Psychopolitics: Conversations with Trevor Cribben Merrill
110
Psychopolitics: Conversations with Trevor Cribben Merrill
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611860535 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Series: | Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture |
| Edition description: | First edition |
| Pages: | 110 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Psychopolitics
Conversations with Trevor Cribben MerrillBy Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2010 François-Xavier de GuibertAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-053-5
Chapter One
Psychopolitics
TREVOR CRIBBEN MERRILL: I met you at Stanford University at a meeting of the research group put together by Dr. Scott Garrels, the Fuller School of Psychology, and the Templeton Foundation to study the application of René Girard's ideas in various disciplines of the social and hard sciences: anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, theology, neuroscience, ethics, literature, epistemology, each one represented by one or more world-class researchers.
Since 1972, you have been working with René Girard, and in 1978 the two of you published Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Already, in the third part of that book, you laid the groundwork for a new psychology, which you termed "interdividual psychology." Since that time you have devoted yourself to clinical and theoretical research in this area, and in 1982 you published The Puppet of Desire followed in 2007 by The Genesis of Desire.
In all of your research and writings you have concentrated on the development of René Girard's first hypothesis, which could be called his psychological hypothesis, the hypothesis of mimetic desire, which, you argue, the recent discovery of mirror neurons has validated scientifically.
But René Girard himself, with his most recent book, Battling to the End, has opened the way to applying his second hypothesis—what I would call his sociological hypothesis, the hypothesis of the scapegoat at the origin of culture and religion—to the field of war and politics, which were not addressed at our annual meetings at Stanford.
In this latest book, Girard analyzes Clausewitz's thought, and sees the "escalation to extremes," as it is defined by the Prussian general, as a sort of synthesis of his two hypotheses.
One of the most famous of Clausewitz's ideas is that "war is the pursuit of politics by other means." I would like to suggest that you reflect on this notion, and reflect also on what Girard announces in his book: the apocalypse is under way and our only chance of avoiding it is to adopt the only commandment that Christ bequeathed to us: "Love one another."
JEAN-MICHEL OUGHOURLIAN: You are quite right to raise these issues—they are fundamental! I have always followed René Girard, as you said. And if he now leads us onto political terrain, it is natural for me to follow him there, all the more so because I have always taken an interest in politics, by which I mean the essential, anthropological mechanisms of politics rather than day-to-day political affairs.
But first of all, let me tell you about a little-known episode in my career: in 1975, in Los Angeles, through a Viennese friend who was living there, the late Fred Bauer, I met Professor Friedrich Hacker. An eminent psychiatrist and a well-known figure in Beverly Hills, he was also interested in war and fascinated by the question of conflicts. In addition to his psychiatric practice in the United States, he had founded the Institut für Konfliktforschung, and he had made a name for himself when the leaders of the OPEC, gathered in Vienna, were taken hostage by Carlos the Jackal, negotiating their release at the request of his friend Bruno Kreisky, who was Austrian chancellor at the time.
An immediate friendship was born between Friedrich Hacker and me, colored on his side by fatherly good will for the young psychiatrist that I was at the time, and on mine by deep and affectionate respect for this distinguished man who had taught in Vienna, known Freud, and managed to escape to the United States at the time of the Anschluss.
He remembered Freud, who was stern of visage but full of charm and bursting with intelligence, but he thought that psychoanalysis was ill-suited to the world where he was now living and to the patients he was treating. "I'm going to give you an example," he told me. "When Freud speaks of the Father, this word implies, even on an unconscious level, a reference to the Father of the Empire, the emperor Franz-Joseph. Do you know that in all the taverns of Vienna, when the name of the Emperor was pronounced, the men stood up, clicked their heels together, and raised their glasses to the health of His Majesty? In those days the Father was powerful and respected. He represented taboo and the law and it is in this light that Freud understood him. I confess that here in Beverly Hills I have trouble finding fathers of this kind."
In the course of our conversations, I learned that Friedrich Hacker had created a Chair of Psychopolitics at the University of Southern California. There he taught students in political science the importance of psychology in world affairs. Inasmuch as they are directed by human beings, states are themselves subject to the laws of psychology. I suggested at once that he add a mimetic dimension to the study of political psychology, and we agreed that this way of looking at things was very interesting. I also remarked to him that psychotherapy is a "political" enterprise in the sense that it must have a specific goal and be realistic about what can and cannot be expected of the patient. Indeed, politics consists in seeing reality as it is without interposing the prism of any theoretical presupposition whatsoever.
