ShrinkWrapped

On Demographic Suicide Redux IV

[This is the final post of a four part series, orignally posted as Shame, Aggression and Demographic Suicide.  The references and comments are to the original series from the Spring of 2006.]

In the first three posts in this series (Part I, Part II, Part III), I have attempted to show how Gudrun, a German woman who entered therapy many years ago, was able to understand some of the ways in which her parents' (especially her mother's) experiences in Germany during WWII led to her inability to enter into a healthy relationship with a man and ultimately led to her decision not to have children.  I then suggested a similar dynamic may be involved in Europe's current demographic collapse. 

AVI has put together some statistics about European demographics that are illustrative, though it is worth wondering if some of his numbers aren't skewed by the fecundity of the substantial Muslim communities in a number of the countries listed (especially France, where  the Muslim birthrate is extremely high compared to the non Muslim French population.) 

A number of commenters, and the comments have been uniformly thought provoking,  made some excellent points.  Maxed Out Mama, in particular (who is under the weather, perhaps as part of her exemplary and ongoing efforts to help us understand the Avian Flu; keep her in your thoughts), wrote about her own family's brush with the "evil at the core" (in the comments to Part II):

I was just brushed by this, and it left a huge mark. You've got no idea of what it is like to, as a child, be in a public park and watch visitors from Europe stiffen at the sight of a park guard in uniform. These, btw, were victims and not perpetrators. You've got no idea what it is like to be forbidden to ever correspond with a number of relatives.

My grandfather was born in Germany, was drafted into the German army as a teenager at the end of WWI, became a socialist, was almost killed by a band of vigilantes after the war, got out to France and eventually made his way to the US. He enlisted at the age of 42 in the US Army for WWII. My father was born here in 1929. After the war, my father's parents brought my great grandmother over from France.

Anyway, one day the police were making the rounds to tell people that the health department was giving free vaccinations. This old lady opened the door, saw the uniform, and ran in screaming hysterics into her bedroom.

David, most Americans can have NO idea.

For those who lived through those evil times, even as passive participants, the fear was ever-present and corrosive.  She also offered this:

On Demographic Suicide Redux: Part III

[Please take a look at The Soldiers' Project and pass along the information to any serviceman or woman, and/or their families, in the New York/New Jersey area who might benefit from our servies.]

In Part I and Part II of this series, I described how my patient, Gudrun, was able to find a partial resolution of her unconscious conflicts that arose out of her family secrets (especially her mother's family secrets) related to the Holocaust.  The discussion in the comments which followed Part II was extremely thought-provoking and enlightening.  Many questions were raised, especially about the applicability of this particular woman's dynamics to the current state of the European zeitgeist.  If you haven't read the comments, I would suggest doing so now, because many of the points are pertinent and relate to this post.

My patient grew up in Germany, post-war, in an environment where the entire population conspired to bury all memory of their complicity, many by an active role but most by their passivity, in the Holocaust.  Her mother's childhood best friend was the Jewish girl who lived next door; one day she and her family simply disappeared, never to be seen or mentioned again.  Gudrun's mother kept this secret to herself for almost 40 years.  Of interest, the mother never really "knew" explicitly that it was a secret; she had merely never thought to mention it to her daughter until Gudrun directly confronted her on a visit when Gudrun was in her late 20's. 

The analogue, in an individual, of Europe's communal denial is repression, and therein lies the tale (if I may borrow from the Bard.)

One of Freud's great insights was that when traumatic memories were "forgotten" or repressed and kept out of awareness, they continually pressed to return to the surface of the mind.  The forces that made "forgetting" necessary fought to keep the trauma out of conscious awareness and out of this struggle symptoms and character deformations resulted.  A classical example of the type we no longer see in sophisticated populations would be hysterical conversion symptoms.  A patient conflicted about his aggression (afraid of hurting others or himself) could develop an hysterical paralysis of his arm.  With a paralyzed arm, he would not be at risk of harming anyone; unfortunately the resulting symptoms often caused more trouble than the impulses.  Freud referred to such symptom formation as a "return of the repressed." 

