Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:145163

doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12327

Splitting the mind within the individual, nation and

economy: Reflections on the struggle for integration in
post-war Germany 1,2,3
nkers
Tomas Pla
Liebigstr. 29, 60323 Frankfurt a. M., Germany plaenkers@sigmundfreud-institut.de
(Accepted for publication 17 December 2014)

With respect to theorisations of psychical splitting, this paper explores the

psychical mechanisms that underlie different forms of social splitting. The
paper first outlines Freuds and Kleins different theorisations of the psychical
mechanisms of splitting, where the good is split from the bad, the inside split
from the outside, and the painful disavowed. I then consider the psychical
mechanisms of splitting that underlie ideological supports of certain social
systems, specifically that of National Socialist Germany, East Germany during the Cold War period, and neoliberal capitalism. Here, I consider ideological splits between good and evil, the relation between external and internal
splits, the relation between geographical, social and internal splitting, as well
as splitting as disavowal of the other.
Keywords: Splitting, Denial, Totalitarianism, GDR, Financial Market, Neoliberalism

Individual freedom is not a cultural asset.

(Sigmund Freud, 1930, p. 455)
The real battle is between insanity based on mutual projections and sanity based on
truth.
(Hanna Segal, 2006, p. 121)

The Berlin Wall

Alongside the many historical sites of National Socialism (NS), the Berlin
Wall, erected in 1961, is a central focal point in Berlin, which Wolf Biermann4
once called the city torn asunder. Anyone searching for the wall these days
will be disappointed for, as you will be aware, apart from a few small memorial sites there is no longer much to see of the wall that monstrous structure
1
Modified version of the public lecture to mark the spring convention of the German Psychoanalytical
Association, Berlin, May 2012. First published in a different German version: Plankers (2014).
2
Translated by Tim Davies
3
Edited by Catherine Humble.
4

Wolf Biermann: 1975 song entitled Die hab ich satt! [Im sick and tired of the place].

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45 km in length which divided East and West Berlin, with its 450,000 sq.m.
death strip watched over by 10,000 border guards and 1,000 dogs.
However, what is still to be found only with difficulty in external reality
lives on in the hearts and minds of those who experienced the partition of
Berlin and the construction of the wall. Permit me to interject an autobiographical episode at this point. I was 9 years old when, in 1960, my parents
hailing from Halle/Salle in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) fled
from East to West Berlin with my brothers and me. At school in Halle, I
had listened with childlike enthusiasm to the propaganda about the merits
of socialism, I had internalized the anthemic Risen from the Ruins, and as
part of the Young Pioneers5 group I had put in building time for socialism.6 I had fantasized about the exploitation of the working class in the
west in very concrete terms: back then, in my minds eye, tattered, emaciated figures were moving into the factories of the corpulent, cigar-smoking
capitalists. In me, the official propaganda images had found their perfectly
concrete expression until the day after our escape, when I walked with my
parents across the Kurf
urstendamm in West Berlin for the first time, just as
twilight was falling. I marvelled at the sight of the brightly illuminated displays in the shop windows, the discernible abundance and the people in the
street, who were so much better dressed. Theyve been telling us such a
pile of lies over there after all! I blurted out. And so it was that this time
my childlike black-and-white painting reversed into a white-and-black one:
the east now became the land of hardship, and the gleaming bright present
and future seemed to be in the west.
This little incident shows how the wall, which then materialized in external reality about a year later, was already extant mentally. My infantile fantasies had responded to an ideology that split the world into good and evil,
black and white, true and false. As such, my external and internal realities
were split at this point, forming two parts incapable of mutual integration.
The Berlin Wall, that object of sub-surface fascination, can thus be seen
to symbolize a specific inner split, and for the psychoanalyst it forms a significant external jumping-off point, linking psychoanalytical theories of
splitting with that city. In the following few pages I will start by exploring
psychoanalytical accounts of psychical splitting in relation to the geographical splitting of East and West Berlin, specifically considering how the
geographical splitting gives rise to psychical splitting.

Splitting: Freud and Klein

Sigmund Freud visited Berlin a total of 19 times during the period from
1884 to 1930 (T
ogel, 2006). One of the highlights of this succession of trips
was undoubtedly his attendance at the 7th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1922. It was the last IPA Congress in
5

Translators note: The Young Pioneers served as the communist youth organization for children age 6
to 14.

Translators note: Those taking part in a project contributed so-called building hours, which were documented with stamps stuck into an Operations Card. Depending on the number of hours, participants
were awarded a certificate and a badge: gold, silver or bronze.

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which Freud took part, and his lecture bore the seemingly indeterminate
title of Etwas vom Unbewussten [Some remarks on the unconscious]. In
the lecture7 Freud announced an essential change to his theory of the psychic instances, which he published a year later in one of his principal works
Das Ich und das Es [The Ego and the Id] (Freud, 1923).
What was it about this period? Up until this time Freud had subdivided the
psychic apparatus as he called it into three instances: the unconscious,
the preconscious and the conscious. In his Berlin lecture, however, Freud
introduced the so-called ego-psychological turning point in psychoanalysis,
i.e. he now subdivided the psyche into three other instances: the id, the ego
and the superego the question of the degree of consciousness forming merely
one aspect of these. In its structure, its state of decay, and its possible unity,
the ego now shifted to centre stage. Perception, thinking, judgements and acting now became the subject of psychoanalytical research, with regard to their
psychological development, function and disturbance. Therapeutically, the
objective became: Where Id was, there shall Ego be (Freud, 1933, p. 86),
which would be the mantra of psychoanalysis henceforth; ideally, the ego was
supposed to become master of the mental processes.
Even in developing a dynamic concept of the unconscious, Freud had
taken a decisive step towards dismantling the image of the holistically constituted individual; in this way, he adhered to a Judaeo-Christian intellectual
tradition that had presented the complexity and non-uniformity of the person since the early Middle Ages, albeit from very different perspectives (cf.
van D
ulmen, 2001). In his clinical work, Freud found a means of increasingly integrating what had been split off or repressed. He wrote:
The neurotic patient presents us with a torn mind, divided by resistances. As we
analyse it and remove the resistances, it grows together; the great unity which we
call his ego fits into itself all the instinctual impulses which before had been split
off and held apart from it. The psychosynthesis is thus achieved during analytical
treatment without our intervention, automatically and inevitably. [. . .] It is not true
that something in the patient has been divided into its components and is now quietly waiting for us to somehow put it together again.
(Freud, 1919, p. 186)

