3.2The psyche of the kamikaze

(in PSICOLOGIA DINAMICA, nn. 1-2-3, Anno IV, 2000)

James Hillman (1) sets the perspective of the suicide not only «as an exit from the life but also as an entry into death». The problem is not merely in relation with the breakdown towards the thought and the ethic of society, that opposes and deplores this gesture, especially considering that the suicide «underlines in radical way the independent reality of the Soul». The analyst faces problems that represent in the patient «above all experiences and sufferings, problems with an ‘interiority’. The patient’s firstly  wants that his analyst is aware of own suffering and to attract him into own experiential world. Experience and suffering are terms strongly related to Soul», Hillman says.

Sometimes Soul rejoices other times it suffers, but it is so delicate, reactive and sensible to easily crouch in itself, at times almost as far as to disappear, when it has the feeling that someone is doing it an injustice or is neglecting it, other times as far as to annihilate itself when it feels  to have been “mortally” wounded.

The “reasons of the soul” exist and are deep but they appear “without discernment” to all people who would like to approach it by means of the logic of the ordinary mind. For these motives, Hillman justly underlines that, during a psychoanalytic treatment, the therapist has to draw near to the Soul avoiding “a proceeding with an attitude of prevention” and since only like this he can maintain that necessary contact to be able to understand what is really happening to it.

The question is that we are not sufficiently accustomed to treat with psychological dimensions that has symbolic valences and with expressions of the psyche that constitute above all “symbolic realizations.”

At the cost of to be misunderstood, but with intellectual honesty, I want to sustain that the soul of the kamikaze (2) doesn't disdain to perish; his self-destructive action is loaded with symbolic values (3).

We will be never able to entirely understand the kamikaze (that we must maintain well distinguished from the terrorist), we can never enter his psyche and, therefore, we cannot also defeat never from him with systems that are not only war or we cannot prevent his actions, if we won't be skilled to understand his “Soul”, that is distant “light-years” from the western culture that also can accept to despatch on the battleground one hundred thousand people but cannot conceive the personal life-sacrifice for a cause. And clearly we are not here discussing if it is a just or wrong cause! I don't think, in fact, that one person, endowed with a crumb of humanity, exists in the world who is lacking in a  feeling of deep disgust in front of the slaughter of human life!

Simply, if we want to approach the Soul of the Other and if we want to find “the words” - this both in the therapeutic field, and in the social field, and in the intercultural field - we have to near Soul understanding its sufferings and its more intimate “irrationality”, besides abandoning the pre-conceptions that can darken a more penetrating vision of that part of the psyche interpretable as the deepest nucleus of the experience.         

If we turn the look to the group events with a less enthusiastic eye than the group-therapist, we could also discover the most dangerous sides of the collective dimension and of our social being or “We”.

The group-aggregations can, for instance, appear “socially pathological”, that is deviant on the basis of some perversions or “aberrations” of the basic-assumptions until the formation of “social-bodies” specialized in running and maintaining the attack-escape assumption (gangster’s organizations, mafia etc.), or coupling-assumption (organized prostitution), or dependence-assumption (drug-addiction groups).

Now, on my opinion, a deep nucleus of truth seems can have the old Latin saying: “senatores boni vires, senatus mala bestia(4). It is on these aspects regarding the group that stands up the part pro-individualist of our experience but without a my capability to lean towards one of the two poles constituted by the binomial “individual-group”. Only we never have to forget that behind different negative social events there is the influence of one or several instigator heads and that a vast humanity can be seen to execute as uncritical victim of the “flock-syndrome”.

Was Freud then so distant from the truth when in his analysis of the social world saw the masses as subjugated by the figure of the leader, for a process of global identification equalizing and uniting the most people?

Further, the fact that the chief is unconsciously a perfect interpreter of the underground feelings of the community (Bion) and he is, therefore, the expression of collective sentiment rather than a “people-fascinator”, it seems that in practice don't change a lot!

A last aspect that I desire to signal, with regard to the psychology of the kamikaze, it is the presence of a double destructive mechanism, because of two contemporaneous dynamics of death: one connected the unconscious “logic” usually present in the homicide and in the war (your death - my life) to which it is added the “logic” of the destructive nihilism (my  death - your death) typical of who is lacking in the survival hope, at last the survival on Earth, that recalls to the mind the biblical epilogue of the Sampson’s fight: “Sampson dies with all the Philistines!”. Probably to gather the present aspects of desperation in every form of kamikaze action and to work for giving back hope to whom totally appears of it deprived this could contribute to find more lasting solutions to the matter of the destructive acting by the kamikaze men and women.  


References

(1) Hillman J., Il suicidio e l'anima, Astrolabio ed., Roma, 1972, pagg. 7, 28,33, 37.
(2) to distinguish from "terrorist".
(3)
I affirm this as person who has never possessed a weapon. The unique occasion when I exploded a shot it was one day I frequented the high school and I was happy to have missed that poor, unarmed, bird against which I was directed the aim, this naturally in spite of the best tradition that characterizes the “noble art of shot”!
(4) “senators are good persons, senate is a bad beast”.

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