Looking under fire - The psychodynamic third position in times of war

Jasmin Spiegel

doi:10.6667/interface.23.2024.224

Looking under fire - The psychodynamic third position in times of war

Jasmin Spiegel

Abstract

In recent times of war, propaganda and hate unlocked strong psychological defenses such as splitting, projection, or denial, both at the individual and the societal level. The objective of this paper is to re-introduce psychoanalysis as an almost forgotten worldview of humanistically informed science in the discussion about collective reactions to war. Psychoanalytic concepts of the gaze will be connected to intergroup phenomena characterizing times of war, such as hatred or resistance. The popular psychoanalytic metaphor of “thinking under fire”, which refers to being able to think in highly stressful situations, will be applied to our visual appropriation of the world in the era of social media. The metaphor of “gazing under fire” will be developed and embedded in the communication in times of fake, fragmented, and radicalized Weltanschauungen. A psychoanalytic position of the “third”, which looks beyond toxic polarization will be claimed as a basic tool that overcomes dichotomies and essentialist ethnocentric political world views. This position can be reached by acknowledging both one’s own guilt as well as the others` pain, despite the primacy of historical and social contextualization of collective suffering. Informed by the psychoanalytic basic principles of communication and treatment, this paper will potentially contribute to the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts for humanities as well as the intellectuals` psychic flexibility in times of war.

Keywords

psychoanalysis, the third position, humanistic science, looking under fire

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6667/interface.23.2024.224

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