Freud spoke of the egos impulsion to bind together and unify and its
compulsion to synthesize (Freud, 1926a, p. 125),8 just as the separate halves
of Aristophanes spherical creatures gravitate towards each other (Freud,
1920, p. 62f; Heinrich, 1995). Towards the end of his life Freud had to partly
turn away from this view, moving from looking at forms of psychological
defence that do not make the conscious unconscious, but reject the psychologically confrontational contents and lead to a splitting of the ego.9 We know
7

The actual lecture has not been published but is being summarised in a congress report (Freud, 1922).

The ego is an organization characterized by a very remarkable trend towards unification, towardssynthesis (Freud, 1926b, p. 223).
9
Freud used the concept of splitting even earlier on too in respect of exclusion from the consciousness
(e.g. Freud and Breuer, 1985, p. 194; Freud, 1909, p. 176), as initially conceived in respect of repression
(Krejci, 2010, 2011a).

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from everyday life what is meant by the technical sounding notion of splitting10 : unwelcome thoughts and feelings are rejected, blanked out, disowned
or denied, and so successfully that those affected no longer realize they had
such thoughts and feelings in the first place (cf. Tuckett, 2011, p. 63).
When Freud established the ego at the centre of his model of the psyche
in the 1920s, he took a closer look at the egos relationship with reality and
found:
that it deforms itself, accepts losses of its unity, even divides and splits itself.
(Freud, 1924, p. 391)

Division and splitting of the personality became a new field of research

(ibid.) for Freud. Concepts like the reality principle, loss of reality, substitution of reality, reality testing, synthesis and integration, disintegration, fragmentation and splitting, which already existed in Freuds writing, now
entered the foreground of his psychoanalytical concepts. Freud spoke of an
outright task of examining [. . .] the neurotics and the human beings relationship with reality altogether (Freud, 1911, p. 231f.).
Freud first described the ruptured or split ego in the fetishist (Freud,
1927), whose ego is split into one part that acknowledges the real penis-lessness of the woman, and another that denies this knowledge precisely with
the aid of a fetish:
The two attitudes persist side by side throughout their lives without influencing
each other. That is what may rightly be called a splitting of the ego.
(Freud, 1940a, p. 134)

Twenty years later, Bion (1962a, 1962b) described this within his theory of
thinking as a splitting of the endeavour for knowledge: there is then a state of
the ego that wants to know (K) in opposition to another state that does not
want to know or else works to obliterate knowledge (minus K). Bion provides
a different theoretical frame for his view of splitting which I will return to
later. For Freud, both parts of the split ego that result in a rift in the Ego
(Freud, 1940b, p. 60) that is acknowledgement of reality and denial of reality master consciousness mutually without one part having a conscious
knowledge of the other. Freud viewed the cause of this splitting as residing in
a hugely frightening effect of a traumatic experience (ibid.), which results in
the perception of reality in one part of the ego simply being denied. Unlike
repression, which still leaves the repressed inside the psychic space of the
unconscious, splitting functions very primitively: here something is rejected,
outlawed from the emotional life corresponding to the desire to obliterate
what is unbearably painful.11 It is the creation of tunnel vision, of a split
10

Translators note: The German term Spaltung may sound more technical in the original, since it also
translates as fission in physics, fissuring in geology and so on.

11
Cf. discussion of the concepts of repression and splitting in Hinshelwood (2008) and Paniagua (2009).
Hinshelwoods apt distinction between a splitting of the ego into coherent (Freud) vs. fragmented parts
(Klein) will not be discussed any further here by me; see also Krejci (2010, 2011b).

