Russian culture richly exemplifies this analytic view: “Mother Russia,” “Mother Moscow,” and “the mother Party” are obvious examples. Sometimes this maternal metaphor is displaced beyond the collective itself and on to some abstract entity which in turn governs the collective, for example, the “mother ideology” which guides the Party or the “mother history” from which lessons must be learned. Sometimes the maternal metaphor is extended in the rhetorical sense, as when Dmitrii Likhachev tries to represent both positive and negative feelings toward Russia:
To divide up the territory of Russia the way the newly formed “independent governments” are now dividing her can only be accomplished by eliminating memory, cultural and historical memory, memory indeed of the motherland [pamiat’ rodiny]—regardless of what value one may place on this motherland. Perhaps she was a stepmother [machekhoi] for many, rather than a mother [mater’iu], but still, she did exist.32
Another example is offered by Nina Katerli and Iurii Shmidt in their extension of the maternal personification of the Party. Writing in a recent issue of Literaturnaia gazeta, they assert that the enemies of democracy have mastered the art of provocation: “They have sucked in this art with the milk of the mother KPSS [Communist Party of the Soviet Union].”33
Here is how psychiatrist Aron Belkin depicts the child’s acquisition of a submissive attitude toward the collective in Russia:
Having barely learned to distinguish words from one another, we find out that “I” [ia] is the last word of the [Russian] alphabet. We have taken in with mother’s milk the conviction that whatever value or meaning each of us might have is only as a particle of the collective, inseparable from the overall mass.34
In this indirect fashion Belkin recognizes that a masochistic attitude toward the collective derives from early interaction with the mother.
If the collective is maternal, then its members are children. We Are All Children of Russia (Vse my—deti Rossii)—proclaims the title of a recent book by conservative literary critic Iurii Prokushev.35 The phrase “children of Russia” has also come to refer to Russians living in non-Russian, formerly Soviet republics, and who may feel endangered and isolated from their true motherland. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union a column titled “The Children of Russia” has been running in Literaturnaia gazeta. A recent instance is introduced with these words: “We are all your children, Russia, both those of us living on the land of our ancestors, and those living beyond her borders. We have the same roots, we have had the same fate. And now there is pain, desperation, anxiety.”36
Sometimes the maternal personification of the collective is slightly less obvious, as in the terms “rodina”’ (“motherland,” literally “birthland”) and “narod” (“the people” or “the folk”)—both of which are related to the verb “rodit’” (“to give birth”) and “rod” (“birth,” as in “ot rodu,” “from birth”), and thereby indirectly suggest the mother.
Usually, however, collectives are not personified or characterized in explicitly maternal terms at all, even in Russia. But there is evidence from psychoanalytic theory, and there are passages from some of Russia’s great philosophers and literary artists—which indicate that the collective to which one submits is always maternal at the level of deep fantasy. Below I will examine key passages in Losev, Berdiaev, Blok, and Dostoevsky to support this idea. Here I wish to offer a few psychoanalytic considerations.
Surprisingly little psychoanalytic work has been done on attitudes toward the collective. Perhaps this is because psychoanalysis, for the most part, developed in the West, where individualism rather than collectivism flourishes. Nonetheless, there are some studies which ought to be mentioned.
Didier Anzieu, reporting on his psychoanalytic work with large groups (up to eighty persons), says that significant anxiety is provoked by the impersonal nature of such a collective. It is impossible to know most of the others in the group, and this is threatening. Not knowing who the “other” is actually raises the question of who the self is: “The group situation in which I don’t know who ‘they’ are and they don’t know who ‘I’ am is, as such, a source of anxiety.”37 There is thus a “danger of losing one’s ego identity.”38 The question “Who am I?” is, as Anzieu says, “the most difficult question that the group situation forces on its members.”39
This question, however, is precisely the question being addressed by the child that is in the process of differentiating itself from the mother and forming itself into a unity that coheres: “The group draws the individual far into his past, to early childhood where he did not yet have consciousness of himself as subject, where he felt incoherent.”40
Fragmentation is a persistent concern of both the pre-Oedipal child and the group member. In the case of the group member the concern is dealt with by means of an “illusion” (Anzieu) whereby the group itself coheres as a person of some kind. Attention is thus defensively displaced from the narcissistic problems of an individual person to the group as person. In other words, the collective is defensively personified.
Another way to view the problem faced by the individual in a collective is in terms of the individual’s ego ideal. This Freudian construct is supposed to have developed in the early interaction of every individual with the parents. It is an internal model to which the ego seeks to conform. But the model can be replaced in intense interaction with the collective by some fictive group ego or group ego ideal. That is, the individual can project certain desired qualities of the ego on to some aspect of the group.41
The individual in a collective is always confronted with the issue of boundaries: where does the individual self leave off and the collective begin? Again, the issue is an old one, that is, a pre-Oedipal one. The most regressive solution is to avoid a boundary altogether, to fantasize fusion or merging with the collective other. Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (influenced by Anzieu) says: “It is as if the group formation represented of itself the hallucinatory realization of the wish to take possession of the mother by the sibship, through a very regressive mode, that of fusion.”
If the group is felt to be unquestionable, all-powerful, ideal, then, says Chasseguet-Smirgel, it “is itself an omnipotent mother.”42 If the group palliates the narcissistic wounds of individuals within it, it is serving as an idealized “breast-mother”—to quote Otto Kernberg’s discussion of Anzieu.43
All of these issues—coherence of the self in relation to the “other,” self-definition or boundary in relation to the “other,” and idealization of the maternal “other”—are also paramount for masochism, as we saw earlier in the clinical chapter. For some reason, however, Anzieu, Chasseguet-Smirgel, and their Kleinian predecessors pay little attention to masochism in their discussions of the psychology of individuals in the collective. Again, this probably testifies to a cultural difference between Western European and Russian attitudes toward the collective. There is no a priori reason to believe that the sophisticated psychotherapeutic trainees in Anzieu’s large groups, for example, should react the same way ordinary Russians would in a similar situation. But the issues dealt with—in particular the identity of the self in contiguity with the collective—are intrinsically the same in any culture. Anzieu’s French subjects appear to be more individualistic and to resist submission in situations where Russian subjects would more likely behave masochistically.