Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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Narcissism KAmerica 1NCThe assumption that foreign decisions are made in reaction to American leadership is the height of narcissism—it’s not only wrong but causes the US to be blamed for every failure and turns the caseWEINER 2013 (Greg, teaches political science at Assumption College, “Narcissistic Polity Disorder: Its Diagnosis and Treatment,” Library of Law and Liberty, July 9, http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/07/09/narcissistic-polity-disorder-its-diagnosis-and-treatment/) The recently published fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual contains no diagnosis for Narcissistic Polity Disorder—the book’s scope being confined to the personality disorder of a similar name—but should the editors ever wish to expand into political science, they will find an excellent case study in the interview Senator John McCain gave on CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday. It turns out the Egyptian coup, which gave all signs of being a conflict among Egyptians about Egypt, was in fact about—well, us. “It’s a strong indicator,” McCain said, “of the lack of American leadership and influence since we urged the military not to do that,” McCain explained. The attentive reader will recognize “failure of American leadership” as an emission from the F6 button of McCain’s keyboard, which he hits anytime an adverse event occurs anywhere in the world. But it turns out Egypt is not the only country into whose water the Senator gazes and sees America’s reflection. He continued: [T]he place is descending into chaos but so is the entire Middle East because of the total vacuum and lack of American leadership whether it be the massacres in Syria—Lebanon is—is beset by sectarian violence, Jordan is about to collapse under the weight of refugees, Iraq is unraveling, Afghanistan, we’re having grave problems organizing a follow on force in Afghanistan. America has not led and America is not leading and when America doesn’t lead bad things happen and other people do lead and Egypt is just one segment of a failure of American leadership over the last five years and we need to start being leaders rather than—than—than bystanders. Sectarian violence in the Middle East, an ancient and evidently incurable phenomenon, an American failure? That’s one powerful reflection staring back from the water. It is also a powerful fantasy, with roots in the same place—and the metaphor is separated from reality by only the narrowest of margins—as narcissistic personality disorder, one of whose hallmarks is the proclivity to interpret foreign events in terms of oneself. Any event, anywhere, anytime becomes a test of American leadership: He who does what America wished he had not done had no autonomous motives; he meant to stick a thumb in the American eye. Thus McCain’s understanding of leadership and its breathtaking condescension—in, ironically, the name of the neoconservative project of spreading freedom. Note that within that model—someone is going to lead and it is therefore best for it to be a, make that the, righteous nation—little room is left for the very thing McCain claims he wants to promote: nations actually making choices about their own futures from within. In the present case, Egyptians are fighting about Egypt; the real issue, according to McCain, must be what the United States had to say, or failed to say, about it. The generals could not possibly have been motivated by (a) different aspirations for Egypt, (b) venality, (c) power or (d) some combination of the above: We must understand their motives for the coup in terms of whether they complied with our request that they “not do that.” To be sure, north of $1.5 billion in foreign aid ought to buy some influence with Egypt’s governors, although primarily what it buys is assurance of Egyptian compliance with the country’s peace with Israel—which the generals may be likelier to keep than the Muslim Brotherhood. If what it was supposed to buy was democracy as an American gift to the Egyptian people, we ought not to be surprised if Egyptians turn around and resent the arrogance of our beneficence—and hold us accountable for its failures too. McCain’s interpretation of the turmoil in the Middle East—note, incidentally, the utter lack of self-awareness as to Iraq’s descent into chaos—is powerful evidence of the extent to which American exceptionalism, poorly understood, can slouch into narcissism. So widespread is the phenomenon that all politicians, even those accused of harboring heretical thoughts about exceptionalism, must make obeisance to it. (President Obama: “[T]here is no substitute for American leadership.”) It did not start this way. John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” address was not a boast. It was a warning. The fact that Heaven had special plans for America meant not that America had special privileges but rather that Americans, should they fail, faced special punishments: For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. That was 1630; this is 2013. No one seriously believes the United States can retreat from the world. Superpower status brings obligations of leadership. But leadership can be exercised with arrogance or humility and in a spirit of adventure or restraint. Conservatism used to prize the latter qualities. They would also be effective therapy for the ailment disordering the nation’s thinking about its responsibilities—and capacities—overseas.