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little concern for the social and ecological circumstances of their production. The only thing that counts is the rationality and efficiency of individual production.
You will all be familiar with this discussion about the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons, the structural impoverishment of the developing countries, unemployment and growing social imbalances in the
developed countries, problems of environmental impact [as well as, T.P.]
large-scale technologies operating on the brink of catastrophe (Habermas,
1985, p. 143). The splittings in financial trading, where financial trading is
primarily interested in abstract quantities and accumulation of money, have
increased to the maximum.32 Here we see the Marxist differentiation in the
good between use and exchange value. Financial speculations on food prices
in the stock exchange, for instance, lead to the food cost going up, causing
hunger in the Third World to spread further.33
The economic processes of neo-liberalism conform to a market rationality, and this market rationality accepts the controlling and integrating measures of the state only insofar as these measures further individual economic
trading. The majority of market participants, producers and consumers,
practise the associated forms of disavowal (cf. Steiner, 1985; Nagel, 2012):
symbolized in the evening scenes in front of the TV news where the catastrophes of the world are assimilated over a glass of wine. Since the 18th
century the liberal market ideology has optimistically assumed, with Adam
Smith34 (1776), that this splitting-based consumer production and trading
results in the harmonious integration of economy and society by itself.35
Structurally, however, producers and consumers live in a state of collectively split perception, so that the consequences of ones own economic
trading no longer need to be considered and felt and this is the central
gain from the splitting mechanisms that underpin the neo-liberal market
ideology. The attendant consequences can be ignored without a problem so
long as they take place at a disavowed remove. In psychoanalytical parlance: as long as the carriers of split and projected parts of the self are at a
great distance and willing to identify with these projections.
In terms of the psychical splitting that underlies the ideological support
of neo-liberal economics, I am referring to a global structure not confined
to the German economic system alone. The process of globalization, which
follows Marxist predictions about the spread of capital, now brings with it
gains for the individual producers and manufacturers; but in line with Marx
32
Cf. the eye-opening study by Tuckett and Taffler (2009) on the disruption of the sense of reality in the
Financial Market. Likewise, Nagel (2012).
33
The financial speculation on food prices influences the food prices, because if food prices rise some
people in the stock exchange make a huge profit.
34
Nor is it always the worse for the society that it [the individual] was not part of it [the objective of its
gainful employment, T.P.] By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more
effectually than when he really intends to promote it. [. . .] in the exchange relationship the interest eventually finds the principle of societal common-sense (Smith, 1776, quoted after Vogl, J. 2010/11, p. 39f.)
[Adapted from the original English-language version]
35
By this splitting-based consumer production and trading I mean that in capitalistic production each
market participant only pursues for his own benefit without looking for the whole. Market participants
are not integrated, but split or fragmented parts of the society.

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(Klein, 1932; Frank, 1999, 2009); in this case, Klein illustrated how, via projective externalization, the object is changed in the subjects experience,
since the object now contains the subjects projected parts. Only now did it
become intelligible that splitting always occurs in connection with the
omnipotent experience of ones own fantasy, with idealization of the good
and denial of the bad in oneself. The heightening of self-esteem that thus
takes place in splitting simultaneously provides liberation from the impositions of a subjective experience of conflict. Freud claimed the same: It is
known, however, that, with the help of this drowner of cares this is
what Freud called the maniform heightening of self-esteem one can at
any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world
of ones own with better conditions of sensibility (1930, p. 436).
The gradual integration of the split parts that takes place during healthy
development (Freud, 1921, p. 85) presents a mentally mature achievement.
The world, and hence ones own self as well, is then no longer perceived in
black-and-white or good-and-evil polarities. But, if everything goes well it
becomes coloured, nuanced, differentiated: no longer ideal or unfathomably
bad, neither heaven nor hell, not a kingdom of good or evil, but earthly.
And so this would bring us to the dialectic counterpart of splitting: integration. Both concepts are mutually implicit, one being unimaginable without
the other; both splitting and integration operate against each other.
But what, in the young child, is a standard psychological process evolving
towards integration through healthy Oedipal development (Krejci, 2011b)
can, through specific, often traumatic influences, lead to the arrest of a
pathological state in which pathological forms of splitting and excessive
projective externalizations dominate. In the childs early development, it is
precisely the failure of normal splitting that leads to its pathological forms
(Britton, 1993). The perception of external and internal reality is then contaminated: the ability to learn from experience is damaged in favour of
omnipotent unconscious fantasies (cf. Steiner, 1985; Caper, 1998). The individual psychopathological necessities are what subsequently determine the
unconscious selective perception of reality. As a result of splitting processes,
perception then becomes uniform, one-sided, undifferentiated and inhibited.

Social splitting
These basic theories of psychical splitting, developed by careful clinical
observations of children and adults, have been applied to groups as well as
to social phenomena; splitting has been considered in relation the totalitarian regimes of German history, especially that of the 20th century. Since the
1980s, scientific and academic interest has veered towards the splitting phenomena, particularly in relation to the protagonists and tacit adherents of
the National Socialist regime; R. J. Liftons (1986) study of the doctors
in the Third Reich is an example of this.13 As an individual as well as a
13
Lifton examined the doubling of the personality, in which a division of the self is produced into
two inter-independently functioning wholes (Lifton, 1986, p. 491) that do not fall foul of each other.
Owing to splitting and denial, two views of reality can co-exist in this way without mutually influencing
each other (Freud, 1940a); cf. also Wurmser (1959).

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collective phenomenon, the disavowal of reality brought about by psychical

pathological splitting led to a pursuit of extermination unimaginable until
then; those persecuted were objects of projection of undesired and split-off
parts of the individual and social psyche.
In the Holocaust, the destructivity of collective splittings took on a
unique manifestation. Looking away, blanking out, rejecting the everyday
perceptible, refusing critical reflectiveness and sympathy, were practised
under Hitler across the collective spectrum. Only on the basis of psychic
splitting was an ideologized, totalitarian society able to emerge, that iron
band of terror of which Hannah Arendt (1955, p. 958) spoke.
Historically, the psychical splitting that underpinned National Socialism
was followed by a 40-year partition of Germany, during which the splitting
mechanism this time related to the ideologies of socialism and capitalism
continued to remain effective in external reality.
As far as socialism is concerned and so I enter first behind the East
part of the Wall I will look at individual and collective psychical splitting,
with the aid of a research interview I conducted a number of years ago
within the framework of a research project at the Sigmund Freud Institute.14 The interview will show the omnipotent experience of fantasy, the
heightening of self-esteem, which goes along with the idealization of the
good and denial of the bad, as outlined above. I will be interested in the
unconscious motives for collaboration in the GDRs Ministry of State Security (MSS [MfS]). I shall then look at a present-day totalitarian socio-political foundation of a completely different kind, considering how it is also
underpinned on a social-economic level by splitting mechanisms.

