(2008).

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies,

5(3):211-221
Group Phantasy: Its Place in the Psychology of Genocide
James M. Glass, Ph.D.
This paper explores the leading role that ideas and beliefs can
play in the formation of groups and their political action, with
particular reference to the psychology of groups and movements
involved in genocide. The paper asserts the notion of the Idea as
leader; thus moving away from Freud's more limited notion in
“Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” of the leader as
a person, a charismatic figure generating feelings of love and
attachment. Alluding to the work of Bion, Neri and Anzieu, the
paper examines the political and psychological significance —
the willed quality — of group phantasy in group-initiated mass
murder, from Nazi genocide to the ideology of radical Islamic
terrorism.

Introduction: Culture and Belief

Much of the literature on political leadership has been influenced by Freud
and his argument in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (Freud,
1921/1955). The conventional notion is that the leader, a person, leads, a
group or followers. And the influence of the leader on this group leads to the
action of the followers. I would, however, like to submit that such a
formulation may be too mechanistic, that, in fact, sometimes ideas may lead
groups, and ideologies can exercise as much influence over groups, as do
specific individuals. It is also the case that what “leads” political leadership
may not be the leader as such, but a group of ideas or a group of civil
associations whose beliefs, values and perceptions may serve as a catalyst to
an entire culture, for example the role of medicine and science in Nazi
Germany. It may be that the knowledge pushing these associations becomes
the “true” leader in any given culture. It is not that knowledge replaces the
leader, but the knowledge clusters coalescing as culture and cultural artifact
may create a belief-atmosphere, as it were, that stokes up a society,
regardless of class, social position, or institutional structure. In this

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 respect, it could be argued that the idea “leads” the leader, and these ideas
manifest their power in the way groups formulate social attitude, social facts,
and intellectual and emotional gestalt.
The ability of cultures to wage mass murder depends on two fundamental
factors: first, a willingness of the population to accept such behavior as
legitimate; and, second, the normalizing of mass murder as essential national
policy. Each of these factors in turn depends on the capacity of groups to
internalize the belief structure necessary for action and to reach consensus on
the methods necessary to implement beliefs. Psychoanalytic group theory
brings us at least a step closer to understanding how this process works. It is
simply not enough to argue that, in the case of Nazi Germany, it was Hitler's
decision or the party's madness, or — with September 11 — that it was bin
Laden's charisma alone. In each instance of mass murder — the murder of
European Jews, the deaths of thousands of innocents in the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon — a group-willed set of beliefs was essential for
carrying out these policies. Masses of individuals, organized into collectives
or groups, needed to hold these ends not as just rational calculation but as
willed belief. Group phantasy articulates the perception; the very existence of
individuals, their bodies, demands annihilation, extermination, purification. In
Germany, Jews and gypsies constitute this hated, impure Other. For the al
Qaeda network, despised otherness appears as the Americans, Western
values, the pleasures of the body. Where can we turn in group-psychology
theory for light that illuminates the causality behind these actions?
Claudio Neri, an Italian psychoanalyst and a Professor of Group
Psychology at the University of Rome, offers provocative insights (Neri,
1998). Neri draws inspiration from Didier Anzieu, a French psychoanalyst
and theorist of group behavior. Anzieu uses concepts like group illusion and
the group as a container; he introduces the concept of the Skin Ego, which I
will return to in a moment. Neri elaborates the idea that illusions tie groups
together. And the group itself acts as a container for powerful, explosive
feelings and channels those feelings into action. Neri's own conclusions are
derived from watching small groups in action. But I believe we can use his
theory to make certain generalizations about large-group behavior — or the
behavior of what I call “culture-groups” — loose associations of various
groups within a given cultural field, united by an overriding ideological
commitment. Neri's small-group psychology offers a beginning point from
which to explain action and behavior on a larger scale. I should also add that
Neri draws from Wilfred Bion; but for my purposes, his theoretical
elaborations of Anzieu are more relevant to the kinds of political groups
engaged in ongoing activities of mass murder.
Neri argues that groups perform binding functions, in the form of a
projection of a mother-image; others in the group provide critical fraternal
links or bondings. And the community of belief forged by these bondings
looks to the external world as the place where the group works. The group's
purpose is to realize, to bring-into-reality, the fraternal message (for example,
destruction of the Other,

