Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy |
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Need of Taboo:
Pictures
of violence and mourning difficulties
by Andrzej Werbart
In memory of Lajos Székely
Can everything be depicted? Where has the boundary been drawn for what
is permissible? When is the description of reality no longer ethical?
What inner need in man leads to his effort to go repeatedly beyond the
boundaries of the permissible, to see all and show all? And what are the
consequences for our psyche, for our inner life, of new technical
approaches by which pictures of what is happening in various places in
the world can be spread so rapidly, without regard to distance?
Questions like this are being posed today not only by professional
opinion-makers but also by the man in the street, who is confronted by
pictures of violence, suffering, death and perversion even in the
sanctity of his home. Psychoanalytical experience is not ineffectual in
the face of these questions even if it can not offer firm backing for a
pronouncement about how it really is today or how it ought to
be. Our specific knowledge can help us to identify the wishes and
fantasies in operation at times when we are fascinated by or feel
loathing for various descriptions of violence, may they be fiction or an
alleged description of what is happening here and now. These highly
private wishes and fantasies are part of our universal dreams which
recur in various disguises throughout the whole history of mankind.
Descriptions
of violence are as old as man’s ability to describe what is happening
around and within himself, from cave paintings through Greek myths,
Homer’s epic, the Bible, to present-day news reports from Bosnia,
violent films and, pornography. In all probability the prohibition
against describing certain facts is old as the capacity to do so. The
prototype of this taboo was the prohibition against naming and
describing the God of the Judaism. As with every prohibition, its origin
is the antithesis – the cult of images, the idolatry. My working
hypothesis is that pictures of violence, like pictures of sexuality,
are in our culture the objects of an ancient taboo. Man’s relation
to his own ability to name and depict, to be his own witness, has always
been ambiguous. The name and the image have taken on magical
significance, and to name or depict has been a mystical way taking
possession of ”the reality”. We can see clear traces of this in
children’s play – there is nothing inexplicable or traumatic in the
child’s world which the child does not attempt to master by
reproducing the incident within the secure framework of play.
The
demoralising influence of depiction on man has been discussed since
antiquity and in Plato’s ideal state all forms of mimetic art were to
be forbidden. Regardless of the medium it uses or to whom it is
addressed, art has always been an attempt to describe man’s
relation to his taboo, to the boundaries he himself has staked out for
himself. At the same time art is a way to create, question, and
break through another boundary, that between reality and fantasy,
between the portrayal and what is portrayed. Today’s debate about
reports of violence in the media once more raises the question of man’s
relation to the taboos he has created in his previous history. New
techniques have given us opportunities for an instant global
communication of messages. The medium has prevailed over the message (McLuhan
1964), creating an illusion that there is no intermediate link, as if
the picture were no longer filtered through the psyche of others but
could reach our inner selves directly: images claim to replace immediate
perception. The images spread in this way deny that the ancient
taboos against depicting mankind’s violence and sexuality exist at all – or that there is an psychic agent for taboo.
Taboo
and Violation
Taking
obsessional neurosis as a model, Freud understands (1913; 1918) taboo as
a conscious prohibition against the fulfilment of the most powerful
unconscious desires and probably the earliest form of conscience. All
taboos have archaic roots; they are external prohibitions against
strongly desirable actions which were imposed on generations of
primitive people. So man’s thirst for blood and his appetite for
murder have grown into a blood and murder taboo. Obedience to taboos is
a parallel to the child’s obedience to this father and the desire to
rebel against him. We all have a strongly ambivalent attitude to taboos:
we want nothing more than to break with them but are at the same time
afraid of doing so.
In
the story of the creation taboos do not have ethical roots; they are
ontological. At the beginning a difference arose. Differentiation was
the original act of creation. God separated day from night, heaven from
earth, the creator from the creation. Only God knew the difference. In
the beginning of man’s history there was a breach of taboo. Eating
from the Tree of Knowledge involved man’s desire to see the difference
himself and attack the distinction between God and man. History began
with the punishment of crime. East of the Garden of Eden the next crime
was committed, Abel’s murder by his brother. In our imagination
sexuality and the thirst for knowledge are linked to forbidden fruits.
The same ambivalent relation, the same unconscious desire to violate the
prohibition, lie at the bottom of science and perversion, man’s
creativity and criminality. Man has taken the liberty of putting the
forbidden into ritualised forms, fenced in by strict rules like the
totem meal, the ecstatic rituals of antiquity, the ”bread and theatre”
of the Roman Empire, the carnival world à rebours.
The
most important function of taboo is to provide frames, to draw a line.
Every taboo establishes a boundary between the allowed and the
forbidden, between God and man, between the sacred and the profane,
between what may be touched and what may not be touched, between the
living and the non-living, between generations, sexes, permitted and
forbidden food. The taboo, the boundary, leaves room for the
imagination, for fancies about being able to do the forbidden. The
imagined violation is an important element in the satisfaction of every
desire. The portrayal of the forbidden gives pleasure only if it
stimulates the imagination. Without imagination the picture is flat and
mechanical. The account which leaves no room for fantasy dissolves the
boundary around the fantasising, the day dream, the game, the theatre,
which needs to be created in order to make it into ”something else”
than the world of everyday life. In the stories patients tell of their
experiences of the first psychotic break-down, the same theme stubbornly
recurs: having crossed a boundary. How does this boundary originate? And
what happens when it is crossed?
A
boundary, a frame, a shield
The
first boundary we confront is that between the ego and the non-ego. Man’s
spiritual dimension, our psyche, may be regarded as a product of a
boundary, a separation. In the psychoanalytical tradition a number of
concepts exist which describe the dividing line between the ego and
stimuli coming from both outside and inside. According to Freud (1895b)
trauma is a matter of large amounts of excitation breaking through the
ego’s protective barrier. He describes depression (1895a; 1917a) as an
”open wound,” a ”hole in the psychic sphere,” an ”inner
bleeding” which empties the ego. Inwardly, too, our psyche is
structured by boundaries drawn between various instruments: the
conscious, the pre-conscious and the unconscious, or the id, the ego and
the superego. Freud (1920) compares the ”protective shield against
excitation” to a membrane or skin which takes on an inorganic
character: because the outer layer has ceased to be living, it saves all
the deeper layers from a similar fate. Anzieu (1985) has studied the
psychic significance of the skin as a boundary and a shield for the ego,
a unifying and protective ”sack.” He coined the concept ”skin ego”
whose function is to protect and contain unconscious psychic phenomena
in a way similar to the way the skin protects and contains the body.