Narcissism is founded on a refusal of vulnerability and pain which both guarantees its reoccurrence and leads us to distance ourselves from the Other who is the object of our desire—on a national scale this results in endless war and violence for security. We should see others as truly Other and accept the fact that we can’t make them into our own image—this shatters narcissism and allows a genuine respect and love for the OtherKIMMEL 2011 (Kenneth, practicing psychoanalyst, Eros and the Shattering Gaze, p. 1-5) Jacques Lacan's notion of the mirror stage helps us to understand the essential alienation inherent in narcissism and its search for perfection in an idealized image of another. Lacan describes a moment in infancy when the six-month-old child "recognizes" himself in the mirror and falsely identifies the reflection as an image of the unified wholeness and mastery he does not in fact possess. In that moment, the infant, with his smiling mother's assent, is lured into an illusion of false certainty and omnipotence that splits him off from his frag- mented body/self with its accompanying experiences of terror and uncertainty. Lacan's conception of the mirror sequence describes the way a mental construction of a perfect, alienating identity can originate, separating the infant from his own insufficient self image. The / itself that takes form here is an artificial representation, a self split between its idealized mirror image and the raw truth of human existence.3 It is not difficult to imagine, then, how this narcissistic ideal can be later projected onto objects of desire who mirror this ideal. Narcissism is not limited to the psychology of individuals. American culture, politics, and its recent national wounding uncannily mirror these narcissistic phenomena. The Patriot Act and the War on Terror can be seen as unconscious fantasies enacted upon the world stage. In this post-September 11 world many individuals err on the side of security and rigid borders, thereby sacrificing freedom, relationality, and dimensionality. Nor is narcissism merely a contemporary phenomenon. Literature and history provide ample illustrations of the historical and cultural contexts underlying the problem of narcissism and the way it is transcended. The essence of narcissism is the repudiation of the other in its differences. Sometimes this takes the form of appropriating the other under the guise of romantic love, and some- times it takes the form of casting out the other to protect the vulnerable self. In these pages I attempt to present a theory of the transcendence of narcissism, in which the humble capacity to love comes about through the surrender of the self to the shattering truth of the other. Western culture's most ancient tale of love, "Psyche and Amor," which forms part of Apuleius' The Golden Ass, will introduce us to these dynamics. The story features a leading man—Amor, the very personification of Love—whose amorous desires are so embedded in narcissism that he never dares to reveal himself to the object of his passion. The couple. Psyche and Amor, remains suspended in a dark fusion removed from life until Psyche has finally had enough; the illusion is pierced and shattered, and loss ensues. Emerging from his state of wounding, Amor comes in a new way to the side of his beloved, the mortal human Psyche, his act signifying the inner "awakening of the sleeping soul through love," as James Hillman puts it.4 How many hundreds of modern romantic dramas follow in the train of the Tale of Psyche and Amor, telling the story of the selfish or hardened man who uses everyone, then loses everything, but then finds a woman from whom he learns how to love? More than a millennium later, the tales of medieval courtly romances portray the fate of lovers whose longing for oneness can be realized not on earth but only in their sacrifi- cial death and reunion in Heaven. These are tragedies portraying an idealized longing for true love that can never be sustained in our flawed human condition.
Ultimately the narcissistic avoidance of the difficulties of life arises in response to a pri- mal experience—the inevitable wounding and loss suffered in the earliest infant-mother relationship. Thus narcissistic dynamics are deeply impacted by the experience of trauma. Psychological wounds too devastating to bear are reflexively partitioned and buried, while si- multaneously, reactionary wars of retaliation against one's pain are staged in order to provide safeguards from disavowed shame and profound vulnerabilities. Throughout life grandiose fantasies in all their forms will magically supplant the experience of unbearable vulnerabil- ity, literally obliterating it. These clinical themes are richly amplified by cultural signifiers found in the myths and mysteries of antiquity and from the medieval Tales of Courtly Love through the literature of the mystics and Romantics, to Gothic horror stories and modern romances from contempo- rary popular culture. These provide the historical and cultural contexts for the contemporary problem of narcissism as well as its transcendence. As we will see, Levinas's postmodern philosophy describes the way the encounter with the ineffable Face of the Other shocks and deconstructs the sameness and narcissism within eros, freeing the subject to assume an enduring responsibility for the other from which new and transcendent capacities to love may be envisioned. My theory of the transcendence of narcissism is based on the work of two men: C. G. Jung and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Jung's theory of the complexes (see the Glossary for italicized terms) illuminates two vital concepts that are threaded throughout this book: the ego's primitive identification with the negative or overly positive aspects of the Mother, and the relationship of the puer aetemus, the eternal boy, with his split-off counterpart, the senex, the old man. We can see how these complexes come about by observing the characters in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, which contains the immortal “Tale of Psyche and Amor." The path through which they are overcome leads from the romantic, narcissistic, predatory preoccu- pations of what I call the mother-bound man to the wound that shatters the isolation of his standpoint. Through the work of the transcendent fimction this shattering may culminate in the emergence of empathic dimensions of emotion and a humble yet still masculine