[Please take a look at The Soldiers' Project and pass along the information to any serviceman or woman, and/or their families, in the New York/New Jersey area who might benefit from our servies.]

In Part I and Part II of this series, I described how my patient, Gudrun, was able to find a partial resolution of her unconscious conflicts that arose out of her family secrets (especially her mother's family secrets) related to the Holocaust.  The discussion in the comments which followed Part II was extremely thought-provoking and enlightening.  Many questions were raised, especially about the applicability of this particular woman's dynamics to the current state of the European zeitgeist.  If you haven't read the comments, I would suggest doing so now, because many of the points are pertinent and relate to this post.

My patient grew up in Germany, post-war, in an environment where the entire population conspired to bury all memory of their complicity, many by an active role but most by their passivity, in the Holocaust.  Her mother's childhood best friend was the Jewish girl who lived next door; one day she and her family simply disappeared, never to be seen or mentioned again.  Gudrun's mother kept this secret to herself for almost 40 years.  Of interest, the mother never really "knew" explicitly that it was a secret; she had merely never thought to mention it to her daughter until Gudrun directly confronted her on a visit when Gudrun was in her late 20's. 

The analogue, in an individual, of Europe's communal denial is repression, and therein lies the tale (if I may borrow from the Bard.)

One of Freud's great insights was that when traumatic memories were "forgotten" or repressed and kept out of awareness, they continually pressed to return to the surface of the mind.  The forces that made "forgetting" necessary fought to keep the trauma out of conscious awareness and out of this struggle symptoms and character deformations resulted.  A classical example of the type we no longer see in sophisticated populations would be hysterical conversion symptoms.  A patient conflicted about his aggression (afraid of hurting others or himself) could develop an hysterical paralysis of his arm.  With a paralyzed arm, he would not be at risk of harming anyone; unfortunately the resulting symptoms often caused more trouble than the impulses.  Freud referred to such symptom formation as a "return of the repressed." 

The Soldier's Project

However one feels about the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is inarguable that the greatest burden of our war effort has fallen upon our military men and women.  They have placed themselves in harm's way at the request of their nation while the rest of us have been asked to do little more than to carry on and go to the mall. 

Repeated and extended deployments are extremely stressful for the men and women involved and on their families.  In an effort to assist our military with the often painful and difficult transitions back to civilian life, I am pleased to be among a group of Mental Health professionals who have volunteered to offer our expertise to our Veterans. 

A Brief Description of the Soldiers' Project of New York and New Jersey (with contact information at the bottom):

The Soldiers' Project offers free psychological counseling in private offices, with no red tape, a flexible schedule, and no limit to the number of sessions.  We also offer free psychological counseling to your extended families (including girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, children, parents and grandparents) - to help them get through deployment issues, and to reintegrate afterwards, and we offer free therapy to members of bereaved families.

This Project is outside the military; it operates on a private practice model, providing free services to any member of the military (all branches, including NG and Reserves - whoever has been in OIF/OEF) and including those who are VA or DoD eligible.    ( For more information please see articles in the Christian Science Monitor, Stars & Stripes, and other newspapers; websites include Any Soldier, and Marine Parents, and especially, The Soldiers' Project, which includes contact information in the Southern California area, as well as a wealth of information about various topics of interest to Veterans and their families.)

Who are we ?

We are a group of licensed psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and marriage and family therapists who feel a personal commitment.  You served your country and now we would like to help you.

This group began as extension of a project of the Trauma Center of LAISPS (Los Angeles Institute & Society for Psychoanalytic Studies). 

For information on the New York and New Jersey Soldiers' Project, please call: 212-242-3784

On Demographic Suicide Redux: Part II

On Monday, I began to tell the story of Gudrun, who was in her mid-20's when she sought treatment for her chronic difficulty in getting along with people.  She was a gifted, attractive German woman who often wore a Jewish star around her neck, had lived in Israel for a year when she was 18, and spent a fair amount of time contemplating a conversion to Judaism.  She discovered during her therapy that she had been named after her mother's childhood best friend, a Jewish girl named Giselle, who had disappeared into the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in the late 1930's, never to be seen or spoken of again. 

