On February 24th, 2022, the Russian army entered the territory of Ukraine, triggering the greatest conventional military conflict in Europe since the war in Yugoslavia and the greatest refugee crisis since WWII. The war in Ukraine immediately started a widespread debate in third-party countries that focused on responsibility for the conflict, the memory of past wars, and the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Suddenly, the COVID-19 pandemic was no longer news, swept away by Ukraine, which took over news broadcasts and captured the full attention of the media. Thus, during the first weeks of the war, the media rushed to find out the opinions of politicians, journalists, war correspondents, diplomats, political experts, military strategists, intellectuals, philosophers, historians, essayists, writers, artists, and celebrities. In the Western
The debate on the war raises concerns that have not had sufficient attention paid to them, such as the permeability of our theories and the incidence and diffusion of our research. The French social psychologist Serge Moscovici proposed the concept of
This article analyzes the weight and influence of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in the social representation of nationalism. Using the discourse of the press, particularly the opinion columns printed in various Western countries during the first weeks of the war, the article explores the persistence of psychopathological language in the popular interpretation of the conflict. In fact, the denunciation and criticism of nationalism are still being formulated at the start of the twenty-first century with the voices of psychology and psychiatry through the memory of fascism, the Holocaust, and the vulgarized representation of Adolf Hitler. In this sense, as we shall see, the Western critics of the illegal invasion of Ukraine have once more narrowed down the explanation of the conflict in the mind of the nationalist, in their infancy and/or their sexuality, appealing to the old interpretative ideas of Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, or Theodor Adorno. The article is organized as follows. Section one examines in detail the main hypothesis of the work: despite the academic renewal of current research into nationalism and the relative consolidation of the constructionist and modernist paradigm, other visions and interpretations of nationalism are still widely accepted and popularized beyond academic circles; in particular, those that have been termed
“To have a nationality is not an inherent attribute of the human being, yet nowadays it would seem so,” stated Ernest Gellner at the start of “Nationalism -the principle which predicates that the basis of political life resides in the existence of homogeneous cultural units and in which there must be cultural unity between those who govern and the governed- is not something which is natural; it is not in the hearts of men and neither is it listed as one of the prior conditions for social life in general; such assertions are a falsehood that the nationalist doctrine has managed to pass as an obvious fact. Nevertheless, as a phenomenon –and not as a doctrine presented by the nationalists-, nationalism is inherent to a certain set of social conditions; and these conditions are, coincidentally, those of our time”
A series of social scientists and historians, contemporaries of Gellner, brought about a paradigmatic turnaround in the academic literature on nationalism. For Anthony Smith, Tom Nairn, Benedict Anderson, John Breully, Charles Tilly, and Eric Hobsbawm, as for Ernest Gellner, nationalism was an ideology that was closely linked to the structural forces and institutional developments of modernity: State, market, democracy, school, bureaucracy, or communication technologies. Quite independently of the fact that they may have arisen from pre-existing ethnic communities—as postulated by Smith (1971/1976, 1991)—nations only came into being as such through a territorial state of citizens (or the aspiration of establishing one), a relative level of economic and technological development, the spread of printing, and the literacy of the population. The basic social processes that Marx, Durkheim, and Weber had advanced one century before to explain the workings of modern societies (industrialization, secularization, rationalization, mass schooling, and democratization) came to be considered decisive in explaining the origin and spread of nationalism (Day & Thompson 2004). Thus, the nation was described as a fundamentally sociological reality, a community imagined on the basis of the social and political institutions and interactions of modern life. According to Benedict Anderson, “[t]he idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation” (1991, 26).
Most experts on nations and nationalism today surely share the basic theses of the modernist and constructivist paradigm formulated by Gellner’s generation (1983/1988; see Brubaker 2009, 21–42). For all that, the possibility that the new ideas concerning nationalism may have truly been heard beyond academia would seem to be more unlikely. How have these ideas influenced the language of politics and public opinion, and what is their impact? If, according to Moscovici (1961/1979), the academic and scientific language has filtered through from expert circles to become common knowledge in social representations and profane theories in current societies, how, then, have the theses of sociological modernism affected the daily discourse of the media? Is the
The article uses this same suspicion as its starting point: the low incidence of the sociological and modernist paradigm in the profane theories of nationalism. In fact, at the start of the twenty-first century, two old visions or “social representations” of the ideology were widely accepted and popularized beyond academia (García-García 2021, e1603). The first representation is based on
The historicist representation owes much to the critics of the Enlightenment and the first ideologues of nationalism, to Rousseau, Herder and Fichte, to Michelet, Renan and Barrès, to the publication and diffusion of such texts as As Susan Condor (1997, 213–255) states, the reified representations of “our national history” in buildings and other memorial places bring to mind the description by Moscovici of the processes of “ontologization” (i.e., personification) and “figuration,” from which a series of scientific constructs become concrete and “almost visible” when they become part of profane knowledge.