stand- point. One of the ways this book contributes to the development of contemporary analytic psychology is through the cross-fertilization of Jungian and contemporary psychoanalytic ideas. For instance, I argue that narcissistic defenses arise not after the development of the complexes, but prior to them. The puer aeternus psychology described by Jung comes into being in reaction to the narcissistic defenses that have appropriated the infant's most archaic, unsignifiable complex—the mother. These narcissistic defenses encapsulate the infant's ego, protecting it from experiences reminiscent of its original loss of maternal containing. Another original area of contribution may be found in my analysis of the Grail Legend, where I view von Eschenbach's Parzival through the lens of eros development in its dual guise, as both a narcissistic and wounding process and one that is relational and healing. The work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas provides the second major source for my theory of how narcissism may be transcended. A traumatic encounter with an utterly unknowable, transcendent Other*—sometimes initiated by analytical work or psychotherapy—may violently shatter the narcissistic illusions that maintain, among other things, the individual's endless, romantically driven projections and erotic fantasies. There is therefore a painful, even violent, yet redemptive potential to the wounding. Levinas's postmodern philosophy is essential to an understanding of this kind of encounter with the Other by a subject; he too emphasizes its capacity to decenter the ego's "solipsism"— the belief that the self is the only reality and the only thing that we can be certain of. Levinas attempts to describe this shift from an ego-centered view of the universe as some- thing that defies understanding or category. All religious experience perhaps stems from such a primordial awareness. His ethical philosophy, informed by the Holocaust in which his entire family was murdered, centers upon the "relation of infinite responsibility to the other person."6 Levinas provides a profound insight into the dangers of how individuals can be so easily subsumed in the vision of a tyrannical utopia which he often refers to as a "totality." To Levinas, the Other is unknowable, ineffable, ungraspable, tormenting, enigmatic, infinite, irreducible, sacred. Its mere trace can only be glimpsed interpersonally or inter- subjectively—a term defining a psychological experience created between individuals. The Other does not originate in the psyche. It is infinite, already there, before subject or object exists, and our subjective awareness of it comes through the primacy of its impact upon us. It transcends subjective being, defies our concepts or categories, and cannot be engulfed or appropriated by ego consciousness.7 As Levinas would say, the trace of the Other is glimpsed in the irreducible "face of the human other," who is revealed in (her) vulnerability, sacredness, and nakedness.8 In Levi- nas's ethical view, one's responsibility emerges from the trauma he feels for the useless suffering and destitution of the one now standing before him. He is taken hostage to the guilt of surviving when the other is stricken. He is even compelled to wish to substitute himself for the other, to put himself in (her) place—but it is too late. This is the torment of which Levinas speaks—the unavoidable responsibility to the other invoked by the shatter- ing Other. It is impossible to evade this summons, which accuses one and even leads him to wonder just how much truth he can bear. In moving from the ethics of human justice and compassion to personal psychology, one can observe how the traumatic impact of the Other destabilizes and shatters the ego's narcis- sism, awakening the subject from his slumber. Such a violent blow often appears to the ego in forms that are dark and shadowy, or that threaten to obliterate its fixed orientation and need for certainty, its wish for everything to remain the same. For Levinas, the ego's need to appropriate alterity—the other's difference—and to reduce it to sameness is the origin of all violence: narcissism is violence. In those cases where the shattering encounter is successfully navigated, a restructuring of a man's core of being occurs. An inner cohesion develops that enables him as an ethical subject to bear love's separations, uncertainties, longing, as well as its closeness. Here I propose a significant revisioning of Jung's concept of the enigmatic Self, concep- tualizing it as an idea akin to Levinas's unknowable Other, where both, I contend, transcend subjective being and the boundaries of the psyche. I argue that this revised understanding of the Self provides the basis for what I have previously described as a unifying theory of the transcendence of narcissism. The obsession with policy solutions in debate and the belief that we can change the world through what we do here is simply hubris—recognizing that we are not all-powerful is the necessary condition for empathyRAHNEMA 1997 (Majid, Professor American Univ in Paris. The Post Development Reader) If the post-development era is to be free of the illusions, ideological perversions, hypocrisy and falsehoods that pervaded the development world, the search for signposts and trails leading to a flow of 'good life' (the fidnaal° in Dadacha's language) should be informed by an entirely new rationale and set of assumptions. This should help, at the local and transnational levels, the jen and the min to rediscover themselves, to learn from each other, to explore new possibilities of dialogue and action, and to weave together relationships of a different kind, transcending the present barriers of language, and thereby going beyond the paradigms that the development era has so persistently maintained for the last fifty years. The search for new possibilities of change The end of development should not be seen as an end to the search for new possibilities of change, for