depth psychology in the study of war and peace (final draft)

8/6/2019 Depth Psychology in the Study of War and Peace (Final Draft)

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Depth Psychology in the Study of War and Peace

The Buddhist monk and contemporary peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh remarked in regards to

human suffering that, People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of fear of the

unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. It is especially confounding to try and

comprehend the meaning of suffering that derives from our own deliberate and willful actions.

For in this category of suffering, we are inevitably faced with at least some degree of the absurd

and the meaningless, if not total absurdity and meaninglessness.

Of all the forms of suffering which we create for ourselves, the suffering resulting from war and

organized violence is one which is all too familiar to the human race. Indeed war carries great

meaning and purpose to those who wage it. We project our highest values of honor, valor, and

sacrifice into war. But at the same time, we abhor it; we wave slogans and march against it.

How do we choose between those things that are worth dying and killing for and those that are

not? How do we ascribe meaning to the death and suffering of war? Does the reality of war

reflect something within us that is basic to our nature? Is war in fact a reflection of the stark

contrast between good and evil within us? Arguably one of the most important, introspective,

and deeply personal meditations on these questions comes from the heart of Victor Frankel

(concentration camp survivor and psychotherapist) in his book Mans Search for Meaning.

All war contains a measure of the absurd and meaningless. Why should human beings come into

existence and be made to share this planet only to kill ourselves off? All the wars we wage, just

or unjust, are wars waged against ourselves. There is no war that is not war against humanity.

The enemies we fight may be beastly human beings, but they are human beings nonetheless.

There is nothing in the enemy that we cannot find in ourselves. To quote Frankel:


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" We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who

invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who

entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael

on his lips. "

In his book Aion (published in 1945) , Carl Jung describes the tendency (particularly within

Christianity) to address the dichotomy of good and evil expressed in human nature by denying

evil its own existence and reducing it to a privatio boni (privation of good) or an accidental lack

of perfection. Consequently, the good side of ourselves, of which we are consciously aware,

becomes inflated in so far as it is presumed to exist in greater measure than evil, which then

becomes subsumed within the shadow archetype where it remains largely unconscious and is

manifested only through shadow projections onto the other. It was in the wake of World War

II and the Holocaust, that Jung issued these words of caution:

One could hardly call the things that have happened in the concentration camps

of the dictator states an accidental lack of perfection- it would sound like

mockery Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil

deeds are as real as the good ones so far as human experience goes and so far as

the psyche judges and differentiates between them. Only the unconscious makes

no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly

does not know which of them predominates in the world. We hope, merely, that

good does- i.e. what seems suitable to us. No one could possibly say what the

general good might be. No amount of insight into the relativity and the fallibility

of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem


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themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of mankind,

because they are twisted with the pain and fear of their own sickness.

Today as never before, it is important that human beings do not overlook the

danger of the evil lurking within them.

Because the unconscious does not make distinctions between good and evil, we must rely on

values, morals, and various social constructs that exist at the conscious level to guide our

judgments toward the general good. How well have these judgments served the general good in

the history of warfare? There has never existed a nation or army, tribe or clan who has fought

under the banner of Evil, but countless ones that believe themselves, at the very least, to be on

the side of the general good. Simone Weil, a French social activist and philosopher who

lived through the Nazi occupation of France warned that, Evil, when we are in its power is not

felt as evil but as a necessity or even as a duty.

The suffering we inflict on one another in war is framed as a struggle between good and evil,

light and shadow, us and them; in other words, a reality where each of us stands on one side

against the other. We have only to make plain what each and every one of us believes in our

hearts to be unquestionably true; I am good, I am right, and it is always the other who

is not. According to Jung, no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable

morale effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the

personality as present and real. When asked recently about his beliefs regarding the reality of evil in the context of war, Thich Nhat Hanh said, Evil exists. God exists also. Evil and God are

two sides of ourselves Every human being carries with himself or herself all the elements of

great understanding, great compassion, and also hatred, ignorance, and violence.


