ShrinkWrapped

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part IV

In Part I of this series I quoted Edward Rothstein's article, A Hatred That Resists Exorcism, and empathized two points which supported the idea that anti-Semitism is the quintessential paranoid structure..

… traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot.

Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive.

In Part II and Part III I told the story of Mr. A, an 18 year old who suffered his first psychotic episode shortly after graduating from high school.

During the prodrome to his overt delusional psychosis and eventual hospitalization Mr. A had suffered from an increasingly dysfunctional cognitive apparatus.  In other words, his illness had attacked his ability to reason, remember, make inferences, in short to do all those things we take for granted.  He was indeed "losing his mind" as his ability to reason eroded.  He lost the ability to succeed at school, became estranged from the people near him, and became unemployable for any but those jobs which require the minimal cognitive function.  Eventually, even sheltered workshop employment became impossible for Mr. A.  During the prodrome of his illness, he had the wherewithal to subconsciously or unconsciously recognize his escalating impairment.  His paranoid delusions were an emergency measure invoked by his mind to protect itself from his ultimate deterioration and from the knowledge of the ongoing deterioration.

In Paranoia and Reason I described how a paranoid delusion can protect a patient temporarily from the terrible and terrifying knowledge that they have become seriously mentally ill: [Emphasis added]

Paranoia has a number of virtues to offer a frightened individual who secretly worries he is worthless.  Consider a hypothetical Paranoid Schizophrenic patient, admitted to the hospital with paranoid delusions that the FBI, CIA, and Mafia are out to get them.

Their illness, in reality, has estranged them from their family, made it impossible for them to maintain long term relationships or productive employment, often leaving them prone to drug and alcohol abuse, frequently victimized on the streets, in general with a bleak future outlook. A person who suffers the devastation of Schizophrenia, with rare exceptions, is emotionally and cognitively crippled. The delusion that they are being followed by the FBI suggests many compensatory attributes. They are never alone (there are always people thinking about them), they are clearly extremely important (the FBI doesn't waste time following people who are inconsequential) and often, they have grandiose fantasies that they are the key to world peace, or some other such problem. We admit them to the hospital, give them powerful medications to help them return to more appropriate reality testing, and often, have to deal with a severe, sometimes dangerous, condition referred to as a Post-psychotic Depression. Giving up their position of power and importance, and facing the bleakness of their lives is terribly distressing; for this reason suicide is a significant risk in young patients who recover from a first psychotic episode.

Consider what Mr. A's paranoia did for him.  It protected his self esteem in the ways listed above but it also performed other functions.  At the core of paranoia, including "normal" or neurotic paranoia, transient states that all of us suffer from at various times in our lives and development, is the defense of projection.  In projection, unacceptable impulses are disavowed and imagined to exist within another person.  In a fragile individual, rage and hatred can be destabilizing.  (We are all familiar with how our cognitive functioning deteriorates when we are most angry or frustrated or sad; intense affects interfere with optimal condition.)  The affects are disowned by disowning the impulses that evoke the affects.   The unconscious inner dialogue takes a specific form:

1) I do not hate him; I do not hate anyone.
2) I do not want to hurt him; such impulses are unacceptable.
3) The anger must be coming from him; he wants to hurt me.
4) I am in danger and need to defend myself.

Step 3 is the defense of projection.  Again, even a great many "normal" people (whatever that might mean) will under the right kinds of stress resort to projection.  The defense is not diagnostic of Schizophrenia or a Character Disorder.  The key point is that it is a pathological defense which attempts to deny an unacceptable aspect of reality and, as such, it can never work well for long; reality always eventually wins.

By using projection Mr. A could disavow his own sexual confusion (the voices calling him gay were the result of his own internal conflicts over sexuality) as well as his dawning awareness of the mental calamity that was befalling him.  It could never work for long but did give him a few months, perhaps a year, where he could maintain the fiction that there was nothing wrong with him.  Eventually the emergency measures put into action by his mind failed, as they inevitably must.

In a person who did not have the constitutional predisposition to psychosis, the same process would lead to a significantly different outcome.  A non-Schizophrenic who is unable to tolerate his own impulses and affects (perhaps murderous feelings toward minorities such as Jews or Blacks) could disown his hatred and project upon those he unconsciously hates.  In that case he may be a thoroughly unpleasant, vaguely paranoid individual, but within, for instance, the White Power community he would find kindred souls who would assure him that his beliefs, that the Blacks and Jews want to control/enslave/use him, were correct.  Instead of being a complete loser, he would have some status in his community for having seen through the lies that the minorities foist upon people and his unacceptable impulses would be successfully repudiated and disowned even as he is able to express his hatred in ways acceptable to his own mind and community.  In the West such belief would consign him to the margins but would preserve his self esteem and status.

The greater problem occurs when an entire culture or society, under great duress, follows a similar pathway.  That will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Shaping the "News"

Honor killings, where a young woman is murdered by her family in order to restore the family's Honor is much in the news these days.  The New York Times has finally recognized the trend and has a two page article on its front page describing an Honor killing in India:

In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine

When Nirupama Pathak left this remote mining region for graduate school in New Delhi, she seemed to be leaving the old India for the new. Her parents paid her tuition and did not resist when she wanted to choose her own career. But choosing a husband was another matter.

Her family was Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and when Ms. Pathak, 22, announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, her family began pressing her to change her mind. They warned of social ostracism and accused her of defiling their religion.

Oh, so it is the Hindu caste system that is implicated in Honor killings?  If you read the NY Times for news, you will look in vain for articles about Honor killings in the Muslim world or in the Muslim immigrant communities in the West.  If you get your news from the blogosphere, you will find countless links to articles about the epidemic of Honor killings in Islam.

Western media and too many of the western leaders, are cowards who are desperate to remain unaware of their cowardice.  They know that to criticize Indian Brahmins (or their perennial favorite targets, the Israelis) is to pontificate without risk.  They might elicit a cross word and a strongly worded letter to the editor, which may or may not be printed.  They also know, but do not admit, that the very same article written about Muslim Honor killings leads to Fatwas and credible death threats.  In this way, day by day, political Islam strengthens, and Western Civilization weakens.

Richard Landes has an excellent piece at Pajamas Media descrinign the cost such surrender takes upon our Civilization:

The Hidden Costs of Jew-Baiting in England

Daniel Eilon, an English barrister, explained to me one of the mechanisms. It isn’t real anti-Semitism. In fact, most of the stuff that comes out against Israel is intellectually hopeless — phony narratives based on fantasy “facts.” This is really just good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. It’s saying things in all righteous innocence that you know will hurt the Jews to whom you address the criticism. The problem for the Brits (and the Europeans in general), he pointed out, is that historically, there’s never been a particularly high price to pay for Jew-baiting. Now there is.

