The pleasures of the gulf war

John M. Broughton

pp. 231-246

in: Stam, Leendert Mos, Warren Thorngate, Bernie Kaplan (eds), Recent trends in theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

Certain unconscious, dynamic characteristics of modern warfare are illustrated in heightened form in the recent Gulf War. The mainstream psychology of war fails to illuminate such dynamics since it is invested in concealing the intense pleasures afforded by warfare. In wartime, actual violence becomes confounded with graphic fantasies of bodily injury and mutilation. This imagery evokes a generic complex of emotional ambivalence-of fascination and dread-found to be active in pacifism as well as militarism. The transgressions of war are socially sanctified and so provide the peculiar ecstasy of legitimate profanation. At the same time, war heightens the felt connection between fantasies of terror, omnipotent grandeur, and sublime surrender. Masochistic submission and self-mutilation are tied to outright sadism, revealing the indiscriminate form that "force" takes in psychotic destructiveness.