The psychologist representation, much less analyzed to date, has its own academic and intellectual sources: from Charles Darwin, Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, and Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Gordon Allport. It springs from the diffusion and popularization of such works as
If the first representation owes much to the historians of the nineteenth century, the second is indebted to the critics of nationalism from the first half of the twentieth century, following the Great War and World War II. From the 1920s onwards, a growing number of Western intellectuals and scholars began to view nationalism as a key factor in the outbreak of wars and conflicts: “Nationalism promises not to unify, but disintegrate, the world; not to preserve and create, but to destroy, civilisation” (Hayes 1926, 133). For the American historian Carlton Hayes and many scholars of his generation, the term
Different schools and academic currents were to participate in this academic turn; such currents included evolutionary biology, degenerationist medicine, and the psychology of the masses (García-García 2015a, 333–346; 2015b, 103–123; 2016, 91–103; 2023, 71–100). On the one hand, the voices of evolutionary biology were soon echoed by the scholars and intellectuals between the two World Wars to describe nationalism as a manifestation of the darker or shadowy parts of the psyche: as a deplorable and painful, but maybe inevitable, outbreak of primitive and brutal instincts or desires on the part of the human race (Howerth 1919, 174–187; Scott 1926; Trotter 1915/1947). According to the English naturalist Ernest Hankin (1937, 151), “Nationalism is self-assertion of that redoubtable being, ‘the cave-man within us.’” When the war drums are heard, the “herd instinct” comes to the fore, as the American sociologist Ira Howerth (1919, 175) said: “a nation, then, is a herd.” Instead of the nation becoming aware of its history and its destiny, nationalism now appeared as the rebirth of the irrational and bloodthirsty “beast” hidden underneath the conscience of the civilized man. As the American psychologist George Stratton (1929, 252) stated, “Scratch a Russian and find a Tartar… scratch a civilized man and find a savage.”
Furthermore, the intellectuals of the period also used the language of medicine and degenerationist psychiatry to condemn and curse the ideology. Thus, nationalism was presented at the same time as pathological and as a moral perversion of civilization (Playne 1925; Toynbee 1915; Wells 1929; Zimmern 1918). Although the experimental advances in genetics at the beginning of the twentieth century had discredited the concept of evolutionary
On the other hand, the behavior of nationalists was similar to that of a primitive, irrational, brutish, and unconscious mass, as had been described decades earlier by the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon in his book
Even so, the psychological turn could only be completed with the contribution of psychoanalysis following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler as the chancellor of Germany (García-García 2021, e1603; 2023, 72–100). At that time, using the thesis that Sigmund Freud himself had put forward in “For the psychology of the masses, the nationalist leader (
For these authors, the behavior of the nationalist was the result of the displacement of private, unutterable desires to the political sphere and could be explained in terms of the participants’ Written by a Galician Jew, Samuel Roth, based on the notes of Adolf Hitler’s imaginary psychoanalyst. The text demonstrates the strong impression of psychoanalysis in the academic and profane representation of the Nazi dictator. See Pick 2012. “Unable to enter into a ‘give-and-take’ relationship with other human beings that might afford him an opportunity of resolving his conflicts in a realistic manner, he projects his personal problem on great nations…”
The British psychiatrist Henry Dicks, who had clinically treated Rudolf Hess, also found the origin of his sadomasochistic character in the figure of a cruel, terrifying father. Once more, the infamous contribution of the adult Hess to German politics seemed to be already written since the childhood of the young Rudolf: the repression of instincts, frustration, and latent hate toward others, the need to identify with a substitute father, the paranoid dynamic, the projection and aggressiveness toward the scapegoats. Dicks completed the psychoanalytical diagnosis with language close to that of the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, portraying Hess as an atavistic and simian person whose face gave “an impression of baleful strength”:
“… a receding forehead, exaggerated supraorbital ridges covered with thick bushy eyebrows, deeply sunken eyes, irregular teeth, a very weak chin and receding lower jaw… The whole man produced the impression of a caged great ape, and ‘oozed’ hostility and suspicion”
By the mid-twentieth century, the psychiatric interpretation of nationalism had spread from the clinical sphere, reaching other areas of academia and spreading beyond as social representation or profane knowledge; nationalism engaged the private passions of disturbing and dangerous individuals, of those who suffered emotional problems, a tormented childhood, and an authoritarian personality (Adorno et al. 1950; Kurth 1950, 293–312; Shafer 1955; Snyder 1954). In his bestselling book