Splitting in East Germany: The GDRs state security

Mr Gabler
First off, Mr Gabler, as I shall call the MSS agent. The contact with him
came about through the agency of the Gauck Office,15 and led to two conversations lasting a total of about seven hours. He had given his consent to
having the interviews scientifically evaluated and published.
Even as we are arranging our interview over the phone, to my surprise
Mr Gabler makes it emphatically clear that he is also very interested in having a conversation of this kind. By our first appointment, I have received
by post and e-mail a plethora of publications by Mr Gabler, as well as
additional material on the history of the Ministry of State Security (MSS).
When he arrives for the first interview, I am surprised to find Mr Gabler
a committed and driven man, in almost youthful fashion, although
advanced in age. During the five-hour conversation, he actively taps into a
wide range of areas that far transcends his personal life story. As he does
14

Kerz-R
uhling and Plankers (2004).
Translators note: This agency is formally called the office of The Federal Commissioner Preserving the
Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic; informally, the office is
often referred to as the Gauck office, Birthler office or Jahn office, always after the incumbent federal
commissioner.
15

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so, I quickly notice that Mr Gabler barely addresses my questions; rather,

he turns them around to his topics: he problematizes either the whole of my
question or a concept used in it, thus entering the realm of the general and
the impersonal. A wealth of information washes over me, so that I soon feel
inundated and notice myself inwardly beginning to resist. Later on in the
interview I learn that Mr Gabler was nicknamed Quassel or Chatterbox,
even in school. Mr Gabler immediately questions my interest in psychically
oriented dialogue and stresses that for him the political is important, as
there would otherwise be a risk of seeing things primarily through psychological glasses (p. 1).16

Mr Gabler and anti-fascism

Born in 1931 in an East German city, Mr Gablers childhood and youth fell
mainly within the Nazi period. He says he is barely able to remember anything from that time: . . .its very odd, I have no vivid images of the family
situation, only external events (p. 58). Elsewhere, he says: So when it
comes to my childhood, nothing doing there! (p. 54). All the more attentively, therefore, I record the two odd childhood scenes he recounts to me:
in one, as a small child of pre-school age, he packs his little suitcase and
leaves his parents home; in the other, he attempts to obtain the jelly bears
from the grocers that he would otherwise only get off his mother (p. 52f.).
Somewhat later he mentions, quasi in passing, that he suffered from asthma
as a child, especially on the way home from school (p. 56f.), whenever he
used to climb the stairs up to his parents flat. His relationship with his parents is said to have been affectionate. That said, he does not dwell on this
for long, but follows it up critically by saying that he did miss having an
intellectual life at home. He himself read an immense amount, got hold of
books from the city library and positively devoured them.
At 14 years old, Mr Gabler was called up to the Volkssturm [the territorial army]17 and shortly after that he witnessed the Americans entering his
hometown. He says: At the time, I did not feel it was liberation, but defeat
for Germany, adding: But that sensation of defeat, which had to be dealt
with anyway, also acted as a driving force! (p. 14). At that time, Mr
Gabler devoted himself with youthful enthusiasm to the anti-fascist opponents of the National Socialist regime. The most active anti-fascists were
communists and social democrats; that induced him to discover the social
question (p. 15). He read Marx, Engels and Stalin, but also Tolstoys trilogy The Road to Calvary, in which Russian intellectuals come to terms with
the ideas of the revolution and socialism.

Mr Gablers GDR career

As a member of the German Socialist Unity Party (GSUP), Mr Gabler was
initially politically active in higher education and in this setting he met
16

The page numbers refer to the interview manuscript.

17

Translators note: The territorial army created towards the end of WWII, designed to act as a home
guard.
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members of the German Socialist Unity Partys (GSUP [German: SED])

Central Committee, as well as well-known foreign personalities, like Zhou
Enlai18, Ho Chi Minh19, Georg Luk
acs20 and Sandor Rad
o21.
From 1958 Mr Gabler was a staff member at the GDRs Ministry of
State Security (MSS) and he worked on the administrative staff of an East
German university, and he had signed an out-and-out declaration of commitment to the MSS, and was then given an alias or codename. But instead
of a spy story, I get to hear that he met up regularly, about once a month,
with an MSS member to discuss with him the personnel and factual situation at the university teaching hospital. He was of use in remedying material shortages. The MSS was a fire brigade facility (p. 65), he says,
whenever urgent material deficits had to be addressed. For example, he
once received urgently needed tracheotomy tubes through the MSS.
In this way, Mr G describes his work for the state security service as
social support. Not a word, then, about political reports and assessments
being drafted behind the backs of those affected, on which their existence
not infrequently depended. In the early 1960s he began working at MSSs
Reconnaissance HQ (HVA).22 Quote: And then they asked me whether I
agreed to work for the HVA. So I said, well yes, of course! For me it was a
matter of honour; the HVA had been something [. . .] like a bearer of tradition, lets just say, for the Red Chapel23 (p. 22).
After his promotion to the HVA, Mr G made trips to the Federal Republic for the purpose of espionage. As an instructor, by preference he
recruited West German law students for membership of the HVA, who were
later supposed to work in important political institutions of the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany); he then took charge of their activity or the flow
of information from West to East Germany. He describes that to me at
length and with visible pleasure: how he sought out law students at West
German universities, as part of the student employment placement service,
using a bogus job order; how he wormed his way into their confidence and
established a friendly, personal relationship in order to win them over. And
not without some pride he tells me about two of these law students:
. . .then by the end they both held top positions in the Federal Government; and unbeknownst to one of them until 1989/90, he had been working
for us (p. 25).
Portraying these recruitments in West Germany, Mr G conveys something of a sporting pleasure at successfully outwitting West German
counter-intelligence: What do you reckon the Federal Agency for Internal
18

From 1949 till the time of his death, Zhou Enlai (18981976) was prime minister of China.

