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PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WARFARE
Aleksandar Fatić
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory
University of Belgrade
Abstract: Participation mystique is a term initially coined to describe the cognitive investment of identity in objects. In other words, it is a relationship that makes it difficult for us to perceive and cognize ourselves outside our connections with important objects. Such objects can range from ordinary tools for everyday use to projects of national emancipation or other collective causes. The concept of participation mystique (initially proposed by Levy-Bruhl, and perhaps most influentially developed by Carl Jung) is deeply embedded in the logic and psychology of subjecthood-objecthood, namely the logical interdependence between the subject and object. This dependence has been paradigmatically elaborated by Arthur Schopenhauer. This paper discusses the concept of participation mystique as relevant to the logic of subject and object as mutually interdependent concepts and the metaphysical consequences of that cognitive interdependence, and applies the dynamics of participation mystique to understanding the psychology of warfare, including the identity processes and cognitive deficits inherent in collective mobilization, to understanding armed conflict and warfare.
Key words: warfare, psychology, cognition, identity, ethics
The insufficiency
Being insufficient from the inside, as beings, we seek compensation not only through our choices and needs in minute, discrete situations and relationships, but through identification with something larger than ourselves, all in the hope of supplementing the lack in our identity and sense of self. Often, this larger paradigm of identity is ideology in its various forms. Considering the individual’s personal history often reveals her desires and drives that make her adopt and, sometimes, ardently advocate a particular ideology, whether it is one focusing on rights of the poor and dispossessed (traditionally the left leaning ideology), or one emphasizing merit and individual liberties (the liberal spectrum), or the feminist, or communist, or whatever other type of value-laden set of normative beliefs about the world. When collectives are concerned, this larger paradigm that a group identifies with and in whose identity the group participates, or partakes, tends to be informed and, often, burdened, by history, or more precisely, collective beliefs about history. The conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians is a typical such conflict. While one side (the Palestinians) tends to see Israel as a colonial, “settler state”, which, having been established only in 1948, by Jews reeling from the holocaust in Europe that they had just survived, was created on the territory of Palestine, a state rightfully inhabited by the Palestinian people. The historical narrative on the Palestinian side has it that Jews had pushed the Palestinians from their land into the two “prisons in the open”, namely the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where they continue to live, largely in subhuman conditions, to date. The Jewish narrative, on the other hand, is that what Palestinians call Palestine had previously, in Biblical times, been Judea, the land of the Jews, a land promised to the Jewish people as the people chosen by God. Thus, the Israelis do not see themselves as a settler nation: they perceive their statehood and their struggle to maintain and enlarge Israel’s territory as their historical and spiritual mission, in much the same way as the Arabs of the Middle East, including the Palestinians, but also Iran and some other countries, consider, and explicitly call Israel “Zionist entity”, thus avoiding a recognition of its statehood and political legitimacy.
The “culture of death” as some describe the use of suicide bombers by the Palestinian militant organizations and an understanding on that side of the conflict that martyrs to the national cause are blessed after death is a compensation of the actual lack of political and military power to assert the group’s aims in this reality. Only in the Gaze Strip and the West Bank there are almost as many Palestinian residents as there are Israelis within Israel, however the power balance is heavily tilted towards Israel, due to the largely unconditional support the Jewish state receives from its western backers in terms of political, military and ideological aid. There is, psychotherapeutically speaking, a fundamental lack in the Palestinian self-perception in such a situation, where what they see as their just cause, a desire to repopulate their homeland and achieve dignity and security within their own state, given that it cannot be realized in this world, at this time, is extended into the spiritual realm: the Jewish state is described as a settler state with fascist methods of self-maintenance, and the Arab cause is pushed into the other life, where the martyrs are received by God as his dear ones, and the anger of god is accumulated leading to a certain future destruction of Israel.
