are so strong that they inevitably provoke the narcissist's aggression and hatred for the Slightly different, much fiercer than for the Completely different.
VI
If there are good Russians, this means there must be good Ukrainians. Their presence nolens volens in one — the Western — media and public sphere, as well as the critical dependence of both categories on it has led to the fact that good Ukrainians are constantly trying to draw a clear line: where we, and where they frequently overdo it. Because as a result the majority of good Ukrainians' hatred is pointed at not the bad Russians — the direct aggressors — but the good Russians, opponents of aggression who, in the opinion of good Ukrainians, never support Ukraine enough, in the right way, or with the right words or actions. And no matter what the opponents of aggression — the good Russians — have done or, on the contrary, not done, they will always owe the good Ukrainians, will always, in the opinion of good Ukrainians, deprive them of the rather comfortable — for with little effort it provides much desired attention — victim status, deprive them with every incorrect, in the opinion of good Ukrainians, mention of the Russo-Ukrainian war: [They're not calling us victims [in the right way]; They're not [only] calling us victims, Better to zip it!] or, conversely, will simply deprive them of this desired status through their silence on the war [They're not calling us victims].
It is for this reason that good Ukrainians are inclined to recognize the Completely different — representatives of the animal world who have attacked [or whom an attack was attributed to] [any] Russians — a shark, a kangaroo, a parrot, and so on — or characters from popular culture — for example, Master Yoda from the Reality-2 universe of Star Wars.
In this world, it is totally natural that there are no attacks by representatives of the animal world on citizens of, say, the United States of America. These attacks don't simply not happen in view of good Ukrainians, they don't happen in their Reality-2.
For example, after the shark attack on citizen of the Russian Federation Vladimir Popov on the beach in Hurghada, Egypt on June 8, 2023, good Ukrainians in their Reality-2 included the shark among their allies in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and this alliance is so important for them that most of them simply ignored — excluded from their Reality-2 — the shark attack on the citizen of the United States of America of Ukrainian extraction, the pro-Ukrainian Tatyana Koltunyuk at Rockaway Beach in New York on August 7, 2023.
A smaller number of good Ukrainians have generally justified [and even encouraged] that second shark, pointing to [a] Tatyana Koltunyuk's status as a Russophone, [b] her older age, and [c] her Odesa origins etc.
In Reality-2 for these good Ukrainians, the shark is a more important ally than the pro-Ukrainian activist just as Reality-2 is more important for good Ukrainians than Reality-1 in general.
VII
A similar line — one of the main ones — of constructing Reality-2 for good Ukrainians coincides with one of the main lines of Vladimir Putin's public self-representation, namely with his numerous official photo sessions with representatives of the animal world — Siberian tigers, dogs, snow cranes, and so on — called on to represent Vladimir Putin in the eyes of both his subjects and foreign leaders as a ruler of not only the human, but all the animal kingdom. Thus, Putin received Angela Merkel in 2007 in Sochi accompanied by one of his dogs, Konni the labrador, knowing full well that Merkel was afraid of dogs.
Similarly to good Ukrainians who are busy constructing the distance between themselves and good Russians, in his public self-representation, Putin constructs a distance between himself and the rest of the people, in particular, using representatives of the animal world.
Putin has a visible aversion to images of the masses. He likes to see himself alone, unaccompanied. The series of staged photos with animals is interesting precisely because it systematically excludes people, emphasizing the loneliness of the leader surrounded by wild nature, paradise before the fall. . . . Putin's representative canon is pointedly antidemocratic, though it is far from the fascist or Soviet models. His political aesthetic excludes the crowd. The inauguration ceremony invented for him is unprecedented in its own way. The last time its strangeness was accentuated by a trip through a Moscow completely devoid of people that ended in a long procession in complete solitude along the stairs and suites of the Grand Kremlin Palace,
writes Mikhail Iampolski in his article "Politics as Aesthetics." [3]
This concurrence in the [methods of constructing] Reality-2 between Vladimir Putin and good Ukrainians explains why back in 2012, according to a poll by the Rating Group, 53% — over half — of Ukrainians felt positively about Putin. This is about the narcissistic type of love that Sigmund Freud writes about in On Narcissism, more specifically about subtype c: to love "that, which you'd like to be yourself" (emphasis added).