What my friend referred to with this last remark is lucidly analyzed by Robin Shepherd in his recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel. The elephant in the room, of course, is radical Islam — the people who interpret being “chosen” by Allah as a charter to dominate the world and submit everyone, willingly or not, to Islam. They’re the people no one dares bait; and they’re the folks who take full advantage of every deference to press for more. Daily aggressions from violent gangs constantly expand the territories where the Queen’s writ does not run. In tempo with the retreat of British law and enforcement, Sharia advances from internal community affairs (explicitly on the model of Jewish religious courts) towards the policing of community boundaries and claims on the state for special treatment. The British — like so many other Western nations –mainstream the extremists and marginalize the moderates. As Nick Cohen put it: “The world faces a psychotic movement and won’t admit it to themselves.”

Read it all and weep.

And if you don't think it is happening here, think again.  We see the exact same structure, of surrender to thugs while pretending to a courageous "taking it to the man" in our own DoJ's corruption of the rule of law.

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part III

In Part I of this series I quoted Edward Rothstein's article, A Hatred That Resists Exorcism, and empathized two points which supported the idea that anti-Semitism is the quintessential paranoid structure..

… traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot.

Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive.

InPart II I began to tell the story of Mr. A, an 18 year old who suffered his first psychotic episode shortly after graduating from high school.

The story continues:

When Mr. A started to hear voices he first worried that he was going crazy, that he was losing his mind. He was terrified. His world had become increasingly confusing and tumultuous. He was getting signals at an increasing rate. Words and numbers on billboards, on the sides of buses, mentioned on TV, all had arcane meanings known only to him, yet despite his “insight” he could not make sense out of what he was experiencing. Once the voices started, often accusing him of being stupid and a failure, or being gay, he felt under siege. He began to despair of ever figuring out what it all meant. He failed two of his courses in his senior year because he could no longer study and his answers on tests had become increasingly idiosyncratic and unappreciated by his teachers. (Despite his failures, he was able to graduate having been a good student prior to his senior year and having accrued enough credits for a diploma.)

For the next two months, Mr. A's life was a living hell. When he left his apartment he would be bombarded with signals; the voices would scream at him with increasing volume and ferocity. He was a fagot; he was worthless; he should just kill himself. Even when he stayed in his room the voices found a way to enter his hitherto safe space. He felt increasingly threatened. He couldn't understand why he was singled out or what was wanted of him but began to fear that an organized group was behind the attacks. He had never been a religious person but began to pray. He began to feel that he could understand the persecution that Jesus must have felt.

Mr. A continued in this terrible state for two months. He lost weight; he couldn't sleep.

One day, while during a brief respite form the voice, he passed a Synagogue in his neighborhood. He was startled to hear the voices return with great intensity, disparaging him and telling him he was nothing. He suddenly realized that only the Jews could be so sophisticated and so evil as to implant a device in his head by which to plague him with their voices. It was that Jewish Doctor he had seen for his senior year physical who must have inserted the device into his brain during the exam! Everything began to make sense except for one detail. Why would the Jews single him out for torment?

For the next few weeks he remained under siege, but no longer in quite so much turmoil.  He still didn't have all the answers but knew he was important and exactly who was persecuting him.  He remined puzzled why he had been chosen by the Jews but was convinced he would find the answer.  And then, one day the scales fell from his eyes and everything fell into place.

He was walking, in an agitated state, at 2 AM, when he passed a Catholic Church in his neighborhood. Suddenly, a light beamed down from the steeple, illuminating him in a warm, loving glow. A voice spoke and told him that he was being tested, that he was the embodiment of Jesus Christ, that many people would reject him and try to stop him, but that his mission was to bring healing to the world, to bring peace to mankind. He could not allow “them” to stop him, but they would try. Suddenly, everything became clear. He looked up and saw a sign proclaiming “we are number 1”. This not only meant that he was Christ but that he must go to the “first place.” But where was that? The most important place? A bus with the number 45 in its identification answered his question and directed him to 45^th Street and 1^st Avenue; of course, he needed to get to the UN! He had to get to Manhattan. He would need to walk, realizing that if he took the subway, he could be more easily stopped. He ran home and got his katana; he would need protection. He began to walk with a new purpose, sure of himself, no longer worried about losing his mind or being crazy. He also finally, put two and two together:

The Jews controlled the banks and the newspapers; they had killed Christ once and were trying to stop his return because they knew he could expose them and destroy them.

When the police noticed a disheveled man walking down the street in the middle of the night carrying a sword, they intervened, luckily with no harm to anyone involved and brought Mr. A to the hospital.

Once Mr. A began to respond to the powerful anti-psychotics which he was given, there was a marked change in his demeanor. He had come in quite agitated, then had become catatonic, immobilized by the struggle taking place within him. (He told me some time later that when he was Catatonic, he had realized that he had the power to create miracles but wasn't sure how to safely wield his power. He could cause hurricanes to destroy his enemies but if he made the wrong move he would lose control of the hurricanes and kill good people, too. His immobility was an effort to avoid making a disastrous, “wrong” move.) Once his catatonia resolved, he had shown himself to be a bright, clever young man, seemingly sure of himself, confident and unwilling to reveal what was on his mind. This was a period in which he remained convinced he was the Second Coming and knew he needed to hide the fact. As his illness decreased its hold on him, there was marked change in his mood. He became profoundly depressed and at one point became overtly suicidal. He told me that he understood he had as serious illness and that it meant his life was ruined. How could he ever find happiness if he was so impaired. He was going to end up homeless, on the streets, like the bums he saw in his neighborhood who spent all day muttering to themselves and glaring at passers-by. His mind was broken; how could ever be normal?

Mr. A recovered from his initial episode, though never recovered his full functioning. Several years later he was re-admitted to the hospital where I was then an attending. By that time he had already been through the recurrent cycle of illness, hospitalization with medication, recovery, cessation of medication (on his own) and recurrence on several occasions. He was quite deteriorated and did not do well in the long term. The medications available in the 1980s were inferior to those that are available now (one reason patients often stopped them on their own) and he suffered from the worst kind of progressively deteriorating Schizophrenia, the kind that Emil Kraepelin called Dememtia Praecox, ie Premature Dementia, later renamed by Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term Schizophrenia.

Demographics & Narcissism Redux

In  Part III of my series on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West I argued that the confluence of material abundance and the decrease in childhood mortality post-WWII led to smaller families in which each individual child was imbued with enhanced parental emotional investment.  In effect, the baby boomer generation were raised under conditions that tended to accentuate narcissistic character traits.  The result is that the baby boomers are the most narcissistically involved generation in our history:

[Prior to the modern era] Most children were not the center of their parent's universe in their earliest years, usually having to share their parents attention with multiple siblings; they had to learn to share at an early age.  Furthermore, children who enter a world in which deprivation and loss is an all too real threat have minimal opportunity to develop over-abundant narcissistic expectations; no parent could afford too much of an emotional investment in a single child when the risk of losing children approached 50% before age 5:

....

After World War II, with the widespread use of antibiotics and vaccines, child mortality declined to <2%. The baby boomer generation became the first generation in the history of man which was born into a world in which the vast majority could be confidently expected to reach adulthood. After the horrendous blood letting of WWII, newly returned GI's and the women who had been left behind formed families at record paces, moved to the suburbs, and created a now (retrospectively) idealized life style which included ever increasing availability of material goods and an ever decreasing risk of the natural ills that man had always been subject to. Because there was less need to have many children in order to support one's old age (Social Security had an important part in this, as did the movement off the farms) and the expectation was that all the children would survive and thrive, the parents were able to make a much greater investment, emotionally and financially, in their fewer children. Children with few siblings were much more likely to remain the center of their parents universe for extended periods of time. Further, the natural inclination of all parents who love their children to protect them from the vicissitudes of life lead to parents raising children who had very little first hand experience of deprivation or disappointment. The extended time and the increased intensity of the child's position as center of the universe led to many baby boomers developing narcissistic pathology.

