Introduction

During the 1990s Dr. Jovan Rašković, a Serb psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
turned politician, and his protégé Dr. Radovan Karadžić were invoking Freudian
theory to justify ethnic separation in ex-Yugoslavia. During the same period, Julia
Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek, scholars of Balkan origin trained in psychoanalysis
by Jacques Lacan and his disciples in Paris, were using Lacanian psychoanalytic
discourse to pathologize the Balkans. Given the propensity of the Balkans to
self-orientalization with respect to the dominant geopolitical stereotype – to see
themselves as represented by the dominant discourse and to act according to it as
if it were an essential identity – the latent geopolitics of psychoanalytic language
became a useful tool in interethnic conflicts there. Oedipal structure imposed as
a universal to every national subject does not, in fact, serve the analytic function
of individual emancipation. In the Balkans, as both arbiter and symptom of
modernity, it became a geopolitical tool in nations aspiring to identify themselves
as European.
Psychoanalysis of the Balkans signifies not only a historical case of
psychoanalytic normalization of an entire geography but, more importantly, it
exemplifies radical transparency of the inherent tension between the discourse
of universal normality and the ‘insanity’ of the planetary space. As such, the
psychoanalysis of the Balkans bears out Michel Foucault’s claim that every order
of psychic normalization creates its own type of pathology, not as an external
opposite but as a constitutive effect of the very process of normalization. This
book examines psychoanalysis of the Balkans as a special historical case in point
of Foucault’s thesis. In the Balkans, the pathology of ethnic hatred and war was
conjured up by psychoanalytic language strategically deployed to normalize the
contested geography of the region at the time of the fall of Communism.
As the official Party ideology in the Socialist Balkans, Marxism functioned as
a master narrative regulating human relations and identities and, in its practical
totality, it even embodied the local culture. With the decline of Marxism and Real-
Socialism, nationalism became the master narrative, presenting itself both as a
consciousness of national liberation and a psychic cure for the social pathology
of Communist totalitarianism. As the new total discourse, nationalist ideology
succeeded in portraying the Balkan people both as “crypto-colonial” (Herzfeld,
2002) subjects oppressed by barbaric, collectivist and Oriental totalitarianism,
and as would-be continental Europeans eager to embrace bourgeois values and
traditions, private property and Oedipalization. Very much like Winston Churchill’s
“Iron Curtain” speech about the dangers of the primitive Communist hordes
from the East, the emerging Balkan nationalism succeeded in reversing the usual
meaning of colonialism by redefining it as domination of the primitive over the

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 2 Normalizing the Balkans

civilized, thus discursively rendering nationalism emancipatory for the oppressed

population. However, in order to become emancipated Europeans, the Balkans had
first to pathologize their own geography, cut organic ties with other ethnic groups,
accept mono-ethnic nation-states, and legalize ethnic differentiation – all elements
of what Bob Hayden (1999) calls “constitutional nationalism” (68).
In the service of emerging nationalism, the perverse rhetoric of the post-
Communist era promoted European colonial discourse as an anti-colonial gesture,
and the language of psychoanalysis with its inherent civilizational bias offered a
sophisticated justification for that discourse. The civilizational bias of psychoanalytic
theory was built into it from the time of its origins in late nineteenth-century
Vienna. Freud readily internalized the geopolitical space of Europe as mirroring
the psychological split of modern subjectivity into the civilized and archaic, and
his travels mediated his own work and inspired major theoretical breakthroughs.
Such was the case with his travels to the Balkans at the turn of the century, which
reinforced the fundamental structure of psychoanalysis as a discourse of rationality
shaped along the lines of colonial exclusions. And, a century after Freud’s journeys
to the region, psychoanalytic discourse would return to the Balkans as reinforcement
for the nationalist rhetoric proliferating there.
Peter Swales (2003), Gil Anidjar (2003) and Stathis Gourgouris (1996) have
shown that Freud encountered, at the peak of his sexual neuroses, his oriental
(neurotic) Otherness in the Balkans. While traveling there in the spring and
summer of 1898, he went through an intense period of self-analysis, and his
dreams and experiences related to this period clearly show the influence of his
fateful encounters with the oriental corner of Christian Europe. Freud’s encounters
with his oriental Otherness also marked a turning point in the evolution of
psychoanalytic theory. That is, as a civilized European, he had to repress their
full implications and, from that point on, he registered the Balkans as well as
the Slavic East as emblematic of the archaic pathological substance that must
be repressed by the demands of modern civilization. Dangerous geographies
such as the Balkans may, like the libido, break through the walls of civilization
(Europe) and, in a manner of “reverse colonization” (Arata, 1990), colonize the
ego-geographies. The task of psychoanalysis is to give support to the ego in this
struggle against libidinal colonization. All of the “civilizing” features of European
colonialism that we find in the mission civilisatrice (Conklin, 1997) of French
Republicanism aimed at incorporation of “primitive” peoples into the Republic’s
system of values were incorporated into psychoanalytic language regarding the
Balkans. Just as “[i]n France, the Revolution convinced the French that they ‘were
the foremost people of the universe’ and that la grande nation had an obligation
to carry their revolutionary ideals beyond France’s borders” (Conklin, 1997: 17),
so was Freud, the enlightened – but internally split – Austrian Jew, convinced that
psychoanalytic conquest would emancipate the modern subject, including those
he regarded as archaic and primitive, from the tyranny of the unrepressed libido.
All of the reactionary aspects of the psychoanalytic language of civilization, the
Oedipal complex, and the split subject lent civilizing legitimacy to the rhetoric

