Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai<br />
influence of old national myths” (Anzulovic, 1999: 145-146). It might be<br />
added that this was exacerbated by the historical continuity and unbroken<br />
hegemony of a narcissist and collectivist mode of subjectivation within the<br />
Serbian culture. The Serbian people seemed particularly receptive to narratives<br />
of annihilation, and feelings of rage grew with their perceived loss<br />
of power due to the fall from a position they had felt entitled to in the name<br />
of their perceived moral superiority. Beyond this, the main responsibility<br />
for what happened falls upon the political and cultural elite of Belgrade,<br />
who were able to evoke repressed anxieties and fantasies of extermination<br />
in order to maintain a position of material, political and cultural privilege<br />
unaltered by the process of democratization.<br />
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “every affect belonging to an emotional<br />
impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety”<br />
(Freud, 1955a: 241). Thus, the feeling of anxiety or anguish emerging<br />
when one sees something “uncanny” should be perceived as an indication<br />
of “something repressed that recurs” (Freud, 1955a: 241, emphasis in<br />
text). Something that comes to be perceived as “uncanny” represents, in<br />
reality, “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and wellestablished<br />
in the mind and which has become alienated from it only<br />
through the process of repression” (Freud, 1955a: 241).<br />
Freud emphasizes how the uncanny elements seem to re-present and reactualize<br />
elements removed from previous stages of individual and<br />
collective cultural and social formations. This would be evident in the fantasies<br />
of omnipotence characterizing the phase of primary narcissism, and<br />
in the ancient animistic conception of a world “characterized by the subject’s<br />
narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief<br />
in the omnipotence of thought… and by all other creations with the help<br />
of which men, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development,<br />
strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality” (Freud, 1955a: 240).<br />
In Freud’s vision, these ideas were not limited to early humanity:<br />
96<br />
Each of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding<br />
to this animistic stage… none of us [have] passed though it without<br />
preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of<br />
manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as<br />
“uncanny” fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic<br />
mental activity within us and bring them to expression (Freud, 1955a:<br />
240-1).<br />
Applied to the actions of the conservative Serb cultural and political elite,<br />
Freud’s idea suggests that this elite, also, succeeded in maintaining its<br />
privileges and power through the elaboration and implementation of their