History is now repeating itself: (Free registration required)

China’s little emperors demand their due

China’s youth can get a bad press. In most accounts, they are the “Little Emperors” or the “Me Generation”, the spoilt and apolitical offspring of one-child families who are interested in fast cars, video games and designer goods but little else. At the main Shanghai store of Louis Vuitton there is a queue to get in at weekends – young women wait patiently in the rope line, as if they were trying to get into the hottest new LA club.

Yet the Me Generation is beginning to show its teeth. Simmering discontent about soaring house prices and the recent wave of strikes at car plants and other factoriesboth speak of the rising and sometimes frustrated expectations of younger Chinese, who want more from their lives than their parents could dream of. It is a phenomenon that could have all sorts of consequences for China’s future.

There are lots of good explanations for the strikes of the past two months, including low pay and a demographic shift that is reducing the number of young people entering the workforce. But there is also a generational shift at play. Chinese often talk about their capacity to chi ku, or “eat bitterness”, which helps explain their resilience amid the chaos and privations of the past century. But the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s has grown up among much wider prosperity, even in poor parts of the countryside.

Narcissists do not "eat bitterness" or easily sacrifice for the next generation.  Read the whole thing.

The implications of this article are many and fascinating.  Currently fashionable thinking has it that China will inevitably become a rival of the United States in the international arena.  Some of their behavior, as interpreted by those who we pay to be paranoid, suggests that they are going to be military rivals.  Support for this point of view include their accelerating military modernization and exponential increases in their defense budget (which is still dwarfed by the US defense budget) and the demographic picture of a large highly nationalistic country with a large surplus of males.  One school of thought has it that any country with a surplus of males who have no acceptable avenue by which to gain status and mates is a country that will be prone to war-like behavior.  This was probably true at one time and may still be true in some places, but large scale wars involving modern high tech armies are unlikely to occur ever again, thanks to the development of nuclear weapons making such affairs an existential risk for the contenders.

[Please note that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been relatively small scale affairs if measured by the number of men under arms and the casualty counts; they are counterinsurgencies as opposed to wars between armies.  In terms of costs, there is a complicated relationship between the cost of war and the number of casualties.  The relationship is not linear but costs tend to increase with a commensurate decrease in casualties; it is expensive to wage war without costing too many lives.]

Narcissists do not go to war unless they either feel personally threatened or are convinced they can easily win without too much pain.  Our invasion of Iraq was sold in exactly those terms and one of the reasons it became such a focus of opposition by the Democrats is that, in reality, it failed on both counts. 

China will soon be the home to many millions of grown-up "Little Emperors" who will be loathe to risk their own well being in wars that are increasingly recognized as unceccesary and risky.  This does not mean they will not be our rivals and that occasionally our interests will not clash, sometimes via proxies.  However, it does mean that with a moderately intelligent policy toward China, in which we do not rise to the bait whenever it is dangled in front of us while preserving a clear sense of our own interests, conflict between the United States and China is much less likely than a long term mutually beneficial economic integration.  China will almost inevitably become more free and more transparent, since their economic well being will depend upon it, and we will find ourselves with a chance to establish an evolving global rule set that benefits all those who accept the membership rules of the modern world. 

In Demographics & Narcissism I opened my discussion with two contrasting quotes that defined and bracketed the evolution of the 1960's:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy - January 20th 1961

Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me.

"Rejoyce" from After Bathing at Baxters Jefferson Airplane, 1967

Time will tell but just as American youth became unwilling to "ask what you can do for your country" I suspect the Narcissistic "Little Emperor" generation in China will find itself unwilling to "give his arm to no gold star mother's farm."

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part II

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part I

In Part I of this series I quoted Edward Rothstein's article, A Hatred That Resists Exorcism, and empathized two points.

… traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot.

Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive.

Anti-Semitism is the quintessential paranoid structure. It is an emergency procedure invoked by a deteriorating mind to serve a number of psychological purposes that protect the anti-Semite's mental apparatus from further decompensation. I will present a brief vignette from a patient's history and show how the paranoid structure works and then will attempt to find elements that can be illuminate aspects of anti-Semitism as a structure that is invoked in an emergency by a failing, deteriorating society to preserve its integrity.

I first met Mr. A during my Residency in Psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He was 18 years old at the time and we met in the emergency room of a large city hospital. He had been brought in by the New York City police because he was threatening passers-by on the street with a martial arts sword. He was in a violently agitated state, threatening to kill the staff, the police, myself; all of us were “in on it” and when queried he replied that we knew exactly what was going on and shouldn't play games with him. His agitation was so great that he needed to be heavily medicated to sedate him and prevent him from harming himself or anyone else in the emergency room. No further history or information was available. The list of potential diagnoses included drug related psychosis and blood was drawn for toxicology (which was negative.) By the next morning he had become calmer but was deeply suspicious and would not talk to anyone. He appeared to be responding to idiosyncratic perceptions and would occasionally be heard mumbling under his breath in a threatening tone. His family was contacted and his parents rushed to the hospital, relieved that they knew where their son was but worried that he was in the Psychiatric ward. They revealed that he had been having some evident difficulty in the preceding months. He had recently just barely graduated high school. During his senior year his behavior had changed. His grades deteriorated and he spent more and more time locked in his room. He stopped his karate training, something he had been involved in since he was 12. His parents were concerned but thought it was no more than a slightly exaggerated version of the teen angst that was so common in their community. He became increasingly sullen and could not be engaged in any but the most superficial conversation. They did wonder if he was getting into drugs but on the rare occasion he left the house they had looked through his belongings and could find no evidence of drugs or paraphernalia. In the week preceding the incident that led to his hospitalization, he had not left his room and could be hurt muttering and pacing in the middle of the night. The night of the hospitalization he had left home without a word sometime after midnight (while his parents were asleep) and his parents were alarmed to find that hie was gone and had taken his ceremonial katana with him.

For the next several days Mr. A was effectively mute. He could not be interviewed, was periodically agitated, often requiring multiple aides to assist in holding him down so he could be put into restraints and medicated. It was a harrowing time. On day 3 he was found in the “quiet room” in a rigid posture, unresponsive. He exhibited the classic “waxy flexibility” seen in Catatonic Schizophrenia. (If we This kind of Catatonia is rarely seen and is a dangerous development. Catatonic patients, while in that state, do not eat or drink readily, and they have a tendency to precipitously emerge from their apparent stupor in a state of intense excitement and aggression. The staff debated whether or not to continue with increasing doses of powerful anti-psychotic medicines or consider ECT (Electro-Convulsive Treatments) which are an established treatment for breaking the hold of a catatonic state. We decided to continue the more conservative course for a few more days but if his catatonia did not lift, we would start a course of ECT. 

