Projective identification in praxis- is a pathology taking over the political?

Part 2

Part 2

In my last Substack I described how a particularly violent form of activism is best understood as pathological rather than political.

I argued there that the tactics of the movement are an elaboration of classic cases of projective identification. I think this is true of a number of polarizing movements, that claim to be political. I want to expose a particularly acute and violent form of which I have personal experience. 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 in different cities 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 tribe of social justice activists. Regardless of these 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. I argue that the behaviour of these groups is best understood as pathological and not political.

Four types of abuse

One action takes the form of a series of opportunistic abuses which can range from pranks to sexual assault or spiking.

A second action is to encourage the victim to apply for social housing. 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. 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. This begs the question, who does this?

Sub-culture

Some have suggested that the aggressors oppose long-term monogamous relationships with men on ideological grounds.  I think we are better looking at the pathological reasons than the self-proclaimed political motivations. Women I worked with suspected that these women suffer from mental health issues. They believed that the group gave themselves ideological reasons to disguise the fact that they are incapable of maintaining long term relationships. There are, of course, a lot of women who want to distance themselves from this group and its activities. They want to make it clear that this is not a ‘German thing’ or a ‘Berliner thing’, they see that the campaign is in part racist, and in part sexist. I agree that the group of women deceive themselves regarding their motives and their desires for successively target different men. Whatever problems my workmate had with me, they did not develop until she felt rejected by me. This rejection came in the form of me rejecting her advances, rejecting a closer friendship, rejecting some of her politics, and refusing to spike people at the bar as part of another campaign. My German female colleagues seen much of this unfold and defended me. I think they seen me as somewhat naïve to the city and what these women were working on. There are a few things to consider about Berlin that were pointed out to me. I would later go looking for statistics to back up this colloquial testimony, and my own experience of living in Berlin for ten years. It is fair to say that I am cherry-picking the statistics to help draw out a demographic that suffers from projective identification.

The sex-positive feminists can struggle in Berlin because single women out number single men. Studies on different college campuses has shown that promiscuity is promoted on campus when women outnumber men. On other campuses where there are less women than men, women dictate the terms of courting and there is an expressed preference to relationships. It is fair to say that expanding these results from the campus to cities is problematic. However, there are some other demographic factors which might reinforce this effect. Berlin has the highest proportion of single parents in Europe, or at least this was the case when I was there. 1 in 3 children in Berlin are raised with one parent and there is a lot of data that shows that one effect of father absence is higher rates of promiscuity in women. In this sense, promiscuity might not be self-consciously chosen by sex-positive feminists in Berlin. The high turnover of people in Berlin only intensifies the ‘promiscuity by conditions’, rather than by choice. Local women know that a relationship with one of the many incomers to Berlin is unlikely to last long term. A lot of people move to Berlin when single to experiment and try new things, they do not want to foreclose their possibilities with monogamy. Even when incomers say they are committed to staying in Berlin, everyone takes that with a pinch of salt. Berlin is a tough city, but this can only be appreciated once you to stay past your crazy weekend or prolong your wild summer. Once the cushion blanket of savings from home has thinned, tough decisions need to be made. Many people won’t last longer than a year. On the other hand, women who move to Berlin can find partners or affairs relatively easy and are happy to make connections quickly. You can understand that some local women might be resentful of this.

It did not help my situation that my girlfriend was Spanish at the time of the financial crisis in Spain, when more Spanish women were coming to Berlin. The two feminists who harassed me claimed these women were taking German boyfriends for pragmatic reason, when they did not like Germans. For my part, I was accused of not liking German women. They pointed out that I had been in Berlin for five years but my two girlfriends were not locals. I did not meet or mix many local women despite trying, this is a common story. Those that I did try to court were not interested. Each will have had their own reasons, but on top of that, as I said above, local women are reluctant to get involved with men who were fresh to Berlin. I realise this may have been a tactic to make me feel guilty. I endured abuse for much longer than I should have because I did not want them to think there was anything horrible about them, nor that I was racist. I tried to kill them with kindness. Around this time a blog written by a Spanish woman that became the talk of Berlin. She spent most of the blog denigrated German men, all except from her boyfriend, that is. This was the first thing these women spoke to my girlfriend about when she popped into the bar. Later they sent an email to my girlfriend inviting her to prepare a Spanish themed meal for them where she would present Spanish food. My girlfriend cried her eyes out and asked me how they got her email. Months earlier I had stupidly included her address in a group email for a BBQ with workmates who were going to bring their partners along. At the time, this intense colleague seemed to threaten me, ‘oh that was trusting, giving your girlfriends email out’.

There is another aspect of the subculture to Berlin that needs to be mentioned, but it is a sensitive issue. I need to mention the trauma which is a living memory for some Berliners. This is relevant because a great part of it was committed by the British in what would now be considered a war crime. The other traumatic experience was exclusively carried out by men and almost exclusively on the women of Berlin. After the annihilation of Berlin in air raids, there were mass incidents of sexual assaults. There is no certainty regarding the numbers involved, but women between eight and eighty years old were raped, some as many as 60 to 70 times. East Prussia suffered the most, and in this area alone we need to talk in the order of a million or more victims. This area suffered worst because, Anthony Beever argues, the Russian authorities unofficially sanctioned rape. However, incidents were reported in the British, French, and American zones. Many cases were investigated, some of the accused were locked up in military prisons, but we know many rapists met no punishment whatsoever. Most of what I know about the effect on Berlin comes from colloquial. I could not find the statistics that were mentioned in these conversations, so I decided to stick with the academic sources.