19

Ho Chi Minh (18901969) was prime minister of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1955 and president
from 1955 to 1969.
20
Georg Luk
acs (18851971) was an important Hungarian philosopher and literary scholar, particularly
in the field of Marxist theory.
21
S
andor Rad
o (18991981), Hungarian communist and during the Nazi period member of the Red
Chapel resistance movement.
22

HVA was the MSSs foreign intelligence service.

23

During World War II Red Chapel was a term for resistance groups opposing the NS regime that had
contacts with the Soviet Union.
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Security would have given to find a bloke like me! And theres something
sporting about the whole thing too, of course, in that sense (p. 39f.). He
is noticeably proud of the fact that: Our frontmen were all seasoned antifascists from the illegal battle [during the Nazi period] (p. 40).

Mr Gs personal situation
After he had detailed sundry successes, as well as critical situations regarding
his HVA activity, I then asked him how he felt about the frequent separation
from his family and the solitude in the West (p. 31). In two terse sentences,
by way of reply, Mr G tells me it was comfortably tolerable, as his wife was
of the same political mindset as him, only to then describe at length and in
detail how enthusiastically a GDR professor was received in the USA. He
then adds briefly that he had to break off all his social contacts at the outset
of his HVA activity in the GDR. That does not seem to have bothered him
either; rather, he outlines to me his worldwide contacts in immediate succession: They were hugely extensive. Geographically, they extended from London to Sofia, and to Moscow and Beijing. [. . .] I got to know Ho Chi Minh
and Zhou Enlai in person, and the later president of the Peoples Republic of
China, Chi Peng-Fei,24 taught me to eat with chopsticks (p. 32).

The end of the GDR

According to Mr G, the end of the GDR in 1989 marked the end of a
country he viewed as my state. . .from the very hour of its founding (p.
2). In our conversation he quickly works his way round to the separation of
idea and reality, contrasting his basic socialist convictions with their realization in the GDR. For example, he speaks critically of the career revolutionaries or of red-tinged powermongers in the GDR. Or he says: At
some point the connection to the modern age, to modernity, has been
missed (p. 19).
Since he has also levelled critical remarks at the GDR in his publications,
I then ask him about that, but receive only a few, abstract statements; for
instance, he once says: Honecker25 has to go! (p. 39), with deep conviction, emphasizing each and every word: For me the GDR is still the most
precious thing that German history has produced to date! (p. 43), but then
he laments the lack of democratic procedure (p. 45) and the GDRs
breakaway from reality (p. 46). Although he touches upon the GDRs
lack of division of powers (p. 43), he says: In its basic structures the GDR
was surely more democratic than the Federal Republic (p. 41).

Discussion
Much in this conversation made me warm to Mr G: his convincing rejection
of National Socialism, the shining humanism in his socialist leanings, his
24
Chi Peng Fei, contrary to what Mr G states, was never president of the CCP, but Chinese ambassador
to the GDR and later Chinas Foreign Minister.
25
Erich Honecker (19121994) was General Secretary of the German Socialist Unity Party (GSUP)
(19711989).

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erudition and learning, and also his friendly and cultivated manners on the
surface. And yet an uncanny feeling of being manipulated increasingly crept
over me, compounded by each new topic raised by him and the swelling
torrent of words that came with it. Mr G was getting into ever higher spirits, demonstrating his excessive self-assurance to me (Money-Kyrle, 1965),
and I was feeling more and more deluged, flabbergasted, occasionally rendered helpless, relieved by the thought of my audio recorder, which would
capture everything after all. A distinct feeling of uncertainty crept over me.
Increasingly, I felt smaller and that I was coming under his control. He, on
the other hand, was getting larger. For personal, intimate contacts, for
example, Mr G substitutes big names, accentuating the importance of his
own personality in the process. At the same time he catapults himself into a
social space inaccessible to me: he is up with the great figures of the world,
I am down with the rank and file. This self-idealization permitted him to
immunize himself against the experience of isolation during his espionage
period broached by me: in its place now came a ripping yarn featuring
celebrities.
Mr G obviously felt threatened by me, which was understandable given
the setting, but he could not be sure whether the research interview was
meant to serve the purpose of unmasking and indicting him. As long as he
was able to dominate the conversation, and hence me, he felt visibly comfortable. Then he was in a claustrum26 beyond my reach. At the same time,
I thought of the spiritual claustrum he mentioned, that of his childhood. I
wondered whether Mr G also needed a claustrum in my presence, because
then, as now, direct human contact was so menacing as to leave him breathless. Did those self-organized jelly bears, which stood out as the only recollection from the darkness of his childhood, represent an autonomous rescue
attempt from a dependence perceived as unbearable? For in our conversation too, he clearly showed me he was combating a fear of dependence with
his dominance. Just as he would talk the hind legs off all and sundry as the
chatterbox even at school, he was doing so with me. Figuratively speaking,
I was the one now becoming asthmatic under this wealth of material. For
him it was about codifying his subjective reality, not about creating some
clarification of objective relationships. He wanted to draw me into this subjective reality; Erika Krejci (2010, 2011b) described this process as typical in
patients operating with splittings. For Mr G it was life saving to take up a
narcissistic position in our interview, to be on a level and identify with leading personalities beyond immediate, close relations. With this distance from
everyday life, he was able to straightforwardly label the GDR the most
precious thing that German history has produced.
This lionizing superelevation of his own group affiliation can be conflated
with the idealisation of the mother object, as thematized by Werner Bohleber
(1991, 2010) with regard to German nationalism. The idealisation supports a
fragile ego-identity and allows Mr G to immunize his socialist ideals from the
empirical outside reality of a permanent supply crisis, totalitarian suppression, spiritual and material servitude, wall and barbed wire, as well as the
26