On the Israeli side, the narrative that the promised homeland for the Jewish people is constantly threatened by a “sea of Arabs” that surrounds Israel is reinforced by a sacramental participation mystique, where the use of extreme violence, one that most Jewish people would normally consider abhorrent in their everyday relations with one another, is seen as justified, even necessary. Israelis know that their war against the Palestinians is losing them friends across the world and that the very legitimacy of Israel in the eyes of various governments and citizens is undermined by the actions of the Israeli army against the Palestinians. However, the narrative with which the Israeli citizens identify, the paradigm of which they partake, that they are on the side of God’s justice even if they act alone and against everybody else, keeps them going. The mantra that “the Middle East only understands power” is a part of that participation mystique, where the fear of annihilation and of being over-run by the more numerous enemy is masked by an uncritical reliance on military power and solidarity at war. The internal differences vis-à-vis the political leadership, the controversies surrounding the Israeli Prime Minister’s onslaught on the independence of the judiciary and public demonstrations against the government all subside at times of war in order to facilitate the participation mystique of solidarity within the pursuit of a greater cause, and that is security for Israel.
The above example illustrates how internally sensed insufficiencies are compensated by the mystique of participation in a larger narrative. The described example involves the insufficiency primarily characterized by fear: both sides fear the other, with Israel’s main fear being that of collective annihilation unless they are always able to project superior military power, and the Palestinian dominant fear of being driven from the remnants of their homeland. The loss of collective existence as a people in the firmer, and the permanent loss of a homeland, in the latter case account for the actual conflict that, while purportedly serving to alleviate the two fears, in fact re-actualizes and additional inflames them. Similarly in counselling one often witnesses the situation where individuals, dogged by a fear, pursue personal strategies supposedly aimed at eliminating the cause of the fear that, in fact, bring about exactly the outcomes one fears. Our lack and our insufficiency not only motivate our compensatory actions, but also determine the nature and content of such actions in a way that, very often, merely reformulate and additionally articulate the very structures that we fear. This is only seemingly a paradox. Namely, the nature of the fear or another insufficiency, or lack, disposes us for certain types of personal strategies that are, logically, related to the structure of the fear or insufficiency that they arise from. Where some unrelated action might tilt the sequence of events away from the feared outcome, the action specifically focused on the feared outcome adds relevance and actuality to the events that are feared and, logically increases the likelihood that they will transpire.
Consider an everyday example. A person with self-love and self-valuation issues from childhood intensely fears rejection and develops an impulsive reactive pattern that, in time, causes her to be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and to lose a valued marriage, with a child. In her attempts to frantically compensate for the sense of internal lack of personal value she engages in violence and public confrontations, develops conflicts with the police and the courts, and, in her late 40s, ends up living alone, in the same appartment where she used to live with her mother when she was a child, abused and neglected. This outcome is one of her worst fears that she has been trying to avoid by aggressive and „pre-emptive“ behavior. In order to psychologically survive the dread of loneliness, she proceeds to wage a legal battle to estrange her child from her husband, so that the child is with her full time, and in order to win that battle she enters into corrupt and publicly suspect political arrangement with a tyranical political regime. Due to this political alignment, she becomes a de facto persona non grata in the social circles where she always wanted to belong. To compensate for that loss, she intensifies her political engagement and manages to be appointed to governing bodies of the same groups and organizations that she wanted to be a part of. A revolt of the groups she is supposed to govern ensues and with a public outcry she is, again, publicly removed from her positions. Unable to accept the series of social defeats, she enters the government just before its political fall and qualifies herself for trial and, at least, public disgrace through transitional justice and lustration after the beginning of democratization. She has now sunk far deeper than the initial situation after her divorce, which she has tried to avoid and change by engaging increasingly with powers that be and by behaving increasingly opportunistically. Her BPD pushes her further and further into actionst hat result in public shaming, where the national media point her out as an example of personal, political and social disgrace, thus depriving her of any potential place in the society that from her childhood she longed for. Her lack of self-respect is now a gaping whole underneath a clumsily sown together edges of what was once a deficient, but potentially real, self-respect. a collapse of the political structure that she has now attached herself to so unequivocally and desperately will spell her lasting marginalization and rejection by the very society she has attempted first to join, and then to subdue, through all of the actions that have led her to the present situation. All of her actions that she took in order to fend off the fear of rejection and depreciation of here personality in the eyes of her significant others have not caused her amplified rejection and public depreciation. At the time when she took them, her actions were reasonable and clearly focused on persuading, or forcing, those whose opinion meant something to her to accept her, willingly or unwillingly. They were not psychotic or obviously instrumentally inappropriate, however they have, without exception, led to a worsened situation that she started off trying to prevent.