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The ubiquitous realities of war, however desensitized to these we may become, face us with stark

and visceral images of this arch contradiction within human nature. And yet despite the reality

of war, another reality also persists, however muted, in at least equal if not greater measure (we

hope)- the reality of peace; and not just peace as in the absence of war, but rather peace in the

sense of the positive and forward strides by humanity away from the bottomless depths of our

inhumanity. Our strongest bid for survival as a species, and the one most within our control, will

be to learn to stop making hell for ourselves on earth.

The following excerpt from a letter written by Pope John Paul II to the International Conference

of Bishops seems to suggest that suffering (in the most general terms) is a necessary aspect of the

evolution of human nature:

[S]uffering seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man. It is as deep

as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is

proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to

man's transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense" destined " to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.

Applied to the specter of war the preceding observation would suggest war is but another painful

step in the evolution of consciousness through which we realize the full depth of evil within us in

order that we may go beyond it. Or we may consider Weils belief that, evil is neither

suffering nor sin, it is both at the same time[S]in makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil,and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against

our will and to our horror.


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And yet, even if one accepts the notion of evil in the world as arising from some form of

original sin, this still places the source of evil outside of the individual. The cause of evil, the

original sin, was committed by someone else, we only inherited the mark. It can be very

difficult to accept that evil originates within us individually and collectively. War is among

evils most insidious expressions and among the single greatest threats to our survival as a

species. We must accept the moral and ethical duty to change our behavior away from war and

toward peace. Only humans are capable of conscious and willful acts of both war and peace. As

Carl Jung observed during the volatile early years of the cold war (and just a few years before the

Cuban missile crisis):

The world today hangs by a thin thread. And that is the psyche of man. We are

the great danger. Psyche is the great danger. How important it is to know about

it and yet we know nothing about it.

In his lectures on Kundalini yoga (circa 1932), Jung refers to the makara (leviathan) of Hindu

mythology which resides in the watery depths of the second chakra (at the threshold of the

unconscious) and which is either the source of regeneration or destruction. According to Jung,

encountering the makara in Kundalini is analogous to encountering the shadow archetype

through the individuation process in depth psychology. The caveat: we may get devoured in the

process . Now we can choose to look at this metaphor as fanciful eastern mysticism, or we can

recognize the reality which it illuminates. Jungs interest in Kundalini yoga stemmed from his

research into his own psyche. For Jung, to know the ones psyche required plunging into its

depths. It is not merely an intellectual process. It requires looking into the suffering within your

own heart, and, equally important, looking into the suffering of the world at large.


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Suffering is a necessary part of evolution. Suffering evokes fundamental opposites within

human nature: evil and good; love and hate; compassion and rage, etc. The aggregate of these

tendencies in turn comprises our collective response to suffering (i.e. making war or making

peace). The crises and turmoil which precipitate and manifest in violence lead us to encounter

the beast within us and the other. If we want to understand the impulse to war and the impulse

to peace, we must better understand our psyche, both collectively and individually.

Depth psychology is aptly named as such in so far as it is concerned with the deep underlying

elements and mechanisms of the psyche. Just as Einsteins theoretical physics opened up a

universe beyond the Newtonian paradigm, so do Jungs theories take us well beyond the

conventions of say, behaviorism or cognitivism. This is not to say that one paradigm should

supplant the other. On the contrary, utilizing diverse perspectives and various levels of analysis

is essential to understanding complex phenomena.

I believe that the unique perspective on human nature afforded by analytical or depth

psychology could prove very useful in a focused and deliberate application toward the study of

war and peace. Psychodynamic theory was born into the dark and brutish realities of war in

early twentieth century Europe. Indeed, the initial visions that inspired Jungs Red Book were

ushered in with the onslaught of World War I. It is fitting then that depth psychology should

aim to facilitate a dialogue with ones darkest evil aspect, the Shadow archetype. Through the

process of individuation, there is the prospect of assimilating the shadow in such a way that

yields, a stronger, wider consciousness than before. As Jung perhaps optimistically

believed:


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If people can be better educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may

be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better.

A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have

good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are too prone to transfer the

injustice and violence to our fellows that we inflict upon our own natures.

