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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
• Blame for the break up of Yugoslavia assigned to western powers
(typically Germany and the Vatican for having recognized Slovenia and
Croatia).
The list could continue, but these examples should suffice to help us see a
broader picture. What is striking in the comparison of these few scattered
narratives taken from the Kosovar Serbian IDPs with the narratives gathered
from Serbian intellectuals and political activists (most of which were
detractors of the then ruling Milosevic regime), is that they are all instrumental
in freeing Serbian collective formations and individuals from the
responsibility of having started the civil wars that followed the break-up of
Yugoslavia. To emphasize this is not to claim that all the responsibility can
and should be assigned to the Serbs, as this position would be untenable
and beyond the purposes of the present work. Rather, what the narratives
suggest is that this self-victimization and conspiracy mindset is consistent
with a collectivist and narcissistic world of moral superiority, a world
which disavows and denies individuality, in terms of both difference and
responsibility. By reiterating the idea that Albanians were manipulated by
foreign powers, that the media disseminated biased information, that they
had been manipulated by Albanian nationalist parties and terrorized by
Albanian paramilitary formations, the Serbian people from Kosovo and
rump Yugoslavia were able to project unconscious perceptions of the situation
in which they increasingly found themselves. In this respect it is
important to underline how the inward-directed libidinal economy of a
narcissist subject does not potentially enable him/her to see the world other
than through his/her idealized and moralized ego, which mediates any
direct engagement with reality that could potentially alter his/her selfperception
in terms of omnipotence, moral superiority, and perfection.
This brings us to another narrative strategy implemented by the Serbian
displaced population, which is also consistent with a narcissist psychological
order: negation. According to Freud, the content removed from a
representation or from one’s thought can sometimes make its way into
consciousness, on the condition that it is negated (Freud, 1955b: 235).
From this perspective, negation becomes a way for the removed to reach
consciousness without the acceptance of what has been repressed. The
action of negating something is thus equivalent to saying, “this is something
which I should prefer to repress”, for “a negative judgement is the
intellectual substitute for repression” (Freud, 1955b: 236). Through this
theory of negation, the promptness with which many Serb IDPs minimized
the blatant nationalist bias of their local state-owned television, denied the
existence of all forms of racism and discrimination within the Yugoslav
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