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 annihilation of the enemy), and to construct a mother-image, that offers the
prospect of healing, a transcendence to a greater unity. External action shores
up fantasies of rescue and redemption — for example, restoring a shattered
mother imago (held in the group unconscious) by striking out at the despised
Other.
Groups construct communication grids or networks; these networks
maintain a set of beliefs internalized by the group. This might be thought of as
the group “matrix”. S. H. Foulkes writes: “The matrix is the common shared
group which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events
and upon which all communications and interpretations, verbal and non-
verbal, rest” (Foulkes, 1964: 292). The group matrix works on the level of
belief, action and cohesion; network and matrix reinforce one another.
Communications regarding belief and action are transmitted through a three-
layer series of recognitions: the basic matrix, the group's “unifying substrate”;
the dynamic matrix, the group's view of its own action imperatives; and the
“personal” matrix, the relation between the members of the group, and the
group itself.
In considering the concept of matrix, Neri argues it is essential “to look for
the constituent elements of the common space and of the group field in
sensorial experiences”. In addition to understanding group behavior, one must
grasp its “terrain”, where it works and operates (Neri, 1998: 27). How do we
account for linking action in the group space, a concept Neri calls group
resonance? Consider that group resonance may have something to do with
beliefs, and in the political group, with ideology and a group logic. In the case
of Germany, the hatred of the Jews, racist biological theory, and eugenics
emerge as a group reason, a grand explanation that spans all cultural
practices.
Transpersonal phenomena in the group arise from common beliefs and
shared psychological and physical space. Shared psychological space
appears in how the group orients itself to thought, ideas, to prevailing
opinion, for example, the belief that the Jews were the innate carriers of
typhus, or the radical Muslim mullah teaching that all evil arises from the
West and that Western culture is the mortal enemy of the true believer in
Islam. For the political or culture group to work effectively, it must share
psychological space that operates on both conscious and unconscious levels
— conscious in the sense of guiding and orienting group behavior (the
construction of ghettos to contain Jewish “contamination”), and unconscious
in the sense of provoking similar forms of identification that forge the group's
empathic connections. Group resonance emerges as the sense within the group
that its shared beliefs represent something special; that its faith in what it
believes to be right and just is unquestionably true — in Germany a set of
virtues rationally configured by a racist biological, genetic and medical
science, and with al Qaeda, precepts enunciated through religious verse and
study of sacred pronouncements.

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 Group as Community
Neri offers intriguing categories of group psychological analysis. Take, for
example, the concepts of the emerging group state and the fraternal community
stage. He asks, when does the group become a functioning coherent unit? At
what point does it meld or blend together as a common actor? He argues that
every group is built around the idea of a messiah and the “fascinating and
enthralling” ideas that surround the messiah figure [a concept analogous to
Bion's view of the group designating a leader to save it from imploding (Bion,
1989)]. The group nourishes itself with messianic hope, faith in the future, the
enrichment of one's life and life world. Further, the group surrounds itself in
illusion, which “is a response to a desire for security, a desire to preserve a
threatened ego”. And “group illusion responds to the threat to individual
narcissism by setting up group narcissism” (Neri, 1998: 41). The aim is to
form a “good group”, but the unconscious aims also involve forming bulwarks
or defenses against what the group most fears: its tendency to disintegrate, to
fall apart. The illusion of the “good” group is both a “reaction to total anguish
and bewilderment” and “an initial condition for birth and development”
(Neri, 1998: 42). Goodness is a quality defined by the group's inventory, its
narrative of itself and the world. And goodness, as an absolute, attaches itself
to the group's authoritative (or rational) explanations of itself, its belief-
systems, the knowledge-claims that validate its existence in the present, past,
and future.
In some groups, members habitually experience a loss of the boundaries of
self, through feelings of fear, uncertainty, anxiety-ridden perceptions of the
outside; the group illusion deflects this phenomenon and contains what are
powerfully entropic feelings in the unconscious. Feelings of insecurity and
loss of boundary, then, are no longer localized but, according to Neri,
diffused and spread across a “common or shared space”. Belief in this
respect may appear as a dream or phantasy that Neri likens to the excitement
of people caught up in a party. With their momentary at-one-ness they may be
unified with the group, but they still retain a memory of their “previous
position”, that is, their position of isolation and detachment or
depersonalization. The group sweeps them up and makes them feel whole,
part of a greater unity far superior to the position of individuality or
aloneness. He calls this process forging a common “mental state”. Moments
of depersonalization may become psychological “transit points” towards
other psychical conditions — such as closer affinity with the group idea or to
even, tragically, more isolation, “a condition of paralysis where thinking is
impossible”, a “disassembly” of the individual position (Neri, 1998: 43).
Emerging group states oscillate between positions of coherence and
disintegration, assembly and disassembly. The group illusion contributes
mightily towards the integrative process — precisely the function in Nazi
Germany of the ideas of race hegemony and the phobic biological properties
attached to Jews. These ideas (defenses against disintegration phantasies)
fight the feelings of disassembly; the nervousness of the self in the group. In
addition, illusion coalescing