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 Introduction 3

of Balkan nationalists and the creation of neoliberal nation-states on the ruins of

former Socialist societies.
The psychoanalysis of the Balkans is not a unified school of thought. Rather,
it is a language linked by geographic, historical, and discursive contingencies.
Geography in general is not an empty exterior to a discourse but rather a shared
form of life mediated by language. Yet discourse may be constitutive of geography.
For example, since Voltaire and the Age of Reason, Europe had been split along
the lines of the masculine reason of the West and the feminine madness of the
East. The Balkans’ “philosophic geography” (Wolff, 1994:7) is an offshoot of the
link between discourse and Europe’s split geography. Freud himself argued that
the Balkans are, because of their primitivity, “un-analyzable,” thus creating the
essence of the Balkans’ subjectivity precisely by declaring them outside the zone
of the particular mythology of psychoanalysis. While the Balkans was never a
colonial territory in the sense of being a military–economic appendix to an empire,
it nonetheless had to confront its oriental, Ottoman, legacy, as the precondition of
its deferred modernity.
Psychoanalysis and psychiatry of the Balkans share historical continuity with
European colonial history. Nazi psychoanalysis or psychiatry deployed to stigmatize
the Jewish and Slavic populations of its Eastern borders (Heyer, 1942), British
colonial psychoanalysis and psychiatry in India (Daly, 1930; Berkeley-Hill, 1921,
1925; Nandy, 1995; Ernst, 2010; Khanna, 2003; McCulloch, 1995), or French-
colonial ethnopsychoanalysis and ethnopsychiatry in North Africa (Keller, 2007;
Fanon, 1963, 1965), all declared colonized geographies insane and colonization a
civilizing cure. The same militarized language of psychoanalysis and psychiatry
has been evident in the policies of ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia.
Discursive unity in Balkan psychoanalysis and psychiatry can be attributed to
the mimetic-orthopedic structure of psychoanalytic language. Sander L. Gilman
(1993) and Daniel Boyarin (1997) both note that Freud’s “discoveries” mimic
anti-Semitic racial fantasies in transforming them into a language of scientific
objectivity. To be ‘objectively’ normal one has to repress the oriental Other
in oneself as a civilizing task, which internalizes the logic of racial exclusion
and represents it as a psychic law of castration. In becoming the law of psychic
normality, the language of psychoanalysis retroactively assumes an orthopedic
and normalizing aspect. In the case of Yugoslavia, this language legitimized
claiming sovereignty over the land of the ethnic Other on behalf of Oedipal
normality, and invocation of psychoanalytic theories such as the “narcissism of
small differences” invested minor ethnic differences with universal significance.
Normalizing rhetoric of this kind also characterized the language of solidarity
in similarities, such as “brotherhood and unity,” as pathological particularity.
The painful conflict ensuing from the creation of pure ethnic states became an
orthopedic adjustment to the principles of Oedipal universality upon which
neoliberal Europe builds its legitimacy.
In his seminal work, Orientalism (1979), Edward W. Said points out that
orientalism may assume different forms – scientific, religious, artistic, or other

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 4 Normalizing the Balkans

– but all of these forms originate with the Western gaze. Psychoanalysis is a
case in point. In Freud and the non-European (2003), Said shows that Freud, an
Eastern European Jew, himself subscribed to stereotypes that, in retrospect, might
well be designated “orientalist.” His Galician-born, East European father, Jacob,
represented for Freud the archaic Jewish masculinity. He had little respect for
Jacob, regarding him as submissive to anti-Semitic public slurs and consequently
epitomizing the effeminate Ostjude, castrated man. More specific than Said,
Gilman argues that Freud responded to anti-Semitism by internalizing his Jewish
identity as the pathological East, and then, as assimilated Jew, rejected his origins
through self-Aryanization: “Freud’s earliest references to Jews entirely fit the
model of the Western, acculturated Jew seeing himself as different from and better
than the Eastern Jew (Ostjude)” (Gilman, 1993: 13).
Boyarin (1997) examines the paradigmatic shift in Freud’s sexual theory
of neurosis toward psychoanalysis as a masculine discipline aimed at purging
Oedipal subjectivity of the taint of femininity. He ties this shift to the rise of
Zionism as a masculinized response to anti-Semitic stereotyping of Ostjuden
as feminized, thus neurotic, men, arguing that psychoanalysis, like the political
Zionism surfacing at the beginning of the twentieth century, promulgated self-
Aryanization as the antidote to the figurative “East” (in psychoanalytic sexual
terminology, the pathology of the feminine) in the Jewish male (1997: 220). The
split in Freud’s Jewish identity between Western assimilation and traditional East
European Jewry was obviously a traumatic one, but Freud still accepted it as a sort
of external Law of castration essential to the formation of modern subjectivity.
Thus he incorporated the hegemonic structure of European modernity into his
own psychological Law as the absolute condition of psychic normality. The result
of this self-splitting was the Aryan hegemonic subject shadowed by its abject-
supplement – the archaic East European Jew (the internal enemy of Christian
Europe) – resurrected in the Balkans as the “Turkish yoke” (the external enemy of
Christian Europe) (Anidjar, 2003).
When Freud constructed his theory of the Oedipal complex, translating the
character of the mythical Oedipus to the fixed structure of a normal child in a
bourgeois family in capitalist society, he was convinced that sexual conflict between
the child and his parents begins very early in life. Put very simply, he theorized
that, at a certain stage of development, the child experiences unconscious erotic
desire for the parent of the opposite sex and homicidal feelings toward the parent of
the same sex. Resolution of the conflict creating these feelings is key to the child’s
development, and the Oedipal complex itself is axiomatic to psychoanalysis – as
are the competing drives for sexual pleasure (Eros) and death (Thanatos).
Freud’s origins were in Eastern Europe, but he strongly identified with secular
German culture and saw joining the Western medical establishment as a means
of transcending his Eastern European origins. Inevitably, a geopolitical map,
reflecting his own split identity and the anti-Semitism of fin de siècle Vienna,
was built into the Oedipal complex as he conceived it. Oedipal psychology
was a colonial outpost in the wilderness of the dangerous East, and, given the

