You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This article attempts to situate the concept of identity within two contexts, firstly, in the object relations analysis of splitting, especially Melanie Klein's, and secondly, in the application of Klein's view to the process of national identification. American academic Mary Caputi has described the way in which two psychoanalysts have analyzed this: Turkish Cypriot-American psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan and French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Caputi posits “the tremendous weight that national identity carries, given its ability to engage deep emotions and to elicit irrational responses.” She argues that psychoanalysis sees national identity as part of the individual's large project of establishing moorings, given that national identities aim to denote stable, clearly defined sets of meanings free of ambiguity and ambivalence. [Caputi, 1996, p. 683]. Both Volkan and Kristeva attempt to engage with the issue of “ego formation and the individual's need for a social identity not beset by fragmentation.” Caputi aims to use these two theorists to reveal the ‘psychoanalytical underpinnings of national identity’. [Caputi, 1996, p. 684]. I will then attempt to apply their analyses to the situations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (though we should remember that the war has been going on since ), and, secondly, the ongoing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.
Volkan insists on the need to grasp those basic psychic processes originating in the pre-Oedipal phase, He argues that splitting is central to the psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of international relations. Splitting is a process “used by pre-Oedipal children beset by the anxieties of differentiation”. The child is unable to weld together the simultaneously good and bad images of the mother, a dilemma that gives rise to intense conflict. They remain “too cognitively and emotionally immature to tolerate the ambiguity of feelings that these good and bad images stir up.” But they know that the rage pro