Most intellectual movements in Europe during Jungs time were understandably pessimistic

about the good side of human nature. A jaundice outlook toward humanity was evident across

the social sciences. One field in particular which was coming into its own in the social and

political sciences following the world wars was international relations (IR). The reason for the

brief exposition of IR theory that follows is that this is a field which purports a good deal of

authority and expertise in explaining how and why the nations of the world behave the way they

do, particularly why states go to war.

Like most academic disciplines, IR contains both complimentary and competing world views

and is a fluid and changing field. However, mainstream IR theories (realism-liberalism) hold the

bulk of the intellectual market share. Both of these theories are based on similar theoretical

approaches and basic assumptions such as the nation state as the primary unit of analysis; the

state as a unified rational actor or decision maker; and the primacy of the nation state over

competing domestic differences. Mainstream IR theories are based on capitalist-democratic

principles which are upheld as the norm. Both are essentially material-power based models.

Realism is concerned more with military balance of power in a zero-sum game, whereas

liberalism (or economic liberalism) focuses on balance of power through globalized economics

as well as international institutions such as the UN and World Bank. Neither realism nor


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liberalism ascribe much explanatory power to variables such as cultural and religious identities

and is only tangentially concerned with the individual level of analysis.

It must be said that for the past sixty or more years of contemporary IR study, these models have

proved more or less effective in explaining the behavior of nation states and offering guidance

for leaders and policy makers. Today however, there is a growing need within IR for a

theoretical framework that can serve as a bridge between high level power politics which is the

focus of realist and liberal theory, and the deeper functions of culture, ethnicity, and religion

which increasingly trump reason of state.

We are also finding that certain cannon of western enlightenment thinking (and the bedrock of

western civilizational norms) can in fact limit our ability to understand and engage cultures that

are sharply different from our own. One practical example: The separation of church and state

cannot be taken as a given or as a one size fits all model of governance. Some important work

is emerging on the need to integrate religious frameworks into foreign policy and even into

military strategizing. Most notable among the scholars in this area is Dr. Douglas Johnston,

whose Washington DC based think tank, the International Center on Religion and Diplomacy

has produced compelling research in this area.

Just as enlightenment principles and scientific rationality had, in Jungs view, reduced

psychology to a study of the average and the norm outside of which lie insanity, so do

many of our deeply held assumptions about international relations tend to reduce humaninteraction on a global scale to highly deterministic models based on limited constructs such as

the nation state, sovereignty of state boarders, and national interest (or, the interest of profit

maximizing firms).


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Constructivist theory, however, is a relatively new set of theories within IR that emerged from

several disciplines, including the field of psychology, and is creating a space within IR to explore

the issues described above. A lengthy explanation of constructivism is not possible given the

limited space here but, suffice it to say, its focus on how culture and identity and role are socially

constructed makes this theory a suitable platform for other theoretical frameworks such as depth

psychology, peace psychology, and even religious and anthropological studies, to contribute to

the greater body of IR theory. Depth psychology in particular would be a good fit within a

constructivist framework as the latter approach looks at how consensus reality can lead to

distorted images of self and other. Consider the following historical examples:

The whole of European colonialism and indeed American expansionism including manifest

destiny can be explained in terms of economics, and politics and numerous other contingencies

and necessities. However, these are also tied to certain key social constructs that validated and

justified the European sense of superiority over the savages of the New World. We can look to

the secular Enlightenment philosophies of John Locke, for example, whose treatise on

government was essentially a mandate for the civilized nations to go out and claim every last

square inch of land on the planet that was not owned and governed (at least not in the terms of

his social contract), displace the indigenous inhabitants, and wring it of every possible

resource it can yield, for this is the natural order of things. The insidious little wars that pepper

the developing world today owe a great debt of gratitude to civilized men who colonized and

dehumanized entire populations and races for hundreds of years and who left highly

dysfunctional and fragmented societies in their wake.