On day 4 his Catatonia lifted. He was able to begin to talk about his recent experiences. He revealed over the course of the next few weeks and months a not uncommon story of a Schizophrenic first break. Starting almost one year prior to his hospitalization Mr. A had begun to have periods of confusion and racing thoughts. He began to have increasing difficulty understanding passages in books he was reading and became convinced there were hidden messages in the text that he needed to decipher. At times he had the eerie feeling that newscasters on his TV were talking directly to him and trying to get him to understand that there was an important hidden text to what they were saying. On the streets when he saw numbers they began to take on greater meanings known only to him. He spent hours each night trying to make sense of the signals he was receiving. The signals increased in frequency such that he was seeing them everywhere. On one occasion he tried to share his evolving insight with a friend, but when his friend told him “that's nuts” he realized that only he could be privy to this new understanding. He withdrew from his friends and began to wonder if he was on the verge of uncovering something much greater than himself. His school work suffered, in part because his idiosyncratic reading of test questions were misunderstood by his teachers, who clearly could not comprehend his reasoning and were unaware of the momentous developments going on around him.

Two months prior to his hospitalization a change took place that shook Mr. A to his core; he began to hear voices telling him he was a failure, that he was gay, and that he should kill himself.

To be continued...

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part I

As the demonization and delegitimization of Israel continues apace, it is worth wondering Why now?  Why is antisemitism approaching and surpassing the evil of the Nazi era at this particular point in time?  After all, the Jews have their own state, have effectively been erased from most of their traditional homes in Europe and throughout the Middle East, and despite being surrounded by hostile neighbors has offered tremendous benefits to the world while behaving in a manner that is almost unique in their realitons with thier foes.  No one expects the Russians to grant rights to the Chechens, or the Chinese to be especially solicitous of the well being of the Uighars; to suggest that the Persians offer full rights to non-Persians and non-Muslims, or that Saudi Arabia tolerate the most minimal of freedoms for non-Muslims is risible.  Only the Western powers, led by the United States, approach Israel's sensitivity to non-combatant casualties and when a Western nation mistakenly kills women and children with drone or mortar attacks, the conscience of the world barely registers the event. 

So, again, why is anti-Semitism now being revived, not only in the Arab/Muslim world, but in Europe, South America, and on the far Left in America, as well?

The first important point is that anti-Semitism is a protean disorder. Edward Rothstein has reviewed a number of the recent publications detailing the history and present course of anti-Semitism and makes some cogent points: [HT: Yaacov Lozowick]

A Hatred That Resists Exorcism

Is there anything left to be said about anti-Semitism? By now surely the outline is clear: how hatred of Jews grew out of early Christianity’s attempts to supplant Judaism; how the demonization of Jews in the Middle Ages turned violent; how the hatred was given its name by a 19th-century German journalist; and how it reached cataclysmic fulfillment in the Holocaust. 

There are other landmarks: the expulsion of the Jews from England, Spain and Portugal; intermittent massacres in Muslim lands; the construction of European ghettos; the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe; the Dreyfus Affair; the Nazification of Europe; Stalin’s purges and show trials.

And then, of course, there are the triumphs that act as a kind of remonstrance: the Enlightenment success of Jews in secular European societies, the myriad opportunities in the United States, the birth of modern Hebrew, and, after a half-century of settlement, land purchases and institution building, the creation of Israel, whose founding principles incorporated both democratic and Judaic ideals.

... 

Surely this attention is a bit overwrought? Aren’t we in an age that must be “post” all such sentiments — postmodern, post-Auschwitz and post-anti-Semitic? Haven’t many anti-Semitic doctrines (or their consequences) been largely overturned? How many people today would advocate ghettos or extermination? Who still believes that Jews bake Christian children’s blood into matzo? Many countries have forbidden hate speech; hasn’t that enforced a decorous social tact? And while it is difficult to ignore the vulgar hatreds expressed by Muslim protestors or in the newspapers of the Arab world or even among Westerners, aren’t those just frustrated expressions of justifiable political grievances?

Besides, anti-Semitism, we now understand, is a form of racism. Like all forms of group hatred, it is subject to reform and to the modern cure of sensitivity training. We learn about such hatreds in order to exorcise them. It seems every museum exhibition, textbook and children’s story about racism provides a similar moral prescription: tolerance.

So isn’t there something a little tasteless about bringing up anti-Semitism all the time, let alone drumming its theme page after page? Sure, racism may still flourish, but given the modern success of Jews, hasn’t this particular form of it become an anomaly? Or worse, hasn’t the term become a manipulative attempt to deflect judgment? As is often pointed out, criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic any more than criticism of any particular Jew is.

The article is well worth reading in full.  There are two points I want to emphasize.  The first point is that anti-Semitism has the structure of a paranoid delusion: [All Emphases mine-SW] 

While anti-Semitism has tapped into racial hatreds in modern times, Mr. Julius and Mr. Wistrich highlight its traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot. Anti-Semitism isn’t just a matter of asserting unpleasant or reprehensible attributes. It sees the Jew as an antinomian threat, overturning all ethical laws. The Jew works in secret, creating invisible alliances, pulling elaborate strings, undermining society’s foundations. This is why the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has found such a fertile international ground. That 19th-century document purports to be the secret minutes of such a plotting ensemble of Jews. It is the counterfeit confirmation of a long-held belief.

The second point is that anti-Semitism organizes inchoate thoughts, perceptions, and feelings into a structure that makes sense:

Anti-Semitism is a metaphysical passion, not a materialist one. It doesn't even require a Jewish presence (as many anti-Semitic societies with Jews have proven). One reason anti-Semites have been so obsessed with the issue of finance in the modern world is that money is the circulatory system of capitalist society. It is mysterious, manipulable: the Jew’s perfect instrument. The Jew, first seen as a theological spoiler, becomes a metaphysical and monetary spoiler. The medieval image of the Jew was related to the vampire, Mr. Julius shows; the modern anti-Semitic vision sees the Jew as a guzzler of a society’s lifeblood.

This amplifies virulence as well: the Jew, for the anti-Semite, is not just a danger, but the greatest danger exerting the greatest powers. In current paradoxical parlance, the Jew is, in essence, a Nazi. The Jew does not just devour a Christian child’s blood, but the blood of all innocent children, and more completely, the blood of all innocents.

Is any evidence needed? Appearances are irrelevant; argument is illusion. What use is visible fact when the power of the Jew is in the web woven below the surface? Jewish autonomy is itself evidence of Jewish threat. Moreover, confrontation requires courage. Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive. This is precisely how the Nazis portrayed it. It is precisely how Islamist ideology does as well, evident, for example, in the principles and founding documents of Hamas and Hezbollah.

These two points are worth amplifying and exploring.  I will first discuss how paranoid delusions work in the mind of a disturbed individual and then will attempt to use that analogue to illuminate some of the issues that emerge from such an understanding.  In so doing I hope to be able to address the questions of Why now? and What is to be done?

