What the study of nonhuman animals reveals
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Psychoanalysis and Politics
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What the study of nonhuman animals reveals about authoritarianism and its alternative
By JAY FRANKEL – Jan. 22nd at 6 pm London time/ 7 pm Berlin time/ 8 pm Cape Town and Jerusalem time/ 1 pm New York Time/ 12 noon Chicago time/ 10 am Vancouver time
Part of the Psychoanalysis and Politics digital series Crises and Transmission
In 1932, psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi introduced the term identification with the aggressor (IWA) to describe how children react to abuse by a parent: they abandon all self-assertion, submit themselves totally to their abuser, become hyper-alert to other people’s feelings and lose contact with their own, and take the blame for being abused onto themselves—all so they can survive.
Ferenczi’s clinical observations have been validated by systematic empirical research. It’s also become clear, since Ferenczi wrote, that the range of triggers for IWA is much broader than child abuse, and that it plays out on all levels of society in response to a range of traumatic situations. On the largest scale, IWA can be triggered in large groups of people by certain types of widespread social anxieties, giving rise to authoritarian movements where masses of people submit to the whims of strongman leaders.
But IWA isn’t simply a psychological phenomenon in individuals or groups of people. Ethologists, who observe nonhuman animals in their natural habitats from the standpoint of their adaptive evolution, have discovered various aspects of IWA-like submission as a response to certain types of threat in other primates, mammals, and even reptiles. Further, this submission response is key in structuring the social organization in many species. IWA is part of our evolutionary heritage.
I will explore the relevant ethological literature, which goes into considerable detail about the role that this kind of submission plays in the response to specific kinds of threats and how it structures social life in many nonhuman animal species.
I’ll then use these findings (1) to refine our understanding of the IWA response and narcissistic reactions in people, (2) to illuminate the dynamics of authoritarianism in human societies, and (3) to examine an alternative social structure also found in many nonhuman animals, which is based on mutual concern rather than rigid hierarchy enforced by threat, and to look at the conditions that facilitate one or the other of these social structures.
Jay Frankel, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with a private practice in New York City. He is also an associate member of the Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society. He is an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor, and Clinical Consultant, in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, at New York University; Faculty in the Trauma Studies Program, at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, in New York; Associate Editor, and previously Executive Editor, of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues; co-author (with Neil Altman, Richard Briggs, Daniel Gensler, and Pasqual Pantone) of Relational Child Psychotherapy (2002, Other Press); co-editor (with Aleksandar Dimitrijevic and Gabriele Cassullo) of Ferenczi’s Influence on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Traditions (2018, Routledge); and author of three dozen journal articles and book chapters, and numerous conference presentations, on topics including trauma, identification with the aggressor, authoritarianism, the analytic relationship, the work of Sándor Ferenczi, play, child psychotherapy, relational psychoanalysis, and others.
