Projective identification- is a pathology taking over the political? (theory)

Some activism today is best understood as pathological, not political. Groups claim their Other contains all that is evil in the world, and only they are wholly good. As I will show in his Substack, this is already leading to a politics of dehumanizing violence. I want to expose a particularly acute and violent form of harassment which I have personal experience. The tactics of the movement should be interpreted as an unconscious elaboration of some classic cases of projective identification. I think this is true of several polarizing movements today that lay claim to ever broadening political landscape. We are creating a society riven with persecution anxiety and mutual hostility is mounting on all sides. I want to offer my case as a case study to work towards an understanding interpocula.

It is important to understand the sub-culture from which this violent campaign arose in Berlin. While some similar actions go on in Glasgow, it is unique to Berlin that all the abuses are carried out by women and are of a sexual nature. I doubt whether people involved in the campaigns in other cities know what is done in Berlin. Different motivations are in play for each group, in each city, and each individual. I believe there is a greater disparity between the administrators of group chats on the one hand, and their members on the other. The latter just want to be seen as good on the group chat and belong to the social justice movement. Their intervention is well meant, and I share the moral emotions, their judgements, but they sadly are misdirected. These groups act anonymously not just to evade the law but because they want to hide what they cannot accept in themselves. As a group they camouflage their hostility in edifying goals. We all need to accept and acknowledge that the potential for evil lies in us all. We need to work towards an understanding interpocula. To this end, I ask you to consider the pathology behind some of these violent movements. Regardless of the hierarchical and topological differences between groups, a family resemblance can be drawn from their tactics and strategy. To understand this family resemblance, we need to appreciate how the abusive behaviour of a certain demographic grew into the intentionally employed tactics of a broader campaign. Next week’s Substack offers a description of this demographic and how it operates in (bad) praxis. Today we will analyse the groups actions as examples of projective displacement.

Two types of abuse

One action is a series of opportunistic abuses which can range from pranks to sexual assault or spiking. These occur in the dating scene in Berlin and the targets are British. While a couple of actions might begin by beginning by targeting a man in a bar he is known to frequent, most begin on a dating app like Tinder or OKCupid.

A second action is perhaps the most destructive. Women win the trust of the target over months, or a year, to encourage him to apply for social housing. Despite locals waiting years for a one-bedroom flat in Berlin, he is given his own private viewing of a flat where he will be spiked and harassed by neighbours who have access to the flat.

The third action, I will leave for another post because it is to complex.

The fourth action in Berlin is inspired by the book and film, ‘Gone Girl’. The group targets British men who have cheated on their girlfriend. It develops a classic form of revenge for a women scorned or offended, in which the woman tells the man she is pregnant. The new trick is to convince a man that a woman has given birth to his child, and he is not allowed to be the father. This is more elaborate than you might think because and it involves council offices and family lawyers as willing collaborators. This will be the subject of another post.

In all actions the women gain notoriety, prestige, and kudos for repeating this process on one man after another. However, they need not wait to find a man they know has cheated to maintain their prestige. Even if their attempts to ensnare the man are continually thwarted, and numerous women are rejected, they have means to persist. As a matter of practice, they gas light him into thinking his girlfriend is cheating on him, while telling his girlfriend he is cheating on her. At best the group intentionally destroy the long-term relationship and the girlfriend eventually joins the abuse, at worse this girlfriend is part of the abuse from the beginning, such that the punishment is cotemporal with the process that is claimed to prove his guilt. The woman who plays this role will resort to sexually assaulting her target if a year of harassment and coercion does not work. The victim will be corralled into a flat for the next in a series of abuses. It is not an exaggeration to say that this elaborate campaign of harassment has developed into a form of torture. So how did this begin?

Projective identification

There are many Berliners in Berlin, and even more Germans, some will cheat on their girlfriend just like some British men and women. So why are British men being targeted? Foreigners alone are an easy target, but why the British? Soon after arriving in Berlin you hear stories about people targeting British men. The abusers express their hatred for British people openly to their victim- an Indian woman focuses on what the British did to her country, while Iranian does the same for her country, a German woman respective of her country. Some might scoff, thinking that ‘he still doesn’t get it’. They entice the victim to make the ridiculous claim, when everyone knows it is because I cheated on my girlfriend. Whether the women targeting the British believe he has cheated, or not, it changes nothing. They target British men and subject them to racist abuse. In many cases, he has not even cheated before the campaign begins I earnest.