From these reasoning we can say that every act of violence, both
psychic and physical, is directed against the ego’s protective shield,
the psychic skin, and concretely against the victim’s skin and body
orifices. This thesis, which is linked to Freud’s statement that
the model for all taboos is the touching taboo, is also applicable to
invasive accounts of violence and perversion.
Our
relation to our own ego and its boundaries is of dubious
character. On the one hand we strive to maintain the ego as an
instrument of autonomy, an active agent in our own lives, a centre for
autonomous and ethical action. On the other hand we all have a longing
to transgress the ego’s boundaries; these may be interpreted as an
obstacle to another, freer existence, going beyond the ego. We can
experience the ego’s dissolution in sleep and in dreams, by using
various types of stimuli, by going to the movies, enjoying nature or by
having ecstatic religious or sexual experiences. A flight too far from
the limits of one’s own ego, as for example into the drug culture, may
end in violence, murder, chaos, and the downfall of the individual.
One
boundary is that between fiction and reality. This boundary is
not determined once and for all. It changes with the development of the
individual and the culture. Often the boundary between fiction and
reality is ritualised, even if the crossing, the threshold, seems to be
invisible. The listeners gather around the bard and the tale can begin.
”Let’s play,” say the children. The family gathers around the
radio, the lights dim at the movies, the curtain goes up at the theatre.
We open the book and can close it again. But we can never be sure. Of
course, as children we could call out to the marionette ”Look out!”
when the enemy sneaked after our hero, even if on another level we knew
that it was ”only” a play at a puppet theatre. In certain primitive
cultures there was a great fear of being photographed – the one who
owned the picture had a magic power over the person pictured. When the
Scudder missiles exploded over Israel in 1992 and were sent via TV
directly into our living rooms, we needed to remind ourselves that it
was neither fireworks nor an exciting film.
Defying
this boundary between fiction and reality has always been the ambition
of great art. Sometimes the need to draw attention to the fact that it
is not a realistic picture of some kind of ”reality” has gotten the
upper hand, as in non-figurative art or the theatre of the absurd.
Sometimes the dominating ambition has been quite the opposite: to go for
an alleged ”true reality,” even ”truer” than reality itself.
Being at a rock concert or a boxing match, watching a pornographic film
or a newsreel picture of children succumbing to thirst can give us the
same feeling – it is actually happening, ”in reality,” here and
now.
This
boundary between fiction and reality, between ”as-if” and ”for
real”, between the portrayal and what is being portrayed, is
constantly being influenced by new narrative techniques and new
communication tools. The generation born before TV existed may be
troubled by the fact that the difference between a news report and a
horror film is wiped out as one flips channels. New electronic media,
the stock example of which has become virtual reality, shifts anew the
boundary between fiction and reality, between living and non-living. A
four-year-old boy points at the TV screen and says, ”That’s
make-believe, isn’t it?” For him the question is as natural in front
of the TV as on the nursery school playground when he wonders if an
older playmate pushes him ”for real” or as a part of the game. Never
previously in the history of mankind, however, have we had the same
chances in our everyday lives to be anywhere in the world as witnesses
to the worst catastrophes, the most bestial murders, the most horrifying
war scenes. This may be perceived as if not only our homes but our very
egos were being invaded, and this starts up the ancient protective
mechanism, our psychic defences. When the account of reality is
unendurable we can make it ”fictive” by regarding it as something
which is happening ”there” as ”only” a picture or something
which is not ”here.” Our children beg for confirmation, ”They don’t
shoot like that in Sweden? Not in our city, anyway? Not on our street?
Not at us?”
There
is also a temptation to cross the boundary between good and evil. Our
memories of endless debates on moral issues from our teen-age years ,
often with various borderline cases as examples, may be a reminder of
this. In the world of fiction Faust as well as heroes of science
fiction personify our fascination with evil. We probably all bear
within us a wish, a fantasy, of a life ”beyond good and evil”
(Nietzsche), beyond the boundaries of our existence, with access to
unlimited power and secret forces. Recently it has been observed that it
is not only film but also newly released books for young people which to
a greater and greater extent deal with evil and death, without love,
without anything good, without explanation. Symptomatically enough, in
these publications there is a recurrence of the same remark the hero
makes when caught in a vulnerable situation: ”It was like a film.”
This fascination with evil and power is always linked to notions of
boundary crossing, originally the wish to go beyond the child’s
helplessness and overstep the authority and prohibitions of parents.
This is also linked to the desire for immortality and a life not
governed by moral principles.
The
outermost limit for us is that between living and dead, between human
and non-human. Perhaps every use of violence implies that the other
person is de-humanised, robbed of his human dignity, regarded not as a
living and feeling subject but as an object of our lust and hate. There
is a hairline difference between two knights who are engaged in a life
and death struggle, but who at the same time recognise each others’
sovereignty, and the undefeated hero battling evil embodied in a human
figure. The systematic annihilation of Jews presupposed that they had
first been declared and been regarded as non-human, vermin and contagion
to be eradicated – we still speak of ”the extermination” of the
Jews.
The
boundaries between fiction and reality, between good and evil and
between living and dead are closely interwoven. When one is eliminated
the other follows along. The longing to cross the boundaries of one’s
own ego is also bound up with the desire to see all and show all. It
soon turns out that all of this deals with one aspect – a
taboo-shrouded aspect – at the expense of the connected whole we do
not want to see or show. This is the mechanism common to every boundary
crossing – isolating a fragment of our emotional life and ignoring the
connected whole. In this way the boundary which is to be crossed and
eliminated is re-created. At this point we can already formulate a
preliminary hypothesis, viz. that descriptions of violence and
perversion may lead to traumatising intra-psychic consequences if they
penetrate the skin ego or contribute to its dissolution. A condition
for the psychological working through of our experiences and conflicts
is, on the contrary, the maintenance of boundaries. In the
psychoanalytical treatment situation the purpose of the frames is to
protect both the analyst and the analysand from the destructiveness them
both. Certain actions are taboo and under that mantle everything can be
expressed and named.