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 Introduction 5

development and articulation of the theory within the context of the cognitive map
of Europe, this universal application was inherently problematic.
Freud was apparently unaware of the extent to which his theory of Oedipal
subjectivity, and his own imaginary map, were influenced by the prevailing
“philosophic geography” of the time. Because of this parallel with the hierarchical
structure of the European cognitive map, psychoanalysis, from its inception,
was complicit in the creation and dissemination of ethnic and racial stereotypes.
The correspondence between Freud and Jung contains many references to the
ways psychoanalysis, in its early days, constructed, and nurtured ethnic bias.
For example, Freud and Jung attributed the ineffectiveness of psychoanalysis in
Russia to a lack of proper individuation among the “Russian material.” In a letter
to Freud dated June 2, 1909, Jung reports to Freud concerning a visit by a Russian
psychiatrist: “This Dr. Asatiani (such is his name) complains about the lack of
therapeutic results. Aside from the imperfection of his art, I think the trouble
lies with the Russian material, where the individual is as ill differentiated as a
fish in a shoal. The problems of the masses are the first things that need solving
there.” (Freud/Jung, 1995: 225) And in another letter to Jung, Freud writes, “The
Russians, I believe, are especially deficient in the art of painstaking work” (226).1
Even though many of his patients were Eastern European and provided Freud
not only with accounts of their personal lives but also with a decent middle-class
livelihood, he still saw them as unindividuated “material” ripe for exploitation, a
psychoanalytic abject. As Freud writes to Sándor Ferenczi, “Patients are a rabble
… they only serve to provide us with a livelihood and material to learn from. We
certainly cannot help them. This is therapeutic nihilism, and yet by the concealment
of these doubts and the raising of patients’ hopes, patients do become caught”
(Ferenczi, 1988: 93). Or to Ferenczi on November 17, 1918, “Our psychoanalysis
has also bad luck. No sooner has it begun to interest the world because of the war
neuroses, than the war comes to an end” (Freud/Ferenczi, 1985: 30). Jung, for
his part, had an early exploitive relation to the “Russian material.” As a married
man, he maintained a sexual relationship with Sabina Spielrein, an eighteen-
year-old Russian girl who was also his patient and who later in her life became
herself a prominent psychoanalyst. When her mother confronted Jung about his
unprofessional conduct, he responded, “if you wish me to adhere strictly to my
role as doctor, you should pay me a fee as suitable recompense for my trouble.
In that way you may be absolutely certain that I will respect my duty as a doctor
under all circumstances.” (Spielrein, 2003: 67) His implication was clear: he had
the right to sex with her daughter as long as he was providing analysis for free.
According to Freud and Jung, not only does the “Russian material” lack
subjectivity but also, apparently, even prominent psychoanalysts such as Max

1 Also, as Ernest Jones writes of Otto Rank in a letter to Brill: “Between ourselves
Rank has been somewhat deteriorating of late and has not been behaving quite straight.
Also his general way of conducting business was distinctly Oriental.” (Grosskurth, 1991:
133)

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 6 Normalizing the Balkans

Eitingon (a former student of Jung and a close friend and valued colleague of
Freud) are suspect simply because of their Russian origins. On this subject, Jung
writes to Freud as follows: “I consider Eitingon a totally impotent gasbag – scarcely
has this uncharitable judgment left my lips than it occurs to me that I envy him his
uninhibited abreaction of the polygamous instinct. I therefore retract ‘impotent’ as
too compromising. He will certainly never amount to anything; one day he may
become a member of the Duma” (Freud/Jung: 90). The Duma was known as an
ineffective political body dissolved by the Czar, and Eitingon’s putative sexual
potency makes him, in Jung’s view, impotent in the matter of democratic institutions
(Rice, 1983). Jung’s sardonic comment about the “polygamous instinct” is quite
hypocritical, given that he was sexually involved with Spielrein at the time. It is
interesting to note that Russian psychoanalysts did not question the geopolitical
bias of either Freud or Jung, but instead internalized it and transmuted it into
psychoanalytic theory. For example, Russian psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé
turns this exclusionary logic upon herself, equating Russian nationality with
sexuality. The heroine of her novel can have sex only with Russian men (Etkind,
1997: 33). To Andreas-Salomé, the cognitive map of Europe conformed to her
understanding of psychoanalysis. In the West, she dedicates her life to reason, in
Russia, to mysticism and femininity (34).
For a long time Freud resisted the Eastern European influence on psychoanalysis,
but eventually accepted it, acknowledging and universalizing a concept originally
theorized by Sabina Spielrein, attraction to death as a counterpoint to attraction
to sex. The catalyst in Spielrein’s own realization of this principle was a violent
confrontation with Jung, her therapist and lover, which she recounts in her diary.
Jung, whom she deeply loved and with whom she wanted to have a child, would
not acknowledge their relationship to Freud. Confronting him, she pulled a knife.
He grabbed her hand and forced her to drop the knife, but not without lacerating
her. Spielrein, leaving the bloody knife on the floor and her lover, teacher, and
therapist behind her, went on to write an essay that would make her famous, in
which she argues that death and destruction are conditions of rebirth (Spielrein,
1994). Years later, Freud would acknowledge the influence of Spielrein’s paper,
“Destruction as a Condition of Becoming,” on his own articulation of the Eros/
Thanatos duality in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) (S.E. XVIII, 1968).
A decade later, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) (S.E. XXI, 1968), he
acknowledged Spielrein’s influence elliptically: “I remember my own defensive
attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psychoanalytic
literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it” (120).
The theory of the “death wish,” then, entered the psychoanalytic canon with a
geopolitical supplement – the special relationship between death and the “Russian
material.” James Rice addresses this relationship, arguing that the theory of the
death wish was generally accepted in Russian intellectual circles and was an
important Russian contribution to psychoanalysis (Etkind, 1997: 110). This is
certainly true, but the question must still be asked whether the desire for death
is innate to the “Russian soul” or was discursively implanted by psychoanalysis

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 Introduction 7

through its internal geopolitics. In the case of Spielrein’s violent scene with Jung,
was she casting herself spontaneously in the role of self-destructive “Russian
material” for which she had been carefully rehearsed? Bruno Bettelheim (1988:
xxxviii) argues precisely this, that Spielrein viewed her involvement with Jung as
“dirty” because Jung saw it that way. She took it upon herself to act as “Russian
material” just to be with her master: “at present I am in league with the devil. May
that be true. My friend and I had the tenderest ‘poetry’ last Wednesday” (Kerr, 1994:
313). The originary bond between the “Russian material” and the death instinct as
created by the psychoanalytic imagination was very personal for Spielrein. On
the other hand, whether the source of this bond was external, internal, or both, it
lent her the creative force to develop her experience into a seminal psychoanalytic
theory that has assured her a place in the history of psychoanalysis. As Judith
Butler writes, “what operates under the sign of the symbolic may be nothing other
than precisely that set of imaginary effects which have become naturalized and
reified as the law of signification.” (1993: 79)
Within this complex network of interpersonal and professional relationships
(and at the intersection of science and racial stereotypes), Freud introduced the
notions of the “primitive” and “pathological geography” to explain and treat
negative Oedipal structure in his clinical work. His published case studies
attribute mental illness to the patient’s lapse into the archaic, passive psychology
of the East. In the case of Dr. Schreber, for example, Freud argued that a negative
Oedipal complex manifested by illusions that he was being turned into a Jew
and sodomized by God caused the patient’s paranoia. To explain Dr. Schreber’s
“feminine wishful phantasy” Freud invoked the notion of the “savage” man of
Europe, and called Schreber “the primitive man, as he stands revealed to us in
the light of the research of archeology and ethnology” (S.E. XII, 1968: 82). In
the case of the “Rat Man” (a case of “Obsessional Neurosis”) the “primitive”
geography became the Orient. Freud named this case “The Rat Man” because
of the patient’s obsession with a “horrible punishment used in the East” (S.E.
X, 1968: 166), a practice in which a bucket with rats under it was placed over
the victim’s buttocks. The rats then burrowed their way into the victim’s anus.
The civilization/barbarism binary is intrinsic to discourse that assigns concepts
strategically to people and territories on behalf of objectivity and normality.
Freud actually attempted to subvert this binary by arguing that “primitive man”
is the unconscious projection of the modern European subject and represents the
universal Other. But, as Celia Brickman observes, “psychoanalytic primitivity
was the term through which Freud affirmed the universality of the psyche at
the same time as it remained the racially indexed term of derogation enlisted to
discredit the pretensions of civilization” (2003: 5).
Relying heavily on the colonial anthropology of “primitive” cultures, Freud
moved from sexuality to social theory. In Totem and Taboo: Resemblances
Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913: S.E. XIII, 1968), he
locates the origins of the Oedipus complex at the beginnings of human society,
theorizing that a band of prehistoric brothers expelled from the alpha-male group