Friedrich Hacker invited me to present these ideas to the university administration and asked that I become his adjunct in the chair of psychopolitics to teach the mimetic dimension of politics and to conduct role-playing exercises. The Game of Nations, a book by former CIA agent Miles Copeland, was making the rounds in those days. In this book, Copeland described one of the techniques employed by the CIA to anticipate the reactions of world leaders: sitting around a table, a number of agents each played the role of a politician, after having read all of his speeches, studied his biography in depth, and watched news footage, so as to absorb his gestures, his tics, and his way of reacting. This role play was obviously mimetic, and it was based on a principle that would later prove to be a fertile one: imitating and identifying with someone ultimately makes us act or react the way he does, and this technique makes it possible to predict his reactions in a given situation. Castro was on everyone's mind at the time, and I was struck by two things. The first was that playing the role of a leader and putting oneself in his skin did sometimes lead to having reactions fairly similar to those he was going to have or had had in the past. And second, I was struck by the absolute cynicism of the students. They were told that they had two options, one ethically sound, and another one that, while better for American interests, would cost 200,000 lives. They all chose the option that required killing 200,000 people! They couldn't have cared less.
I had only been adjunct professor of psychopolitics for two years when Friedrich Hacker's death unfortunately put an end to this teaching experience.
So yes, since René Girard leads us onto the terrain of war and politics, we cannot help but take an interest in these things. But before going any further, let me add another remark concerning the citation from Clausewitz that defines war as the pursuit of politics by other means. I disagree wholeheartedly, though sometimes appearances make it seem that this is the case. In my opinion—and I insist on this point—war is the failure of politics. I think we will have occasion to come back to this question later in our conversations.
TCM: You went a bit too fast when you were defining psychopolitics. Could you give a more precise definition?
JMO: Psychopolitics is an art that first of all teaches how to use psychology in politics. Napoleon compared politics to a game of chess played with human pieces. How could one play such a game without understanding human beings, and how could one understand them without having recourse to psychology? Without psychology, politics is blind; without politics, psychology is powerless. The sage Sun Tzu wrote:
Know the enemy,
Know thyself,
And victory
Is never in doubt,
Not in a hundred battles.
He who knows self,
But not the enemy
Will suffer one defeat
For every victory.
He who knows
Neither self
Nor enemy
Will fail in every battle.
Indeed, in politics it is imperative to know with whom one is dealing. Machiavelli, too, recommends knowing in depth the attributes and flaws, the virtues and vices of the princes that one wishes to seduce, deceive, fight, or betray. The politician must therefore have human experience and know human nature, without succumbing to any ideological illusion, without having prejudices, without being afraid to look reality in the face and see it as it is. A simple example: a piece of news or information, a request or a claim, will be judged and interpreted differently and given a different response depending on whether it is presented to the prince by an agreeable friend or by a disagreeable courtier: the reaction will be positive in the first case, negative in the second. It follows that no proposition can be considered as objective when it is presented to the prince: everything is subject to his point of view. Political reality is fluctuating, subjective, made of particular cases, supple and adaptable, non-Euclidean.
Politics is not logical. It is psychological.
But knowing others begins with knowing oneself. The politician must know his strengths and weaknesses, his vices and virtues, as well as those of his adversary. He must know himself well enough not to be blinded by his pride, his fear, his ambition, or his self-complacency, and he must not let himself be guided by his likes and dislikes. Then what, you wonder, will be his guide, what will be his criterion for action? The chosen objective! All of his efforts, his actions, reactions, feelings, emotions, must be guided by the objective to be achieved. That being said, the greatest wisdom in politics consists in knowing when to change objectives if the one set initially proves to be out of reach, idealistic, too dangerous, or too expensive.
It is in this sense that psychopolitics is also an art that teaches us how to apply politics to psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. These disciplines must learn from politics to set a clear, realistic, attainable objective. And to assure themselves that this objective is shared and understood by the patient, at least in principle.
For psychotherapy, setting a clear objective means starting from a rigorous and precise diagnosis. In politics one would say: a complete and realistic analysis of the situation. This means evaluating the chances of success of such and such a treatment, such and such a technique. It also means striving to present the diagnosis and the treatment in a way that is intelligible and acceptable to the patient, at his or her level. It is necessary to remain within the patient's scope of understanding, to know the audience one is addressing. The great rabbi Gilles Bernheim tells us: "blessing the child and the student means knowing how to adapt the essential word of our own lives so as to give a response calibrated to the needs of both the child's and the student's understanding." And that is also what it means to treat a patient in psychotherapy and to be persuasive in politics.
Christ says the same thing in a different way: "Do not cast your pearls before swine." This sentence is not intended as an insult to pigs. It simply means that nobody should be given food that will give him indigestion. Pearls are precious to us, and we might think we were giving the pigs a splendid gift, but they are not in the least interested and cannot digest them.