Claustrum denotes a psychic space unconsciously entered as a retreat (cf. Meltzer, 1992).

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inner reality of critical objections that would go hand in hand with feelings of
guilt and shame. The lack of psychological integration between ideal and reality is materialized in this immunization. Only in this way could Mr G relate
absolutely to the GDR without asking fundamental questions about his ideals. .And only thus was he able to heroize his conspiratorial and intrusive
behaviour during his student recruitment days in West Germany as part of
the class struggle. Through this split from reality he lost an ego state in which
he could have perceived and questioned himself
At the same time, this split from reality and the loss of a self-questioning
ego state was accompanied by his high spirits during our interview, which
were reflective of the latent omnipotence that went hand in hand with the
splitting of his world and the inner possession of idealized objects; this state
of high spirits is the most tangible benefit of psychological splitting and
turns it into a wistfully sweet sickness, since think of Freuds comment
about the drowner of cares it successfully blanks out all mood-dulling perceptions and thoughts. Melanie Klein (1963, p. 490) referred to the fact that
some idealization of people and situations can be regarded as a normal
defence, being part of the search for idealized inner objects which is projected onto the external world. In the case of Mr G, however, the idealization is absolute: we see a fundamentalist clinging to political convictions
that seem cut off from particular aspects of external and inner reality. Mr
G was on the right side as part of a historical process. This secures him
with a moral superiority that simultaneously becomes immoral, as it dismisses any empathetic feelings and thoughts about the bitter sickness of
the victims of the GDRs history.
Along an imaginary inner wall, Mr G kept the difficult knowledge about
the reality of the GDR split from his socialist ideals. In a similar split structure, the GSUP Central Committees knowledge about the countrys actual
situation was made available only selectively suggesting a similar split
between knowledge of reality and rejection of such knowledge. Mr G
behaved like Freuds fetishist: one part of his ego acknowledged the miserable plight of the GDR, another part was in denial about it, aided by a fetish-like super-elevation of the socialist ideal, suggesting the perverse
amalgam of knowing and not-wanting-to-know (Steiner, 1985, 1982). The
part of his personality that did not want to know obviously succeeded in
seducing the knowing part (Rosenfeld, 1971, 1984; Steiner, 1982; Plankers,
2011) and dominated him in this way: a sweet sickness, just that.
The integration of realistic perceptions that oppose absolute beliefs is
feared and fended off in this state: depressive, mentally painful emotional
states then become too much of a threat. Thus, for example, he was not
allowed to express the social isolation that went hand in hand with his
HVA activity as being onerous. By the same token, Mr G repeatedly
stressed: The Wailing Wall is not my spot! (p. 47) or, The thing that
matters to me and actually its even a key issue is that people with my
way of thinking, I might also say people with our way of thinking, with the
socialist way of thinking, are not allowed to make for the Wailing Wall in
any situation (p. 51). The resonating contempt for the Wailing Wall with
its implicit reference to Judaism and the Holocaust serves to cement
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the splitting and projective externalization of that part of the self, which is
asthmatic, dreads dependence and neediness, and is capable of feeling mental pain. The narcissistic benefit from the feeling of elation then contrasts
with the loss of an essential part of ones own personality. What then
emerges here is the laceration of the ego, the torn mind divided by resistances (Freud, 1919, p. 186) described by Freud (1940b, p. 60).
In this interview with a member of the security service of the German
Democratic Republic we not only capture the circumstances and effects of
psychological splitting mechanisms in individual cases, but also those in a
political belief system. More precisely, it is the unquestioned identification
with such a belief system that forces the individual to live in a split world.
By considering how a psychodynamic model of splitting is at play in belief
systems shared by large groups and societies, the psychical concept of splitting is expanded to encompass social processes.