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 8 Normalizing the Balkans

returned to kill their father, the dominant male to whom all the women in the
group belonged. And, he postulates, religion is founded on the need for expiation
of the guilt that inheres in the collective memory because of the killing of the
primal father. The three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
– are, Freud concludes, projections of deep-seated desire for expiation of guilt
onto the idealized character of God the Father and, as such, have been tainted
by the unresolved “father-complex,” causing mass psychosis. Of the three
Abrahamic religions, the foundational Christian narrative of the killing of the son
of god (Father of the human subject) comes closest to the resolution of the father-
complex. Judaism represses consciousness of the murder of the Father and this
repression is the primary cause of the Jewish inclination to neurosis. Islam remains
the most remote from such resolution and is thus the most prone to pathology.
Psychoanalysis offers a way to neutralize and regulate the guilt deeply rooted in
the collective unconscious because of the killing of the father and also a way to
free the subject from the oppression caused by guilt. The liberating mission of
psychoanalysis is then twofold: to demystify religion and its unconscious sexual
content attached to the “father-complex,” and to liberate the individual from
the effects of repressed sexuality by adopting the father’s prohibitions against
incestuous desire as the condition of civilization. In Civilization and its Discontents
(1930) Freud predicates freedom in Western civilization upon conscious loyalty
to the authority of the Father-figure. As he himself declared on the eve of the First
World War, “All my libido is given to Austro-Hungary” (Jones, 1955: 171). To the
extent that psychoanalysis as arbiter of the health of Western civilization underpins
such authority, Freud’s theory indirectly pointed to a potential civilizational threat
to the West among those who nurtured disloyalty.
The “father-complex” was readily translatable into a rationale for establishing
a confluence between Oedipal normality and the claim to sovereignty over
colonial space. As a case in point, let us consider its application in a colonial
context by Freud’s follower Owen Berkeley-Hill. Colonel Berkeley-Hill served
the British Empire for twelve years as Superintendent of the European Asylum
– the most prominent psychiatric position in India. He published a paper on the
psychoanalysis of Islam, “A Short Study of the Life and Character of Mohammed”
(1921). In this paper he argues that Mohammed’s character and activities had
“roots in an intense ‘father-complex’ involving a strong infantile fixation in regard
to the mother” (32), and confirmed Freud’s point of view that, “Islam stirs up the
deeply-buried and unconscious complex against the father, which is an attribute
that pervades the minds of all men” (51).
Berkeley-Hill’s paper addresses the genesis of Mohammed’s “father-complex,”
through interpretation of a complex genealogy: Mohammed was raised by his
grandfather Abdullah; his father died before his birth and his mother died a few
months later. Out of his fantasy for the lost father, he created a “fresh father”
projected onto God-“Allah.” It is this psychosis, Berkeley-Hill emphasizes,
that inspired the Muslim world to conquer and change the world in accord with
Mohammed’s father-fantasy: “Hence the adherents of no religious system are

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 Introduction 9

so prone as the Mohammedans to sudden outbursts of frenzy against the very

authority they are adjured to revere and obey” (50). Berkeley-Hill characterizes
Mohammed’s demand for radical change in the world as a “stupendous revolution”
aimed at the father’s authority: “This tendency to attack the authority of the father
in the realm of religion and politics, as exemplified in the lives of Amenhotep
and Mohammed, is not confined to individuals who show no other manifestation
of mental derangement, but is now recognized to be a notable symptom of
certain varieties of psychoneurosis” (34). He locates Mohammed’s pathology in
unchecked incestuous desires: “This curious construction of the imagination is
closely connected with incestuous wishes, since it is an exaggerated form of the
commoner desire to be one’s own father” (43). Mohammed’s family life offers
rich supporting data for this theory: “A study of the married life of Mohammed
certainly reveals a number of data which support this hypothesis i.e. that the
repression of every impulse towards sexual experience was due to the immensity
of certain incestuous fixations” (45). He first marries the elderly matron Khadijah,
“a very perfect replacement-figure for his own mother” (45). Documenting this,
and numerous other marriages of the founder of Islam, Berkeley-Hill manages
to find evidence of “incestuous fixation” in all of them. In closing his catalogue
of Mohammed’s unchecked sexual desires and religious madness, he offers a
psychoanalytic version of orientalism:

From hardly any other source could there spring those wild torrents of emotion
that enable men, “utterly lost to every call of honour, or patriotism, or family
affection, whose only occupation is eating, and whose only recreation is woman,
to thrill with excitement at the summons of the faith, and meet death with a
contempt the Red Indian could only envy” (51).