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 as ideology welds the emerging group state into a mental and psychological
unity, and accounts, as well, for the creation of the fraternal, communal bond.
It is at this stage that the group becomes identifiable as a collective subject
speaking with one political voice, a cohesiveness enabling action.
To support his thesis of group cohesion Neri draws from the existential
phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, 1984/1991). According to
Sartre, the fusion of the group leads individuals to emerge from isolation,
alienation and impotence (Sartre, 1984/1991: 47). Emergence from individual
passivity signals the joining of a group; and in concert, individuals begin to
act on the world. No longer facing the world alone, the self merges with
others to act towards achieving common goals. This reciprocity of
relationship enables change to develop. Each individual has a right in
relationship to the group, but the holder of the right is not each individual
isolated to himself, but each member of the group in relation to the group
itself, “insofar as he is a part of the fraternal Community” (Sartre, 1984/1991:
48). Rousseau's concept of the General Will runs through this formulation, at
least in my reading of Neri, it appears to do so. Each member, unreservedly,
gives the self to the community and in return receives back, from the
community or the group, emotional life, sustenance and meaning. Rousseau's
comments in The Social Contract on the binding character of civil religion
suggest not tolerance and individual detachment, but the opposite: the fervor
of intolerance, and enthusiastic participation in an Idea greater than oneself
(Rousseau, 1950).
This is especially true in the context of Nazi Germany, because the
“fraternal community” understood itself in terms of a “general will” drawn
from the ideology of race belief. To be a member of the group, to hold a right
in relation to the group, meant that the group enacted or carried the fantasies
of each member of the group — fantasies including the cleansing and
purification of the blood, the removal of infection from the world, and the
purging through fire of a contaminated racial and biological environment.
What this fraternal culture group creates is a common psychological space
that allows for the construction of collective forms of thought — which both
create the world and drive away unconscious demons in the group's members,
a kind of resonance initiated and maintained by the group's
psychological/perceptual affinity. But this common space is also mental or
conscious, bounded by prevailing knowledge-claims and practices that
provide authoritative justification. Anzieu: “… the psychical space brings
about transformations of sensory qualities into elements of phantasies,
suppressed thoughts”, which in conscious form may resemble rational
argument, scientific “proof”, cultural practice and professional standards
(Anzieu, 1984: 230). Knowledge-claims coming out of the group environment
bolster the psychical envelope, enrich the skin of explanation, and offer a
reassuring language, “words heard weav[ing] a symbolic skin” (Anzieu,
1984: 230). Never underestimate, Anzieu warns, the power of language to
construct the world; “the written [and it should be added, the spoken] word
has the power to function as a skin” (Anzieu, 1984: 231). So this psychical
universe — a bundle of perceptions — fertile