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
   Button Gwinnett
   Lyman Hall
   George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
   William Hooper
   Joseph Hewes
   John Penn
South Carolina:
   Edward Rutledge
   Thomas Heyward, Jr.
   Thomas Lynch, Jr.
   Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
   Robert Morris
   Benjamin Rush
   Benjamin Franklin
   John Morton
   George Clymer
   James Smith
   George Taylor
   James Wilson
   George Ross
Delaware:
   Caesar Rodney
   George Read
   Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
   William Floyd
   Philip Livingston
   Francis Lewis
   Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
   Richard Stockton
   John Witherspoon
   Francis Hopkinson
   John Hart
   Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
   Josiah Bartlett
   William Whipple
Massachusetts:
   Samuel Adams
   John Adams
   Robert Treat Paine
   Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
   Stephen Hopkins
   William Ellery
Connecticut:
   Roger Sherman
   Samuel Huntington
   William Williams
   Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
   Matthew Thornton

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
   Button Gwinnett
   Lyman Hall
   George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
   William Hooper
   Joseph Hewes
   John Penn
South Carolina:
   Edward Rutledge
   Thomas Heyward, Jr.
   Thomas Lynch, Jr.
   Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
   Robert Morris
   Benjamin Rush
   Benjamin Franklin
   John Morton
   George Clymer
   James Smith
   George Taylor
   James Wilson
   George Ross
Delaware:
   Caesar Rodney
   George Read
   Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
   William Floyd
   Philip Livingston
   Francis Lewis
   Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
   Richard Stockton
   John Witherspoon
   Francis Hopkinson
   John Hart
   Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
   Josiah Bartlett
   William Whipple
Massachusetts:
   Samuel Adams
   John Adams
   Robert Treat Paine
   Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
   Stephen Hopkins
   William Ellery
Connecticut:
   Roger Sherman
   Samuel Huntington
   William Williams
   Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
   Matthew Thornton

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
   Button Gwinnett
   Lyman Hall
   George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
   William Hooper
   Joseph Hewes
   John Penn
South Carolina:
   Edward Rutledge
   Thomas Heyward, Jr.
   Thomas Lynch, Jr.
   Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
   Robert Morris
   Benjamin Rush
   Benjamin Franklin
   John Morton
   George Clymer
   James Smith
   George Taylor
   James Wilson
   George Ross
Delaware:
   Caesar Rodney
   George Read
   Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
   William Floyd
   Philip Livingston
   Francis Lewis
   Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
   Richard Stockton
   John Witherspoon
   Francis Hopkinson
   John Hart
   Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
   Josiah Bartlett
   William Whipple
Massachusetts:
   Samuel Adams
   John Adams
   Robert Treat Paine
   Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
   Stephen Hopkins
   William Ellery
Connecticut:
   Roger Sherman
   Samuel Huntington
   William Williams
   Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
   Matthew Thornton

Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes

This post was part of a series that I wrote in February 2007.  "Susan" was an angry, miserable, and deeply unhappy woman who was profoundly disappointed in herself and her life.  One of the central issues in her unconscious emotional life involved her relationship to abortion.  Her analysis was an eye opening experience for me that allowed me, in retrospect, to crystalize my thinking about the subject.  As often happens here, a commenter has left a good summary of the issues.  Jimmy J wrote:

I am opposed to abortion for the very reason that Gloria pointed out. Life is sacred. The fetus is a life. Abortion ends a life. That said, the problem arises because the fetus is not able to survive outside the womb until a certain point of development. As a small l libertarian, I also object to the state telling a person what they can or must do with their body. So, while I would always have the personal preference that a woman carry an "unwanted" child to birth and give it a chance at life through adoption, I would grudgingly accept a law making abortion legal up to the point where the child is viable outside the womb and no later.

I suspect such an outcome would be an acceptable, though conflicted, resolution for most Americans.  It is reasonable and incorporates the idea of "personhood", something that does not require a belief in the Divine to accept. 

The links are to the prior posts in the series, but this post can stand alone.

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?

Part III: Children of Choice

Susan, a Child of Choices

Susan was in her mid-20s when she came to me for a consultation, referred by a colleague for Psychoanalysis. She was an attractive, extremely bright young woman who defiantly announced at our first meeting that she was an ardent feminist, didn’t think much of Psychoanalysis with its phallocentric bias, and was only coming for analysis because her family and her therapist thought it was necessary. She was skeptical but willing to try it, especially because she did, in fact, have some concerns about herself.

Susan was the younger of two children of a highly successful, though remote, father, and a brittle, beautiful, self involved mother. She had been unfavorably compared to her mother in subtle ways throughout her life, with her mother making it a point to comment on how thin she (the mother) was compared to how chunky Susan was. Susan had been quite successful in college but had difficulty in her jobs; she tended to get caught up in power struggles with her bosses, especially her male bosses, and she had recently been fired from a "dream" job because of her contentious behavior.

Needless to say, the early part of Susan’s Psychoanalysis was difficult.

She resembled nothing so much as the "abuse" sketch from Monty Python where my every comment was treated with contemptuous bile; nothing I could say was worth the breath I expended to say it. She recognized that her success in destroying my ability to help her would condemn her to suffer but could not stop herself and derived great sadistic pleasure when she thought she had scored a point off me. Two things offered a chink in her aggressive armor. During our second year of work, after a vacation break, she came in more defiant and argumentative than usual (which was quite remarkable since I hadn’t thought she could get more difficult). She told me that the prior weekend she had met a girl and had a wild, sexual encounter. She had never told me she was bisexual because she assumed that a "phallocentric" old man like me (I was in my late 30s at the time) would be judgmental and not at all understanding. Although her preference was to enjoy the company of men, and she had some worries about a tendency to promiscuity, she occasionally liked to just "let go" with a girl. She was quite firm that this was not a subject for exploration. The second event occurred about 4 months later when Susan became quite depressed. Her depression was unusual in that it only lasted two weeks, and seemed to have nothing to do with the material that had been coming up in the sessions. Furthermore, she pointed out that this episode was not unusual. Every year at the same time, in the early Spring, she had an experience just like this one; it was "no big deal". She could think of nothing that would explain her mood change (Psychoanalysts are always on the look out for "anniversary reactions") and we had to file the episode away for future exploration.

As time went on we were able to understand that Susan experienced a tremendous amount of loneliness in her life. She rarely felt she could connect to anyone and reacted to any hint of kindness, especially from me, as a danger to be avoided and defended against. I wondered if she had been abused, though there were no memories of such, and wondered as well if she worried about her unconscious need to seduce and be seduced, a common enough conflict that arises in the intensity of the analytic situation. Yet neither possibility seemed to fit. We became aware that Susan saw herself as a terrible person, and often behaved in ways to alienate people and prove she was a terrible person, but the usual sources of such feelings, while clearly involved, once interpreted never seemed to make much of an impact on her bad feeling about herself.

Both Susan and I almost missed a glaring clue, in a classic example of how ideology can blind one to unconscious conflicts. During a session in which Susan had regressed to her argumentative hectoring style, she told me she was planning on attending a pro-choice rally. She off-handedly mentioned she had had an abortion when she was younger and she feared the right wing religious nuts were going to take away her rights; they had to be fought. I asked if she had had any reaction to the abortion. She assumed (correctly) that I was as unthinkingly pro-choice as she was at the time and replied that it was inconsequential; a pregnancy was an inconvenience that would have derailed her life and interfered with her career. Both of us colluded in our avoidance of the fact that she never answered the question.