In the above excerpt, Berkeley-Hill quotes Meredith Townsend’s Asia and

Europe (1902). Townsend kept vigil on British colonial stability in Asia, explaining
the coming challenges to the West: “it is evident to me that the white races under
the pressure of an entirely new impulse are about to renew their periodic attempt to
conquer or at least to dominate that vast continent” (Townsend, 1902: 1). Berkeley-
Hill’s psychoanalysis of Mohammed followed in the same vein. According to him,
Muslims – not Hindus – are the real threat to British colonial rule because of
the rebellious character raging through Islam (and exemplified by Mohammad’s
sexual pathology) in the absence of fear of castration. Psychoanalysis utilizes the
theory of the “father-complex” to justify colonial authority as the condition of
freedom for colonial subjects and as the guardian of psychic health. Berkeley-Hill
concludes his paper on Mohammed with a justification of Europe’s fear of Islam:

So it comes about that after thirteen centuries we may observe an Asiatic,

apathetic to a degree no ordinary European can comprehend, start up a hero,
if appealed to in the name of Mohammed, fling away life with a glad laugh of
exultation or risk a throne to defend a guest!

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 10 Normalizing the Balkans

That these emotional outbursts are not confined to individuals but may affect
whole communities is a phenomenon men of every creed and generation will at
least be wise to consider. It is due to its appeal to these hidden sources of feeling
that Islam is still, when its stateliest empires have passed away, and its greatest
achievements have been forgotten, the only force able to hurl Asia upon the iron
civilization of Europe (53).

That the pathology of the unresolved father-complex is “not confined to

individuals but may affect whole communities … a phenomenon men of every
creed and generation will at least be wise to consider” strongly suggests the
possibility for the massive outburst of rebellious behavior among the followers of
Mohammed against the British imperial authority in India and it strongly links the
psychoanalytic to the colonial concern.2
As Indian society between the two World Wars under the leadership of
Mahatma Gandhi began a non-violent campaign against British colonial rule,
colonial psychoanalysis, Christine Hartnak contends, extended its expertise to
justifying not only civilization’s concerns about the Hindu character but also hate
against the Hindu:

Women who did not obey the Victorian mores, mentally disturbed British
subjects, Hindus and people of colour … were not only perceived as entirely
different and thus inferior, but were also considered to be dangerous. They
were not only in the majority, but there was a potential of hysteria, violence,
revolution, sexual seduction and other supposedly irrational acts, which would
be difficult to control. Therefore, it was the ‘white man’s burden’ to keep them
under surveillance (Nandy, 1995: 100).

Armed with such language, colonial psychoanalysis was able to pass a normative
judgment on the population subjected to the colonial power it represented.
Berkeley-Hill, Hartnak adds, “contributed to a properly functioning colonial
world” (Nandy, 100) equating colonial resistance with a failing relation to the
Father authority.
The true authority of this language was not only in passing a normative
judgment and rationalizing suppression of the anti-colonial struggle in which
Islam played an important role, but in the power to inflict self-orientalization
both as an element of psychic modernity and of national liberation upon the
natives subscribing to psychoanalysis as the sign of European modernity.
The struggle to civilize archaic, insane premodernity became more than a
therapeutic technique, as Ashim Nandy describes in the case of colonial India

2 Berkeley-Hill’s psychoanalysis of Mohammed was consistent with prevailing

stereotypes of the Ottomans. A historian writes, “Europe was inundated with publications,
paintings, rumors, and stories creating an image of a brutal, bloodthirsty Ottoman who was
pederast, sodomite, and devotee of impalement of the Westerners” (Kayatekin, 2008: 203).

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 Introduction 11

and its Westernized intellectual elite: “Psychoanalysis also had to serve as a

new instrument of social criticism, as a means of demystifying aspects of Indian
culture that seemed anachronistic or pathological to the articulate middle classes,
and as a dissenting western school of thought that could be turned against the
West itself” (Nandy, 1995: 83). But to what extent, Nandy asks, did this hope to
use the Empire’s school of thought against the Empire itself fall into “a colonial
grid of knowledge?”
Nandy’s concern is not only relevant to colonial India. This was particularly
evident in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, which were belatedly
entering modernity and experiencing national liberation after World War II. The
consequence of channeling psychoanalytic concepts into the post-Ottoman world
at the time of the Arab national awakening engendered a special form of voluntary
colonization, self-orientalization. Instead of maintaining a critical distance from
psychoanalytic orientalism, progressive national intelligentsia impressed by
European modernity internalized psychoanalytic orientalism as a necessary tool
for identifying the pathological presence of the Ottoman legacy and healing their
own backward nations. In applying the language of the “father-complex” the
former Ottoman territories could envision their modernity much as Freud could
his own, by identifying and then dis-identifying with the orient.
Joseph A. Massad in Desiring Arabs (2008) offers ample evidence of what
kind of beast has been “caught in a colonial grid of knowledge” in the case of the
Arab coloniality. He describes how psychoanalysis framed Arab late modernity in
the language of self-orientalization:

Influenced by such readings, and especially by the Orientalists’ judgment that

Arab culture had “degraded” to an age of “decadence” under the Ottoman, most
Arab writers since the middle of the nineteenth century were overcome with
a sense of crisis concerning the Arab present, its “culture,” its “language,” its
political and economic order, its “tradition,” its view on its own “heritage,”
even “Islam” itself, in short, a malady that afflicted the whole of Arab Islamic
“civilization.” The diagnosis would echo the Orientalist judgment of the Arabs,
including “backwardness,” “decadence,” “moral decline,” “irrationality,”
and most of all, “degeneration,” resulting from centuries of Ottoman rule
characterized by stasis at best or retardation of things Arab (and sometimes
Muslim) at worst (Massad, 2007: 8).

Massad goes on to elaborate the history of psychoanalytic discourse in the Arab

world. Between 1940 and 1950, Syrian and Egyptian Marxists critically examined
the decadence of “Arab desire” and its relationship to the Arabs’ arrested modernity
resulting from long subjection to Ottoman rule. Arab psychoanalysis offered a
discursive model for rationalizing self-orientalization in promoting the notion that
Arab weakness is due to inherent moral weakness and effeminacy.
Egyptian professor of literature Muhammad al-Nuwayhi sought the source
of the Arab malady in his psychoanalytic investigation of the decadent poetry of