The
Perverse Universe
The
desires and fantasies played back in the media today in the pictures of
violence are among the perverse components in each and every one of us
but they are also a depiction of the perverse aspects of our social
life. In the perverse universe there is no difference between ”as if”
and ”make-believe” and ”for real,” between fantasy and deed,
between our inner, psychic reality and the outside world. Everything is
”for fun” at the same time that it is happening in reality. ”Beyond
good and evil,” the dividing line between living, human, and dead,
non-human is erased. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984; 1986; 1989) calls
attention to the fact that the perverse scenario is apt to be revived in
a group context where the differences between individuals are levelled
out. According to her the distinguishing characteristic of perversion is
that differences between sexes and between generations are erased. The
differentiation which perversion attempts to obliterate revives,
however, in the middle of the perverse scenario which perpetually
revolves around power, control, and dominance or subjection. Man’s
hybris is in his longing to take the Creator’s place.
Chasseguet-Smirgel sees perversion as one of the ways to attempt to
expand the boundaries of what is possible and be set free from reality.
(Creativity is another way). The perverse temptation is to regard
pregenital desires and satisfactions, accessible to the little girl or
boy, as equal or better than the adult’s genital desires and
activities. The antithesis of the perverse universe is the
three-dimensional Oedipal psyche: between mother and child there is the
father/reality itself which sets up an incest barrier. Separation and
differentiation are the cornerstones of the law.
Violence
and Destructiveness in our Inner World and in Society
The
connection between our inner world and the society into which we are
born and which we ourselves create is a dark chapter in psychoanalytical
theory. Unless we approach this uncertain area, however, we can not
answer the opening questions. In Freud’s (1930) vision of man and
society we find violence as the basis of our existence on two levels.
Here I mean the violence in the uninhibited instinct and the violence
which our culture practices against the individual. Without a certain
measure of compulsion and restraint in the gratification of impulses,
cultural institutions can not be maintained, Freud says (1927, p. 7):
”One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in
all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends
and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to
determinate their behaviour in human society.” Social violence is
represented within us as the superego. The ego’s function is to find
compromises between the unbridled pressures of instinct, the outer
world, and the restraints of the superego. (Freud 1933a.)
On
the initiative of the League of Nations Albert Einstein turned to Freud
in 1932 with the question, ”Why war?”. Freud (1933b) began his reply
with a reminder that in antiquity violence was the traditional way to
solve all conflicts and that the goal has always been to eliminate the
adversary entirely. Throughout the development of civilisation the
violence of the strong individual has been overcome by transferring
power to a larger unit, consolidated by emotional ties between its
members. Group solidarity can, however, lead to the disintegration of
ego boundaries when the individual joins a larger association to which
he delegates his responsibility and his conscience. When the leader
replaces the ego ideal of the individual, acts which were previously
forbidden may appear to be permissible (Freud 1921). Man’s aggressive
and destructive urges may be integrated with the libido and work
constructively, or be separated from it and given free rein. Despite
Freud’s celebrated scepticism, the exchange of letters with Einstein
breathed life into the belief that everything which promotes
civilisation and culture operates against war. The cornerstone of
civilisation is the universal prohibition against incest (Freud 1913).
Even here we return to the central role played by a boundary, a
difference. Without distinctions between different psychic agents,
without a boundary between our desires and our conscience, no
compromises are possible.
Psychoanalytical
experience teaches us that periods of vast revolutionary changes are
followed by crises for the individual, albeit after a certain delay and
after the acute phase has passed. Bychowski (1968) shows convincingly
how anxiety and fear lead to hate within the individual and in the
society – from antiquity to the present day. During certain historical
epochs, when large groups of people have lost faith in the old solutions
to their life problems, in religion and other ideologies, and when the
superego has degenerated, a state of discontent, hopelessness and
uncertainty arises. This releases a psychological regression which
activates infantile reaction patterns and awakens a longing for a strong
leader, a helping father. Starting from Caesar, Cromwell, Robespierre,
Hitler and Stalin Bychowski shows how people who no longer believe in
their own strength transfer all their hope to the leader who promises
salvation and a new faith in the future. Following Freud’s line he
points out that man’s wickedness, hate and destructiveness find their
best outlet when they serve man’s highest ideals. From another
perspective Hanna Arendt (1970) observed a displacement of violence to
the political arena after the time of the student revolt. According to
her, loss of power brings with it a temptation to replace it with
violence when violence is no longer supported and controlled by
authority. On the psychological plane there is a parallel in the feeling
of powerlessness which breeds rage and violence.
After
Auschwitz
Despite
our humanistic ideals, love of our fellow man and concern for others,
there are in us all more or less distinct traces of the desire to make
others into non-us, and in the end into non-people. It is our own
outraged narcissism which reduces others to a non-human status and
underlies ”the Fascist mentality” (Bollas 1992). Fear of the
different, on the other side of our prescribed cairn, lays the
foundation for xenophobia. Eissler (1975) gives the name ”cultural
narcissism” to that force which causes us to overvalue our own
national, political or religious affiliation, leading to conflict and
war. Green (1981) believes that every culture builds on inherent
paranoid processes: the distinctive character of the culture is
confirmed by the devaluation and rejection of another culture often
lying near at hand. Minority groups which deviate from our own group in
matters of religion, ethnical origin, political views, language or
sexuality are convenient projection screens for the intolerance of our
own weakness and aggressivity. The path the projection takes often
follows ”the narcissism of small differences” (Freud 1918; 1921;
1930): the closest neighbour is perceived as a threat to our own
identity and survival and the neighbour farther away seems to be nicer
and more exciting. We meet ”strangers” on visits home. In Sweden we
tell Norwegian stories but not English or Russian stories. Yet as a
matter of fact we do not eat up our neighbours, we do not make lamp
shades out of their skin and mattresses out of their hair. Though all
that has happened. Cannibalism, child murder and human sacrifice are
part of our prehistoric roots.
The
culture we live and feel discontent in originated in large measure from
the prohibition against doing what was once allowed, indeed even holy,
like sacrificing our children to the gods (Bergman 1992). These
unconscious murderous and cannibalistic desires have left indelible
marks on the religious rituals of the West. The murderous desires of
children against parents (the Oedipus complex) and the murderous desires
of parents against children (the Laius complex) are, according to
Bergman, interwoven with each other as components in the existential
conditions of mankind. But there are historical experiences of a much
more recent date. We live in a world after Auschwitz. Our parents have
been there or could have been, in one way or another. They knew or did
not want to know. Our children are the third generation after the mass
use of the gas chamber and the cremation ovens, after all the taboos
were abolished once again – not as an exception, as a crime, but as a
systematic operation with both bureaucratic and industrial overtones.
