What follows is the fourth section of my new book, Politics on the Couch. Because we live in an interactive world and this election is an interactive process, I am conducting a new experiment - posting sections of the manuscript twice weekly on my blog at HuffingtonPost.com and inviting readers' comments which may be folded into the final print edition.
Splitting and Reparation: Part One
Splitting is a normal process necessary for psychic survival; it enables the infant to keep feelings and images of pain and pleasure, hate and love, danger and safety internally separate. This protects against the experience of chaos and despair. In older children splitting helps them make sense of their world - and to keep anxiety at bay. By the time children are older, they have routinely relocated inner bad feelings in the world at large. After 9/11 the world at large became more terrifying than ever, reinforcing natural splitting phenomena in dramatic fashion: many were so afraid to fly that they required the assurances of President Bush that flying was safe, as well being as a patriotic expression that the terrorists had not won.
But at the same time as Bush was reassuring us to travel and shop he continued to play the splitting card, warning everyone "You are either with us or against us". We willingly supported his split world-view, though some noted that the price of this split was that any opposition to Bush could be called treason. How does this happen, that we need and fear a president - need him to protect us from outside dangers while fearing his wrath inside our patriotic selves should we question his actions?
In infancy, splitting was necessary to help the baby organize his experience and protect his inner world against terror (based on normal but intense feelings of frustration) which threatened to overwhelm him with panic. By making the threats external, the child mobilizes its defenses against them. Extreme opposites had to be kept apart - and 9/11 made the need to split even greater and easier to achieve. For instance, our obvious innocence in the face of the hijackers' willful destructiveness couldn't be contaminated at all by memories of our having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And if we did happen to remember the thousands of innocent Japanese lives lost or irradiated, we justified our acts as necessary and virtuous in order to rationalize the massive civilian destruction that accompanied our determination to end World War II.
Voters live in a world more split than ever since 9/11. Our internal splits influence how we choose our leaders, as we often are drawn to candidates who are dominated by splitting processes similar to our own. For this reason - to look psychological resonance within each of us - it seems important for voters to examine the different kinds of splitting exhibited by Senators McCain and Obama. To the psychoanalyst part of me, splitting is necessary for self-protection, while repair of deep splits is necessary for emotional growth to occur.
Let's start with McCain who splits his world in ways remarkably similar to George W. Bush. Maintaining a split world-view - that we are good people surrounded by evil - means that we must strategize at the same time as we avoid having to think. This problem - keeping anxiety at bay by denying the humanity of the "enemy" - made it impossible for McCain and others to anticipate the consequences of invading Iraq. He maintains his split vision at all costs, now reminding everyone that the surge has worked - even though he cannot visit Baghdad without massive protection. One reason we evade facing facts about Iraq is to remain internally split: splitting keeps people from feeling helpless because it mobilizes aggression against those experienced as totally bad. we want to ignore negative qualities in ourselves, like our own hates and capacities to inflict harm.
Splitting also supports a kind of emotional delinquency, as splitters evade their psychic realities: men like Senator Larry Craig and Congressman Mark Foley publicly attack homosexuality while remaining privately gay. Bush's delinquency is well known, from his DUI days to his countless signing statements undermining laws passed in Congress. Politicians are famous for splitting past from present, previous actions from current ones. Voters evade having to face their own destructiveness and delinquency by finding themselves drawn to McCain and Bush who express it for them.
McCain splits past from present, straight talk from dissembling, courage from cowardice. On the day (June 12, 2008) the Supreme Court affirmed that the Constitutional right of habeas corpus applies to Guantanamo detainees, McCain said, "I always favored closing of Guantanamo Bay and I still think that we ought to do that." But the next day his need to split reasserted itself, and he went on the attack. He said, "The Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."
One cannot maintain a split between good and evil - really a split between human and sub-human - if detainees are humanized or given the same rights the rest of us enjoy.
McCain's reaction not only reminds us of his stunning capacity to reverse himself, but also that he can split off his own history of having been a prisoner of war. The likelihood that McCain could empathize with current detainees is compromised - and saw the light of day for 72 hours when he joined with Senators Graham and Warner to object to Bush policies at Abu Ghraib. They soon returned to the fold, however, and continued their support of water boarding and the like.
Obama was born with split, something which must have affected the normal process of splitting and repression required by children to manage anxiety. He couldn't separate black from white in the same way that children can who don't have a mixed race background. His split was pre-healed which must have lessened the psychological possibility of his keeping opposites separate - after all, he was made up of opposites. I think that because of this psychic fact, he seeks to bring people together through the process he calls "change".
At a different psychological level, internal cohesion is threatened by family splits. In Obama's case, his father left the family when he was two - leaving behind a split internal world in which parents no longer existed as a coherent unit. Having an internal parental unit helps children feel safer. Obama has written extensively about his experience. I just wanted to add that one searches for a father to heal a different split - a split in the internal world when parents are not together as a coherent couple in the mind of the child. One way to heal such a split was for Obama to become a loving father himself. On Father's Day 2008, Obama said, "If I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my girls; that if I could give them anything, I would give them that rock - that foundation - on which to build their lives." Later in that speech Obama referred to how important it is for children, if at all possible, to grow up having two parents who respect and love each other.
Some voters are passionately drawn to Obama because he not only promises change from divisive Washington politics, but also because he evokes infantile yearnings for an undifferentiated psychic state without splitting - a state in which the destructive effects of the Bush Administration might be faced and overcome. Other voters are passionately drawn to McCain - as they were to Bush before him - because he represents their continuing need the world as split and make sure the bad guys will fight over there so they don't come here. In this scenario the bad remains outside and the good stays inside. To those voters, Obama's willingness to take a different approach, i.e. to use diplomacy, threatens their split world-view and is attacked by splitters as capitulating and defeatist.. Mixing anything bad with the good is terrifying to such voters.
There is an obvious split that Obama's candidacy itself evokes, and is something that the McCain candidacy might exploit - something it can accomplish without much effort: the simple split between white and black. Some voters drawn to splitting for their own internal reasons may refuse ever to vote for an African-American for President, keeping the racial divide as large as possible. The tapes of Reverend Wright encourage splitting and fear, as well as getting voters to forget that Obama is also half-white. Healing of racial unrest continues, but even genuine reparation does not mean that splits become dissolved or irrelevant.
Obama poses another threat to reparation - mainly to supporters of Israel: one New York shop, for example, sells T-shirts that say "Obama equals Hitler". Obama's middle name not only evokes frightening images in some voters of a Muslim President, it also links - especially for Jewish voters - to the many African-Americans who have adopted Muslim names. How dangerous is it for voters already drawn to splitting to think of having a black and Muslim president? Republicans salivate at the prospect of keeping these primitive fears in front of voters.
Part 2 of Splitting and Reparation will be next.
Questions: To the psychoanalyst part of me, splitting is necessary for self-protection, while repair of deep splits is necessary for emotional growth to occur.
What do you notice in yourselves when trying to repair splits?
Do reparative efforts make you feel weak or less safe?
What other reactions do you have to struggles between splitting and repairing?