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 12 Normalizing the Balkans

medieval Arab poet Abu Nuwas and his “fetishism” for boys. His investigation
became central to psychoanalytic critique of Arabs’ sexuality, in particularly
their proclivity to inverse sexuality caused by the failing father authority and
overidentification with the mother. Consistent with this theory, Muhammad al-
Nuwayhi not surprisingly assigns responsibility for the poet’s Oedipus to his
Persian mother. And, reflecting the Arab contempt for Persians, psychoanalysis
manages to move the cause of the poet’s failing Oedipus further East. Similarly,
Syrian political scientist Jurj Tarabishi, a Marxist, claims that after the traumatic
defeat by Israel in 1967, the Arab intelligentsia regressed into a sort of “group
neurosis” characterized by passivity and disease. He generalized the Arab
geopolitical context during the Cold War period by subsuming its complexity into
the self-orientalizing cliché of Arab effeminacy. “Here,” Massad observes, “it
seems that it is Tarabishi who is ‘regressing’ to a colonial medical discourse that
once labeled the Ottoman Empire ‘the sick man of Europe’” (22).
As in Arab psychoanalysis, the “Ottoman legacy” still permeates the
psychoanalysis of the Balkans. Following her mentor Samuel Huntington, Julia
Kristeva contrasts French liberté with “spaces of repression such as the Islamic
world and its fatwas” (Almond, 2007: 132), and for Žižek “Islamo-Fascism”
resists “integration into capitalist global order” (Almond, 2007:190–91; Žižek,
2005a: 48–9). Whereas Žižek’s goal is to use Islam’s Otherness to articulate a
radical politics based on psychoanalysis, for Kristeva psychoanalysis has to find
“a modus vivendi, which is not easy,” between the Europeans and Muslims. When
Jovan Rašković called for the Serbs’ separation from Bosnian Muslims because
Muslims are “anal,” he invented a radical politics centered on psychoanalytically
constructed differences stemming from the Christian trauma of the “Ottoman
legacy.” For the Balkan subject (as well as for the Balkan psychoanalysts discussed
here) a negative relation to the “Ottoman legacy” is the corollary of a positive
relation to European modernity. The “Ottoman legacy” had become the burden
of the Balkan identity since the Berlin Congress of 1878 and the birth of the
“Eastern Question.” Cast as the decaying Other and enemy of Christian Europe,
the Balkans inherited the task of curing itself from this historical plague. This
was impossible to accomplish, since the “Ottoman legacy,” a part of European
identity, had created an internal split of the population and a geopolitical paradox
of identity in a liminal geography.
Historically, the Balkans have internalized not only the geopolitical split
between Western and Eastern Europe, but also the split between Europe and
the Orient. With respect to the split between Europe and the Orient, historians
have recently argued that Voltaire and the Enlightenment divided European
space into the rational West and the irrational East, a division that has shaped
Western discourse of rationality (including psychoanalysis) along the lines of
colonial exclusions. Larry Wolff (1994) and Maria Todorova (1997) agree that
the philosophy of the Enlightenment constructed Eastern Europe and the Balkans
as the dangerous exterior, “the dark side of the collective Europe,” the place of
Europe’s forbidden desire, of vampires, unruly feminine sexuality and tribalism.

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 Introduction 13

That is, what the West had to discharge in order to become the center of the world
– the Empire – was ascribed to the East as the constitutive dark counterpoint to
Enlightenment. Relations here have traditionally been fixed by a sort of “cognitive
paranoia,” whereby the West, with its cognitive superiority, constructs the identity
of the “other” part of Europe (Neumann, 1999). Lacking its own Enlightenment
and corresponding Eastern European Cartesianism, this geopolitical “Other”
either submits to (and internalizes) the externally imposed identity or completely
rejects it. The small East European nations from the Baltic to the Balkans share
more or less the same historical pattern of internally split populations allied with
Western or Eastern empires (Okey, 1987). In such a division of European space,
the Balkans, as did colonial subjects, signified a barbaric, primitive civilization
arrested in its development. “The ferocity of the Balkan peoples,” a British
journalist reporting on the siege of Sarajevo comments, “had at times been so
primitive that anthropologists have linked them to the Amazon’s Yanamamo, one
of the world’s most savage and primitive tribes” (Goldsworthy, 2002: 26).
The British journalist’s report is illustrative of balkanism, a representational
scheme elucidated by Todorova. Todorova, emphasizing primacy of representation
over physical geography in the formation of the Balkans, proposes that what
we know about the Balkans can’t be separated from how we know it – the
conditions that have formed our knowledge of the region. She articulates these
representational conditions as balkanism, which (similarly to Said’s orientalism) is
a stable representational scheme originating in travelogues, literature, and Western
journalism. Todorova, however, also points out where balkanism and orientalism
diverge (1997: 11), unlike orient the Balkans have different and concrete historic
legacy. Placed between the West and the East the Balkans, the product of the
“Ottoman legacy”, while primarily Christian, retains geopolitical ambiguity with
a specific subjectivity reflecting this geopolitical ambiguity.
In contrast with the longstanding geopolitical split between Western and
Eastern Europe, the split between Christian Europe and the Muslim Orient
of the Ottoman Empire is unique to the Balkans’ modernity. Here the Balkans
relate to the “Ottoman legacy” as Western Europe toward the East in order to
recreate the language of European modernity. Greek historian Ellie Scopetea sees
the relationship of the Balkans to its “Ottoman heritage” as inseparable from its
relationship to the West. For Scopetea, the Ottoman legacy is the other “unity
in diversity (besides the relationship to the West)” that underpins the “time-
resistant” ambiguous position of the Balkans between East and West. Yet there is
a fundamental difference between the two relationships:

The difference between [the relationship with the Ottoman legacy] and that with
the West is that this was not an openly avowed and cherished relationship, not a
goal to be achieved. It was, as it were, each Balkan nation’s own “secret”: a secret
locked up in everyday language, in everyday behaviour, in the underground
of each nation’s existence, safe from any kind of official ideological scheme
(Scopetea, 2003: 173).