If, however, this person had decided to ignore her own internal tension and sense of urgency to „do something“ to force others to take her in from the proverbial (psychological and social) cold, to rescue her from her loneliness and self-doubt, and if she had focused on improving herself in something, whether it is a skill, academic prowess, or her personality, by undergoing psychotherapy, she would likely have escaped the situation that she finds unbearable, namely public shame and rejection by those whose ranks she desperately desires to join. In other words, if she had approached her fear laterally, at an angle, and if she had focused on her potential, rather than her lack and insufficiency, she would likely have narrowed the internal gap that tears her personality apart and makes her feel and act in ways that push those who matter further away from her.
There is a seemingly paradoxical logic of participation mystique that, when one focuses on attaining the participation dynamics one desires, this generates the opposite outcomes, and one ends up further separated from the larger structures of belonging, acceptance and collective identity that one desires. Just as Israel has managed to taint its public image and reputation by applying dysproportionate force and visiting destruction upon the Palestinians in 2023, pulling oneself into a public image that the country dreads, namely that of an etatist regime prepared to commit indiscriminate atrocities against significantly different others, the Palestinian Hamas has succeeded to portray itself as a terror group that should represent no-one, a dangerous regiment of murderous villains not welcome, even as refugees, even in the neighbouring Arab countries, including Egypt, the only country the Gaza Strip has a border crossing with. Their dread of isolation, containment in a limited strip of land and continued repression and expulsion has led them to commit the terrorist act by attacking Israel and killing 1200 people, with the result that their land is in ruins from Israel’s retribution, and they themselves are seen as highly suspect, dangerous and unwanted potential representatives of the Palestinian people. Their desire to partake of international political subjecthood led them to desperate actions, and these actions caused them to be lastingly denied international political subjecthood. It seems that there is a logic to this type of outcomes that surpasses any inadequacy of the chosen means, namely that the action on participation mystique re-emphasises the missing object of a larger identity that is sought through participation mystique, and further deprives the subject from attainmtne of the emotional and value goals inherent in participation mystique. Accordingly, it would seem that acting outside participation mystique is more likely to ameliorate the suffering involved in participation mystique, to diminish the lack and the insufficiency that fuel participation mystique, and thus act therapeutically on the subject, whether individual, collective, or the entire community.
Confrontatio as compensation
In the wars of participation mystique (based on nationalistic, religious or value-related quests for identity), multiple layers of confrontation releal the structures of compensation that anmity serves. A good example was the American „war on terror“ against Afghanistan in 2001. After the assault by a number of terrorists on the World Trade Centre in New Yorks and on the Pentagon, with hijacked commercial aircraft, the US launched a retaliation war on Afghanistan, before it could be established whether and to what extent the country of Afghanistan could be blamed for the terrorist incident. The US issued an ultimatum to the government of Afghanistan to deliver members of the Al Quaeda radical organization to face American justice, and when, for whatever reasons, the Arghan government failed to do so, a bombing campaing was unleashed, soon to be broadened to what was called „global war on terror“, and included the military actions in Iraq and Pakistan, as well, inflicting as many as half a million deaths on these countries (Voice of America, 2018). The decision to launch a war against the largely arbitrarily chosen enemy was criticized broadly, on several counts, perhaps most notably because it conferred the status of a state enemy on a terrorist organization whose boundaries, ideology and membership were all fuzzy and difficult to establish, and because it might be politically and intellectually untenable to launch a war on a tactic to achieve political goals (terrorism) rather than on an entity that is the subject of such tactis (Boyle, 2008; Daalder and Lindsay, 2003). There was a distinct sense amongst the critics that the American attack was launched because the US government needed to be seen as doing something in response to 9/11, even if it did not have a clear enemy and had no sustainable military options on the table (Hoderich, 2002; Honderich, 2003). This last perspective portrays the „global war on terror“ as a classical psychological compensation for the US’s inability to identify an adversary and the effective measures whereby it would both address the security threat from terrorism and at once reaffirm its own political and military credibility, both internally and externally.