Without our really knowing how, the Holocaust and death factories
have influenced our conscious and unconscious ideas, our super egos, our
desires and our terrors. The technology of death and the cult of the
death’s-head have not been a parenthesis in history leaving no traces.
The perverse, seductive, paranoid father – the Führer – has been
replaced by our ideas about the fatherless society, by the absence of
the Law of the Father. Fifty years after Auschwitz we are complaining
about the absence of adults to see, set limits and say no. The confusion
between generations is said to characterise our Zeitgeist. The
middle-aged generation, born in the time of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,
refuse to give up their own eternal youth. At the same time the younger
generation, the third, take over adult roles too early. To formulate
that in the dualistic terms of Freudian instinct theory: the strained
acceptance of libido, of Eros, turns into its opposite, the cult of
death, and Thanatos looms in the wake of longing to subvert the
boundaries of the ego.
In
Adorno’s widely quoted phrasing, it is impossible to write poems after
Auschwitz. It has often been said that it is not possible to imagine or
depict the Holocaust. The taboo against pictures and descriptions of the
Holocaust have, however, never existed – all the art created in hiding
places, the ghettos and concentration camps bear witness to this. On the
contrary, I would like to assert that Auschwitz demolished the taboo
against describing certain phenomena. Both the crossing of boundaries
between good and evil, human and non-human, living and dead, and ”ignorance”
of this have been replaced not only by the desire but also the
technology to see all and show all. Today we would be able to witness
the consequences of Zyklon B in a direct broadcast. There is logic in
this: that at the same time as the Holocaust is being denied
there are no longer any limits for what can be depicted – and
neither perhaps for what may be done so that it will be depicted. No
doubt it is more difficult to create poetry after Auschwitz – it
requires an effort to restore the boundary between fiction and reality,
between the portrayal and what is portrayed.
After
the Collapse of the Berlin Wall
As
I pointed out at the start, psychoanalysis does not provide us with any
basis for comment on political change but only on the unconscious
desires and defences brought into focus by the change. Let us take the
Berlin Wall as a symbol. On one side of the wall we had ”the good”
Europeans or Germans and on the other ”the bad.” This distortion of
reality was based on the defence mechanisms of denial, splitting and
projection, well known to psychoanalysts from the individual inner
scene, which taken together seriously jeopardise the reality testing.
But the collapse of the wall is not only a victory for democracy. It is
also a threat to the psychic survival of every East German; the
depression which struck many citizens of the former East Germany has
been noted by several writers. The old defences do not function; the ego
ideal has changed key. Two paths are accessible to the individual: the
painful confrontation with his own emotional reactions to the new state
of things or flight from his affliction through new denials, splittings
and projections. The various outcomes of this identity crisis are
dependent not only on the ability of each individual to mourn his own
inner lost object but also on the models he finds in the prevailing
culture. We can also take the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia as
examples. The aspect I want to call attention to is ”the taboo”
against national conflicts. These multinational hybrids were possible
because of the same psychic mechanisms of denial, splitting and
projection. There were no conflicts between nations inside their own
borders, only outside them. When the outer ”curtain” has been
perforated we can observe what Freud (1896) described as the return of
the repressed.
The
world after the collapse of the Berlin Wall has sometimes been compared
to the Middle Ages: several small centres, local power structures, the
disintegration of the central authority. Denial, splitting and
projection can no longer follow the simple east- west path. When these
mechanisms, primitive but structuring for the ego, no longer function in
the same way, the ego risks being flooded by archaic, violent and
perverse impulses. When hate and envy are not held back by taboo, there
is scope for uninhibited killing. The need for order and new psychic
defences becomes acute, and this may lead to a perverted
reconstruction of frames, characterised by paranoid delusions. ”Ethnic
cleansing” may here serve as an example from the political arena. The
prohibition against hybris, against mixing, is then revived as a
perverse decree to uphold absolute cleanliness.
At the same time another change has been going on with consequences for
our inner life and our culture which up to now have been difficult to
assess. Modern media technology can give us an illusion of direct
presence in the centre of events. We can sit at home and on the TV
screen follow the advance of the troops over the desert on the border
between Kuwait and Iraq. Through our computers we can make direct
contact with a colleague in the besieged Sarajevo. On the one hand this
can give us a feeling of omnipotence and on the other hand of
powerlessness and unreality. The new technical means of extending the
range of our sense and motor organs confronts our psyche with new
demands on our ability to test reality and defend ourselves against
overstimulation, to weed out unessential information. It is a
classic psychoanalytical thesis that our culture, our civilisation, is
based on repression. At the same time it is only the intellectual and
economic elite who have the resources to set priorities independently on
the flood of information, using the minimal, absolutely essential part.
For the great majority the result may be traumatic overstimulation and
the defences which accompany it, like encapsulation, screening, ego
restrictions, etc. Until new boundaries between the inner and the outer
are established the distinction between reality and illusion will remain
indistinct. Natural disasters, such as for example the earthquake in
Kobe, may be required to remind the Japanese stock market that the
information world is not the only reality we live in.
The
Limits of Boundary Crossing
The
inner, psychic processes described above, bolstered by changes in the
social arena and in the area of media technique, coincide in time and
strengthen each other. At the same time as the limitless state of things
appears to be an ideal, development here meets its own border. The
desire to overstep and obliterate the boundaries of the ego, to break
with taboos, is an important incentive to portrayals of man’s
destructiveness and sexuality. Crossing a boundary is possible only if
there is a boundary to cross. Beyond the boundary everything is allowed.
Passing a geographical border, leaving one’s own country, is often the
equivalent of leaving behind the restrictions of one’s own superego.