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 14 Normalizing the Balkans

Each new Balkan nation-state aiming to become westernized enters into a

special cleansing relationship with its persistent residue of the “Ottoman legacy.”
According to Scopetea, this process runs parallel with Westernization. To become
Western, she points out, means adopting both Western values and Western
orientalist stereotypes – a Western telos. She also points out that, in adopting a
stereotype, “one tends to be oblivious that one is part of that stereotype” (174). Or,
as Ivaylo Ditchev puts it, “High culture is constructed precisely by repressing all
traces of local culture considered degrading, Oriental, body-centered, amorphous,
etc.” (Ditchev, 2002: 245). These “Oriental,” “degrading,” or “secret” aspects of
local culture are then attributed to the Eastern neighbor, a process that activates
Western orientalist stereotyping – and is also self-orientalizing. Milica Bakić-
Hayden characterizes this process by which all ethnic groups define the “other” as
the “East” of them as “nesting orientalism.” And, she writes, “[in the Balkans] the
designation of ‘other’ has been appropriated and manipulated by those who have
themselves been designated as such in orientalist discourse” (Bakić-Hayden, 1995:
922). Specifically, the Slovenes see themselves as more civilized than the Serbs,
who are farther East; the Serbs, in turn, see themselves as more civilized than the
Albanians. In addition, such representational schemes based on spatial hierarchies
have been internalized as essential identities because they allow and justify
exclusion of the Other. Todorova, Scopetea, and Bakić-Hayden all agree that a
fundamental split in Balkan identity has been created by “local self-representation
strategies, which aim to both seduce and defy [the Western other]” (Ditchev,
2002: 236). And, as we learn from Fanon’s experience of colonial psychology,
the doubling and splitting of the subject turns it into a passive supplement to its
signifying master. In other words, the colonial subject has been constructed by the
very same debilitating power that constructed the split between the Empire and the
colony as the archaic Other.
There has proven to be a demonic conjunction between the ingrained
geopolitical and self-orientalizing structure of psychoanalysis and the Balkans’
propensity to self-orientalization stemming from the “Ottoman legacy.” Not
only did psychoanalytic rhetoric serve to pathologize the ethnic other but it also
followed the structure of “nesting orientalism” that defines the pathological other
as an ethnic group farther to the East. The well-known Slovene journalist Alenka
Puhar in her paper “Childhood Nightmares and Dreams of Revenge,” published in
The Journal of Psychohistory (1994), ventures to explain to the Western academic
audience why Slovenes are not violent, while Southerners are. According to Puhar,
Slovenes are raised in single-family households where Oedipal relations can be
established. Serbs, on the other hand, have grown up in groups, in “the zadruga type
of family, functioned without private property and left a heritage of seeing money
as an evil, corrupting agent and commerce as a shameful, humiliating activity”
(Puhar, 1994: 159–60). She explains that Serb ethnic violence is the direct result of
the traditional collective ownership of the land and failure of Oedipal development
caused by growing up in extended families. This distinction between Slovene and
Serb family life is relevant to Puhar’s own subject position as a Slovene analyst. In

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 Introduction 15

defending the achievements of Western civilization and denigrating the Balkans,

she preserves the positive aspect of cleansing as a form of Oedipal hygiene and
belies the negative, criminal connotation of “ethnic cleansing.” She defends
this distinction on the grounds that “cleansing” is a consequence of symbolic
castration and must not be associated with “terror on a vast scale, messy, dirty,
drunk, random, berserk” that is endemic to the Serbs. Because “cleansing” inheres
in the Symbolic, it cannot characterize the Serbs in any way. This is Puhar’s quasi-
psychoanalytic interpretation of “cleansing”:

Let me conclude with an observation on “ethnic cleansing.” All such expressions,

not to mention the reality they cover, are revolting, but this one is inappropriate,
too, in fact as misleading as it can be. It has nothing whatsoever to do with
the concept of cleanliness, which implies order, discipline, and punctuality.
On the contrary, it is sheer terror on a vast scale, messy, dirty, drunk, random,
berserk. And there is no plan behind it, no vision of a structured, orderly, rational
eventual life. The wish behind it is very simple: Let’s huddle together, brothers,
and let’s butcher as many of those who do not deserve to be our brothers any
more, before they butcher us (167–8).

The aim of Puhar’s convoluted semantics is not to absolve the Serbs of genocide;
she simply objects to the term “cleansing,” with its hygienic overtones, being
applied in any form to the pre-symbolic Serbs. She is, in fact, ratcheting up
the prejudice against them by invoking the Oedipal structure, implying that the
tendency to commit genocide is inborn in the entire Serb pre-Oedipal population.
Moving East, Croatian psychiatrist, Eduard Klain has declared that:

The Serbs are burdened with an inferiority complex compared to the peoples of
the Western part of Yugoslavia, for they are conscious that they are on a lower
level of civilization. They try to get rid of that feeling by means of various
defense mechanisms, such as negation, projections, denial and destruction …
The Serbs are inclined to regress to a schizoparanoid position and exhibit an
archaic type of aggression which can explain the torturing of the wounded and
massacring dead bodies (Weine, 1999: 140).

And, even further East, Nada Todorov, a Serb academic, employs a deeply
psychoanalytic logic to characterize Muslim sexuality. Since The Tales of the
Arabian Nights are “full of eroticism,” she claims,

… it is certain that they (the Muslims) read them carefully during puberty;
their effect on the personality of the latter is clearly evident. In committing
atrocities (rapes) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, (their) conscious, sub-conscious, and
unconscious levels or personality have been at work. (Todorov, 1993: 20–21)

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 16 Normalizing the Balkans

Despite the claim to political neutrality and universality of psychoanalytic

language and metapsychological categories, the language of psychoanalysis,
deeply vested in the national struggle over the control and domination of ethnic
space, was strongly influenced by the mechanism of “nesting-orientalism”
prevalent throughout the Balkans. The work of Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek,
though not directly advocating violence, plays into the self-orientalization
internalized into Balkan identity and exemplifies the representational practice of
balkanism in the sense of the space itself defining collective identity. Representing
that space as psychologically dangerous, feminized, and mad, even in an erudite
fashion, can only add to the fear of the space-related other. Though Rašković and
Karadžić employed the colonizing language of exclusion explicitly for political
manipulation, and Kristeva’s and Žižek’s work purports to be only theoretical,
their language equally bears the hallmark of the self-orientalization ingrained in
psychoanalysis itself.
In 1990 Dr. Jovan Rašković demanded of Croatian president Franjo Tuđman that
the Serbs in Croatia, as Orthodox Christians, be allowed to use the Cyrillic script.
When Tuđman denied this request, Dr. Rašković responded with the declaration:
“Serbs are mad people.” With his demand, Rašković was pressing the point that,
if prevented from using Cyrillic script, so important for maintaining Serb ethnic
identity, the Serbs would go mad and, obsessed with madness, start a war with
the Croatian government. Rašković insisted on the small linguistic differences
between Croats and Serbs, who had up to that point spoken the same Serbo-Croat
language (as well as sharing the same country), as a precondition for peace. He
was hoping to make “narcissism of small differences” a political institution. As
a Freudian, he knew that his request meant locking both ethnic groups into a
relationship of permanent tension. It is this self-contradictory structure that has
given birth to the unconstructable idiom (Cioffi, 1998: 101) of settling peace with
the language of permanent group intolerance. Such language about language has
opened the cross-pollination between nationalism and psychoanalysis. Jacques
Lacan’s reformulation of Freud, that the unconscious is structured as a language,
seems now ideological as much as psychoanalytic.
The language of psychoanalysis is intertwined with the language of European
modernity and has constructed a complete theory of the subject to signify
both normality and modernity at the same time. For Freud, the entire Western
civilization hinges on the subject’s proper relation to the Name-of-the-Father:
that is, to the authority of psychoanalytic language. Central to this language is
the Oedipal complex and the tension between the unconscious desire of the child
and the fear of symbolic castration by the father, which is resolved favorably for
Oedipus only by the splitting from the maternal bond and desiring the symbolic
expression granted by the Father authority. Applying this principle to her maternal
space, Kristeva calls Bulgaria “the lost luggage of history” and demands of
Bulgarians to undergo psychotherapy just as she did, and Žižek enumerates the
Slovenes’ maladies of the soul caused by the archaic maternal superego. Such
language, consolidated strategically around the Name-of-the-Father, invokes the