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 with linguistic authority, imagination and feeling, refers not necessarily to
physical space, “but to the space existing between individuals forming a
group, that is to say, individuals bound one to another … by the many things
which they have in common … [Group resonance means the] feeling of
belonging and … a distinction between what the group is and what it is not”
(Anzieu, 1984: 49).
Now here is where ideology enters the picture with the large culture-group
or association (for example, groups considered part of the fabric of civil
society). Psychological space is contained or held together to prevent
disintegration through what Neri calls a mental skin. The group takes over all
psychological boundary functions through the provision of a mental skin
(belief systems) that literally adhere to the psychological self. And like
Anzieu's notion of a skin ego, this mental skin is the protective casing that
“holds individuals together” (Anzieu, 1984: 50). It works both on the
conscious level of reason (knowledge, the professions, social practices), and
unconsciously as the affective glue adhering group identifications and
symbols. Boundaries, both rational and psychological, become membranes or
barriers; membranes holding in the collective anxiety; barriers in the sense of
keeping out poisonous thoughts, toxins in the environment, defects in the gene
pool, polluted flesh. The mental skin of the group functions as a
“transpersonal container” and keeps inside those values essential to the belief
structure of the group and outside, those values and others the group hates
(tainted Jewish blood; in the case of the al Qaeda network, corrupt Western
culture). This mental skin provides symbols of identification that will enable
members of the group to resist temptation or tendencies to transgress mental
and physical boundaries (in Germany sexual relations with Jews; for the
September 11 terrorists the ability to live in Western cultural environments
and to remain immune to temptation and “evil”).
What is important here is that the group is united by a psychological and
not necessarily a physical space. In Germany these interpersonal containers
were provided by race theory — in its practices, in medical care, art,
entertainment, literature, and in the day-to-day group life of civil society —
probably the most dramatic embodiment of these containers.
Bion refers to this in his concept of the binding quality of unconscious
phantasies (Bion, 1987). In the case of Germany, the unconscious phantasy of
purification (and the elimination of filth) received sanction through social and
cultural practices reinforcing the boundary that keeps out the bad, and
strengthening the ideology's mental skin (the transpersonal pool of feelings,
emotions and ideas). Some of these mental forms might be thought of as
psychotic “cysts” split off from the normal function of the group. However, in
the case of what I am calling the culture-group, there are no psychotic cysts in
the group itself — or what the group would call psychotic. In Germany in
1938, the murder of schizophrenics, for example, is seen as a normal and
necessary part of the culture-group's transpersonal container. The euthanasia
program of the late 1930s classified a number of different groups as infectious
(either biologically or genetically) and therefore subject to extermination on
the grounds of being a danger

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 to the nation's (or community's) health. From the internal point of view — that
is, from the group's consciousness outwards — nothing of their action was
perceived to be psychotic. Psychotic aspects of the personality are literally
normalized by the group; for example, we would regard the phantasy of
ploughing a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center as crazy, but not for the
September 11 terrorists. The phantasy had been normalized and realized
through their group, or more specifically, through the resilient mental skin that
“contained” the terrorists' thoughts, phantasies and fears. This “field” of the
mental state transforms into a field of hate. Thus, the group's mental skin
defines itself through the imagery and symbology of hated objects and through
the group imperative, to act to rid the world of the hated unclean objects.
Group Odor: A Suggestive Metaphor
Neri notes the observation by Metter regarding group odors (Metter,
1994). I think this is interesting as a representation of group cohesion and
resonance, a kind of olfactory accompaniment to the more visual mental skin.
Metter (1994) writes that in certain environments — public lavatories,
breweries, stations — an odor has been deposited, so specific and
characteristic that even though the rooms have been thoroughly aired, we
continue to perceive that this odor has pervaded the environment. Similarly,
going into certain groups, we feel, for example, a sense of longstanding
rancor, or of gloom and boredom, that cannot be removed. Going into other
groups, we have a sense of mental openness and lightness. If the group
produces certain “mental fields”, these can permeate what Correale has
defined as historical field, “giving origin to a quality of culture, of belonging
to this certain group, which cannot easily be modified and transformed”
(Correale, 1991: 160). Bion's proto-mental systems, primitive mentality, the
group at a more archaic level of organization, are other ways of expressing
this sense of a group odor (Bion, 1962). It is akin to an automatic or
compulsory communication that occurs at the proto-mental level of
understanding and therefore is sensed as “being there”, even though it is not
readily definable. This sense of “being there”, of being in the right place, is a
psychological space, distinguished by the intensity of imminent
communication. Neri refers to emotive constellations, unconscious thoughts
evolving and being picked up by others “… a constellation that is still being
formed and defined” (Neri, 1998: 105). In political terms, the group as
self-object knows itself through the mirroring effect of group ideology.
Neri addresses the issue of the passage of emotions, thoughts and
phantasies from the individual to the group, and for our purposes in
understanding political action, the other way around: from the group to the
individual. This passage is facilitated by what he calls “effective narration”.
Ideology may be thought of as an effective narration that comes to life and
takes its place “within the living fabric of the group's thought”. These
narratives in the case of Germany evolved through research and practice in
professions charged with administering and