a relational world of friendship, or for genuine processes of regeneration able to give birth to new forms of solidarity. It should only mean that the binary, the mechanistic, the reductionist, the inhumane and the ultimately self-destructive approach to change is over. It should represent a call to the 'good people' everywhere to think and work together. It should prompt everyone to begin the genuine work of self-knowledge and `self polishing' (as the ahle sayqal do, according to Rilrni), an exercise that enables us to listen more carefully to others, in particular to friends who are ready to do the same thing. It could be the beginning of a long process aiming at replacing the present 'clis-order' by an 'aesthetic order' based on respect for differences and the uniqueness of every single person and culture. On powerlessness and the 'mask of love' A first condition for such a search is to look at things as they are, rather than as we want them to be; to overcome our fears of the unknown; and, instead of claiming to be able to change the world and to save 'humanity', to try saving ourselves from our own compelling need for comforting illusions. The hubris of the modern individual has led him or her to believe that the existential powerlessness of humankind can usefully be replaced with compulsive ‘actomania'. This illusion is similar to the modern obsession with fighting death at all costs. Both compulsions tend, in fact, to undermine, disfigure and eventually destroy the only forms of power that define true life. Paradoxically, it is through fully experiencing our powerlessness, as painful as that may be, that it becomes possible for us to be in tune with human suffering, in all its manifestations; to understand the 'power of the powerless' (to use Vaclay Havel's expression); and to rediscover our oneness with all those in pain. Blinkered by the Promethean myth of Progress, development called on all the 'powerless' people to join in a world-wide crusade against the very idea of powerlessness, building its own power of seduction and conviction on the mass production of new illusions. It designed for every taste a 'mask of love' — an expression coined by John McKnight" to define the modern notion of ‘care' — which various 'developers' could deploy when inviting new recruits to join the crusade. It is because development incarnated a false love for an abstract humanity that it ended up by upsetting the lives of millions of living human beings. For half a century its 'target populations' suffered the intrusion in their lives of an army of development teachers and experts, including well-intentioned field workers and activists, who spoke big words — from conscientization to learning from and living with the people. Often they had studied Marx, Gramsci, Freire and the latest research about empowerment and participation. However, their lives (and often careers) seldom allowed them to enter the intimate world of their 'target populations'. They were good at giving people passionate lectures about their rights, their entitlements, the class struggle and land reform. Yet few asked themselves about the deeper motivations prompting them to do what they were doing. Often they knew neither the people they were working with, nor themselves. And they were so busy achieving what they thought they had to do for the people, that they could not learn enough from them about how actually to 'care' for them, as they would for their closest relatives and friends whom they knew and loved. My intention in bringing up this point is not to blame such activists or field workers — many of them may have been kind and loving persons. It is,rather, to make the point that 'the masks of love' to which they became addicted prevented them discovering the extraordinary redeeming power of human powerlessness, when it opens one's soul to the world of true love and compassion. Similar 'masks of love' have now destroyed the possibilities of our truly `caring'. Thus, when we hear about the massacres in Algeria, Rwanda, Zaire, the Middle East or Bosnia, or the innumerable children, women and men dying from starvation, or being tortured and killed with impunity, we feel comforted and relieved when we send a cheque to the right organization or demonstrate on their behalf in the streets. And although we are fully aware that such gestures are, at very best, like distributing aspirin pills to dying people whom nothing can save; although we may have doubts as to whether our money will reach the victims, or fears that it might even ultimately serve those governments, institutions or interests who are responsible for this suffering; we continue to do these things. We continue to cheat ourselves, because we consider it not decent, not morally justifiable, not 'politically correct', to do otherwise. Such gestures, which we insist on calling acts of solidarity rather than ‘charity', may however be explained differently: by the great fear we have of becoming fully aware of our powerlessness in situations when nothing can be done. And yet this is perhaps the most authentic way of rediscovering our oneness with those in pain. For the experiencing of our powerlessness can lead us to encounter the kind of deep and redeeming suffering that provides entry to the world of compassion and discovery of our true limits and possibilities. It can also be the first step in the direction of starting a truthful relationship with the world, as it is. Finally, it can help us understand this very simple tautology: that no one is in a position to do more than one can. As one humbly recognizes this limitation, and learns to free oneself from the egocentric illusions inculcated by the Promethean myth, one discovers the secrets of a power of a different quality: that genuine and extraordinary power that enables a tiny seed, in all its difference and uniqueness, to start its journey into the unknown. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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