Masques noirs, masques blancs : Les mascarades et le suicide collectif de Jonestown

Abstract

Black masks, white masks. Masquerades and the collective suicide of Jonestown, Guyana. This paper deals with the elusive concept of “psychotic group” through the study of some group strategies of the People’s Temple, a large Californian sect which committed collective suicide in 1978 deep within the Guyana jungle. Both masks and masquerades played a relevant role in those strategies, which aimed at creating the psychodynamic conditions for the group’s self-annihilation. Persecutory racial sociodramas were performed by white members acting as blacks and black members acting as whites, within a group which pretended to be fiercely anti-racist but had established a markedly racist internal social system. The masquerades strived to integrate sociological and psychological trompe-V œils toward a climbing spiral of splittings and projections embedded in a frame of massive derealization and “fraternité-terreur”. The functions of separation and absence which inhere to the masks as symbols kept sapping the group myth of the “perfect group”, for they introduced individuation processes perceived as a threatening fragmentation of the “archigroupe” (Kaës). The more and more precarious restoration of the “archigroupe” asked for a more and more extreme cohesion, which longed for collective suicide as its terminal verification.