The problem is that people can react to trauma in completely different ways, and it is hard to weave this into a complex account of social behaviour belonging to a demographic. The women I encountered from this group could be cold and direct, and it could be hard to read anything from their face or behaviour, except from an air of hostility. However, they could be warm and show some vulnerability and thereby win your trust back, only to suddenly begin shouting at you in a cafe or bar. More than anything else, I wanted to emphasize the effects of father absence because it seems that father absence, or an abusive father, seems to be a recurrent story among these types of activists in Berlin. However, it seems fair to say that a particularly negative perception of men could be more prominent in Berlin because of its recent traumatic past. That said, many of the women who carry out the abuses are not from Berlin. I heard their story either directly or in the bar from other women. Some tell of an overly religious father, some forced them to go round doors trying to get people to convert, or a traditional father in India, or an alcoholic father, or various forms of father absence, or similar stories of step-fathers. It seems that Berlin provides a support network, a kind of home from home, for women who have suffered men until they could leave the situation. This support network might be good in many cases, but it also seems to entrench hatred and promote violence in others. It seems possible that over decades this subculture has developed a particularly violent group who take vengeance on men without much provocation.

Projective identification

The women in this group in Berlin do not want to acknowledge that they are racist, nor accept rejection. However, it seems more likely that the women 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 therefore 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.

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. 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

I want to offer three examples of how the two women harassed me while I worked in the bar, examples that also read as instances of projective displacement.

After my sacked colleague and a regular had both been rejected, they attempted to find different reasons for their resentment and hatred of me. I did not realise at the time just how lucky I was that my colleague and my boss- both women- came to my defence. At times this harassment would have an effect on them as well. For instance, I was having a conversation with another female colleague about her Master’s thesis on dance theory. The colleague who would harass me came over and threw herself down on a chair next to us. We acknowledged her and continued our conversation. This colleague just started shouting at us in the quiet cafe. ‘Keine versteht das!’, ‘No one would understand that’. It was not just strange to suddenly start shouting in this quiet cafe, but also because my other workmate had understood me. She ignored the existence of my workmate who was replying to me and elaborating on her thesis when she exploded. I tried to placate the colleague who had exploded, but by doing so, I only made the other one angrier at being totally overlooked. To cut a long story short, the woman who would come to harass me was jealous of me having a philosophical chat because I was her British friend doing a PhD in philosophy. There were many instances of the sudden change of mood in her.

Me and this colleague were talking about Bergman films. She thought it conspicuous that I had not seen any of the film that Liv Ullman had directed, when I am such a big fan. She thought this was because Liv Ullman was a woman. This might have been true in part. I acknowledged this and I was curious, so I asked my colleague, “what are her films like then?”. I intentionally avoided the question whether she had seen them. She responded, “I have not watched any”. We are all vulnerable to the prejudices of a patriarchal culture and men should not be singled out for abuse when their objectionable proclivities are no different from women. I wonder though, if some guilt is not projected onto men when women feel guilty for not finding socially prescribed progressive art interesting. I think men sometimes bear the brunt of a woman’s dissatisfaction with herself as a feminist.

The other example is when they abruptly asked me if I had slept with any black women, the context pointed to their intent to accuse me of racism. Luckily, I could answer in the affirmative, but it was pointless. I challenged them because I was getting used to their line of questioning. I asked, “and if I hadn’t, would you take that to mean that I am racist?”. The regular replied, changing from English to German, and addressing my colleague, ‘ah, he hasn’t, he is just saying he has so he doesn’t sound racist’. The implication was that I needed to lie to hide something. These two women insisted that I was ‘of that kind’ that hate German women. So the problem was not with them, it was not that they are not attractive, it is rather the problem was with me, I was a racist. Thus the very ugly feelings and violent actions which followed from their feeling of rejection were camouflaged as justified actions taken against a racist. I was the cruel racist and not them.

I resented the betrayal of trust by my abusers that posed as friends and by my girlfriend. I was angry with myself for having absorbed the abuse for as long as I did while trying to kill them with kindness. Melanie Klein acknowledges that this approach can work, but she warns that it can quickly turn to mutual hostility. This is one of the few passages that Klein draws an analogy to politics:

One way of trying to deal with excessive suspicion is to try and pacify the supposed or actual enemies. […] But such a relations easily breaks down and changes to mutual hostility. In passing I would mention the difficulties that such fluctuations in the attitudes of leading statemen may produce in international affairs.

These people harass and abuse the other in the firm belief he is evil, or toxic, until eventually he says or does something to express any form of agency he can in his situation. Thus, it appears like he is toxic or aggressive. The Gone Girl feminists in Berlin may genuinely believe they have an intuition for the toxicity of men.  As they go through their life harassing, drugging and abusing men, they believe they in the  gift of intuition. In their eyes, this belief is repeatedly vindicated by the reaction they get from men.

The group members encourage one another to believe that they are wholly good, while the victim contains all that is wrong in the world. He is the scape goat to demonstrate their moral status in the tribe. They punish and shame the toxic Other in public and on the group chat. This process begins in Berlin where a small number of violent extremists take on the role of judge and executioner. Noone asks who these people are. No one questions their state of mind. This political activism is a form of projective identification that has gone viral. Mutual accusations are hurled onto a screen that a certain group identifies with, they know who to hate, and many people resort to persecuting people to prove that they are pure of those traits that they cannot accept in themselves. This in turn only makes everyone more anxious in an increasingly hostile world. We are creating a society riven with persecution anxiety and mutual hostility is mounting. This has already led to dehumanizing violence against men, and it is becoming normalized. Much more needs to be said interpocula.