Interesingly, the above described situations, where countries or governments cannot identify sustainable and credible actions to take and actors to confront, but feel that they must resort to arbitrary, „approximate“ actions and military targetting in order to be seen as responding to the threats they face, are the same situations when the use of a language of inclusive collective subjecthood peaks. The latter includes the use of normative concepts such as „the international community“, or „the family of nations“, where participation mystique is used as a justification for bellicose actions that a state takes because it feels that it is expected to identify an enemy, although it cannot actually identify a plausible enemy.
One of the problems with the above described expectations and the participation-mystique that is used to mask inadequate or imprecise responses to those expectations concerns the actual subjects of the expectations, a topic usefully elaborated on by Honderich (Honderich, 2002: 108–109). Societies consist of groups, not all of which are equal in their access to or resources for forming and expressing a political opinion. An example is the elections. At most elections in democratic countries, the number of people who actually vote rarely exceeds one half of all registered voters. Whether somebody will vote or not depends on a number of factors, including their resources. Some do not have a car to get to the voting place, others lack education to unerstand the importance of voting or the differences between the policies proposed by various political candidates (individual or collective). Most of those who actually vote own sufficient resources, both material and conceptual, to actually turn up at the booth and articulate their political choice. Similar considerations apply to expressing „expectations“ in terms of how to respond to terror attacks, for example. Not everybody „expects“ the state to respond by warfare to an act of terror. Consider the expectations by the US citizens post-9/11, or after the terror attacks on Israel by the Hamas on 7 October 2023. In the former case, it was the expectations by the mainstream middle class that matters the most to American politics, because they are the most active voters, that fuelled the drive to attack Afghanistan despite the lack of evidence that Afghanistan as a state was behind 9/11. Those American citizens who cannot and do not vote, for the above mentioned reasons, do not matter to the American government in situations when such choices must be made. What matters is whether those with institucional influence and active voters will support a particular course of action, not what those who do not vote think, although the latter encompass a half of the American citizens. The situation is even clearer with regard to Israel’s war on Gaza in late 2023. The public opinion in the US is sharply divided on the matter, with a considerable number of active voters (especially Muslim Americans) holidng public protests and threatening to beseat President Joseph Biden at the next election, as this article is being written. Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and Boston have also risen, protesting against the behavior of Israel and demanding a ceasefire. Many Jewish intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and many others) are demanding that Israel withdraws from Gaza and ceases its occupation of the Palestinian lands. Major academic journals (such as Lancet) have published collectively signed letters of scientists demanding the cessation of Israel’s occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinians, and so have various universities. All of these demands occur within the approximately one half of the American electoral body that is active, that actually votes. Thus, the expectations are not simple or unequivocal, and the governments use participation mystique to meet all of them to an extent. The particular way in which the US Administration sought to address the two types of expectations (those demanding a continuation of the traditional American policy of unconditionally supporting Israel against its Arab adversaries in the Middle East, and those demanding a stop to Israel’s colonial and aggressive policies in the region, especially against the Palestinians), was, first, by sending two aircraft carriers into the region and useing its ships to deter Iran and intercept missiles launched at Israel from Jemen and other places, as well as offering verbal support to the Israeli government by saying that Israel had „the right to defend itself“, even when waging war deep into Palestinian territory. The second way to use participation mystique was to insist that the US would „not allow the permanent displacement of Palestinians from Gaza“, and to demand „breaks in fighting“ (in effect, ceasefires, whilst avoiding the word „ceasefire“) to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Another way of addressing the expectations to tame Israel’s war were the statements by the US Secretary of State that „the number of civilian deaths in Gaza is unacceptable“.