Interest in this subject is not limited to the sphere of study of historians or social scientists; it is not restricted to the clinical sphere of medicine and the psychiatrist’s couch. The debate concerning nations and nationalisms has always spread beyond the sphere of historiography and expert research, reaching beyond academia to be reformulated and reproduced in the political and media spheres as social representation and profane theory (Moscovici 1961/1979). The concept of
In the second part of this article, the thesis is put to the test, focusing on the debate over Putin and the illegal invasion of Ukraine, an invasion that the Russian leader had called “a special operation” and which was carried out
The invasion by the Russian army, from the very start, engendered an enormous flood of news following the events that modified international geopolitics, endangered the world order, and threatened to set off a nuclear conflict. Suddenly, the war in Ukraine opened the TV news, hogged the headlines in the newspapers, and demanded the opinion of all kinds of experts and commentators: politicians, journalists, war correspondents, diplomats, military strategists, academics, intellectuals, philosophers, essayists, writers, artists, and celebrities of the communication media. Among this wide range of commentators and debaters, the authoritative voices of psychologists and psychiatrists had enormous coverage and notoriety during the first weeks of the conflict. The examples are legion. In the
The voice of psychology was not only heard through the words of psychologists. Journalists, novelists, philosophers, historians, and political experts often spoke of the conflict using very similar terminology. In the newspaper “I don’t know about you, but the texts of experts in international relations have not been of much use to me for understanding what this crisis is about. However, the texts of specialists in social psychology have been a great help… [Vladimir Putin] is an entrepreneur of identity. His great achievement has been to help the Russians recover from their mental trauma -the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union- and to give them a collective identity… Yet, it has all spiraled out of control... Putin’s policy of identity is so virulent because it is highly narcissistic… and narcissists… are insecure souls who try to hide their fragility …”
Another proof of the centrality of the clinical perspective in the debate on the war was the explicit reference to such authors as Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Henry Dicks, or Walter Langer. For instance, the journalist Peter Pomerantsev quoted the studies of Erich Fromm and Henry Dicks to establish a comparison between the mentality of Putin and that of the Nazis (Pomerantsev 2022). The economist and sociologist Mauricio Rubio, in
In his study on social representations, in the diffusion of a scientific theory with the image of its creator (“personification”), Serge Moscovici saw a common way to convert complex and inaccessible scientific knowledge into familiar and profane knowledge. In this case, the popularized and vulgarized image of Freud and his couch often continue to be brought into the political and media debate on nationalism and the war (Ffytche & Pick 2016; García-García 2023, 72–100; Pick, 2012). In the words of the film producer Robert Fox, printed in the “…a better understanding of Putin’s motivations for a greater Russia, and the lesser Ukraine, might be derived from the collected works of Sigmund Freud. It is time to put Vladimir V. Putin on Professor Freud’s legendary couch… He is increasingly working a path of parallel realities, and at times seems to be in a world of his own”
Mental trauma, psychopathic personality, couches… A new war that had begun and was justified
In some sense, that is what the Western mass media transmitted. Because of the almost exclusive concentration on the psychic profile and the psychiatric explanations, the reiterative recourse to the supposed psychopathologies of the Russian leader became the focus of a large part of the debate in the press during the first weeks of the war. In fact, the choice of headlines in articles and opinion columns turned out to be highly relevant, with the pages of
The reference to the “mind” of Vladimir Putin can also be seen as a “figuration” in the terminology of Moscovici, a way of alluding to psychodynamic theories and complex clinical notions with metaphors or simplified images easy to understand (Moscovici 1961/1979): what’s going on inside Putin’s mind? Although the writers of articles asked themselves about the plans and objectives of a leader who questioned territorial frontiers and put the world order and security in danger, the questions about his mind almost always pointed toward the unconsciousness and the irrationality of his actions. The philosopher and journalist Michel Eltchaninoff asked, “Are these the actions of a rational leader?” He concluded that a perpetual sense of victimhood allowed Putin to present “a vision of the world that is paranoid” (Eltchaninoff 2022). The journalist Peter Pomerantsev stated that the issue here is not about rational security demands, which can be defined in negotiations and balanced with the security concerns of others; the issue is instead about hidden desires and motivations, irrational demands that do not refer to a concrete geographical territory, but to an intangible and ethereal region—the unconscious. Once more, the questions and answers concerning the war appear to be taken over by psychiatry and psychoanalysis:
“… Putin’s sphere of influence waxes and wanes. It can mean the Russosphere… It can mean the mystical idea of a “single people” that encompasses Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. It can denote much of central Europe, the countries… “orphaned” by the end of the USSR… Henry Dicks, the psychoanalyst who studied Nazi soldiers during the WWII, came to the conclusion that Hitler’s idea of Lebensraum… was not just a geopolitical idea but a sign of a psychology that was so steeped in humiliation it grabbed things outside itself to sate its sense of endless inadequacy. Like an angry infant that doesn’t understand its own borders…”
The constant reference to the leader’s mind and subconscious takes us to another common sphere of the Freudian perspective: the dark, disturbing, and turbulent world of childhood. In fact, during the first few weeks of the war, an urgent, imprecise, and speculative search was carried out concerning the biography of the young Vladimir: a scrutiny or archaeological exploration of his present policies on the basis of his early life and his experiences from the past. Suddenly, as if it were necessary to look for the causes of the war in some omitted and repressed detail of his childhood, writers began to describe a series of details from a childhood that was seen as difficult and traumatic: a sordid upbringing, a lack of affection, bedroom secrets, sexual abuse, fighting at school, humiliations and betrayals by peers, repressed sexuality, latent homosexuality, etc. (Fallon 2022a; Fisher 2022; Garrido 2022; Rubio 2022; Taubman 2022; Whittell 2022). The sociologist Mauricio Rubio (2022) stated that “for several reasons, the possibility that Putin is a closet gay cannot be discarded.” In the words of the neuroscientist James Fallon, the case is that he has a terrible past as an illegitimate son who “routinely suffered abuse from an early age, even sexual abuse.” Fallon concludes that “the man is settling his scores with the world because of how he suffered as a child. Now he is the bully” (2022a).
As Vladimir Fédorovski said, we are facing “a complex personality” without a glimmer of fascination in his judgment (Whittell 2022). In fact, the Russian writer and ex-diplomat saw in President Putin a character marked by a childhood of misery and violence, of frustration and resentment, a man who had tried to survive for many years in a conflictive and impoverished quarter of the old city of Leningrad: “The way he has today of responding an eye for an eye in the international sphere goes back to that childhood,” Fédorovski stated (Whittell 2022). The writer and journalist Manuel Vicent described him as “a third-rate spy” and “a nobody” born in a marginal quarter populated by thugs. “That nobody is now that thug who is razing Ukraine and has the entire world on tenterhooks,” Vicent added (2022). In some sense, the world seems to be a tragic, inverted version of the great man theory of history: a linear and teleological narrative that, rather than heroes and memorable exploits, requires resentful, narcissistic villains, leaders affected by a life full of traumas and childhood complexes that can never be forgotten. In the words of William Taubman:
“Putin’s many grievances against the West, his revivified nationalist ideology and dream of resurrecting the Russian Empire, his recent isolation during the pandemic, and perhaps a hidden illness, too,… all help explain his bloody war against Ukraine. But all are baked into the layers of a man whose main theme of life is a fierce determination to avoid defeat by lashing out against those who humiliate and betray him”
Putting Putin on the couch again and again, focusing the debate on his mental state and his unconscious desires, transferring the reasons for the conflict to a very distant childhood in which everything was preordained, does not seem to help us understand the causes of the current war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, it could serve to justify and rationalize
In fact, Putin’s psychological portrait also seems to be court-martial in times of war: an almost unanimous clinical judgment, despite the lack of conclusive proof. As Walter Langer stated in his study on the 1940s, the psychologists and psychiatrists of the twenty-first century recognize the necessary limitations of a diagnosis of the leader that has not been preceded by a detailed clinical analysis (Fallon 2022a; Ivars 2022; Linden & Wilkes 2022). Despite such reservations, nothing has prevented them from putting forward a closed diagnosis since the very start of the war. Despite being based on partial data, rumors, and speculation, the final judgment is often expressed in a categorical way. “There is no doubt in my mind that [Putin] is a psychopath,” stated the professor of criminal psychology Vicente Garrido, a perfect example of narcissism, lack of empathy, manipulative ability, and the criminal will typical of the integrated psychopath, who is only discovered when he finally becomes a mass murderer. “Unfortunately, we have already seen several like him,” Garrido concluded (2022; see also Gonzales Posada 2022). The neuroscientist James Fallon expressed himself with the same clarity, stating that Putin has the “typical traits” of other dictators of the past: a cold, manipulative, hypersexual, sadistic psychopath (2022a), a portrait similar to that drawn by the psychologist Magnus Linden and the historian George Wilkes (2022).