Splitting in society
With his pathological splitting, idealization and denial mechanisms, the
HVA instructor presents an example of the mental functioning that
occurred in the history of the divided Berlin and in other aspects of German
history and hence always in individuals throughout German history as well.
The dissociation of reality, the establishment of unlinked sectors of perception and sugar-coated ideals, are mechanisms we not only can observe in
individuals but in large groups who generally function on a paranoidschizoid level (Alford, 1990). If paranoidschizoid splitting underpins political
and/or economic power, totalitarian conditions can develop.
I want now to consider what I have identified as individual dynamics at
the level of belief systems and ideologies of whole societies. In 1971, when
food shortages and rationing in the midst of genuinely existing socialism
reached their culmination, the Polish philosopher and author Stanislaw
Lem published his novel The Futurological Congress (B
ottcher, 2005); in this
book, Stanislaw Lem describes a fictitious society in the year 2039, in which
the chemical manipulation of human sensory perceptions is practised extensively. So-called benignators chemical placating agents, are meant to prevent the discontented population from revolting.27 The novels protagonist,
astronaut Ijon Tichy, finds himself in a world where, with the aid of chemicals, the best of all worlds is conjured up by hallucination, becoming
abruptly perceptible in its wretched reality when Tichy disables the chemical
dissociation of reality with the help of an antidote. At the time, using science fiction, Stanislaw Lem was alluding to a social reality which, with the
help of a state-controlled propaganda apparatus, constantly purported to
safeguard freedom, prosperity and justice, but in practice engendered
oppression, increasing impoverishment and corruption. The book suggests
that the more ideal the reality asserted, the more wretched the actual life
conditions. In the countries where socialism genuinely existed, it was clear
27
A modern version of this theme is conceived in the film trilogy The Matrix (1999), Matrix
Reloaded (2003) and Matrix Revolutions (2003).

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to Stanislaw Lems readers in the 1970s and 1980s that this was not really a
futuristic novel but was describing the present, albeit with the difference
that the state-prescribed socialist placators displayed virtually no effect on
the bulk of the population.
From the psychoanalysis of groups we know that the best indicator of
splitting mechanisms is the magnitude of the idealization pursued (Alford,
1990). In the east of Germany, under Soviet supremacy, socialism was
erected as an ideal. Thus Mr Gs grandiose self was in line with the GDRs
assertion, forever being reiterated like a mantra, of belonging to the victors
of history. As early as 1930 Freud commented sceptically on communism,
noting laconically:
I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot
inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous.
But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is
based are an untenable illusion.
(Freud, 1930, p. 472f.)28

For Bion, political ideological idealism can be seen as acceptance of a

messianic promise that cuts off entire collectives from learning by experience (Bion, 1961). The more the ideologists in the GDR fancied themselves
on the road to a promise of communist paradise, the more strongly the capitalist camp turned into the enemy. In this split structure, idealization of
ones own world and debasement of the other went hand in hand.
It is in the nature of splitting mechanisms that they keep diametrically
opposed states separate. Thus, some have seen the idealization of the
GDRs social make-up as forming a defence against the GDRs own entanglement with the Third Reich; this defence can also be seen to take place in
West Germany in its identification with the victorious western powers. In
East and West alike, new clothes were donned, so to speak, intended to
make the formerly brown attire unrecognizable (cf. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich Nielsen, 1967; Koenen, 2010); linked to this is the view that both
sides sought to dispose of their guilt after World War II and the Holocaust
via projective externalization. For both the West and the East, the
other side was seen as the one in which the Nazi period lived on: in the
East, in the form of a dictatorship with single-party supremacy, censorship,
persecution and oppression of dissenters; in the West, in the sovereignty of
capital, from which the escape to safety was through the Anti-fascist Protective Barricade, as it was known.
Each ideology created camps of contradiction, in which, via a split logic,
they saw themselves as good and the other as evil. During the Cold War,
each social system viewed the other as existentially threatening to its own
foundation, so that each social system amassed the potential for destruction
against the other. Each of the two socio-economic systems collectively
28
I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would
be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among
socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception
of human nature (Freud, 1930, p. 504).

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asserted it was fighting something in the other that was alien to it: that did
not belong to it. Yet that alien element was covering up for something all
too well known: the catastrophic German past.

The capitalist split: Neo-liberal market ideology

With the reversal of the German partition, is the psychical splitting in the
social fabric, as described in Stanislaw Lems novel, an old story on which
we can only look back? With the collapse of real-life existing socialism,
are there no longer any placators to conceal social states of splitting? Contrary to the socialist eschatology in the GDR, the West German state never
maintained that it was a consummate society or at least on the way to being
there. That kind of megalomaniac fantasy did not occur in the West so
explicitly as in the East.
Social states of splitting can also be observed in capitalist societies and
therefore not only in Germany: I mean in the constantly widening gap
between rich and poor. The splitting mechanism which involves the omnipotent idealization of the good and denial of the bad in oneself, and the
heightening of self-esteem by liberation from subjective experiences of conflict, can also be seen to underpin an economic belief system that allows a
few to possess excessive wealth and many others to have increasingly less.29
With the fall of the Wall came the collapse of a political system that sought
social salvation through absolute regulation of commercial life; instead
deregulation, privatization and the withdrawal of the state from economic
trading30 became guiding principles of an economic dynamism, in conformity
with German neo-liberalism.31 In the process, the Federal Republics neoliberal economic concepts from 1949 were now extended to the unified Germany.
The ideology which on the surface seemed so favourable of free trading in the domain of the economy, carries within it the establishment of a
socially unintegrated state. Regulated as little as possible by the state, the
many individuals of a neo-liberal capitalist society pursue their own individual aims, demoting the other person to the position of competitor. In agreement with this ideology they all share an unintegrated state with large
groups in general, whose fragile structural bond defines them as masses.
Here, we have a social set-up whereby commodities are exchanged with
29
Cf. the analysis published by Claudia Nagel (2012) of the perverse nature of the financial sector characterized by splitting mechanisms and fantasies of omnipotence.
30

Cf. Alcorn and Stein, 2012.

