Monthly Archives: March 2007

Now, some of them believe that by delaying funding for our troops, they can force me to accept restrictions on our commanders that I believe would make withdrawal and defeat more likely. That’s not going to happen. If Congress fails to pass a bill to fund our troops on the front lines, the American people will know who to hold responsible. (Applause.) Our troops in Iraq deserve the full support of the Congress and the full support of this nation. (Applause.)

I know when you see somebody in the uniform, you praise them, and I thank you for that. We need to praise those military families, too, that are strong, standing by their loved one in this mighty struggle to defend this country. They risk their lives to fight a brutal and determined enemy, an enemy that has no respect for human life.

We saw that brutality in a recent attack. Just two weeks ago, terrorists in Baghdad put two children in the back of an explosive-laden car, and they used them to get the car past a security checkpoint. And once through, the terrorists fled the vehicle and detonated the car with the children inside. Some call this civil war; others call it emergency [sic] — I call it pure evil. And that evil that uses children in a terrorist attack in Iraq is the same evil that inspired and rejoiced in the attacks of September the 11th, 2001. And that evil must be defeated overseas, so we don’t have to face them here again. (Applause.)

If we cannot muster the resolve to defeat this evil in Iraq, America will have lost its moral purpose in the world, and we will endanger our citizens, because if we leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here. Prevailing in Iraq is not going to be easy. Four years after this war began, the nature of the fight has changed, but this is a fight that can be won. We can have confidence in the outcome, because this nation has done this kind of work before. March 28:07 President Bush Discusses Economy, War on Terror During Remarks to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association

THE FATHER/LY

The role of the father in psychoanalysis is conceived as being that of a lawgiver (Freud, Lacan, Chasseguet-Smirgel), as well as that of a liberator and facilitator of desire and ambition (Benjamin, 1988). The father’s role is widely conceptualized as creating an exit from the mother-infant orbit (sometimes called “merger”, “symbiosis”, the Imaginary, or”regression”) into the outer world, lawful, reality, language, and the Symbolic Order (Lacan). In religious fundamentalism the figure of the father is perverted: a father who liberates his sons (and daughters) into social life, into taking initiative, and into the joy of competence and the entitlement to pursue their desires in life, becomes the Father who liberates his sons (and daughters) from “themselves”, from their individuality, human compassion and the moral impulse. Love for this father liberates his sons to humiliate, kill and destroy “his” enemies. The persecutory father, who is an inner “gang leader” (Rosenfeld, 1971) is rephrased as a loved and loving father, although this father is obviously a vengeful killer. Obviously, what subtends this love of God is tremendous, transformed hatred, a kind of loving paranoia.

When discussing paranoia, we tend to stress the persecuted, fearing-and-hating, self-referential, hostility-imputing quality of experience. But we often forget another dimension that marks this state of mind: solemn reverence and mindless adoration. At the beginning of his Analysis of the Self, Kohut (1971) draws a most evocative diagram in which he traces the regressive itinerary of the omnipotent archaic object. This archaic object constitutes an endpoint along the path of the disintegration of higher forms of narcissism into archaic narcissistic positions. The regressive itinerary of the archaic object exists, according to Kohut, alongside the regressive itinerary of the self. On this diagram, (1) “normalcy” is the capacity for admiration and enthusiasm. In narcissistic personality disturbances, writes Kohut, this capacity degenerates, at the stage of (2) “idealized parental imago,” into a “compelling need for merger with the powerful object.” A further “downward” spiraling stage, still within the narcissistic personality disturbances, is that of “nuclei (fragments) of the idealized omnipotent object: disjointed mystical religious feelings, vague awe. The final, irreversible stage is reached in (3) psychosis, with the “delusional reconstruction of the omnipotent object: the powerful persecutor, the influencing machine” (p. 9; italics added).
excerpt. FUNDAMENTALISM, FATHER AND SON, AND VERTICAL DESIRE By Ruth Stein