Some journalists, writers, and historians openly speak of an insane leader who has gone mad while carrying out his duties (Beevor 2022a, 2022b; Freedland 2022; De Azúa 2022; McEwan 2022; Motyl 2022); many other writers, without actually questioning his sanity, still describe Putin using the language of psychology and psychiatry (Bassets 2022; Eltchaninoff 2022; Ivars 2022; Marías 2022; Robertson 2022c; Velasco 2022). Thus, Putin often appears as a “megalomaniac” and a “homophobe” and as “enormously arrogant and self-conscious,” to paraphrase the words of the writer Javier Marías (2022). Ian Robertson states that, although this case is not one of insanity or madness, Putin shows symptoms of narcissism and suffers from the “Hubris syndrome” (Robertson, 2022c). “He is not psychotic, he is not a sick person, he is not crazy,” the forensic psychologist Javier Urra repeats, while also describing him as Machiavellian and as a narcissist, a dangerous psychopath (Velasco, 2022). The psychiatrist Vicente Rubio states that, although “he is not mentally ill” and he “is fully conscious of his actions,” he still fulfills the profiles of “psychopath” and “evil narcissist” (Ivars 2022).
The most frequent portrait is indebted to the classical literature on the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al. 1950; Freud 1921/2010; Fromm 1941/1982). In fact, the voices of psychoanalysis repeatedly appear in descriptions of the Russian leader: self-conscious, humiliated, resentful, insecure, narcissistic, megalomaniac, authoritarian, psychopathic, paranoid, sadistic, Machiavellian, cynical, hypersexual, perverted, homophobic (Artigue 2022; Brooks 2022; Fallon 2022a; Fisher 2022; Fox 2022; Garrido 2022; Gonzales Posada 2022; Grossman 2022; Linden & Wilkes 2022; Marías 2022; Motyl 2022; Rubio 2022; Taubman 2022; Whittell 2022). Two characterological traits are cited much more than the rest: narcissist and psychopath. “His story is classically Freudian… a tale of narcissism and betrayal,” states Robert Fox (2022). Narcissists such as Putin “crave recognition, but they never have enough… they crave psychological security, yet they act in self-destructive ways,” states David Brooks (2022). The diagnosis is repeated many times: “extreme narcissist” (Robertson 2022c); “evil narcissist” (Ivars 2022); “super macho narcissism” (Whittell 2002); “psychopath” (Garrido 2002); “narcissistic psychopath” (Fallon 2022a). For Putin the narcissist, “the other does not exist,” the psychiatrist Javier Lacruz warns; “he lacks empathy, presents a false pride, despises others and unfailingly seeks power” (Ivars 2022). Before us is an authoritarian leader with such disturbing antisocial tendencies as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (Linden & Wilkes 2022); a leader who is “unmoved by the torturing and poisoning of his enemies” (Arias 2022).
