Killing and dying for the sacred object: Commentary on R.D. Hinshelwood, ‘Ideology and Identity: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of a Social Phenomenon’

Abstract

The primary task of an ideology, Hinshelwood says, is to promote ‘devotion to, and survival of, ideas held by the group’. How does it happen, then, that an idea can become such a powerful dimension of the psyche that people are willing to kill and die for it? In this paper I examine how people attach to ‘sacred objects’ that are conceived as more significant than the self. Collective forms of violence are generated on the basis of a perception of ‘enemies’ that are imagined to be acting to destroy a sacred object that constitutes the foundation for one's society. Enemies represent that which is separate from the self – and they challenge the group's fantasy of omnipotence. People kill and die in the name of defending their fantasy of omnipotence. The psychoanalysis of culture and society seeks to interrogate ideas and ideals that generate collective forms of violence. We become capable of doing so at the moment we begin to abandon our own identification with ideologies conceived as omnipotent.