As soon as they are on board the ferry from Sweden, young people begin
to drink without restraint and on the boat from Finland Finish youth do
the same. When the culturally accepted boundaries for the permissible
are shifted, the content of actions and pictures which were intended to
challenge the taboos is also affected. Since accounts of man’s
destructiveness and sexuality adapt themselves to this they must tempt
us with promises that we may be allowed to see something which has never
before been witnessed, more genuine, more real, more harrowing. The
indignation or the excitation which the depiction of violence is
intended to arouse demands new, bolder pictures. This inflation of the
crossing of boundaries finally leaves us bored and indifferent: still
one more picture of the wounded in the Sarajevo food queues, yet another
series of blurred pictures of stretchers, the focus on the pools of
blood on the ground. Paradoxically enough the taboo needs to be
recreated so that we will be able to enjoy or be horrified at seeing and
giving a name to the forbidden. TV news broadcasts warn us of shocking
and violent pictures. The advertising for VCR films tempts us with an
uncut version – more blood and sperm. The dialectic of boundary
crossing is that it restores the prohibition which was to be abolished.
In the unconscious, crimes against taboos are punishable by the death
penalty. For us humans the ultimate boundary transgression is our own
death and that of others, the irreversible crossing. The temptation
and desire to cross boundaries is linked to the sexualisation of death
and the mortification of sexuality. The object of pictures of
violence and pornography is always killed symbolically, transformed from
a living, feeling subject to a dead thing, a waste product. The viewer
of these portrayals goes through a corresponding transformation: his
sensitivity and his ability to empathise with others have to be blunted
and parts of his own subjectivity put between parentheses. This
transition may be surrounded by protective rituals: the spectators
gather at the Colosseum and the emperor declares the gladiatorial games
open; we put the cassette into the VCR and settle ourselves comfortably
on the sofa. When there is no refuge, when suddenly at breakfast we are
served bodies twisting in death agonies or orgiastic spasms we are
ourselves the subjects of violence. Our inner selves are outraged. We
can turn away or continue to watch without seeing. The picture loses its
substance, becomes a shadow play without reference to anything outside
the picture. The symbolic meaning is killed. The eagerly awaited
excitation in watching what is not allowed to be shown is transformed
into distaste and boredom (Bruckner & Finkielkraut 1977) as a
consequence of scotomas which characterise perverse scenarios. The new
pornographers, violating man’s ultimate, decisive separateness, do our
fantasy work for us, Steiner (1967) writes in his essay, ” Night
Words.” In this way we consent to being dispossessed of our own
fantasies. What tempts us is that we believe we are overcoming death.
Fascination
with Violence and Escape from Suffering and Mourning
Accounts
of violence and perversion promise us that we will be vicariously freed
from the shackles of our own consciences and social norms, that we will
at last realise ourselves to the fullest. They promise to tear down all
the prohibitions which have hitherto limited our chances. The less
comprehensible the reason for violence seems to be, the more devoid of
all emotional connections the perverse acts are, the stronger our
positive or negative reactions are. Turned on or dismayed, we let
ourselves be cheated. Foucault (1976) concludes the first volume of ”The
History of Sexuality”: The irony of this deployment is in having us
believe that it concerns our ‘liberation’.” These ever more
sophisticated or realistic direct accounts leave a feeling of emptiness,
satiation and disgust in their wake. The promised liberation never
comes, regardless of whether we regard it as an apocalypse or a Paradise
on earth. The insurmountable boredom of pictures of violence catches up
with us. In Freud’s (1923, p. 46) description ”the death instincts
are by their nature mute” and ”the clamour of life proceeds for the
most part from Eros”. In the superego of the melancholic ”a pure
culture of the death instinct” reigns supreme (Freud 1923, p. 53).
When perpetual repetitions of the same actions are presented without
their historical and emotional context they lose their relationship to
the conditions of our human existence and with our roots. Thus the
depression recurs which the picture of violence, like every boundary
crossing, has been passed off as helping us to escape. This void,
covering up our own violent, destructive desires, is a pathological form
of sorrow from a psychoanalytical standpoint, an expression of the
inability or refusal to suffer and to mourn.
The
desire to escape every limitation in man’s existence ends in
depression or destructiveness. Sabina Spielrein, who in 1912 suggested
the first psychoanalytical phraseology for the death instinct, wrote
that the most important characteristic of an individual is that he is a
”dividual,” Dividuum. Wurmser (1987) sees man’s claim to
the absolute as ”the perversion of conscience” – it fosters the
”demonic” side of the personality and leads to evil, destructiveness
and violence. According to Shengold (1991) our original desire for ”everything”
is an expression of the utmost narcissism, and it makes ”something”
unattainable. Our murderous desires express a rage which turns against
the inevitably frustrating reality we live in, represented by the
indispensable parents. Only a tolerance for ”no,” ”never” and
”nothingness” can create a real place where it is possible for ”someone”
to exist as a separate individual with his own identity.
The psychoanalytical term ”the omnipotence of thought” can help us
to understand the effects of the spread of accounts of violence in the
media. The concept was coined by one of Freud’s patients, known as the
Ratman (1909) and used by Freud in his research on taboo (1913). What
the magic thoughts of small children, obsessive neurotic patients and
people in primitive cultures have in common is that the thought is
considered to be on a par with the deed. The distinctive mark of the
new, global media is that it so easily brings up to date this archaic,
infantile ”omnipotence of thought” and in that way promotes
narcissistic solutions. In its turn this narcissism is an effective
obstacle to – and a flight from – perceived suffering, depression,
mourning and working through. Added to this is also the
disintegration of the individual conscience by participation in the
global network of viewers. In Freud’s research on taboo the
archetype for this process was the primitive man’s totem meal when the
totem animal was killed and eaten: every individual is aware that he is
doing something forbidden, allowed only because the whole clan is
participating in it.
According to Freud (1913) man’s cultural products are a first
acknowledgement of Ananke, ”Necessity”, in the sense of
limitations inherent in the existential conditions of man which
challenge our narcissism. In this context it could be added that the
relation of art to ”Necessity” has always been ambivalent. Every
innovative work of art, like every new medium, is an effort to subjugate Ananke, overstep the boundaries in our earthly existence and
re-establish a narcissistic structure. Art which ends there, however,
will not be art; not until it reaches a bottom layer of depression can
it help us to mourn. Subtle ties bind creativity to our narcissistic and
depressive sides (Székely 1976; 1983; Haynal 1985; Kristeva 1987;
Cullberg 1992; Crafoord 1993). Narratives which deal in depth with our
existential conditions, with what makes us humans irretrievably doomed
to live as separate ”in-dividuals”, dependent on each other, divided
into two sexes and several generations, vulnerable and mortal, can help
us to be reconciled with our existential conditions. A painful
acknowledgement of Ananke is also an important part of the
psychotherapeutic process of change. Let me illustrate this with three
clinical vignettes and a film.