[In my post Monday, I failed to point out that Gudrun's naming by her mother had been in keeping with the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) tradition of using the first initial to denote a connection to a lost loved one.] 

Despite what Gudrun was able to learn about herself, self knowledge which went a long way toward helping her understand the ways in which she unconsciously provoked others to attack her, she was never able to find and maintain a suitable long term relationship.  This was puzzling since we both thought we understood much of what had interfered with her relationships in the past and she was very frequently courted by men who to all appearances were thoroughly appropriate.

Ultimately, we learned that there was an irreducible conflict that prevented Gudrun from ever finding the long term relationship she craved.

Even after many years of work, Gudrun could not fully appreciate the enormity of what her family had lived through and how they had dealt with their own roles in the events surrounding the Holocaust.  Although she was not a religious person and had had minimal religious training and teaching (in a Protestant denomination), she felt that the stain of the Holocaust on her family was, in effect, an original sin, for which she could never fully atone.  Where Christians felt that their "original sin" was redeemed by Christ's sacrifice, especially in the post-Holocaust highly secular world of post-war Europe, there was no equivalent redemption available.  It took a very long time for Gudrun to put into words her deeply held feelings that the shameful stain at her core could never be erased.

Christmas

To all my Christian friends and readers, may you have a Merry Christmas and may the message of Peace on Earth and Goodwill toward Men prevail in the new year.

On Demographic Suicide Redux

[On Thursday, December 26, I will be posting an important announcement about a new program being set up for Iraq Veterans and their families.  Please check here for details.]

This week I will be re-posting a series I wrote on Shame, Aggression, & Demographic Suicide, originally posted almost 2 years ago.  With the recent news that Mohammed is now the second most popular boy's name in England, the subject of Europe's demographic suicide is certainly topical.  In my series of posts I described part of the psychology of a young German woman whose guilt over her parents' generations atrocities led her to commit demographic suicide.   While the individual psychology of one woman is not directly applicable to a continent, I do believe her experience can offer some insight into the complicated and conflicted reactions of our European friends in our current parlous times.

Shame, Aggression, & Demographic Suicide: Part I

Early in my career, a woman, who I shall call Gudrun, came to me for treatment, under duress.  She was in an excellent job which seemed well suited to her but had been told by her boss that if she did not obtain Psychiatric treatment she was going to be fired.  She recognized that she did not get along well with people; in most of her relationships she ended up feeling and being mistreated.  There were a number of striking things about this woman, not least of which her beauty and intelligence.  She was German and had come to the United States in her mid-20's in order to obtain her graduate degree, and had decided to stay in New York because she didn't see much of a future for herself in Germany.

My initial impression was that this woman was very appealing, even beyond her obvious charm and intellect.  She was engaging, warm, able to become involved in a relatively intensive psychotherapy without any obvious difficulties in the area of emotional intimacy and openness, and I found myself wondering why she had been unable to ever have a long term relationship and why she evoked such powerful anger in her boss and co-workers.  As time went on, I noticed there were significant missing parts of her history.

She was born a little more than 10 years after the end of World War II.  Her father had been in the German army and after the war had been imprisoned in Stalin's gulag for several years before he was released and made his way home.  Her mother was a teenager during the war and had lived through the war in Berlin.  Her parents married when her father finally returned home after the war.   She had no siblings.  It took several months of therapy for both of us to recognize what was missing from her story:  She had no idea what her parents had experienced during the war.

The Reality and Dangers of AGW

On occasion I write about various aspects of the Anthropogenic Global Warming controversy.  I try to take a scientific approach to the discussion and am quite convinced that the proponents of an impending AGW catastrophe do not currently have the weight of the evidence on their side; nor is there a scientific consensus that "man-made global warming" is a crisis.  The effect of human derived CO2 on climate is uncertain, the computer models are so incomplete as to be nearly worthless, and the effects of solar output, interstellar dust and a host of other variables have not yet been well understood in their impact on climate.  Using the AGW theory and current short term climate changes to justify and dictate policy prescriptions is thus quite problematic.  At the moment, the greatest danger from climate change is not the potential of a few degrees of warming but rather the risk of well intentioned politicians and bureaucrats to curtail our freedoms in the name of saving the planet.