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 disciplining the body and self (medicine, psychiatry, education), organizing
the public space (bureaucracy and regime), building and constructing
(engineering) and creating and disseminating new ideas and concepts (the arts
and sciences). Groups become fertile, but this fertility, birth of action and
idea, a movement from sterility to regeneration, finds itself nurtured by social
and cultural practices. It is groups and civil associations that stimulate the
phantasy of being cured, the projection of the bad outside, and rid the
psychological and physical universe of that polluted outside. But groups also
develop the strategies, mechanisms, technologies and institutions that embody
and carry out whatever psychological imperatives push the construction of
group phantasies. Indeed, the agent of the group phantasy emerges as the
culture's practices, particularly as those practices affect the body, its internal
and external regulation, its administration and discipline.
The Skin Ego
Anzieu speaks of “the imaginary skin, which covers the ego” (Anzieu,
1989). It may become a “poisoned tunic, suffocating, burning, disintegrating”.
Groups go to considerable lengths to put out this kind of fire, this toxicity. A
toxic skin ego means the group-community fears for its life, thus the drive for
regeneration and purification. And in the group that drive appears as
ideology, circulating through public representation, and stimulating the dread
of being touched, the fear of contact, the phobic relation of the self to the
object, the fear of contagion. “The prohibition on touching contributes to the
establishment of a frontier, an interface, between the Ego and the Id” (Anzieu,
1989: 123). We crave the touch of the familiar; we are scared mightily by the
presence, particularly the physical presence, of the strange, the foreign, the
horrible, or what the group projects as the horrible. Anzieu writes:
To exist at all the group needs an overarching agency [skin ego] that
envelops it. Thus the group is organized around the same agencies
as the individuals composing it. …The unconscious and conscious
functioning of the group will differ depending upon the agency that
serves as envelope to the group psychical apparatus; the enveloping
agency also affects the behavior of the group, the goals and attitudes
towards external reality. (Anzieu, 1984: 101)
The group defends against its narcissistic wounds, it resists the impact of
feelings like fragmentation anxiety, dismemberment. And the phanticized
reality of the group, its protective envelope, is the messianic hope of being
cured. The group itself becomes the curative agent and simultaneously, the
curative process. “… [T]he group reality is a product of collective phantasies
and their symbolic representations” (Anzieu, 1984: 101-102). For example, in
Germany, draconian race and marriage laws may be understood against the
backdrop of the skin ego, and the impenetrable membrane constructed to keep
out those seen to be filthy, contaminated and biologically and genetically
impure.