Three
Patients and Three COLOURS
The
first girl’s colours were brown. Brown’s inner world was filled with
terror and perversion. She could sit for hours in front of the TV and
watch the most brutal and cruel violent and pornographic films. Before
the approaching termination of her psychotherapy Brown fantasised
butchering her therapist and cutting up her dead mother. There was no
limit to Brown’s hate for her therapist and her mother, both of whom
had unavoidably left her. Her own progress in therapy and in life
confronted her with the need to accept that, as a matter of fact, she
was able to look after herself on her own. When she took a decisive step
in that direction she regressed and in confusion went out to her mother’s
grave. On the way back she met with the same type of accident which had
led to her mother’s death. By identifying with her mother she was
trying to understand her mother’s death and accept the fact that she
had nothing to do with it, at the same time as she was trying to ”be”
the mother. Brown teetered on the brink of death and had to go through a
series of surgical procedures. After one of the operations she thought
that she had finally buried her mother and freed herself from her.
Before the conclusion of the therapy she hit on the idea that she might
go to another psychotherapist and this made her feel like a traitor. She
had a whim that she might plant the same kind of potted plant as the one
in the therapist’s consulting room. Perhaps it would bloom for her,
too, and then she could cut a flower and give it to the therapist.
Actually she was still grappling with the separation from her mother’s
body and expressing a hope that she would be able to refrain from
butchering and eating it. She could not keep the good plant herself but
imagined that she had to pick the flower and give it back to the
therapist, a representative of her mother. Before the next operation a
few weeks later she mixed up ideas about the dead mother’s mangled
body with fantasies about cutting up her own body and that of the
therapist. The therapist who had survived these onslaughts received a
postcard after the operation which had on it a picture of the flower
Brown wanted to plant, cut and give to her. That moment might be
described as a transition from the Fascist mentality and the brown anal
universe to a world where the difference between Brown and others and
between the symbol and what is symbolised may be allowed to exist.
The
second girl’s colours were pink. Pink’s fear of her own
destructiveness was hidden behind an idyllic facade. She was a sweet
innocent, a china doll. As Pink approached the end of her therapy she
wanted to make the process short. Apparently she perceived the upcoming
separation as a sign of the therapist’s sadism. Her own sadism
continued to be denied and projected. At this point Pink’s fantasies
revolved around the desire to hold the female therapist’s hand when a
man penetrated her. With their long knives men were nasty creatures.
With the therapist she constantly re-created a feeling that there was
always something more to work with which she was not allowing the
therapist to penetrate. Pink could not endure the difference between the
bodies of a man and a woman, between parent and child generations,
between patient and therapist, and she also did everything she could to
deny the boundary created by the termination. She thought that
psychotherapy was not worth anything if it was really going to end by
the therapist and her being separated. Everything was ruined and it was
just as well to begin slashing her wrists and burning herself with
cigarettes. She thought that it helped her to feel real if she saw blood
flowing. During one therapy session she stuck her fingertip with a
needle, squeezing out a few drops of blood that she wanted the therapist
to suck on. In this action Pink’s vampirism mingled with fantasies
about the therapist’s bloodthirstiness. At the same time Pink was more
and more openly seductive toward the therapist, alternating between
inviting physical contact and reproaching her for the lack of it. Not
until the therapist became aware of her own strongly negative reactions
to Pink’s bloodthirstiness and her homosexual invitations was she able
to understand that at every session Pink was giving her the feeling that
she was leaving something unfinished and unprocessed behind and that
Pink’s motivation was to get the therapist to realise how impossible
the upcoming separation seemed to her. This became the starting point
for a new round in her work with Pink’s refusal to live in a world of
differences.
Green, a middle-aged woman who looked like a teenager, was concerned
about environmental destruction. The very first sessions of
psychoanalysis aroused her dread of the future termination. She could
not understand why she should embark on this relationship if she could
not ”get” the analyst and she complained constantly about the lack
of mutuality in the relationship. For several years Green reacted to
every separation from the analyst with hateful feelings and murderous
fantasies, such as butchering and eating her body. Despite the violent
quality in her emotions, dreams, fantasies and accusations Green did not
need to stage them in her real life or assault her own body, nor did she
need to hide her desires behind a facade of innocence and naiveté. She
could speak openly about her reactions and her desires remained simply
desires. The months before the end of the analysis were characterised by
a profound mourning made possible when ambivalent emotions were allowed
to come out. Green came to the final session with a gift for her analyst
which in symbolic form summed up the inner change she had gone through
but was also a symbolic representation of a funeral. She was able to
give up the illusion that her desire to have the father/analyst to
herself would finally be satisfied after the termination, and she buried
her fantasy picture.
Brown’s and Pink’s colours seemed like the reverse of each
other but they both lived in the same archaic universe where their
bodies and those of their mothers had grown together. Sometimes Green’s
colours might seem brown and sometimes pink. Even though she protested
vehemently against every difference between her and the analyst, between
her own and her mother’s relation to her father, she could present her
own conflicts in symbolic form. Certainly in her analysis she regressed
to the same archaic universe in which Brown and Pink permanently
inhabited, but in contrast to the two other patients her starting point
was a deep depression and not a psychosis. In all three cases violence
and perversion disclosed their demands to obliterate all differences.
A
Film
”No
animals or human beings have been injured in creating this film,” we
are assured after Milcho Manchevski’s film ”Before the Rain.” We
can feel secure that everything was just fiction, ”make believe.”
Photographer and Pulitzer prize winner Alex is on a trip to Bosnia as a
newspaper correspondent after 16 years in London. On one occasion he
observes to a Serbian militiaman, ”Nothing is happening here.” ”We
can easily fix that,” answers the militiaman and shoots a prisoner. In
this scene the boundary between fiction and reality is dissolved when
the desire for an authentically shocking picture determines what becomes
real.
