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Paper short abstract

I trace how hate is projected into ideological opponents and circulates in the form in which it is initially deposited or is modified before being sent further, critically exploring the usefulness of concepts from various schools of psychoanalytic thought.

Paper long abstract

If we are concerned to describe the inner life of people, not merely their personhood as part of a collective but their individual selves, then psychoanalytic concepts are indispensable. Within psychoanalysis, there has been more than a century of rigorously competing schools, each with its own experimental epistemologies, both for the analytic session and for theories of interpretation. We have, therefore, inherited some rich and rigorous ways to document and analyze the human psyche from different perspectives and with different questions on which to focus. I discuss how concepts are linked in participant observation and in analysis, and how such linking leads to a deeper understanding of what is going on with us humans irrespective of which concepts one begins with. I draw on my fieldwork experience of the forty-year Cold War political division of Germany followed by the over thirty years of efforts to reverse these effects and unify Germany and its residents. My goal is to shed some light on the psychic effects of hate on polarization. Individual and collective processes differ in many ways although the same concepts are useful to describe both, but here I will restrict my analysis to the collective. I will conceptualize three periods: the Cold War division, the period of the dissolution of the GDR and integration into the Federal Republic, and the process of reunification in which German citizens are still living today. I also elaborate several concepts: projective identification, the unconscious, ambivalence, the container and contained, and splitting.