Abstract
Anecdote as a means of advancing our understanding of clinical and social phenomena has slipped down the hierarchy of professional writing to occupy a place well below the hunt for empirical data and just above the use of fictional narrative, which some psychiatrists and social scientists prefer to handle with tongs whenever they come across it.
Not so the two authors of this article, who have plunged boldly into a history and literature which, as far as I am aware, no group analyst has yet touched. The history is that of the late unlamented Soviet Union and the literature, though not fictional, is lit up by the sparkling writing of Anna Alexievich, an acclaimed investigative journalist more concerned with employing her empathic skills to elicit graphic stories than piecing together clinical case histories.
In this fascinating account of the connection between the personal act of suicide and the demise of an entire political system, George Ikkos and Daniel McQueen have opened the door onto a field of enquiry which lies at the heart of group analysis: the interrelationship between the individual and the group, expressed in one of its darkest manifestations, the self-inflicted destruction of both. The terrain which they explore is the secretive, ironclad expanse of the Soviet Union, its sudden implosion and its replacement by an uncontrolled epidemic of capitalist marketeering engineered by corrupt oligarchs and their attendant gangsters.
As a sequel, which at first I found jarring in its inconsequentiality, the authors go on to postulate that what the United Kingdom is currently experiencing in its efforts to extricate itself from the European Union is tantamount to national suicide, or at best, national self-harm and that useful lessons can be learnt from the fate of the Soviet Union. The juxtapositioning of the Russian story with the emotional contortions of Brexit felt like a psychotic association. However, when I thought about the conceptual bridge of suicide with which the authors have straddled these two narratives, I began to see an interesting line of thinking bringing into a single focus the abrupt ending of an era, a traumatic transition period and the dawn of a grey new age, in the British case yet to be defined.
On the Russian front Ikkos and McQueen have taken extracts of Alexandra Alexievitch’s interviews with friends and relatives of those who committed suicide in the wake of glasnost and perestroika. These vignettes inspired them to look at the relationship between the private world of the individual and the political dynamic of the State. In this, they follow in the footsteps of the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who at the end of the 19th century identified a form of suicide arising from a breakdown in the balance between the outwardly imposed social order and the individual’s inner aspirations, resulting in ‘moral confusion’. Durkheim coined the term anomic suicide, something likely to occur in times of social upheaval associated with extreme changes in wealth, whether upward or downward. Meaning is stripped away from existence, the individual’s previous expectations of life are extinguished and there is nothing to replace them (Durkheim, 1951 [1987]).
The Soviet Union presents the interesting case of a vast monolithic society forged in the flames of revolution and bound together during the Second World War in a desperate fight for survival during which millions were slaughtered or perished through starvation and disease. The traumatic implications of this epoch can hardly be overstated. The ‘enemy’ was both inside the country’s borders and beyond them. Held within its monolithic structure were hundreds of ethnic groups whose cultural and religious diversity was ruthlessly suppressed by those who had risen to the top of the social ferment. The centuries-old ineffectual and corrupt power of the czars had been smashed by the Bolsheviks, paving the way for a new age dominated by the proletariat, ‘the people’.
Here, I am reminded of the first French revolution of 1789, another colossal upheaval which tore France apart and precipitated a European war which only ended with an emperor–dictator on the throne of France far more powerful than the absolute monarch whom the revolutionaries had overthrown.
How are we to process these convulsions in psychological terms? The danger, as Ikkos and McQueen point out, is to become simplistic. The opposite danger is to get lost in a forest of detail. The violent end of an epoch, it seems, is followed by the threat of chaos. A battle ensues, in which conflicting forces struggle to gain control. Once achieved, the ideals of a new age governed by the State (group) give way to new values led by the most powerful forces in the field who pay lip-service to the old ideals but rule the new world with an iron grip. Joseph Djugashvili became Joseph Stalin, the man of steel.
The Communist regime relied on tight social control for its survival. Art, music, literature and poetry were hammered into a uniform shape upholding a single purpose: to serve the interests of the State. As group analysts, we should be interested in the hideous paradox inherent in the Soviet political machine: the pronouncement that the group was sacrosanct set against the cult of hero-worship of a powerful dictator whose whim and word could destroy the lives of thousands. Personal yearnings for self-expression were stifled and dissidents were rooted out. The brutal methods of instilling fear used by the old czarist regime—murder, exile, cruel physical punishments—were embraced and refined by new technologies involving the invasion of the inner self by means of psychological techniques.
The watchword of the Communist ideology was collectivism. Its implementation called forth a culture of vigilance, persecution and oppression. A new public language sprang up, speaking robustly of prosperity and optimism. Expressions of negativity, whether voiced as truthful accounts of suffering or felt as doubt, helplessness or disappointment, were forced into the realms of denial. George Orwell wrote, ‘Animal Farm’ to bring home more vividly than any political treatise the cynicism and doublethink behind the Soviet legend (Orwell, 1945).
