NOTES TO PAGES 306–9Guanta ́namo and in United States detention sites for ‘‘suspected terrorists,’’ gives little credence to
initial defenses of the Abu-Ghraib scenes as ‘‘animal house’’ behavior. For news on these links, see,
e.g.: Josh White, ‘‘Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guanta ́namo,’’Washington Post, July 14,
2005, A01; Oliver Burkerman, ‘‘Bush Team ‘Knew of Abuse’ at Guanta ́namo,’’The Guardian, Sep-
tember 13, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303105,00.html; Richard
Serrano and John Daniszewski, ‘‘Dozens Have Alleged Koran’s Mishandling,’’LA Times, May 22,
2005, A1.
- Ibid., 41.
- The latter distress is one Freud makes quite concrete in his brief discussion of panic, a
feeling he describes as ‘‘feeling alone in the face of danger,’’ which is experienced psychically when-
ever the emotional ties that sustain us are felt to disintegrate (Freud,Group Psychology, 36). - Ibid., 50.
- Ibid.
- The idealization of the beloved gratifies the demands of the ego-ideal upon the ego, de-
mands that are always punishing and that this roundabout order of love seeks partially to relieve
from such punishment and failure through this idealization. The headiness of being in love, Freud
suggests, issues in part from such relief. - Ibid., 56.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 57.
- Rousseau’s version of the social contract follows this model precisely, however. His effort
to ‘‘transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a
much greater whole, from which the same individual will then receive, in a sense, his life and his
being’’ parallels Freud’s understanding of a group as individuals in love with something common
that is also external to the group. See Rousseau,The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New
York: Penguin, 1968), 84. Note, too, thatcommune moi(‘‘common me, or common ego’’) is Rous-
seau’s norm for the formation (exceeding a mere tie that binds) produced by and at the heart of
the social contract (Social Contract, 61). - Presumably this explains why the sexual organization of modern cults often involves in-
junctions to abstinence, injunctions to promiscuity, and/or the unlimited sexual access of the leader
to all women in the group. - ‘‘Civilization... obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by
weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison
in a conquered city’’ (Freud,Civilization and Its Discontents, 84). Cities represent the literal conquest
of man, the containment of his instincts, but Freud is also analogizing the civilized psychetoa
conquered city. Civilization thus entails a double subjection, first by the aim-inhibition required by
civilization, and then by the introjection of civilization’s demands into the psyche. Both of these
are challenged by the psychic undoing that produces the group. - Freud,Group Psychology, 13–15.
- This converges with Hegel’s analysis of the philosophical movement from family to ethical
life: ‘‘Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated
on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent
existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with
me. But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form. In the state, it is no longer present.
There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content must be rational, and I must know it.
The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and
that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete’’ (Philosophy of Right,trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed.
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