Shortly thereafter, Susan entered into her now expected, yearly, depressive plunge. During a session in the midst of the episode, while Susan was complaining of her loneliness, that no one would ever love her because of what a terrible person she was, and how her hostility drove everyone away, some barely conscious awareness led me to ask when she had had her abortion. I don’t recall the exact circumstances in the session, but the question felt organic, as if it arose from the material, though I could not describe precisely what chain of associations by Susan or myself led to this. She was silent for quite a while, an unusual state for Susan, and then tentatively offered that she had her abortion in April, 10 years ago. Inexplicably, for the first time in her treatment, Susan began to cry. She told me the baby had been in its fourth month and she was convinced, though never told, that it was a girl. She never told anyone that she had actually named the baby Cynthia. She recalled a moment of sadness, with a clear mental image of an infant baby girl, in a pink dress with bows in her blond hair, and then put Cynthia out of her mind. She became overwhelmed with tears and sadness. She told me that lately she had been fixated on little blond girls and now understood why. With a start she realized that almost every girl she had ever had a fling with was blond. Over the course of several weeks, Susan explored her feelings about her abortion. She had never realized it was still alive within her. She had killed her child and could understand why no one would ever see her as worthwhile or lovable. How could she have done something so terrible. She hadn’t even thought of it at the time. She had just done it.

The reverberations of the event were felt and worked through over the course of another 2 years in her analysis. She learned, another barely repressed memory, that her mother had had an abortion when she was 4 years old. Her mother did not want to lose her slim figure, of which she was so proud. Susan began to understand her tendency to gain weight as related to unconscious wishes to become pregnant again, as well as to differentiate herself from her mother, who championed a woman’s right to choose.

Ultimately, Susan was able to become more empathic of the younger, more callous, careless, and narcissistic women/girl, she had been. She gained a fuller appreciation of the depths of her own emotional life. Her stridency, which reflected the intensity of her need to not know and feel, was relaxed and her friendships and relationships were able to take on a warmer, more loving, tone. She could never quite forgive herself, or her mother, completely, but was able to forgive herself enough to be able to tolerate love and affection. She felt that if she let go of her guilt completely it would be another abandonment of her unborn daughter, and her guilt was a necessary price for what she had done. Susan did not become a pro-life activist, but became convinced that she could never again consider an abortion, in the event of a pregnancy, wanted or otherwise.

It was through my work with Susan, and work with a number of other people touched by the tragedy of abortion, that I began to re-assess my conviction that abortion was a relatively minor, ultimately harmless exercise and that a woman’s right to choose was sacrosanct.

At this point I have concluded that the only possible option for myself is to remain in a state of some conflict over the question. I can see no way to understand abortion as anything but the killing of a child. I long ago concluded, along with Mrs. SW, that, even in the event of an unexpected pregnancy, we could not choose to terminate our child. I have concluded for myself that the child’s right to life must trump the mother’s right to choose at the time of viability, which is now 22 weeks, though I do believe in exceptions for exceptional circumstances. I recognize that other people can come to different conclusions, but I also firmly believe that by short-circuiting the public discussion of what abortion means, we have done ourselves a terrible disservice.

When conflictual material is suppressed or repressed, it does not disappear, harmlessly out of sight. It has effects that reverberate throughout a person’s life and character. Susan felt that she was a bad person, not worth loving. While there were multiple antecedents for her feelings, her abortion formed the nidus around which many of these concerns coalesced. I suspect, though I cannot prove, that had she never had the abortion, the feelings would have been less intense and had less of a hold on her psyche. I suspect carrying the child to term and giving it up for adoption would have been extremely difficult but ultimately a healthier resolution for Susan.

I do not know if abortion worsens or causes psychiatric disorders, though the New York Times magazine report, Is There a Post-Aboriton Syndrome, [HT: Soccer Dad] concludes otherwise. I do know that abortion on demand can exert a powerful effect on the psyche without it reaching the level of a psychiatric diagnosis.

I have concluded that our society desperately needs to re-open the debate and discussion about abortion, which is really a debate about the value we place on our children and our future. One of the most brilliant understandings that our founders grasped was that in human affairs there is rarely absolute certainty. That can only be the province of the Founder who so many no longer credit. Among human beings, we can only attempt to grope toward uncertain resolutions to our conflicts that we hope work better than alternative solutions. To that end they established a federal system to enable the assessment of various solutions to problems. This process was derailed by the Supreme Court 30 years ago and we have suffered from their arrogance (with which I agreed at the time) since. For the most human of psychological reasons, I would like to see the Supreme Court repudiate and rescind Roe v Wade and return the debate to the people, where it belongs. In New York, where I live, abortion on demand is certain to be established as the law of the land. I suspect in Kansas, there would be a different outcome. Neither resolution will be fixed in stone; we will, as a nation, be forced to come to grips with what abortion means, to the individual and to our society, and as time goes on we will learn if Oklahoma’s response to the question works better than Florida’s response. We will no longer be able to use facile intellectualization and rationalization to deny that abortion requires killing a living creature that by 22 weeks, ie, early in the second trimester, is a viable human being. The age of viability is being pushed closer and closer toward conception and we need to determine where the lines are to be drawn and how we are going to deal with the truth of the act.

Part II: Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?

Part III: Children of Choice

Susan, a Child of Choices

Susan was in her mid-20s when she came to me for a consultation, referred by a colleague for Psychoanalysis. She was an attractive, extremely bright young woman who defiantly announced at our first meeting that she was an ardent feminist, didn’t think much of Psychoanalysis with its phallocentric bias, and was only coming for analysis because her family and her therapist thought it was necessary. She was skeptical but willing to try it, especially because she did, in fact, have some concerns about herself.

Susan was the younger of two children of a highly successful, though remote, father, and a brittle, beautiful, self involved mother. She had been unfavorably compared to her mother in subtle ways throughout her life, with her mother making it a point to comment on how thin she (the mother) was compared to how chunky Susan was. Susan had been quite successful in college but had difficulty in her jobs; she tended to get caught up in power struggles with her bosses, especially her male bosses, and she had recently been fired from a "dream" job because of her contentious behavior.

Needless to say, the early part of Susan’s Psychoanalysis was difficult.

She resembled nothing so much as the "abuse" sketch from Monty Python where my every comment was treated with contemptuous bile; nothing I could say was worth the breath I expended to say it. She recognized that her success in destroying my ability to help her would condemn her to suffer but could not stop herself and derived great sadistic pleasure when she thought she had scored a point off me. Two things offered a chink in her aggressive armor. During our second year of work, after a vacation break, she came in more defiant and argumentative than usual (which was quite remarkable since I hadn’t thought she could get more difficult). She told me that the prior weekend she had met a girl and had a wild, sexual encounter. She had never told me she was bisexual because she assumed that a "phallocentric" old man like me (I was in my late 30s at the time) would be judgmental and not at all understanding. Although her preference was to enjoy the company of men, and she had some worries about a tendency to promiscuity, she occasionally liked to just "let go" with a girl. She was quite firm that this was not a subject for exploration. The second event occurred about 4 months later when Susan became quite depressed. Her depression was unusual in that it only lasted two weeks, and seemed to have nothing to do with the material that had been coming up in the sessions. Furthermore, she pointed out that this episode was not unusual. Every year at the same time, in the early Spring, she had an experience just like this one; it was "no big deal". She could think of nothing that would explain her mood change (Psychoanalysts are always on the look out for "anniversary reactions") and we had to file the episode away for future exploration.

