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Psychoanalytic cultural studies usually treat the nation as a collective projection of individual egos and as a mental extension of the maternal body. Scapegoating and ethnic hatred are interpreted as clinging to the symbiotic unity and repressing one's castration—i.e., the shift from the imaginary wholeness of primary narcissism into a separate being in the symbolic order represented by the father and adult sexuality. For instance, “greedy” Jews represented for the Nazis greedy siblings, who fulfilled their own dream to live parasitically off of the mother instead of working. Hate and envy, which the nationalists disown, are projected onto the others and the externalized feelings are polluting and poisoning the harmonious dual union between the nationalist/boy and nation/mother from the outside. The more the inner balance of a society is shattered, the more others as multifaceted beings will be homogenized and—at worst—deanimated in order to produce united groups bent under one will.1
Thus, these overly organic metaphors of “nation” in texts and imagery make psychoanalytically oriented researchers suspect either arrested individual development or displaced social conflict—or both at the same time.
Media researchers Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, in their study on sacrificial wishes and rituals around the American flag, agree that the flag is revered in patriotic rituals as the embodiment of a bloodthirsty totem god who organizes killing energy. But they reject any psychoanalytic hermeneutics and claim that ever-recurrent blood sacrifices of young men, leaders, or outsiders indicate only irreversible ontology of social bonds, structural functions, rather than primitive remnants or developmental defects in identity formation.
According to their Durkheimean theory, the sacrifice renews the group's agreement to be a group. “The totem secret, the collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the death of its own members at the hands of the group” (2,