Participation mystique is a way for us to compensate for internal inadequacies by becoming a part of the larger and more complete entity, ideology, policy or other value structure. The US’s „war on terror“ was an attempt to create, or join, a larger value structure involving „civilized nations“ against the policies of terror, without being able to specifically address the Islamic terror act on 9/11. After all, many years aftter the „terror war“ on Afghanistan, the Taliban are in power in the country and „civilized countries“ negotiate with them on a number of cross border and even internal policy issues (education of women, for example). The idea of a „war on terror“ is an untenable one, because terror, in many cases, is a strategy embraced due to the absence of legitimate strategies (lack of influence in international institutions and on domestic policy front) byy marginalized groups. When such groups are in fact the factual majority in a particular territory, and when history is frought with controversy as to their rights, especially the right to land, as is the case in Israel with the Palestinians, then many such dispossessed and politically imobilized groups see terrorism as the only way to attract international attention and keep their unresolved rights issues on the table. To compensate for the lack of such an approach (mass killings of civilians, destruction of infrastructure, large numbers of refugess amongst own population) the participation mystique narrative is developed of martyrdom, eternal justice or a historical logic that is bound, eventually, to lead to the destruction of the enemy. This is the participation mystique narrative of the Palestinian Hamas in its current war with Israel.
Israel’s participation mystique is an appeal to Israel’s historical narrative of a nation chosen by God, but often abandoned by all other nations, fighting alone, but empowered by God, destined to ultimately prevail. This narrative allows the current Israeli government to operate outside the boundaries of international humanitarian law, with exceptionally numerous civilian casualties in Gaza and with illegal restrictive tactics routinely being used against Palestinians in the West Bank. The policies would not normally be endorsed by ordinary Israeli citizens without the „survival“ narrative based on the mantra of a conspiracy by large numbers of enemies to destroy the Jewish people. This narrative is usefully reinforced by statements by countries such as Iran, which deny Israel the legitimacy of statehood, call it an „entity“ and openly call for its annihilation. Both sides feed their own participation mystique arising from internal insufficiencies: Iran cannot establish a dominance in the Middle East largely due to Israel’s strength, which is in fact a projection of the US military power in the region, and Israel cannot establish a „pure“ Jewish state „between the river and the sea“ (between River Jordan and the Red Sea), because of the international concerns over the rights and livelihoods of the Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. Both sides lack something important, most likely the power to implement their projected value structure and territorial wholeness. Participation mystique through confrontation is a compensation for that insufficiency.
An interesting thing is that neither side can withdraw from the confrontation both generally, and specifically from the current war in Gaza, because this would be seen as an admission of internal insufficiencies that nobody wants to see and recognize. It is a particular type of collective neurosis where the populations are not ready to recognize the limitations of their collective narrative. The structure of this neurosis is the same as in individual neuroses, when a person cannot accept the lack in their personality and life experience in light of the projected identity, capacities and self-perceptions that are induced by the society and important others. Lives are lost specifically because of this collective neurotic structure. It is in this sense that the populations of countries emmersed in participation mystique warfare are not innocent. A person may be driven to act in a compensatory manner for her own insufficiencies and inadequacies, in a way that harms others, however the fact that such actions are the results of an inner compensatory drive does not render the person not responsible for her choices. A similar consideration can apply to collectives: perhaps the Israeli public feel that sticking to the identity and survival narrative of a chosen people surrounded by enemies and thereby entitled to exist and operate outside international law, however if so, the fact that this is a collective instinct does not render the Israeli citizens innocent of the crimes committed by the Israel Defence Forces in their name in Gaza. Conversely, the Palestinian people perhaps perceive their institutional and political marginalization as a carte blanche to use Hamas as a terrorist organization to attack their enemies, within the participation mystique narrative of compensating for political insufficiency and disempowerment by physical violence against Israeli civilians. However, the sense that one is powerless does not remove one’s responsibility for the choices made instead of the use of legitimate institutional power. Thus, neither population is entirely innocent, save for underaged children and those whosee ability to articulate political views through proper elections is blocked or impaired. Again, this appears more the case on the Palestinian side, given the institutional and democratic defficiencies apparently present in the Palestinian territories. In othere words, it appears more feasible to excuse parts of the Palestinian population from the collective responsibility for the 7 October 2023 crimes committed by Hamas in Israel, than to excuse parts of the Israeli population for the crimes committed by IDF in Gaza, the reason being the supposedly lower ability of Palestinians to actually influence the political decisions of the Hamas in Gaza than the institutional ability of the Israelis to influence official Israeli policy.
