Psychoanalytic Pure War: Interactions with the Post-Apocalyptic Unconscious

Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer’s concept of “pure war” refers to the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely (12).2 We as psychoanalysts can—and increasingly must—explore the impact of this concept on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a patient’s worst fears in actual catastrophic events has always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however, catastrophic events not only threaten friends, family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, television, and Internet.3 Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the analyst treating patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of our cultural veneer? At the end of the First World War, the first “total war,” Walter Benjamin observed that “nothing [after the war] remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body”(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our contemporary situation, “The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that horror...can rage absolutely” (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of World War I that “war is too serious to be confined to the military” (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15). Virilio and Lotringer gave the name “pure war” to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape inevitable destruction—it requires a way out—but this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in the external possibility—at least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposes— pure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death. The tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York City has given us a bitter but important opportunity to study the effects of the pure war condition on individuals. It allows us to look at how this all-encompassing state appears in psychoanalytic treatment and to observe its influence through the analysis of transference/countertransference dynamics. The pure war condition has been brought grimly to consciousness. In this paper, I will explore how it manifests itself in society, in character, and most specifically in the psychoanalytic treatment of one patient whose dynamics highlight significant aspects of the pure war state. How does treatment happen when, at some level, we perceive ourselves as already dead? Whatever our individual differences, our visions of the psychoanalytic endeavor arise out of the social defense of the culture within which we live and work (I have referred to this as “community character,” cf. Borg 350). And whatever our individual differences, in a pure war situation the primary task is simply to sustain the dream of psychic survival. The case of Joyce, who saw the first explosion at the World Trade Center as she rode down Fifth Avenue in a bus after her session with me, exemplifies this task.