Obsessional and Hysterical Modes of National Identity1

… puisque qu'est-ce qu'une chose? sinon ce qui dure, identique, un certain temps.

The possibility of a psychoanalytic understanding of national identity arises with Lacan's reconceptualization of Freudian theory, and its necessity derives from the tragic impasse of current history. National identity is a defining problem of our times, and its specificity as a problem corresponds to an essential feature of the psychoanalytic situation: a blockage in the deep structure of interlocution, an instability of intersubjective exchange. Lacanian psychoanalysis clearly frames the relationship of subject and other, bringing out the dialectical character of neuroses affecting that relationship; applied to national identity, it frees us from the quixotic attempt to impose “reason” on the national, allowing us rather to see such reason as itself a mode of neurosis aggravating by its action a fundamental conflict or contradiction which it is powerless to resolve. National identity at present appears as a limit to the hegemony of the social/humanistic ratio. In Lacanian terms, national identity becomes real as a consequence of its suppression in the Symbolic, or rather such suppression produces a monstrous Real, which takes the horrific contemporary forms of interethnic violence, repression, displacement, and genocide.

The principal contention of this essay is that national identity has a characteristic semiotic structure deriving from its material and historical premises, and that this structure produces a dialectical alternation in the political reactions which national identity provokes. These dialectically articulated modes of national identity are called obsessional and hysterical, borrowing the schema of neurotic types as it is featured in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The terms obsessional and hysterical are used advisedly, with reference mainly to the semiotic mechanisms which they represent; yet their psychoanalytic meaning is also in play, presenting t