Withdrawal as a solution to participation mystique in warfare
If confrontation is a part or form of compensation, withdrawal could be seen as a way to revisit the unconscious dynamics of participation mystique. By withdrawing from conflict, one recognizes one’s internal mechanisms of filling the internal gaps and takes a more critical and considered stance towards one’s own insufficiency. That is how self-change starts. In the context of participation mystique of warfare, that is how such intractable conflicts are brought to en end. It is thus the mechanism of withdrawal that requires special attention here.
Withdrawal, psychologically viewed, is not a negative action, not merely a negation of what one would otherwise engage in. To withdraw from a conflict, or from any type of engagement, is a positive, affirmative and usually difficult decision, especially in situations like the ones described so far. When a government faces strong expectations by citizens or interest groups it is far easier to engage in a proximate and strategic, but fundamentally inadequate, even damaging, manner, than to withdraw. The bombing of Afghanistan has left it economically ruined, institutionally destitute and under Taliban rule and Shariah law — all the cultural and political facts that the American “anti-terror” policy purported to counter. The Israeli attack on Gaza in 2023 is even openly counterproductive. For each Palestinian civilian killed by the IDF several others are automatically recruited into resistance, and for Palestinians “resistance” is what Israel calls “terrorism”. The collective memory of the Israeli destruction of Palestinian civilian settlements will reinforce the participation mystique on the part of the Palestinians that articulates itself in terms of martyrdom for an eternal cause. Even Palestinian doctors today, when interviewed in Gaza about the plight of the injured civilians, talk about “martyred” families. The idea of martyrdom calls for justice, as the martyr is an innocent victim whose death calls for retaliation from God, and that retaliation takes place through the hands and boots of other members of the martyr’s community. Thus, what Israel is doing with its consistent military policy of mass destruction and the driving of Palestinians further an further away from its borders is in fact a process that reproduces enmity, reinforces the eschatological participation mystique between the Palestinians, both those who are religious and those who hesitate or are more secular in their philosophy of life. It is a policy that is sure to perpetuate warfare and security threats to Israel, yet one that Israeli communities are so incapable of withdrawing from.
The ability to withdraw from a conflict that is framed by participation mystique (the larger paradigm that sees the war as a part of a greater national, religious or identity project, in most cases) requires a consistent focus by national elites. To withdraw means to change the paradigm of participation mystique, and the first step to that change is a refusal, by an act of pure free will, to engage in the automaticity that is invoked by participation mystique itself.
The capacity and willingness to withdraw, to resist the magnetism of participation mystique is what brings security studies in line with psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic methodology. It is what makes the psychology of warfare and integral part of both psychotherapeutic thinking and security analysis.
References:
Voice of America (2018). „Us War on Terror kills nearly 500,000 in Avghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan“. 8 November. https://www.voanews.com/a/us-war-on-terror-kills-nearly-half-million-people-in-afghanistan-iraq-pakistan/4650554.html.
Daalder, Ivo and James Lindsay (2003). America unbound: The Bush revolution in foreign policy. Washington: The Brookings Institution.
Boyle, Michael J. (2008). „The War on Terror in American grand strategy“. International Affairs 84, 2: 191–209. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25144761.
Honderich, Ted (2002). After the Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Honderich, Ted (2003). “After the Terror: A book and further thoughts”. The Journal of Ethics 7, 2: 161–181. Doi: 10.1023/a:1022947208226.
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