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 Introduction 17

language of European modernity and promotes nationalistic reconstruction of the

Balkans symbolic order.
Psychoanalysis of the Balkans, operating as orientalist language poised to
‘conquer’ a territory in order to restore its proper relation to the Father, illustrates
well Michel Foucault’s point about the territorial contingency of power operating
as a form of a discourse. Unlike the Cartesian and Hegelian versions of European
Modernity structured in time, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Said insists, “fractures
geographically” the unified language of European Modernity into its geographic
axiom: “there was always some struggle going on over territory” (Said, 2001:
195). In Prison Notebooks, European modernity appears as a military map. Not
only is the language of European Modernity bound to the struggle over land, but
also discourse itself has been bound by geography. Despite the transcendental
argument about universal meaning, the radius of meaning is limited to the space
organized by the dominant discourse and always by the spatial boundaries of the
very struggle. In 1935, in a time of increasing anti-Semitism, Edmund Husserl gave
his famous Vienna lectures on “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind”
and followed them up with the Prague lectures, “The Crisis of European Science
and Psychology,” on the problems of modern philosophy and science at a time
of emerging anti-Semitism. These lectures reminded Europeans of the Greeks’
discovery of transcendental rationality and the need of the continent to return to
the principles of universality. However, because Husserl was a Jew, no one would
publish his lectures. German philosopher Arthur Liebert eventually published
them in 1936 in Belgrade as The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental
Phenomenology. It is ironic that this book, which is concerned, in part, with an
important mathematical concept (transcendental rationality) discovered in the
Balkan Peninsula, could only be published there. This, of course, does not alter the
internal argument made by Husserl that transcendental rationality is independent
of its location. Nor does it alter the internal logic of the Pythagorean theorem.
However, the implications of publication in the local space in itself valorizes the
Gramscian concept of geography as a military map. In fracturing the temporally
unified language of European Modernity, Gramsci also opened an alternative to
the transcendental universalism of psychoanalysis. The Gramscian subject is not
defined by the metapsychological model of the Oedipal complex, but is interwoven
(through the shared infinity of traces, inscribed in geographies, personal memories,
and group histories) with the competing Other (Gramsci, 1999: 324).
The Balkans lack any equivalent to the European Renaissance, Reformation,
or Enlightenment – all of which make European modernity look not as a military
map but rather as a laboratory of ideas and worldviews. Nonetheless, all of these
movements contributed to the symbolic formation of colonialism. The Balkans’
modernity, on the other hand, has a strong military aspect because, historically, the
struggle over land in the region has been a total cultural event. Bosnian philosopher
Ugo Vlaisavljević points out that, for the small South Slavic ethnie, the battlefield
is the formative place of language. The ethnic traumatic attachment to territory
frames the language of the battlefield. The battlefield is, so to speak, the place of

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 18 Normalizing the Balkans

a semiotic harvest of “proper names,” the master signifiers ascending heroically

from the battlefield as the pillars holding together the ethnic simulacrum (as well
as the place of semiotic catastrophes for the losing side):

The collective trauma of the lost battle, as well as the resulting occupation, is
reinforced by the inscription of the victor’s symbolic order on the lost territory.
Battles made the earth tremble, while foreign culture moved away much of the
solid ground. Ethnic space no longer corresponds to inherited territory, or, to put
it more cautiously, these correspond less than before (Vlaisavljević, 2002: 197).

Balkan ethnic identity, then, maintains and defends its space with language: “The
language of the conqueror, and his cultural idiom more generally, not only enters
the land of the defeated minority but seek to occupy the very place of the conquered
language. In other words, the language of the intruder has a stronger toponymical
claim” (199). From its inception, the Yugoslav Federation was, for the country’s
linguists, a battlefield of competing toponymical claims over ethnic space. For
the nationalists, language became a weapon in dismantling the Federation,
and its break-up coincided with the break-up of Serbo-Croat into three official
“languages”: Serbian, Croat, and Bosnian. So when Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs
make the claim, legitimized by their national linguists, that they speak different
languages, and then arm themselves to defend their linguistic space, we should
see this as a punishment of induced differences based on theory. The conflict does
not come from real linguistic differences; they understand each other perfectly. To
use Ludwig Wittgenstein, they already agree in the language they use, but they
disagree in opinion – in the way they theorize language – which is the basis of the
exclusionary logic here. Through the Balkan veins, Mephistopheles would have
said, streams a “special juice,” brewed not in nature but in ink and grammar.
French sociologist Étienne Balibar holds that “the fate of European identity
as a whole has been played out in Yugoslavia and more generally in the Balkans”
(2004: 6). The destiny of Europe hinges, he argues, on the paradox of Europe’s
external and internal borders, of which today’s Balkans is one of the effects. On
the one hand, he explains, Europe claims a universalism and inclusiveness in
relation to the entire continent and, on the basis of this inclusive external border,
gives itself the right to intervene in the Balkans as a part of Europe. On the other
hand, Europe has internal exclusionary borders precisely because of the Balkans,
to guard its unifying principles against the danger of fragmentation. Nowhere
else in Europe has the order of signification been as closely tied to the battlefield
as it has in the Balkans. Nowhere else in Europe has modern subjectivity been
so fractured by geography as in the Balkans. The purpose of this book is to
examine the ways in which psychoanalysis as the dominant language of European
modernity participated in the struggle over the ethnic space and the ways in which
it has contributed to the military map of Balkan modernity.

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