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 These laws (the membrane taking political form), instituted in 1935,
legislated extreme punishment for “race” mixing, particularly in the realm of
sexual contact between German and Jew. Punishments for Jews, for any
sexual contact with a German, could be death. For Germans it could mean
imprisonment and/or fines.
Conclusion
The issue here is how to explain the workings of political and cultural
groups and their relation to mass murder; therefore to draw from small-group
theory to explain these kinds of public phenomena may present analytical
difficulties. To see the small group as a laboratory sufficient to explain the
action of large culture groups ignores the place of ideology as a group
container and thoroughly overlooks the political significance of group
resonance. It may not be the leader that drives and defines action; rather, the
significant motivator may be the resonances carried and shared by the group's
psychological space. Stanley Milgram's laboratory at Yale lacked sufficient
historical and physical scope to “explain” the mass murdering of Jews during
the Holocaust (Milgram, 1974). It ignored the impact of ideology, cultural
practice and group phantasy. While Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men
presents credible evidence for the ordinary German's complicity in mass
murder, Browning subverts his argument by relying, heavily, on Milgram's
experiments (Browning, 1992).
What may provoke groups to engage in mass murder may entail more than
“obedience to authority”, a kind of mindless acquiescence to the commands of
superiors. Browning argues that there is precious little evidence showing that
ordinary German soldiers or irregulars were punished for refusing to shoot
Jews. If the inclination was there to exercise restraint, it could have been
done without fear of reprisal; but in his study very few soldiers refused to
engage in rounding up and killing Jews. The evidence suggests more than
carrying out the wishes of authority. Such action took on a willed quality, with
many participants exhibiting enthusiasm at their task of killing. Similarly, with
the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. No evidence, at least so
far, demonstrates that participants were coerced into the plan. It appears to be
the opposite: a great joy at being able to accomplish the destruction.
Therefore, to assume that deference to authority explains group-initiated mass
murder ignores the critical factor of group belief, the culturally internalized
narratives pushing both individual and group, and the circulation of phantasies
providing adhesive identifications in the group itself.
Likewise, the artificial Tavistock group, the weekend experiment of
strangers sitting in small rooms, is not sufficient to explain why intelligent,
educated men smash airlines into 110-story buildings. There needs to be a
new language of interpretation for political groups whose singular purpose is
murdering, and for those groups in civil society that support this political
logic. This interpretative language may require drawing data from the role of
the professions and the

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 function of knowledge and religious belief in performing leadership guidance
for groups.
I want to stress here the notion of the Idea as leader; thus moving away
from Freud's more limited notion in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego” of the leader as a person, a charismatic figure generating feelings of
love and attachment (Freud, 1921/1955). Why not consider a charismatic
form of Knowledge? Ideologies in this respect become shared fantasies,
psychological spaces where forbidden wishes may be deposited or displaced.
In Anzieu's terms the group illusion constructs a collective defense against
potentially lethal persecution anxiety. And these illusions, understood
politically, may transform into ideology. He speaks of ego ideal, ideal ego,
and super ego; ideology functions more like the group's ego ideal. It protects
against fragmentation anxiety and fragmentation fantasies. And the professions
through their authority, influence on cultural practice, and knowledge-claims
contribute to the construction of these ideological defenses. Anzieu also
speaks of phantasy resonance, or ideas that grip an audience through
unconscious associations and connection (analogous to Metter's notion of the
group odor), and he notes the power of the circulation of phantasies shared by
a group as an implicit understanding of the world (Anzieu, 1984).
Phantasy enables a group to split its containing functions into persecution
and idealization. Idealizing the group's rescue functions, its curative ego
ideal, and persecuting the hated Other, keeps group boundaries intact. Indeed,
both functions may need to occur simultaneously to keep the group from
splitting apart. It is a case where with the culture-group ideology becomes
leader, with a set of informal leaders (in the professions), as opposed to the
more narrow Freudian view of one singular leader. Bion refers to ideology as
“bible making”, an interesting analogy because the scriptures of the bible
contain unvarnished and undisputed truth (Bion, 1987: 80). The group's
psychical envelope becomes this truth. It is inviolate, and it energizes, it
points the way, provides the justification and facilitates the action. Jews are
the evil, or the radical Islamic declaration that Western culture contaminates
the world.
For too long group psychology has been under the impression that it is the
leader who defines the goals. Bion, Anzieu and Neri demonstrate that it is
often the group itself that shows the leader what to proclaim and declaim, that
the group defines its parameters through ideology. Group leadership then may
have as much to do with articulating the group's underlying proto-mental
system (its odor, if you will), as it does with the thoroughly mistaken idea that
it is the leader who drags the group along willy-nilly. Nothing in the case of
Nazi Germany and the al Qaeda Network could be further from the truth. For
the actors in both these mass-murdering environments, action comes from the
faith in belief and ideology, as much as it does from the “orders” of the
“leader”.

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 Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Glass, J.M. (2008). Group Phantasy: Its Place in the Psychology of
Genocide. Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies, 5(3):211-221

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