As time went on we were able to understand that Susan experienced a tremendous amount of loneliness in her life. She rarely felt she could connect to anyone and reacted to any hint of kindness, especially from me, as a danger to be avoided and defended against. I wondered if she had been abused, though there were no memories of such, and wondered as well if she worried about her unconscious need to seduce and be seduced, a common enough conflict that arises in the intensity of the analytic situation. Yet neither possibility seemed to fit. We became aware that Susan saw herself as a terrible person, and often behaved in ways to alienate people and prove she was a terrible person, but the usual sources of such feelings, while clearly involved, once interpreted never seemed to make much of an impact on her bad feeling about herself.

Both Susan and I almost missed a glaring clue, in a classic example of how ideology can blind one to unconscious conflicts. During a session in which Susan had regressed to her argumentative hectoring style, she told me she was planning on attending a pro-choice rally. She off-handedly mentioned she had had an abortion when she was younger and she feared the right wing religious nuts were going to take away her rights; they had to be fought. I asked if she had had any reaction to the abortion. She assumed (correctly) that I was as unthinkingly pro-choice as she was at the time and replied that it was inconsequential; a pregnancy was an inconvenience that would have derailed her life and interfered with her career. Both of us colluded in our avoidance of the fact that she never answered the question.

Shortly thereafter, Susan entered into her now expected, yearly, depressive plunge. During a session in the midst of the episode, while Susan was complaining of her loneliness, that no one would ever love her because of what a terrible person she was, and how her hostility drove everyone away, some barely conscious awareness led me to ask when she had had her abortion. I don’t recall the exact circumstances in the session, but the question felt organic, as if it arose from the material, though I could not describe precisely what chain of associations by Susan or myself led to this. She was silent for quite a while, an unusual state for Susan, and then tentatively offered that she had her abortion in April, 10 years ago. Inexplicably, for the first time in her treatment, Susan began to cry. She told me the baby had been in its fourth month and she was convinced, though never told, that it was a girl. She never told anyone that she had actually named the baby Cynthia. She recalled a moment of sadness, with a clear mental image of an infant baby girl, in a pink dress with bows in her blond hair, and then put Cynthia out of her mind. She became overwhelmed with tears and sadness. She told me that lately she had been fixated on little blond girls and now understood why. With a start she realized that almost every girl she had ever had a fling with was blond. Over the course of several weeks, Susan explored her feelings about her abortion. She had never realized it was still alive within her. She had killed her child and could understand why no one would ever see her as worthwhile or lovable. How could she have done something so terrible. She hadn’t even thought of it at the time. She had just done it.

The reverberations of the event were felt and worked through over the course of another 2 years in her analysis. She learned, another barely repressed memory, that her mother had had an abortion when she was 4 years old. Her mother did not want to lose her slim figure, of which she was so proud. Susan began to understand her tendency to gain weight as related to unconscious wishes to become pregnant again, as well as to differentiate herself from her mother, who championed a woman’s right to choose.

Ultimately, Susan was able to become more empathic of the younger, more callous, careless, and narcissistic women/girl, she had been. She gained a fuller appreciation of the depths of her own emotional life. Her stridency, which reflected the intensity of her need to not know and feel, was relaxed and her friendships and relationships were able to take on a warmer, more loving, tone. She could never quite forgive herself, or her mother, completely, but was able to forgive herself enough to be able to tolerate love and affection. She felt that if she let go of her guilt completely it would be another abandonment of her unborn daughter, and her guilt was a necessary price for what she had done. Susan did not become a pro-life activist, but became convinced that she could never again consider an abortion, in the event of a pregnancy, wanted or otherwise.

It was through my work with Susan, and work with a number of other people touched by the tragedy of abortion, that I began to re-assess my conviction that abortion was a relatively minor, ultimately harmless exercise and that a woman’s right to choose was sacrosanct.

At this point I have concluded that the only possible option for myself is to remain in a state of some conflict over the question. I can see no way to understand abortion as anything but the killing of a child. I long ago concluded, along with Mrs. SW, that, even in the event of an unexpected pregnancy, we could not choose to terminate our child. I have concluded for myself that the child’s right to life must trump the mother’s right to choose at the time of viability, which is now 22 weeks, though I do believe in exceptions for exceptional circumstances. I recognize that other people can come to different conclusions, but I also firmly believe that by short-circuiting the public discussion of what abortion means, we have done ourselves a terrible disservice.

When conflictual material is suppressed or repressed, it does not disappear, harmlessly out of sight. It has effects that reverberate throughout a person’s life and character. Susan felt that she was a bad person, not worth loving. While there were multiple antecedents for her feelings, her abortion formed the nidus around which many of these concerns coalesced. I suspect, though I cannot prove, that had she never had the abortion, the feelings would have been less intense and had less of a hold on her psyche. I suspect carrying the child to term and giving it up for adoption would have been extremely difficult but ultimately a healthier resolution for Susan.

I do not know if abortion worsens or causes psychiatric disorders, though the New York Times magazine report, Is There a Post-Aboriton Syndrome, [HT: Soccer Dad] concludes otherwise. I do know that abortion on demand can exert a powerful effect on the psyche without it reaching the level of a psychiatric diagnosis.

I have concluded that our society desperately needs to re-open the debate and discussion about abortion, which is really a debate about the value we place on our children and our future. One of the most brilliant understandings that our founders grasped was that in human affairs there is rarely absolute certainty. That can only be the province of the Founder who so many no longer credit. Among human beings, we can only attempt to grope toward uncertain resolutions to our conflicts that we hope work better than alternative solutions. To that end they established a federal system to enable the assessment of various solutions to problems. This process was derailed by the Supreme Court 30 years ago and we have suffered from their arrogance (with which I agreed at the time) since. For the most human of psychological reasons, I would like to see the Supreme Court repudiate and rescind Roe v Wade and return the debate to the people, where it belongs. In New York, where I live, abortion on demand is certain to be established as the law of the land. I suspect in Kansas, there would be a different outcome. Neither resolution will be fixed in stone; we will, as a nation, be forced to come to grips with what abortion means, to the individual and to our society, and as time goes on we will learn if Oklahoma’s response to the question works better than Florida’s response. We will no longer be able to use facile intellectualization and rationalization to deny that abortion requires killing a living creature that by 22 weeks, ie, early in the second trimester, is a viable human being. The age of viability is being pushed closer and closer toward conception and we need to determine where the lines are to be drawn and how we are going to deal with the truth of the act.

On the Psychology of Abortion

There is a transparent rationalization at the core of the abortion debate. 

