Beyond the Pleasure Principle at Ft. Hood

15Nov/090

Beyond the Pleasure Principle at Ft. Hood

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud set out to understand why traumatic events could lead to nightmares and "flashbacks." This was in the wake of WWI, and partly in response to the diagnosis of "shell shock." The Pleasure Principle could explain dreams that reconciled negative emotions, but couldn't explain those that revisited the event of a trauma repeatedly on those who survived it.

The analogy that Freud used was similar to that of the body defending itself against a perceived foreign threat by summoning antibodies (and Islamism is nothing if not xenophobic). A traumatic breach of psychic defenses caused a "hypercathexis" of psychic energies against the psychic "location" (in memory) of the breach, in this analogy. Energies were poured into the gaping hole left in the normative sense of security that people require to function properly, and the subconscious mind's repeated unsuccessful attempts to neutralize the threat led to its replaying. It's become a motif of war and action movies that the hero who has experienced a traumatic event will relive it in his dreams, waking in a cold sweat with his adamantium claws fully extended.

Today, Ann Coulter and others recapitulate the MSM spin on the Ft. Hood massacre which describes Hasan as having suffered from second-hand PTSD, an explanation that is meant both to explain and mitigate his behavior. It is undeniable that Hasan was a deeply troubled individual, and we've discussed on this site some of the ways in which that was so, and the Army and intelligence services seem to share a good deal of blame for having conveniently minimized their assessments of the threat he posed in obeisance to political correctness. Still, there is, at least in Freudian thought, such a thing as a "Reality Principle" that is arrogantly elided by the narratives offered by the MSM in general: Hasan is an Islamist who sought out contacts with enemies of the United States and voiced radical opinions that dehumanized those not of his sect, before leaping on a desk, shouting "Allahu akbar!" and emptying multiple clips into a crowd of unarmed soldiers and civilians in an attempt to take as many of them as possible to his martyrdom.

PTSD is a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis, and whatever one may think of Freud's theory---we'll skip the idea of "thanatos" for now, though it could be used to lend a patina of intelligent motive to the MSM's response---it does seek to grapple with the issue of the psychic damage that is visited on trauma victims and to explain the behaviors that arise as a result of the trauma. What it does not and cannot do is illuminate the media hypercathexis to the "threat" of blaming radical Islamism for atrocities visited on individuals and societies by its adherents. For that, one needs to consider the narcissism and psychotic delusion that is required to project his hatred onto those who judge him in the proper light.