And yet, the tragic history of colonialism is just another cycle in the dance between conquerors

and the conquered. I once visited a Native American Indian ruin in New Mexico belonging to a


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series of tribes, most recently the Pecos Indians. The foundation of the original city walls still

clearly outlines the city that once stood there thousands of years ago. And naturally, my

sympathies were inclined for the original inhabitants of the place whom I presumed lived a noble

and peaceful life until the arrival of the Europeans, missionaries, and pioneers. The first thing I

came upon as I entered the ruins was a plaque which once marked the city entrance. On this

plaque was a translation of what I would describe as a sort of declaration, or manifest destiny

of the original inhabitants. I dont recall what it said to the last word, but essentially the message

was this: W e are the biggest. W e are the best. W e take what we want and the others are obliged

to surrender it all to us . And then of course you continue on your way through the ruins and seethe history of all those who came and conquered the place many times over. The realization has

since stuck with me: the warring, conquering, pillaging spirit in man is universal. It is simply a

part of who we are.

History makes victims and perpetrators of us all.

That said, of course, the amassing of technology and wealth in the dominant countries of the

world today (itself a legacy of colonialism) has enabled these countries not only to exercise their

will with relative impunity, but also to shape consensus reality concerning global issues in

ways that are far from inclusive or democratic and which have lead to subtle and not so subtle

forms of institutional violence. The cost of living and maintaining the lives to which we in the

west have become accustomed, often sows the seeds of discontent and violence in places that are

far removed from our conscious awareness. For an example of this, we neednt look deeper than

the bottom of a barrel of oil. And yet, whereas the savage Indian, the brutish Norseman or the

warring Mongol was at ease with, and unabashed by his lust for war and plunder; modern


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esteemed institutions in the US and around the world that feature curricula dedicated to the

systematic study of peace and conflict resolution.

Depth psychology could prove a useful tool in better understanding those social constructs which

underlie the judgments we make about ourselves and others regarding the rationality-

irrationality, justice-injustice, good-evil of our collective actions and behaviors; for the Jungian

perspective is concerned not only with the collective unconscious, but with collective

consciousness as well. Depth psychology is not simply a turning away from the external world

to a magical inner world of myths and dreams; it seeks to raise the level of awareness of the

individual of her relationship to the world (in all its beauty and ugliness) in which she lives. This

is clearly evident in the following quotes by Jung:

Since the individual is not only a single entity, but also by his very existence,

presupposes a collective relationship, the process of individuation does not lead to

isolation, but to an intenser and more universal collective solidarity.

Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realize that

you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in

space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. You are part of an atomic

structure, and that atomic structure is part of a molecule which, with others, builds

up a body.

Likely, there is much more war yet to be waged and much more blood yet to be shed. And the

human race may shed its last before we get to wherever it is we are going. We would not be the

first species to lose the evolutionary race. In fact, evolutionary psychologists have pointed out


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that the 5,000 or so years of civilization from ancient Egypt to the present is but a small

fraction of the 20,000 or more years prior to civilization that human beings lived as nomadic

hunter gatherers. In evolutionary time, we are but in the nascent phase of psychosocial

development of our species. And yet, we find ourselves thrust into a global society when it

may be that we are still just adjusting to life among our closest neighbors. But there is no going

back. History is littered with failed (albeit noble) attempts to turn the clock back to utopian

agrarian societies. What we need to do is turn our attention to expanding our conscious

awareness to match the level of complex interconnectedness that is modern human civilization.

The instinct for survival is very strong. Khrushchev and Kennedy learned to see past the duality

of us vs. them when it came down to it. A prevailing sanity, an awareness between these men

and the generals behind them, brought them to decide that; today, we will not blow up the world .

Presently, we do not face the immediate threat of mutually assured destruction such as we

faced during the cold war. But our world is facing a growing list of deep crises which may be

less apparent and obvious than a superpower rivalry, but no less ominous a threat to our survival.

The instinct for survival needs to come up from the level of instinct to the level of conscious

awareness where it is integrated as part of a world view; one that recognizes the need for a

deeper understanding of ourselves and our interconnectedness in order that we may better face

the challenges and crises that will inevitably arise in the years to come.

depth psychology in the study of war and peace (final draft)

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