First, it must be made clear that all psychological defenses function, in part, by allowing us to lie to ourselves.  When we use  a healthy, more mature defense, we allow ourselves to soften the blows of reality.  For example, when we use "black humor" to mitigate our reverses, we are distancing ourselves from the pain; in effect, we are, usually, with awareness (which is what makes it a healthier defence) trying to diminish the intensity of an unhappy situation.  A somewhat less mature, though ubiquitous, defense is rationalization.  Rationalization is a more sophisticated form of defense than overt denial but functions in the same way.  In a rationalization we invent a reasonable sounding (pseudo) explanation for something we do not want to face too directly.  For example, when one has been rejected, it is not uncommon for the unfortunate one who has been rejected to catalog all the reasons that the rejector was a poor choice:  She/he wasn't that good-looking and said lots of dumb things, therefore, I am really lucky I led her/him to reject me!  Now, I can find someone better and don't even have to feel bad that I was rejected!

The rejectee has now protected his/her self esteem from the full force of rejection and the pain that rejection provokes. 

How does this work in the Abortion debate?  In a series of posts discussing Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes I addressed the key question concerning abortion: [Emphasis in the original]

Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes (Part II) 

Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?

For a couple who desire a child, life begins before conception. A couple trying to become pregnant find that each month, if the woman has her menses, there is a small feeling of loss; the hoped for and already loved child has not appeared. When, finally, the woman determines she is pregnant, often responding to barely conscious and unconscious bodily signals that herald the changes taking place within, the child begins to take on a reality, a life of its own. By the time of "quickening", typically in the fourth month or thereabouts, the child is already a baby in the minds of the parents. There is no question that wanted children are psychologically already babies from very early in the sequence. Furthermore, a wanted child is the repository of all that is best in the couple. They imbue the soon-to-be infant with all sorts of possibilities and qualities. Most first time parents have significant anxiety over their ability to parent and raise a child, but there is no question that from the moment of the positive EPT, reinforced each step of the way (heartbeat, sonograms, movement), the woman is carrying a person, not a fetus, and not a clump of cells.

Contrast this with an unwanted pregnancy. The language and the psychological processes couldn’t be more different. The future abortion is dehumanized from the start. It is a clump of cells or a fetus. It is the repository of all that is rejected and ambivalent in the parents.

Our society’s response to abortion is an almost direct reflection of the psychological process of splitting.

It should be unobjectionable to point out that for a wanted pregnancy the child exists for the parents, psychologically, long before the actual infant has arrived on the scene.  I mentioned the psychological defense of splitting because for new parents the infant is typically imbued with all of the positive, ideal attributes, that the parents most value in themselves.  The infant son is going to be a great baseball player or a Doctor; he will be smart, good looking, and funny.  The infant daughter will be a great beauty and perhaps grow up to be a Doctor.  Our children should be taller and smarter and better looking than we are!  This is a healthy use of splitting though can be pathological if the parents do not also recognize that a newborn will change their lives in all sorts of ways.  At the same time, we have some anxiety that our offspring will exhibit all of our worst and most ego dystonic attributes; this is the devalued half of the split, which we usually remian relatively unaware of.   Our unconscious resentments (encapsulated in the Laius Complex*) are generally maintained out of awareness, in our unconscious minds. 

[*Recall that in the Oedipus myth, it was his parents, Laius and Jocasta, who rejected him in a clear expression of projection, (imagining) that he would some day come back and kill his father and sleep with his mother.  Later it was Laius, who initiated the fight that led to Oedipus killing him.  Our envy of the youth and freedom of our children is tempered and softened by our love for them, just as their resentments are tempered by their love for us.]

This morning David Thompson beautifully described the devalued aspect of the splitting that pregnancy evokes:

Just Thwarted Sperm

Readers will recall Amanda Marcotte, a popular leftwing feminist whose wisdom has entertained us more than once. Not least with her famous publishing blunder and subsequent, rather competitive, displays of  racial consciousness. Nor should we forget Amanda’s belief that the inclination to reproduce is a dastardly social construct “preserved” by unnamed villains solely to ensure that women without children aren’t recognised as “complete individuals.” Some may treasure memories of Amanda’s evidence-free claim that critics of academic feminism, among them Daphne Patai and Christina Hoff Sommers, are “trying to oppress women.”

Ms Marcotte’s recent ruminations involve sympathy cards for men and women affected by abortion. Of particular interest to Amanda is the sympathy card for men whose partners have chosen to abort their child-to-be:  

 

The card is question is produced by the Fatherhood Forever Foundation, a religious organisation opposed to current abortion law. Now one might disagree with the motives of the organisation and one might find the cards grimly cheesy and a dubious commercial prospect, but that isn’t what caught my eye. What’s interesting are the reactions of Ms Marcotte and her readers in a post titled Thwarted Sperm Finally Have An Advocate. It goes without saying the Sisterhood isn’t thrilled:

Anti-choicers [are] pretending that they just discovered they oppose abortion because it violates men’s rights over their uterine property (established by the “poke it/own it” law laid down in beer commercials).

Please go to David's blog to read the rest of his comments and his excerpts from Amanda Marcotte's post.  She illustrates the negative side of splitting; for her, men can have no noble or loving feelings, but only express the need to control and destroy a woman's autonomy (which is an interesting inversion of the insistence upon the woman's sole right to control and destroy the "other" within her.)  For Marcotte, et al, who deny the humanity of men and embryos, they become the repositories of all the devalued, split-off attributes that are unacceptable.

Marcotte, et al, insist that an unwanted pregnancy is not a person, but psychologically, the fetus is exactly that.  The abortion is desired because an infant would be too stressful, destabilizing, inconvenient for the mother; if it were not already psychologically a child, she would not have a felt need to get rid of it.  The fetus, collection of cells, or whatever other euphemism that is involved, is a devalued object, containing all the evil that the wanted pregnancy lacks.  The unwanted baby is destructive, demanding, insistent, a terrible drain on the mother's narcissistic supplies.  If it were merely a neutral object, the donation of several months of discomfort leading up to an adoption would be a small price to pay to avoid the death of an incipient person.  A pregnancy involves the most intense emotions, both positive and negative, because it is the single greatest creation of any human being.  For those who choose abortion, the baby cannot be allowed to be born because its birth and first cries would threaten its devalued, wretched state in the mother's mind. 

Ancient cultures often resorted to infanticide when the stress of more mouths to feed became untenable.  Our ability to intervene earlier in the process has allowed us to devise a "civilized" approach to the same problem and we are able to disguise what we are doing by way of rationalizations and other defensive maneuvers.  To kill a real baby would be monstrous thus the fetus must be dehumanized and embued with all the negative traits available.  Most peopel who reluctantly have abortions successfully rationalize the need for the procedure and avoid the full impact of the act. 

I remain conflictedly pro-choice, with third trimester (after the point of viability) restrictions because the alternative is too harsh and damaging to our balance of freedoms and responsibilities.  Yet I think we would all be better for it were we to fully acknowledge what we are doing. 

Tomorrow I will post an excerpt from an Analysis which led me to fundamentally re-evaluate my relationship to abortion.