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Article

French

ID: <

10670/1.g2artr

>

Where these data come from
Freud and nationalism

Abstract

The modern design of the nation includes a demand for individual autonomy and happiness, coupled with the requirement of social equality. It is inspired by the ideals of progress and reason. However, the law on engraving national imagination consists of the exclusion of foreigners and minorities. As a result, it leads to the excesses of nationalism. The construction of nation states was a complex process, following heterogeneous historical trajectories, but there are convergent themes linked to identity issues in beliefs in the nation. There is a strong connection between this ideology and religious expectations. In addition, nationalism has continuously maintained regressive fantasy that have flourished in mass movements. Today, as in the past, populists have expressed a suspicion of foreigners, which sometimes confines racism. They attract people who feared the rise of dissimilar people, those from a different culture and different “breeds”. Their leaders have a discourse that is not complex, always manicheran. They attract their activists by legitimising their rabies. In many countries in the southern hemisphere, the failure of the nation state has favoured the development of ethno-nationalist sectarianism, usually associated with religious fundamentalism. Freud lived in a time marked by the deliors of nationalism, and it was in these circumstances that psychanalysis emerged. He did not engage in the study of nationalism, but his thoughts on cultural ideals, his work on identity building processes and narcissism, his interpretation of religious illusions and obsessive rituals, his analysis of the dynamics of crowds, ties of solidarity and relationships of authority, nevertheless provide keys to interpreting nationalism and its excesses. In addition, the horrific performance of contemporary civil wars, the indiscriminate and suicidal violence they entail, is reviving feelings of disarray similar to those expressed by Freud on the eve of the Second World War, namely the impression of living ‘a particularly curious time’ and of discovering with surprise that ‘progress has reached a compact with barbarism’.

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