Ikkos and McQueen present the reader with a conundrum: why did we witness the emergence of suicidal acts during the apparently healthy period of recovery from decades of social control and suppression of individuality? The case histories they present us with are illuminating. In the first of these, a ‘much loved’ 14-year-old boy, after several flirtations with death, hangs himself. A friend tells the interviewer that he was one of ‘our lost generation—a communist upbringing and a capitalist life’. The authors underline the point that this youngster, unlike the older generation, had never known brutal fear, but only a crippling secrecy and a longing for freedom. When this freedom was eventually realized the discovery that it was merely a wasteland of corruption and exploitation led to the collapse of the dream—and the desire to find out what lay beyond death. Suicide, the authors maintain, can be seen as a wish to escape or transcend the helplessness and despair of cold reality. I could not help thinking here about the mentality of young terrorists and suicide bombers whose bleak everyday world breeds feelings of alienation, the antidote to which is felt to be the prospect of being rewarded in a utopian world beyond death.
The second case history records the suicide of an elderly man, still distraught seven years after having been abandoned by his cheating wife. Why now? Perhaps the anger and self-destructive feelings which flooded to the surface could only be discharged after the emotional numbness imposed by the Soviet tyranny had worn off. Ikkos and McQueen point to the fact that suicidal acts occur in a political context as well as having multifaceted origins in personal, familial and cultural dynamics. The unleashing of pent-up feelings, thoughts and desires controlled by means of fear releases waves of emotion which spill out into the open in defiance of time, logic, reason and boundaries surrounding lost objects of desire.
This leads me to ask, perhaps naively, whether it is possible to fall in love with an ideology.
There is a tantalizing quote by the poet Lermontov which heads this article, ‘I love my fatherland but with a strange love’. I associate this with the Russian people’s mystical passion for Russia, regardless of its political complexion (‘mother Russia’, or perhaps the Russian ‘fatherland’). The notion that Russians were in love with Communism is probably true. After all, they had been rescued from destruction at the hands of an external enemy and from the depredations of the aristocracy. But was it Communism or Russia which held their true love?
Stalin was seen as a saviour, but not long after the Soviet Union had imploded a new father-figure arose, Vladimir Putin, a he-man who set about stamping out the Russian mafia and imposing his own nationalistic, militaristic, hero-worshipping cult on the country. Russians could now feel that their national pride was restored and that they could once again nurture their spiritual selves through ancient religious practices. Co-incidental to writing this comment, I came across an observation by Isaiah Berlin that nationalism feeds on a sense of wounded pride and humiliation (Nougayréde, 2017). This set me thinking that the collapse of the Communist empire (‘dictatorship’ would be a better word) created a vacuum which was filled by multiple aggressive nationalisms. The breakdown of Yugoslavia might be another case in point. Yet again, massive trauma, layered over by decades of ideological control, spilled out into internecine warfare.
Travelling from East to West, Ikkos and McQueen continue their journey by taking us into contemporary Britain, a country in the throes of exiting from the European Union. Can Brexit be understood, they ask, as an act of national suicide, or is it merely an act of national self-harm? They point to the central theme of the campaign to leave Europe as the wish to ‘regain control’ and they associate this with the persecutory dynamic of a traumatized group which classically exhibits scapegoating and attacks against ‘the other’. When Ikkos and McQueen speak of ‘the idealization of national omnipotence’ as a feature of the Brexit mentality, I take it that they are referring to the worst excesses of nationalism and its accompanying xenophobia. Here, we face another paradox: the proclamations of extreme nationalism which have accompanied Brexit, far from pumping iron into the national muscle, appear to be sapping its energy. The myth which supports the Brexit campaign, that Britain is best off ‘going it alone’ is fuelled by the belief that this island, always under threat of invasion by continental neighbours and ultimately left to fend for itself by powerful allies, can never trust foreigners to act in its best interests and must fight its battles in grand isolation. The ghost of Churchill, soldier and imperialist, looms over us as the country declines into mediocrity, proving once again the power of myth over reason, dream over reality. Perhaps this country is also looking for a saviour. Let us hope there is not a dictator waiting in the wings.
How does this tie in to the theme of national suicide? Both Russia and Britain survived invasions during the Second World War, but the scale of the trauma experienced by Russia was incomparably greater. Moreover, the protection afforded to this country by its long-established democratic system and its island status has enabled it to weather storms from Europe with greater resilience than its continental neighbours.
In response to Ikkos and McQueen’s implicit question whether the United Kingdom is experiencing, through Brexit, the suicide of a nation, my response is that this is not a full-blown act of national suicide but more likely a less malignant variant of self-destruction, probably better described as national self-harm. As we know from individual instances of self-harming, there is an unbearable tension behind seemingly unrealizable fantasies, which is only inadequately relieved by the self-harming act. Britain is not impervious to the emotional appeal of myths designed to heal traumatic experiences, hence the trumpeting of Brexit slogans and the simplistic fantasies of being overwhelmed by an influx of foreigners.
Ikkos and McQueen raise more questions than they answer, but they cannot be faulted for this. On the contrary, they are to be admired for impelling us to debate the social aspects of suicide, for introducing us to the Russian political landscape through some fine literature and for resuscitating the method of anecdotal case discussion as a means of examining suicide at both clinical and societal levels.