Moral Outrage
I have recently been inundated with emails from the United States criticising my pages referring to the 'Arab-Israeli conflict'.One of these messages struck me in particular. It was from a psychoanalyst who asked "on what basis and by what authority" I could include such one-sided views on the Freud Museum website. My blood boiled. "By the authority of MORAL OUTRAGE" I thought to myself, remembering the world wide condemnation of Israel's tactics against Palestinian rioters in September 2000 when the piece was written. (You will recall that some months later the government adopted a policy of greater restraint (plastic bullets etc) - a belated acknowledgement of world opinion and growing disquiet within Israel itself.) As the expression entered my mind I felt myself inflating my chest in defiance and adopting a statuesque pose for the benefit of my computer monitor. I was turning into a caricature of myself.
In those early days, watching it on television, my feelings were crystallised by the pathetic, now iconic, image of 12 year old Mohammed al-Durrah, seconds before he died. It is now claimed that he was killed in the crossfire by a Palestinian bullet, but such niceties hardly seemed to address the relevant issue. The image itself is a complex one, displaying not only the pathetic vulnerability of the child, crouching in terror by a wall, but the impotence of the father to protect him. It had huge emotional impact.
But where did the feeling of moral outrage come from?
The feeling must have arisen from an identification with the victim. I was the little boy whose father was unable to protect him; I was the father unable to protect his son; and I was the youths throwing stones, taunting the lethal might of the state.
The concept of 'identification with the aggressor' is of course well known. Anna Freud made much of it in her book 'The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence', and one can see the psychical benefits of such a manoeuvre. But what would be the reason for an identification with the victim? (Given the British propensity to support the underdog and value heroic defeat, perhaps I should be thinking about this in terms of national character traits rather than individual pathology). This identification is 'masochistic' in the broadest sense. Like the homoerotic images of St Sebastian penetrated with Roman arrows, or the wounding of Christ on the cross (a wounding which Freud does not refer to as far as I can remember), there is a melding of pain and anticipated pleasure. It is not too extreme to say that my identification with the Palestinian boys offering their bodies as sacrifices to the bullets of the soldiers might have an almost sexual significance. But at what cost? With what dangers?
Freud would presume that the masochistic phantasy brings in its wake a threat of castration.
In 'Analysis terminable and interminable' he complains: "At no other point in one's analytic work does one suffer [!] more from an oppressive feeling that all one's repeated efforts have been in vain, and from a suspicion that one has been 'preaching to the winds', than when .... one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life".
Thus the 'moral outrage' I experienced may have been the energetic denial of the castation threat. And recently when the phrase popped into my head (one might almost say 'penetrated'), and I assumed that unmistakable gesture of self righteousness, it made me feel potent again, and, more importantly, safe. In the 'real world' however - the world we hardly ever notice - I was frightened by the implied threat of the message: that the correspondent will contact the 'authorities' and have me dismissed from my job.
But what about the moral outrage of my detractors? Surely the aetiology must be different, since these people, I feel, are identifying with the aggressor? In fact that is not the case. Their moral outrage showed a similar underlying identification with the victim - the Jewish people as victims, either of the holocaust yesterday or of the suicide bomber today. And in their outraged expressions there was a similar propensity to avoid criticism of the fathers who were unable to protect their children. Surely every son of a Holocaust survivor must have said angrily to his father 'How did you let it happen?'. Surely Mohhamed al-Durrah's mother must have said to her husband 'Why didn't you lie on top of the child?'. Accusations against the father, and all the psychological difficulties of such, evaporate in the fire of moral outrage. It serves a double function.
So perhaps my detractors, in part, are motivated by the same dynamics that I see in myself.
If moral outrage is a form of 'masculine protest', to use Adler's felicitous expression which Freud does not entirely repudiate, what of the women's reactions and criticism? Firstly there were far fewer women complaining about the site. Secondly, there was little of the moral outrage. Instead of masculine protest there were expressions of loss and hurt: ""I am extremely upset" said one; "I was horribly disappointed" said another, using the word - 'horrible' - that Freud often reserves for his discussions of castration. The sense of loss was what dominated the women rather than the sense of threat. I suppose Kleinian analysts would say that they exhibited a more mature 'depressive position' state of mind than either I or my male critics.
Of course there are women who also exhibit a form of masculine protest. But if the conflict of words about the middle east mirrors in some way the conflict of bombs, perhaps we should all look forward to a time when it is women who sit down at the negotiating table.
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