The women in this group in Berlin do not want to acknowledge that they are racist, nor that they are incapable of  accepting rejection. It seems more likely that the women repeatedly attacking British men are xenophobic, rather than the other way around. Of course, being racist and xenophobic is not something a radical lefty would identify with. These women thus project what is intolerable in themselves onto their victims. They treat the victim cruelly and violently because they cannot tolerate themselves. The same can be said of the two women in the bar. They should ask themselves if their incapacity to accept rejection is not the toxic behaviour they project on men, and in particular the vulnerable British foreigners they target. Here we already have two examples of projective identification.

It is worth defining a few key concepts in psychoanalysis before we continue. The ego, according to Freud, is the organised part of the self,  constantly influenced by instinctual impulses but keeping them under control by repression; furthermore, it directs all activities and establishes and maintains the relation to the external world. The self is used to cover the whole of the personality, which includes not only the ego but the instinctual life which Freud called the id. The self develops a relationships with objects which is a technical term to refer to the self’s ‘representations of people’. Freud described two different processes through which the self relates to objects. Projection names the confusion of what is inside with what is outside. This occurs when what we experience inside us, as a part of our self, is projected onto an object. Introjection is basically the opposite. This occurs when the self confuses what is occurring on the outside with what is occurring on the inside, as part of the self. Strictly speaking it is not correct to say that the self relates to the object in these two ways because this suggests that the self and object are two separate and preformed things. In fact the processes of projection and introjection are constitutive of the self and the object in question. They are a means by which the environment effects us and we effect our environment. So projection and introjections are not necessarily negative, in fact they are often productive of our self in a healthy way. Projecting positive emotions onto another person is a way of understanding the feeling, needs and satisfactions of someone else. It is a means of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Identification is when someone imitates the behaviour of another person (object). Again, this is not necessarily negative we can imitate those people we love and admire. So, when does projection or identification become destructive?

Projective identification is a concept developed by Melanie Klein during the 1960’s.  Her approach is based on the idea that the newborn baby experiences anxiety in the process of birth and in the adjustment to the postnatal situation. She describes this anxiety as one of a ‘persecutory nature’. This sense of persecution, she explains, is the result of the infant ‘feeling unconsciously every discomfort as though it were inflicted on it by hostile forces’. If the infant experiences love and comfort, this gives rise to happier emotions. This comfort is said to come from good forces. This makes it possible the infant to experience its first loving relation to a person. This first fundamental relation is to the mother. These comforting emotions remain active our whol life. However, frustration, discomfort and pain are experiences as persecution by the mother who represents the whole of the external world in the first few months of infancy. These emotions remain active our whole life, not least because

“destructive impulses towards anybody are always bound to give rise to the feeling that that person will also become hostile and retaliatory”

Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, p249

We all feel frustration at some point and the frustration we feel as a child will develop into destructive impulses that need to be ‘worked through’, to use Freud’s phrase. However, as long as the interplay between introjection and projection remains in balance ‘the inner world is enriched and the relations with the external world are improved’. If, however, the sense of persecution and grievance, and other negative impulses are projected onto others, it can have a destructive effect on relationships. The hostile emotions of greed, envy and resentment are emotions that many people do not want to identify in themselves. One coping mechanism is to project them onto others.

This projection of grievance even if it is only unconscious, and not spoken, can rouse a counter feeling of hostility. Very few of us can cope with being accused, and we often dislike the person who accuses us. Thus, we appear all the more as enemies to them; in consequence they regard us with increased persecutory feelings and suspicions. This creates a vicious circle in which people project aspects of themselves they cannot accept onto others. Not only do the project these traits but they criticize and attack their object for having these qualities. The persistent attacks can provoke the object into hostile reactions and generate the negative trait that was falsely projected. In a sense, people who suffer from projective identification can often feel vindicated in their grievances because projective identification often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A pathology of Gone Girl Feminism

The women attacking British men in Berlin claim that the British men hate German women are suffering from projective identification. They are the xenophobes, not their victims. The women who are willing to sleep with any man that is chosen as the next victim of the group are the promiscuous people who will sleep with anyone, not the victims. The women who sleep with other men directly before, and unbeknown to, their victim are betraying the trust of those they are trying to publicly humiliate. The women who will not accept no from a man are the ones who sexually harass and coerce people at the workplace, not the men they despise. If these women believe all men cheat it might be a projection of their own behaviour and their inability to maintain relationships. They should also ask themselves whether their belief that monogamy is a lie of the patriarchy, is really vindicated by the destruction they can reap.