As promised, Jimmy J offers some nuanced perspective that is conspicuously absent from our MSM coverage of the problem:

It is always interesting to me that the "true believers" in AGW claim it is a cataclysmic crisis that must be attacked.......right now! Then when you ask them what to do it is always government regulation of transportation and government mandated alternative energy for electricity. And, oh yes, government enforced home energy conservation. They tell everyone that such measures will solve the problem.

I read an engineering report a few days back (can't find the link, so I'll be quoting from memory.) Anyway, the gist of the report was that if we are to slow or stop the CO2 build up without forcing the global population to go backward energy-wise, the world will have to:
1. Build 14 new nuclear power plants,
2. Build 44 new high efficiency coal fired plants,
3. Build the equivalent of Three Gorges hydroelectic capacity,
4. Convert 1,000,000 homes to all solar power,
5. Build 21 major wind or tidal farms,
EVERY YEAR for the next 40-50 years.

That gives some perspective on the scale of what will be necessary to satisfy the goals of the AGW proponents and keep satisfying global energy demand while fazing out old power sources. Is it even possible? It may be possible, but would require a massive, united effort by all nations. It would also require that the Greens allow nuclear plants, hydro-electric plants, and wind farms (Yes, Teddy, off the coast of Cape Cod) to be built.

Interesting Comments

On occassion TypePad acts up in incomprehensible ways.  For example, on more than one occassion, I have been unable to leave a comment on my own Blog.  David Bogner at Treppenwitz noted the same problem and discovered that TypePad was placing comments in the spam folder.  Following his lead I have discovered the same thing occuring here.  For future reference, if you attempt to post a comment and it never appears, send me an e-mail and I will check the comment spam folder to see if your comment was snared. 

Unfortunately, in the last week or so, two excellent comments were captured in the spam folder and both deserve to be read.  The first was from Joanne in repsone to the Sanity Squad Podcast on Guns; the second comment was from Jimmy J and will follow tomorrow.  (Note the clever way in which I induce you to check back tomorrow by mentioning Jimmy.) 

Here is Joanne's story, an instrcutive one from a confirmed New York Liberal:

I had two experiences that underline the point made in this Sanity Squad podcast about kinder, gentler "pacifist" people turning out to be clueless, ineffectual people when the chips are down. I live in an upscale "brownstone" neighborhood in

Brooklyn

, but I was mugged twice right in front of my apartment building, once in 2002 and again in 2004. Both times occurred at night, about 11 pm, as I was returning home.

I'm well left of center politically, but I couldn't help thinking of these incidents as I listened to your podcast. Specifically, I couldn't help thinking of the contrast between the two times.

THE FIRST TIME:

There were two young guys, one of whom held me down on the sidewalk while the other relieved me of my handbag. I saw that no violence was going to happen, so I took the calculated risk of yelling loudly, hoping that someone would hear me. Someone did. There was a couple across the street. The man chased the muggers down the block but they got away on a bus. He later said that he couldn't have challenged them directly anyway, as he had no police backup, but he did retrieve all my important things: credit cards, driver's license, etc, to the point where my losses caused me no great inconvenience.

While he chased the muggers, his girlfriend came over to me and comforted me. Their help and kind words lessened the material and emotional impact of the event. It turned out that my male helper lived on my street, but I had a hell of a time finding out the address. Someone in my building who knew him told me that he wanted no reward (I was going to send flowers addressed to the two of them), but I managed to wrangle an address and send a thank-you card.  Note that he wasn't a vigilante; he acted bravely but also intelligently. The point is that he and his girlfriend acted to help me. It turns out he was in the US Marines!!

THE SECOND TIME:

Option 6

In my last post, I quoted Hillel Halkin suggesting that if Israel's current options fail, it will be  time for Option 6.   I believe Option 6 is closer than people suspect.