These considerations must be taken very seriously in medicine; the debate over transparency and the need to tell the patient the truth should take inspiration from them. Saying to a patient, "You have cancer," or to parents, "Your son is schizophrenic," can lead to catastrophic effects when people are ill-prepared to accept these "truths," for words are often more frightening than the things themselves. Blindly throwing raw truths at patients or families is a form of cowardice: the doctor, the psychiatrist, the therapist rid themselves of a problem by dumping it on someone else's shoulders, so as to protect themselves, so that "nobody can blame them for anything." For the politician, flinging a truth out into the world without knowing how it will be received, understood, interpreted, digested, is the height of naïveté and perversity.
That, my dear Trevor, is a concise summary of what psychopolitics can and must be. In a word, for me politics and psychology are indissolubly linked.
TCM: Nonetheless, some readers may think you are saying that politicians, like psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists, must hide the truth. Your American readers, in particular, will never accept the idea that lying can be something positive!
JMO: To lie is to speak the opposite of the truth or an untruth. That is not what I am talking about. I am saying that the politician who unveils his intentions prematurely gives proof of naïveté. To refrain from telling everything to everyone is not lying. To refrain from saying everything about everything is not lying.
As for the doctor or the psychotherapist, he must adapt what he gives to the person who is going to receive it. He must not lie either. He must not say, "You do not have cancer," or, "Your son is not schizophrenic," but he must avoid being cowardly, must assume responsibility, and avoid taking cover behind the precautionary principle as he prepares his patient little by little to understand the situation and readies him for the struggle ahead by sparing his nerves and energy.
The sage Sun Tzu, who was not American but Chinese, goes even further when he writes:
The Way of War is
A Way of Deception.
When able,
Feign inability;
When deploying troops,
Appear not to be.
When near,
Appear far;
When far,
Appear near.
Lure with bait;
Strike with chaos.
If the enemy is full,
Be prepared.
If strong,
Avoid him.
If he is angry,
Disconcert him.
If he is weak,
Stir him to pride.
If he is relaxed,
Harry him;
If his men are harmonious,
Split them.
Attack
Where he is
Unprepared;
Appear
Where you are
Unexpected.
Despite the way it begins, this passage is less an apology for deceit than it is another way of underscoring, yet again, the absolute necessity of knowing the other. This holds true for war and we will come back to this point. It holds just as true for politics and psychology.
TCM: I would now like to come back to the "Game of Nations," the meetings during which CIA specialists played the role of the era's great world leaders. How could they assign a predictive value to the reactions of one or another of those present who were playing the role of Castro, Khrushchev, Tito, Nehru, or Nasser? In other words, how could they think that the real Nasser, for example, would react to a given situation in the same way as the person playing his role in the group?
JMO: Great politicians are people who have found a role that suits them and who play it better than anyone else. They must under all circumstances remain faithful to their character, the one they have invented, created, the one that is adored by the people they lead.
I remember an interview that Barbara Walters conducted with President Ronald Reagan. She asked him if he thought that his experience as a stage and film actor had helped him in his political career and he replied: "It helped me so much that I wonder how politicians who have not received this training can do without it."
The tricorner hat and the double-breasted coat characterize Napoleon, the tunic suit is inseparable from Mao, the V for Victory sign belongs to Churchill, and Khrushchev cannot be evoked without mentioning the unconventional use to which he put his shoe at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Castro without his beard would no longer be Castro, and so on. Leaders create a character of which they are in a way prisoner and their actions must be in agreement with this character: they create symbols that characterize them, and their behavior cannot betray these symbols.
The in-depth study of their gestures, their speeches, their attitudes, their personal history, the imitation of their way of speaking, walking, and gesticulating and of their favorite expressions ended up making those who were imitating them say things that were compatible with their character. One has only to think of the most famous French impersonators: Thierry Le Luron, Laurent Gerra, Nicolas Canteloup, Henri Tisot. They invent sketches and put words in the mouths of the politicians they imitate that the entire audience recognizes as plausible, as "fitting."
This phenomenon, which is familiar to us from observation, has found a scientific explanation with the discovery of mirror neurons by the neuroscientists of Parma: Rizzolatti, Gallese, Fogassi, and others. I wrote on this subject at length in The Genesis of Desire. I would like to come back to it for a moment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Psychopolitics by Jean-Michel Oughourlian Copyright © 2010 by François-Xavier de Guibert . Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword René Girard vii
Chapter 1 Psychopolitics 1
Chapter 2 War and Terrorism 13
Chapter 3 The War of the Gods 25
Chapter 4 Mimetic Rivalry on an International Scale 31
Chapter 5 Politics and Religion 39
Chapter 6 The Apocalypse 47
Chapter 7 Is there any Hope? 57
Chapter 8 In Conclusion 79
Notes 87
Bibliography 93
Index 95