VIII
Yet it is good Ukrainians who accuse bad Ukrainians of love for the enemy; since if there are good Ukrainians, there must be bad Ukrainians from whom the former must constantly keep the distance, transferring to them all their own old repressed desires — desires that good Ukrainians today cannot admit to having, desires that they are now wildly afraid of, desires made taboo by the Super-Ego — and this too is the effect of the reality principle — so much that the very mention of them today provokes silence if not fierce, defensive hatred in good Ukrainians.
Collectivist rituals, above all collectivist rituals of hatred, and participation or non-participation in them are what allow good Ukrainians to distinguish themselves from bad Ukrainians. Good Ukrainians interpret any emotional control, any separation, attempt at external, disinterested analysis as betrayal, love for the enemy, an attempt to resolve the conflict pleasing both sides, and so on.
IX
Mass thinking is incapable of differentiation in the sense that it cannot go beyond binary oppositions: we [all must be the same] versus they [are all the same]. It is not able to reject excessive generalizations since it is directly based on them: mass thinking is always and necessarily epicomitological thinking.
Ultimately, the language that J. R. R. Tolkien, linguist and soldier in the Great World War, constructed for the universe — in Reality-2 — of The Lord of the Rings quite naturally becomes the language with which to describe the Russo-Ukrainian War in mass communications, especially and above all because of the deceptive simplicity of the binary oppositions upon which it's based and which don't tolerate intermediate forms or any shades.
As befits epic mythology, in it we are always Good, Light, greatness, heroism, righteousness, civilization, and so on; they are always Evil, Darkness, monstrosity, rape, betrayal, filth, barbarism, and so on. [Self-]promotion of one's own as representatives — or even defenders — of civilization and, accordingly, in opposition to the barbarians is the basic construction of any collective narcissism.
Especially if the occupying army of the Russian Federation really confirms this over and over every day and every night.
X
So language forms and determines consciousness. Language determines thought. Language determines one's picture of the world, and therefore the very world — Reality-2 — of its speakers.
But the public institutions of the modern West are constructed on completely different principles: on the normativity of pluralities, on the idea that the world is not a battlefield of Good and Evil, but a multitude of actors with diverse interests, and on the necessity of ordering this world through the creation of a number of institutions for the sake of their rational harmonization.
The modern West consciously established a system of institutions thanks to which a peaceful dialog should be possible between even the fiercest opponents, even between existential enemies.
The modern West knows no moral metaphysics.
All of this quite naturally only multiplies the rage and aggression of good Ukrainians: instead of describing the Russo-Ukrainian War as an epic battle of Good versus Evil, it is presented as a regional conflict, albeit the largest and bloodiest in Europe since World War II. This is obviously not enough to satisfy the collective narcissism, since it is impossible to ever satisfy it.
XI
Good Ukrainians and the West speak different languages and exist in different Realities-2; it is hard for them to hear or understand each other: good Ukrainians' agenda is too far from contemporary, conventional Western rationality; and, despite all its help for Ukraine, good Ukrainians view the mechanisms and practices of the West as betrayal and coercion to surrender.
The collective West — the system of Western actors and institutions — is being accused by good Ukrainians of the same things as good Russians and bad Ukrainians: They're not calling us victims [in the right way], They're not [only] calling us victims.
Neither the West's help, so critical to Ukraine, nor the constant qualifications of the Russo-Ukrainian War by the West as the cruel, unmotivated, unprovoked, aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, nor the recognition by the West of the former's war crimes against the latter is able to satisfy good Ukrainians — no more than the fact that such criticism is tolerated less and less in the West and, obviously will be tolerated even less in the future, is capable of stopping them.