Weighed down by guilt feelings, Alex travels to Macedonia where he
wishes to make amends for his crime by trying to rescue the daughter of
his youthful love. He winds up in the middle of a feud between Albanians
and Macedonians (”they have oppressed us for 500 years”) and
witnesses how a brother murders his sister, an Albanian girl charged
with having killed a Macedonian. He is finally killed by his own
brother. In the first part of the film, ”Words,” we get no
explanations for all the hate and violence we are witness to. Part two,
”Faces,” transports us to London only so that we may once again
witness something incomprehensible. In a restaurant a Yugoslav picks a
quarrel with a fellow countryman, insulting him until he is thrown out.
In a few minutes he comes back and mows down the restaurant guests. The
explanation does not come until the third part, ”Pictures.” Here we
see a Macedonia where next door neighbours are full of hate for each
other and we follow the fateful course of events in connection with Alex’
rescue attempt. As in a Greek tragedy it proves to be impossible for
Alex, for all of us, to stay out of things and circumvent fate: when
Alex fights to preserve his own humanity he puts at stake the life of
the girl he was to rescue as well as his own.
The whole film may be considered an exposé of the difference
between the viewer of incomprehensible descriptions of violence
without meaning or relation and the witness to meaningful and
comprehensible actions, however strange and frightening, being the
consequence of a long and not immediately recognisable story. Shocking
pictures from the war scene skimmed through in a London office,
completely unacceptable in their invasion of everyday life, come
gradually to be replaced by ”faces” of people, their fates, the
coherence of life. The violence in the epic story of the film with its
dazzlingly beautiful, almost dreamlike pictures, is contrasted with
extremely realistic pictures from Bosnia, reaching us at the same moment
they are happening, invading us without giving us any connection or
possibility to understand. The highly personal, stylised tale, filtered
through the psyche of another subject, gives us a feeling of
participation in our common human history. Within the frame of a
ritually limited time and place we meet our own and our neighbour’s
destructiveness and once again discover that there is nowhere to flee.
This family of ours who inhabit the earth are brothers and sisters who
are killing each other.
Pictures
of Violence and Perversion are Different From Images of Conditio
Humana
Now
that we have gotten so far into this discourse we may need to go back to
some of the theses we formulated earlier and elaborate further on them.
Our contemporary descriptions of man’s violence, destruction and
sexuality destroy the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between
the portrayal and what is portrayed, between good and evil, living and
dead, human and non-human. This plays a part in our longing to cross the
boundaries of our own ego. In combination with denying that a taboo
against portrayal of certain occurrences exists at all, these pictures
present a perverse scenario, which may bring into focus corresponding
aspects of our inner world. The preoccupation with violence and
perversion in our culture can be regarded as a consequence of
secularisation, the victory of rationality over faith, and a
continuation of the disintegration of the boundary between sacred and
profane. Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky articulated this perception of Gott
ist tot: if God is dead all crimes and perversions are allowed.
After
Auschwitz our culture was to a great extent characterised by the desire
to see all and show all and by a denial of the boundaries for what may
be depicted and what may be done. This involves a change in our relation
to the ultimate limit of our existence, death. Great ambivalence
characterises the cult of death which is continuing its advance in the
shadow of the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens. On the one hand
the taboo surrounding death seems to have been strengthened and on the
other hand eliminated. Much of the concrete, physical content of death
has been rendered invisible at the same time as pictures of dead and
dying bodies are inundating us. We seem to be denying that our own death
and that of others is one of the realities of life and a ”beyond,”
at the same time as we violate previous taboos surrounding death and the
images of it. If death is not a final crossing and if pictures of murder
and corpses are a common ingredient of our daily lives, perhaps there is
nothing we need to be afraid of and nothing to mourn, either. This cult
of death seems to be an attempt to come to terms with the narcissistic
outrage perpetrated on us by the fact that we are mortal.
Present
day techniques for the spread of information has extended the range of
our sense and motor organs to a level which spans the globe. This global
expansion of boundaries of the outer organs of the ego has not been
accompanied by a corresponding change in our ego. The skin ego, the
outer shield of our body image and our inner world, is lagging behind.
This state of things resembles adolescence: the teenager’s body
changes faster than his chances of integrating it into his self-image,
at the same time as the radical increase in the pressure of his
instincts triggers regression. In contrast to the teenager, however,
what we are talking about here is not a matter of the increased pressure
of the libido but of the death instinct. The result is that we once
again meet the archaic, infantile sides of our selves, this time under
the hegemony of hate and destructiveness. Changes in the social arena
and in the scope of the media coincide and together strengthen the
regressive psychic processes, which have also been apparent in other
epochs of historic upheavals.
The
effect of exposure to pictures of violence and perversion may be
described in terms of regression to narcissistic structures. Another
consequence was the mortification of our psyche, a process which may be
said to chisel out the ”living dead” parts of our ego. Effects like
these have previously been observed in a pure form in people who have
survived a perverted world full of destructiveness, violence and evil
– the survivors of the Holocaust, of torture and psychosis (Werbart
& Lindbom-Jakobson 1993). The preliminary hypothesis that pictures
of violence and sexuality may have traumatising intrapsychic
consequences if they penetrate or contribute to the disintegration of
the skin ego can now be confirmed. A massive exposure to images of man’s
evil and perversion, devoid of every emotional and historical context,
may activate our ”archaic remnants.” Our own destructiveness and
narcissism then come to life rather than being diverted and canalised.
This may lead to a temporary or persistent reorganisation of the ego.
The appeal of these images and the regression they conjure up lie in the
fact that the projection outward of our own aggressivity and hate is
accompanied by flight from depression and grief, manifest in the
ecstatic expectation of being able to free ourselves from all the
boundaries in our existence. This regression in the individual and in
the group can be carried over from generation to generation (Kaës et
al. 1993).