Many agree that for the near term Israel is facing the most dangerous time in its history.  The next few years are likely to include an ongoing evolving existential threat from Iranian nuclear weapons coupled with emboldened and enhanced terror attacks from the North and South.  Israel has developed a successful approach to minimizing suicide bombers but has not yet perfected a tactical or strategic approach to the rockets, and eventuallythe missiles sure to be launched against its citizens from close to its borders.   Israel cannot win an extended war of attrition in the short run.  Its primary responses have been defensive (building a fence) with carefully directed offensive attacks targeting the leadership of the various terrorist groups aligned against it.  As discussed yesterday, widening the war, as much as it might be desired, with the goal of definitively ending the conflict, is an impossibility and unworkable, in any event.  Israel will retain the option of destroying their enemies in a nuclear holocaust, but would only use it in extremis, and even then, there are reasons to believe that no Israeli government would ever use the Sampson Option until too late to save the Jewish state, which means that, since the only possible rationale for the Samson Option would be a nuclear weapon exploding in Israel, MAD would out.  This would be small consolation for Israel and those who care about her.

The fence has worked quite well to separate the Israelis from the Palestinians, who are only very slowly beginning to show some self-reflection and take some minimal responsibility for their plight.  Ray Hanania  is an Arab journalist who describes the crippling tendency of his countrymen to nurture their shame and hatred:

Getting past 'normalization'

Imprisoned by a wall of ignorance constructed by their own foolish failure to see through the rhetoric and the hatred of the past to the reality of today, Palestinians have only one option: They can either start living in reality or they can disappear in the past.

Such articles are a start but he fact that it appears in the Jerusalem Post and will never be read by most Palestinians suggest that waiting for the Palestinians to become "peace partners" is a fool's errand.

At the same time, the wall can only be a partial approach to separation since the Palestinians have been nothing if not inventive in their approach to killing Jews.

The second leg of Israeli defense is described well in this morning's Jerusalem Post where Yaakov Katz lays out the rationale for targeted assassinations:

Can Israel Survive?

The near future for Israel is bleak.  Everyday rockets rain down on southern Israel from the Gaza strip; Sderot is partially abandoned and as the Gazan rockets gain in accuracy and distance, more and more Israelis will come within range.  This is not a stable situation and as Hillel Halkin suggests this morning, the Israeli options are almost universally poor.  None of the options are likely to actually stop the attacks, though his second option is the most likely in the near term:

2. Escalate the pressure. Attack Hamas installations, institutions, and leaders; respond to rocket and mortar attacks with air and artillery strikes that may result in larger numbers of civilian casualties on the Palestinian side; tighten the siege on Gaza by reducing or cutting off Israeli electricity to it, preventing the shipment into it of basic commodities and foodstuffs, etc.

The Israelis are facing not only a hostile, openly genocidal enemy on their south but they also face a hostile, openly genocidal enemy to their north (Hezbollah), northeast (Syria), and further east (Iran.)  At the same time they face a hostile international press and have almost no chance to even come close to a neutral battle space in the information war.  It is the information war that most limits Israel's responses, as well as the well-founded fear that widening the war would cause universal condemnation upon Israel if the world's oil supply were to be threatened (as it would be if Israel were to go after Damascus or Tehran as the source of the terror against them.)

As Hillel Halkin notes in his conclusion, after dismissing all the other options aas unworkable or too risky:

That leaves 2. And indeed, this is what we most likely will get in the months ahead: A slow and steady ratcheting up of military and economic pressure on the Gaza Strip with the prayer that nothing blows up too badly in Israel's face while this is being done. Will it stop the Kassams? Probably not, but it's worth a try. After that, it will be time to think of Option 6.

No nation can long survive constant attacks on its civilians with no ability to respond in a definitive way.  Since Israel can only respond in a definitive way (ie, with overwhelming force, enough to destroy the enemy's will and ability to carry on the war) to an existential threat, and cannot indefinitely survive a war of attrition with the Arab world, prospects seem bleak.