XII
In his essay On Narcissism Sigmund Freud writes about the genesis of narcissism:
Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child — which sober observation would find no occasion to do — and to conceal and forget all his shortcomings. . . . Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child's favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation — 'His Majesty the Baby,' [4]as we once fancied ourselves [emphasis added]. The child shall fulfill those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out — the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father's place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents' narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature.[5]
So narcissism develops at a mature age in individuals of whom too much was demanded as children — be first, be the best, always win, and so on — or who were excessively coddled, especially if this coddling decreased (or from the child's perspective, was violently ripped away) with the birth of the next child. Both the undue demands and the suddenly withdrawn love necessarily lead to an insurmountable feeling of inferiority.
It is for this reason that at a mature age, the narcissist is critically dependent on external reactions.
XIII
The narcissist, just like the paranoiac, thinks of themself as the center of the Universe — all the Universe's glances are directed at them/everything in the Universe happens because of them.
The narcissist constantly feels the need to respond to these external glances. They are forced to constantly prove they deserve this central position that they occupy and they are critically dependent on external validation, which they try to find wherever possible.
Of course, their enemy should be ideal. And if the narcissist is critically unsure of themself, their Ego Ideal gets transferred onto the enemy, who finally offers the narcissist both the dreamed-of external validation and mental discharge: a fight with the ideal enemy should naturally be lost.
XIV
It is for this reason that the internal destruction of Vladimir Putin's personalist regime cannot be imagined, since in his conception, this regime is monolithic, static, welded tight, and therefore, insurmountable.
The narcissist cannot imagine the private interests of Marina Ovsiannikova related to her career and her employment in the European Union or at least her private travels there, which her [former] colleagues cannot have. For the narcissist, Marina Ovsiannikova is a weak-willed, direct executor of the instructions of, if not Putin himself, then Vladislav Surkov — and the narcissist cares not that at the time of Marina Ovsiannikova's protest, Vladislav Surkov had already been removed from power for a few years and could not have approved or planned her actions. For the narcissist, all of this is part of the cover operation, just like the fact that after Marina Ovsiannikova's protest, the Russian search engine Yandex stopped showing her photo in search results.
At the level of praxis, the narcissist is incapable of forming unions — neither stable private ones [family, friends, etc.], nor situational public ones [Viktor Shenderovich: "We [and Ukraine] are partners until the first turn"], nor long-term public ones [institutions of the collective West created to coordinate the interests of various actors].
At the level of praxis, the narcissist always ignores both the opportunity and the importance of schisms among the enemy's elites as a necessary condition for the collapse of their regime — the regime of a narcissistic enemy is always monolithic and insurmountable; the narcissist would not agree to less.
XV
In the terminal state, the narcissist develops moralism: the narcissist is incapable of opposing external demands, identifies with them, and the Universe, in which everyone is unable to meet their demands for morality, becomes their enemy.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes about one of his patients:
A year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game [Fort–Da] used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: "Go to the fwont!" He had heard at that time that his absent father was "at the front," and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother[6][7]
Everyone who participates in Ukrainian social media has seen hundreds of similar comments beneath anything that one commenter or another didn't find to their liking. Just like Dr. Freud's young patient, their Go to the front! Go fight! Enough lazing around the rear! and are only substitutes for Perish! Go to your death! Die! In general, social media is a great illustration of mass communication and mass psychopathology.
Unfortunately, such moralistic condemnations to death are not limited to social media, since these networks do not invent anything fundamentally new, only make visible and manifest what already exists. Even the concept of a social network or social circle belongs to Georg Simmel, a contemporary of Freud's, and in Reality-1 it corresponds to police raids in places where people gather to relax with the mass distribution of summonses; raids if not hunting.
