[Update: Note that several links have been added below the break.]
One of the most common defenses of childhood is externalization. It is not at all atypical for a child to react to a disappointing grade with the explanation that the teacher is unfair or needlessly rigorous. The fault is therefore not the child's perhaps less than stellar study habits or preference for TV and video games to study, but is rather the responsibility of the teacher, who treated the child most unfairly. A refinement of externalization is projection. In projection, a more immature and pathological defense, the child did poorly on the test because the teacher holds a particular animus for the child. "My teacher hates me and marked my test unfairly." When projection is transient and situational, it falls within the spectrum of "normal pathology"; ie, the typical neurotic reactions that we all have to one degree or another at one time or another. However, when the projection becomes fixed and codified, it takes on the force of a character defense; a person whose character is dominated by a particular pathological defense has a diagnosable Character Disorder. (The Character Disorder most associated with the use of projection is the Paranoid Character.) Finally, when the immature and pathological defenses predominate and reality testing fails, psychosis is the result; the person shows a complete break down in their ability to assess and deal with reality.
The individual who adopts projection as a characterological defense is a well known type. Typically, the person is a loner who is usually noted muttering to himself about the lazy/evil/nasty blacks/Jews/Arabs who hold him down. They believe that everyone not identified as supportive is a potential enemy who wishes them harm. Such an individual can be functional but is deeply suspicious, assumes everyone is trying to do to him what he wishes to do to others, and can, under the worst case scenario, decompensate in a dangerous fashion. Some cases of shooting sprees pertain to individuals who are paranoid characters and decide to redress their imagined grievances by finally acting on their quasi-delusional belief that others have it in for them.
For the individual who adopts a more specific, targeted projection, the outcome is more perilous. Here the enemy is identifiable and contains all the venom that the individual cannot tolerate recognizing within himself. Further, the assigned enemy becomes the explanation for all of the person's failings. The dynamic takes several steps:
1) The person first experiences a failure which threatens his self esteem. (This could be anything from a romantic or social rejection, to a school or job failure, or any other experience which is felt as a failure. Often the failure reflects the intersection of the person's constitutional limitations with their nascent illness.)
2) They react to the attack on their self esteem with denial of responsibility in order to protect their fragile self esteem. (I am doing a great job at work; my boss unfairly gave me a poor report.)
3) The externalization is inadequate to preserve self esteem and the person resorts to defensive anger in order to protect themselves against despair. (I hate my boss for hurting me so much.)
4) The hate and anger is disavowed and assigned [projected] onto the other. (I am a good person; I am peaceful and not hateful. It isn't that I am over my head at work but it is my boos who is jealous of me and has it in for me. In fact, I suddenly realize, it is my boss who is the hater; he hates me; he is evil!)
Up until now there are many choices for t e person to take. The less impaired, more mature person can look in the mirror, admit that they did not do a good job and begin to either rebuild their credibility at work or find another job. The slightly less mature person with more tender self esteem may alternatively simply find another job in a tacit, unadmitted acknowledgement that he has some responsibility for his failures. In such cases, the projection is transient and allows the person to tolerate their failures and ultimately take some actions to change how they operate. [Note that this does not apply to the person who is unfairly stigmatized by a boss who may be threatened by him; how to differentiate the situations may not always be obvious.]
For the individual who cannot tolerate the painful diminution of self esteem that accompanies any failure and is unable to use the defensive projection as a bridge to a more mature response, the great danger is that the projection will become rigid and codified.
Step 5 then is the crystallization of a paranoid persecutory delusion: "My boss is an evil man who wants to do me harm. He thwarts my every effort to do good. He must be stopped." (This is often accompanied by a grandiose fantasy, which can become a delusion in its own right, that the person has an important job, granted by G-d for instance, to save the world.)
With repeated failures the now overtly paranoid person finds the conflict between their needs to preserve self esteem and their ongoing failures so powerful that even the projection fails. The delusion escalates. Now not only is the boss evil and actively conspiring against the person but his evil influence is spreading. He is now the reason the person's marriage failed; he is the reason the person is in debt and losing his house. The boss is now the explanation for all of his problems in life. The boss must be stopped before he does even more damage. In self-defense the boss must be killed.
In the setting of the most serious psychotic illnesses, such thinking rarely leads to violence. Such individuals are so impaired by their illness that they cannot organize themselves enough for planning violence, yet the very same dynamic, adopted by a culture or society, can lead to the worst kinds of violence and genocide. Simply exchange Israel and the Jews for the boss in my example above and you will understand the dynamic pervading the Middle East at this time.
The question of whether or not Iran can be treated as an opponent with whom to work out a modus vivendi versus an enemy who must be fought revolves around an assessment of whether or not they are trapped in the paranoid projective dynamic. Roger Cohen makes the case for those who desire nothing more than talk:
... the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime — with no sense of its limitations — so frenziedly anti-Semitic that it would accept inevitable nuclear annihilation if it could destroy Israel first.