31

The concept of ordoliberalism was essentially devised by the Freiburg School of national economics
to which Walter Eucken, Franz B
ohm, Leonhard Miksch and Hans Gromann-Doerth belonged (German Wikipedia, accessed on 01.05.2012) and developed at the turn of the 20th century. It served as a
basis for establishing the social market economy in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949. The
ideas of neoliberalism, whose foremost exponent in Germany was Eucken (*1891, died 1950), are based
largely on the negative experience of unbridled liberalism of 19th century laissez-faire, when the state left
the economy totally to the free play of market forces. From the neoliberalist angle, therefore, state interventions in the economy are justified and necessary when, say, they promote market activity and prevent
the formation of monopolies or cartels, equalize cyclical fluctuations or serve social equilibrium [. . .]
With its chief representative Friedrich August von Hayek (*1899, died 1992), the Anglo-Saxon variant
invests more in self-policing of the market economy (Duden, 2009). Both traditions are closely connected with the economic programme of the so-called Chicago school based around Milton Friedman.
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little concern for the social and ecological circumstances of their production. The only thing that counts is the rationality and efficiency of individual production.
You will all be familiar with this discussion about the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons, the structural impoverishment of the developing countries, unemployment and growing social imbalances in the
developed countries, problems of environmental impact [as well as, T.P.]
large-scale technologies operating on the brink of catastrophe (Habermas,
1985, p. 143). The splittings in financial trading, where financial trading is
primarily interested in abstract quantities and accumulation of money, have
increased to the maximum.32 Here we see the Marxist differentiation in the
good between use and exchange value. Financial speculations on food prices
in the stock exchange, for instance, lead to the food cost going up, causing
hunger in the Third World to spread further.33
The economic processes of neo-liberalism conform to a market rationality, and this market rationality accepts the controlling and integrating measures of the state only insofar as these measures further individual economic
trading. The majority of market participants, producers and consumers,
practise the associated forms of disavowal (cf. Steiner, 1985; Nagel, 2012):
symbolized in the evening scenes in front of the TV news where the catastrophes of the world are assimilated over a glass of wine. Since the 18th
century the liberal market ideology has optimistically assumed, with Adam
Smith34 (1776), that this splitting-based consumer production and trading
results in the harmonious integration of economy and society by itself.35
Structurally, however, producers and consumers live in a state of collectively split perception, so that the consequences of ones own economic
trading no longer need to be considered and felt and this is the central
gain from the splitting mechanisms that underpin the neo-liberal market
ideology. The attendant consequences can be ignored without a problem so
long as they take place at a disavowed remove. In psychoanalytical parlance: as long as the carriers of split and projected parts of the self are at a
great distance and willing to identify with these projections.
In terms of the psychical splitting that underlies the ideological support
of neo-liberal economics, I am referring to a global structure not confined
to the German economic system alone. The process of globalization, which
follows Marxist predictions about the spread of capital, now brings with it
gains for the individual producers and manufacturers; but in line with Marx
32
Cf. the eye-opening study by Tuckett and Taffler (2009) on the disruption of the sense of reality in the
Financial Market. Likewise, Nagel (2012).
33
The financial speculation on food prices influences the food prices, because if food prices rise some
people in the stock exchange make a huge profit.
34
Nor is it always the worse for the society that it [the individual] was not part of it [the objective of its
gainful employment, T.P.] By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more
effectually than when he really intends to promote it. [. . .] in the exchange relationship the interest eventually finds the principle of societal common-sense (Smith, 1776, quoted after Vogl, J. 2010/11, p. 39f.)
[Adapted from the original English-language version]
35
By this splitting-based consumer production and trading I mean that in capitalistic production each
market participant only pursues for his own benefit without looking for the whole. Market participants
are not integrated, but split or fragmented parts of the society.

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again, in a manner intrinsic to the system, develops an increasing indifference to the specific bearer of the exchange value: eventually, money is supposed to generate more money. For example, our wonderful smart phones
and tablets are built with metal that comes from Africa, where child labourers are digging for it under brutal circumstances. But if one sees the tablet
here one does not see these parts of origin. In our brave new world the bad
parts of the self seem to be far away.
Alongside its positive financial results, the globalization of this economic
logic is also revealing more and more its negative consequences. In some
areas, the dark undersides of splitting, looking away, and projective rejection are stretched to its limits: the objects of splitting and the projected
parts of the self are publicly taking the floor. In its importance for social
large groups as well as the individual,36 the destructive potential of collectively predominant splitting, both for the individual and the group, is gradually penetrating the public consciousness, and the idea of regulation once
split off in the East is now making a comeback (cf. Long and Sievers,
2012; Sandel, 2012). Buzzwords here include anti-nuclear movement, climate
protection, resource conservation and, especially, promotion of the public
supervision of the financial market.37
Thus the Germany united in 1990 and currently participating with renewed
busyness (Arendt, 1950, p. 342) in this economic system that is now establishing its presence worldwide also shares in all the implications of the associated splittings, threatening the integrity of social cohesion. Let us return to
Freud (1940b, p. 60), who saw a massive deterrent effect, i.e. a traumatic
experience, at the root of splittings. So what is being warded off by these current forms of splitting in Germany? The trauma symbolized in Auschwitz? Or
the fear of loss of identity through so much that is foreign and alien in light of
our open borders? Or our own misery foisted onto the misery of the Third
World? Many interpretations might be elaborated here, but I lack faith in the
soundness of any one of them alone. Unlike the individual, societies have no
couch, no analyst. But even in the analysis of the individual, the analysts allexplaining interpretation simply does not exist. Rather, with individual as well
as collective splittings, the interpretation is the object of a communication
process aimed at understanding, which alone determines what we do and do
not ascribe to ourselves in our endeavour to surmount splittings.

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