XVI
So despite the fact that at the level of discourse, the heroism of those fighting is constantly and absolutely reasonably emphasized — Glory to Jesus and the Armed Forces! Our Kittens, Thanks to the army, I believe in the army, glory to the army! — at the level of praxis, both the state and society view being sent to the front as punishment.
XVII
Reality-2 features collective rituals of love and gratitude; Reality-1 has collective rituals of hatred and punishment, condemnations to death.
XVIII
Death knows no moral metaphysics. Anyway, moralism itself is a concentrated death drive.
For moralists, everyone is guilty as long as they're alive, and guilty precisely because they're alive.
It is for this reason that moralists love dead heroes. But moralists' hero worship is just a lure for those in whom they instilled a sense of guilt and inferiority — and in doing so made them into moralists.
Beyond this, Reality-1 has only pure, naked death; death that desires one thing — more death.
XIX
The horrible war that the Russian Federation started, its unjustified and unprovoked aggression, the daily and nightly atrocities of its occupying forces in Ukraine, has created an ideal environment for moralists: their hatred has finally received the external, completely legitimate justification they've so desired.
The lives of moralists, earlier deprived of meaning, have finally found it: the hatred that had earlier been suppressed with varying success no longer needs suppression.
On the contrary, it is encouraged in every way.
XX
This means that in the three interrelated areas of [a] the collective psyche, [b] mass communication, and [c] the national mythology of the Russo-Ukrainian War, one thing will continue, if not forever, then at least for another generation: after the war with bad Russians, good Ukrainians will continue the war with good Russians, with bad Ukrainians, and ultimately with the West, for the disapprobation of moralists is infinite, their hatred enough for everyone.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella
The "War Is… Ukrainian Writers on Living Through Catastrophe" essay project is created with the support of Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a Canadian charitable non-profit organization.
Footnotes
- ^ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 154.
- ^ Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, October 31, 1916, https://pep-web.org/browse/document/ipl.089.0060a?page=P0060.
- ^ To this article, which Mikhail Iampolski wrote in 2013, it is necessary to add that subsequently, after the Russian Federation's illegal annexation of Sevastopol, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (2014) and Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts (2022) — six partially or completely occupied regions of Ukraine — there were attempts to introduce Nazi organicism into Putin's representational canon and show him as the Leader who restores the Body of the Nation earlier torn apart by enemies and thus gives it a new life. But these attempts generally remained just that, attempts that failed to establish his new representational canon.
- ^ In English in the original. Perhaps a reference to a well-known Royal Academy picture of the Edwardian age, which bore that title and showed two London policemen holding up the crowded traffic to allow a nursery-maid to wheel a perambulator across the street. — "His Majesty the Ego" appears in Freud's earlier paper on Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908).
- ^ Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914)," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 91, https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/d/16656/files/2018/11/Freud-On-Narcissism-1fhlw4o.pdf.
- ^ * When this child was five and three-quarters, his mother died. Now that she was really "gone" ("o-o-o"), the little boy showed no signs of grief. It is true that in the interval a second child had been born and had roused him to violent jealousy.
- ^ Sigmund Freud, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York:Norton, 1961), 10. http://xenopraxis.net/readings/freud_beyondthepleasureprinciple.pdf
Váno Krueger
Poet, philosopher
Kyiv, Ukraine
Member of PEN Ukraine. Graduated from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy with a master's degree in political science. Laureate of the Oles Honchar International Ukrainian-German Literary Prize for his book Siggy Freud & Cthulhu. Scholarship holder of the President of Ukraine, PEN Center, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. Author of the poetry books Farewell Kiss from Illich (Kyiv: Liuta Sprava, 2015), Ziggy Freud & Cthulhu (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2014), Vertep in Kurenivka (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2015), A Pail Without a Bottom (Kyiv: Liuta Sprava, 2020); books of philosophical and literary essays When I Hear the Word "Culture"... (Kyiv: Laurus, 2018), and The Open Flower (Kyiv: Laurus, 2020).