If many columnists use the categories made popular by psychoanalysis in order to delve into the mind of the Russian leader, then there are also those who have recourse to the voices of neuroscience, genetics, kinesics, or even criminal anthropology, until they can create a portrait not unlike the
As mentioned above, a frequent way to convert a clinical and academic theory into a familiar and vulgarized social representation is to associate its abstract formulations and statements with a real, concrete individual, often its creator, or to transform the erudite and complex language of science into a symbol or icon, as in Freud’s couch (Moscovici 1961/1979). Even so, the reception of the psychological paradigm of nationalism would never have been so effective and penetrating without the memory of an alternative iconic character, much less related to the intellectual creation and academia than to war and total destruction. In fact, besides being the incarnation of infamy and wickedness, following WWII and the Holocaust, the figure of Adolf Hitler will be remembered as a simile or metaphor of psychological malaise and mental collapse, someone with emotional problems, a tormented childhood, and authoritarian personality. As the historian Daniel Pick rightly pointed out, the words “Hitler” and “little Hitler,” or the pejorative terms “Nazi” and “fascist,” came to be used after the war as a metaphor or rhetorical figure referring to psychological conflicts, “authoritarian qualities,” and “pernicious states of mind” (Pick 2012, 242).
The psychiatrization of the Russian leader has been repeatedly constructed in the distorted, amplifying, and shameful mirror of the person responsible for the Holocaust (Amat 2022; Bassets 2022; de Azúa 2022; Fallon 2022a; Friedman 2022; Grossman 2022; Motyl 2022; Pomerantsev 2022; Ruane 2022; Rubio 2022; Vicent 2022). Thus, many articles incorporated the comparison in the headline itself: “Both men came to power after their countries experienced imperial dismemberment and economic collapse. Both promised to revive their nation’s glory and enjoyed enormous popularity… Both identified their nations with themselves. Both promoted reactionary ideologies that identified one nation -Jews for Hitler, Ukrainians for Putin- as the enemy. And both used their national minorities living in neighboring states as pretexts for expansion. Both were also consummate liars and had deranged personalities…”
Their rise to power following the break-up of the empire, their total identification with the nation, their reactionary nationalism, their recalcitrant xenophobia… Although these and many other historical parallelisms and similarities could be established between one character and the other, the last traits that Motyl points to provide rhetorical strength and narrative plausibility to the entire comparison: their mental insanity and their absolute evil, the same old traits of the
In the early 1990s, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm interpreted the owl of Minerva’s circular flight as the definitive twilight of a modern era of nations and nationalisms (Hobsbawm 1990). “After all,” said Hobsbawm, “the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak” (1990, 192). Since then, several generations of researchers and experts in nationalism have continued, with the apparent distance and coldness of the owl, to expose and deconstruct the political passions of a world of invented traditions, imagined communities, and banalized flags (Anderson 1991; Billig 1995; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Nevertheless, at this point, it would seem convenient to remember that the experts on nations and nationalism are only a small, almost insignificant, part of the population as a whole; for many other academics and most ordinary citizens, the gods and altars of history are still intact and are remembered and celebrated. In a recent analysis of the Western media’s interpretations of the war in Ukraine, the historian Alexander Maxwell exposed how the wider public still consider the historicist or “primordialist” representation of the past to be valid. “While nationalism theorists have mostly rejected primordialism, politicians and the wider public typically have a primordialist and essentialist understanding of national history” (Maxwell 2022b, 152). In the cited research, Maxwell also alluded to another outstanding and persistent aspect of the rhetoric concerning nationalism: the psychiatrization or “stigmatization” of a leader with “fantastic,” “delusional,” or “deranged” ideas that is repeatedly compared to Adolf Hitler (Maxwell 2022b, 163–164; see also Maxwell 2022a, 94–103).
The continuity of the world of nations and nationalism could be put to the test by the penetration of the two social representations: the historicist, which naturalizes the nation and essentializes the past (often,
In the field of nationalism studies, it has long been known that nationalism is a fluid, “chameleon like” ideology (Özkirimli 2000, 61); a “modular artefact” (Anderson 1991, 21); a “ductile tool” (Tamir 2021, 237) which can be used for many public and private ends, consciously or unconsciously, but not always of a projective nature (Ramírez 1992). It is also well known that it is not possible to look for the key to ideological processes in the personality of a minority of individuals (Bauman 1997; Billig 1978; Mock 2019, 105–129). Neither can nationalist wars simply be explained as a regression to primitive barbarism or a lost battle of childhood. Even so, the psychodynamic concept of the nationalist as tormented, narcissistic, and turbulent is still one of the most penetrating and lasting social representations of the ideology, a profane theory periodically raised by politicians and communicators to explain the origins of war. And all too frequently it is an outraged, psychiatrizing discourse that transfers the causes of the conflict to a faraway, uncertain time, that masks their own responsibility in the present and projects onto others all the blame, complexes, and moral destitution, making dialogue and pacification even more difficult.