What then is the difference between pictures of violence and perversion
which serve the ends of the death instinct and accounts which promote
the action of the life instinct in joining together instead of tearing
down? One difference is between pictures which isolate a fragment of our
life, ignoring its total emotional and historical context, and accounts
which are incorporated into a human story. Another difference is between
showing or viewing, and witnessing. This difference deals with the
presence or absence of a Narrator, an intermediate agent who is
responsible for a certain psychic and symbolic pre-processing. The
tales of the Greek bards, the Bible stories, the Islandic Edda and Völsungasagan or the Finnish Kalevala are not devoid of
atrocities, but they are presented by someone who witnesses, relates and
mediates. With the modern technique for the spread of information, the
Narrator tends to become invisible and to be replaced by the medium. The
mediating instrument seeks to obliterate the subject’s presence as an
intermediate link in order to be seen as a neutral extension of our
perceptual organs. Unprocessed, non-symbolised pictures are still not
testimony, for that requires a narrative communicated through another
person’s subjectivity. The portrayals which ”rape” us are pictures
without a tie to experience, empty of suffering, pain, meaning, and
message. Behind the undoctored images of violence and perversion is an
incapacity to endure suffering and psychic pain – in reality a refusal
to accept mankind’s existential conditions. In psychoanalytical terms
it deals with an attempt to make the Oedipal third invisible or to
eliminate it. Such pictures play along with our desire to cross the
boundaries of our own ego and confirm the ego’s temporary or permanent
disintegration. Pictures of violence and perversion included in a
description of conditio humana, on the other hand, contribute to
the re-establishment of the ego as a psychic agent of our
self-government.
To
Re-establish the Ego is to Restore Differences
The
world we live in, the incomprehensible events occurring all around us,
all the dangers to our own existence as individuals and as a species,
constantly threaten the ego’s unity. When pictures of naked violence,
the free outlet for murderous and perverse desires, are perceived as
invasive and perforate the skin ego, the entire arsenal of our ancient
defence mechanisms is activated. Besides denial, projection and
splitting, I have mentioned such defences against traumatic
overstimulation as encapsulation, screening, and ego restriction. The
sense of our vulnerability and our own murderous desires are both so
threatening to us that, faced with pictures of this kind, we may react
by ”de-identifying ourselves,” keeping a distance, regarding reality
as fiction, de-humanising others. This is not true; it can’t be like
this. It is happening there, not here. It is they who are doing it, not
us. They are not like us; they are different. ”They are only Jews,”
as an eye witness to the liquidation of the ghetto expressed it in
Steven Spielberg’s film, ”Schindler’s List.” It’s just a
movie, not for real. The use of these defence mechanisms is facilitated
by the pretended transparency of the new media. ”This is exactly how
it is...” When the presence of the mediating agent is made invisible
and the re-editing by the ”third” subject is denied, we can protect
the unity of our ego by contrariwise looking upon the portrayal as
completely opaque. There is nothing beyond the presentation; the medium
itself is the message. In the end it is the murderer within ourselves,
the bloodthirsty beast we do not want to know. As in neurosis and
psychosis a massive use of our most primitive, rigid defences
contributes to strengthening the effect of what we are defending
ourselves against. This may lead to a perverted reconstruction of
frames, characterised by paranoid delusions. When the taboo against
portrayal of certain occurrences is denied, that which we do not want to
know can be fully possible.
In the current debate about the mass media in the USA, a paradox
has recently come to light. It seems that everyone follows Simpson’s
trial in direct TV broadcasts. This murder affects the entire population
since they can recognise themselves in the drama and identify with both
the perpetrator and the victim. The pictures from Serbia, on the other
hand, do not seem to affect the American public and are regarded as just
pictures on the TV screen. The spread of pictures of violence by the
media may contribute to the identification process (like the broadcasts
of the hunt for and the trial of Simpson) or to de-humanisation and the
onset of xenophobia (”We never believed anything else about the Balkan
people”). Our attempt at ”objective news reporting” may contribute
to this de-humanisation. Inexplicable pictures of bleeding, maimed or
dead bodies, often in direct broadcasts, may easily strengthen the
feeling of unreality.
Pictures of evil, violence, destructiveness, and perversion may
contribute to the re-establishment of the ego’s boundaries if they
counteract the disintegration of the ego and restore differences. In
order that they may help us to work through our experiences, to endure
suffering and to mourn, such descriptions have to fulfil certain
conditions. The subjective position, with the portrayal separated from
what is being portrayed, may make it easier for us to identify with one
of the protagonists. The narrator’s visible presence, the mediating
agent responsible for a certain psychic pre-processing, can contribute
to our leaving the role of the passive viewer and becoming an active
witness. This also promotes the symbolisation and reconstruction of a
historic context. Such accounts can help us to accept the loss of our
infantile omnipotence.
In
Freud’s (1917b) aphorism one of the great injures to the narcissism of
man is that our ego is not master in its own house. Changes in our
culture, in the political arena and the technology of the spread of
information work together today to influence the boundaries between our
ego and the outside world, between our ego ideal and perceived
self-esteem, between the desirable and the undesirable aspects of our
inner world. This is a new outrage to our narcissism. Our impulses,
desires and fantasies are the same as they were ten thousand years
earlier. Never before, however, has our repressed, archaic world had the
same chance not only to break through to the surface but also to be
rapidly spread over the whole world and shared by everyone. The boundary
between the festivals of the Ancient Age or the carnivals of the Middle
Ages and the every day life was circumscribed by a train of rules and
ceremonies. The bard and the story teller could extend the range of our
sense and motor organs because his ego was the mediating link. With the
technology of today these boundaries are indistinct and the mediating
subject is reduced to a minimum. Modernism, post-modernism,
deconstruction have had the goal of breaking with various taboos,
crossing boundaries, mixing what previously could not be mixed. For the
archaic stratum in our ego the message that everything may be depicted
may take on the meaning that everything may also be done. In the world
we live in today several different technological and cultural factors
work together to activate the archaic and perverse sides of our
personalities. All those who are depicting our passage and our fate on
this earth are involved in this process of the breakthrough of archaic
material. Restoring the ego involves restoring our ancient taboos and
re-establishing differences between fiction and reality, between good
and evil, the permissible and the forbidden, living and dead, human and
non-human.
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(1983). The creative process: relation to mourning and understanding. Int.
J. Psycho-Anal., 64:149-58.
Werbart,
A. & Lindbom-Jakobson, M. (1993). ”The ‘living dead’:
survivors of torture and psychosis.” Psychoanal. Psychotherapy, 7:163-179.
Wurmser,
L. (1987). Flucht vor dem Gewissen. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
FOOTNOTE:
This
essay was written for the Governmental Council Concerning Violence in
Moving Images, Department of Culture, Sweden, and was published in
Swedish. The English translation by Sheila Smith was made possible by
the Psychosocial Research Centre, Stockholm County Council.
Copyright:
Free Associations
Andrzej
Werbart is an associate member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical
Society, private practicing psychoanalyst, and director of the Research
Unit at the Institute of Psychotherapy in Stockholm.
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