The presence of these Jews [the 25,000 remianing Iranian Jews-SW] undermines that vision. It blunts the hawks’ case; hence the rage.
I think pragmatism lies at the core of the revolution’s survival. It led to cooperation with Israel in cold-war days; it ended the Iraq war; it averted an invasion of Afghanistan in 1998 after Iranian diplomats were murdered; it brought post-9/11 cooperation with America on Afghanistan; it explains the ebb and flow of liberalization since 1979; and it makes sense of the Jewish presence.
Pragmatism is also one way of looking at Iran’s nuclear program. A state facing a nuclear-armed Israel and Pakistan, American invasions in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and noting North Korea’s immunity from assault, might reasonably conclude that preserving the revolution requires nuclear resolve.
What’s required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.
Although Roger Cohen's contention that those who are concerned about Iran and see it as an enemy state are in a rage because the presence of 25,000 Jews somehow blunts their presumably war-like vision reads more as a projection of his own than anything supported by his article, that is the least inane of his comments. The last line I quote from his article contains such a self-contradictory Mobius Strip of logic as to defy sense. Those who propose to engage in chat with the Iranians have already effectively removed military force from the equation. If the Iranians believe that a nuclear capability is necessary for their survival, as they have announced and as Cohen accepts, then without the threat of force what could we possibly offer them to get them to stop their program? Beyond that, Cohen is rather sanguine about the Iranian's potential for mischief. To his way of thinking, they are rational actors, unaffected by their anti-Semitism. Yet their entire ideology contains at or near its core, anti-Semitic paranoia of the kind that would be recognizable by any emergency room Psychiatrist encountering a delusional paranoid patient who is absolutely convinced that the Jews control the world and are actively working against them.
What Cohen and his apologists fail to understand is that anti-Semitism is not a static construct. Once adopted as an explanatory and exculpatory structure, anti-Semitism tends to spread and deepen in proportion to the travails of the larger society which incubates it. As Iran becomes more and more stressed, the virulence of their anti-Semitism has to increase (as it has historically.) To believe that for the Iranians their anti-Semitism is mere rhetoric, perhaps at worst an opportunistic appeal for legitimacy, is to misunderstand the psychology behind such delusional systems. The Iranians can no more forsake their anti-Semitism than they could forsake Islam. The two are inseparable.
It is probable that once Iran has a nuclear arsenal they will not immediately attack Israel. More likely they will use their nuclear confidence to escalate their war of legitimacy and terror against Israel, with the cowardly enabling of the Europeans and the active participation of the Russians, who would never want to miss an opportunity to slander and attack the Jewish state. However, since their anti-Semitism would remain a central motivator, that leaves two unacceptable outcomes. If Iran gains, by virtue of their nuclear program, great power status and continues to wage war on Israel, at some point it will either become more powerful than Israel (unlikely, but in 20 years, with an enervated America and a passive and fearful Europe leaving Israel with no friends, such an outcome is a distinct possibility) or Iran under the twin weights of a dysfunctional Islam and their delusional externalization and projection will become an increasingly failed society, with the powers of the Mullahs at risk. In such an eventuality, the case for the Iranians to "use it or lose it" (and the losing it would refer to their country and their ideology) would impel them to use their bombs in one last gasp attempt to bring on the desired Apocalypse and hasten the return of the 12th Imam. Only a long term stable balance of terror could avoid the use of an Iranian bomb and that returns us to the question of the rationality and deterrability of the Iranians. Roger Cohen may feel confident in advising the Israelis to "stop worrying and learn to love the bomb" but I doubt any Israeli Prime Minister who has even a minimal knowledge of history would share his optimism.
[Please note that all of this applies equally well to the case of the Palestinians and many of the world's failed Muslim nations. For example, Egypt's official and unofficial anti-Semitism has been accelerating in proportion to the government's perceived insecurity and failed governance. The succession struggle after the death of Mubarak is likely to release intense anti-Semitism and may well threaten the cold peace between Israel and Egypt. Anti-Semitism has never resolved for a culture peacefully once it has been adopted as a core ideological component.]
It is easy for people like Roger Cohen, with their lack of understanding of psychology, to recommend Israel bet its existence on the behavior of anti-Semites; it would be suicidal for Israel to agree to the existential wager.
Jeffrey Goldberg has a couple of short takes on Roger Cohen that are worth reading, including this:
Roger Cohen doesn't know what would happen if the situation were reversed and Hamas and Hezbollah had military superiority over Israel. The mind reels.
Note also Paul Rivlin's comments on the economic dysfunction of the Arab world that provides the fuel that keeps the anti-Semitic fires burning.
Finally, Elder of Ziyon, in his own succinct way, summarizes Cohen's problem with reality:
When you look at things from the perspective of a criminal, everything can be justified as "pragmatic." Most people don't do insane things in a vacuum; in their own worldview, things make sense. The problem is when their worldview is itself insane.
Read them all.
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