Discussion of Branka Pecotic's and Andrew Cooper's ‘Healthy and Pathological Consequences of Two Cultures’

It seems to me fascinating to enter the dialogue between Branka Pecotic and Andrew Cooper. Fascinating why? It is a bold and open discussion of issues that hardly can be neglected in our lives: relational and narcissistic modes of our existence. It is quite striking how much space was devoted by Branka Pecotic to the external reality of the Soviet State Trials, and how much less to her personal background in her family. The opposite is true in the contribution of Andrew Cooper, who started his part by telling the dream, and then went on to describe the internal vicissitudes between his social and narcissistic patterns, and found Liberalism as the debatable ‘third position’.

I believe this basic exposition says something essential about the different experiences of reality in the so-called West and East, at least in the post-war time. Stalin's Soviet Union represented a monstrous pathological external reality created by Stalin's pathological personality, and by those who served him and followed him. Collectivistic ideas were misused and denigrated by the Soviet regime, which essentially remained feudal under the red flag of communistic collectivistic goals: it was a ‘collective’ of serfs who were not supposed to think and develop, or be real individuals in search of external and internal freedom. This external reality can be compared to the anal universum (as described by Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984) where morphological structures turn into amorphous material. I think Bukharin was still trying to keep a collectivistic ‘structure’ as a meaning for his death, a defence against the inevitable loss of structure (a loss of meaning) in the anal universum. When external reality takes on severe pathological attributes and becomes paranoid-schizoid, then it is difficult to define an internal paranoid-schizoid position as something really internal