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Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen
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If we try to find a way to describe the Syrian situation today, we have to look for an antonym to the Mühlmannina term of agonal partnership - a search that could produce a term like "agonal autism". That would refer to the lack of communality, and the non-functioning of social communication and interaction including a basic lack of reciprocity. In people with an autistic personality disorder this comes to show in the problems that appear in everyday rituals like meeting and leaving, asking, giving and thanking, reciprocal smiles, frowns etc. - To be sure, the clinical term of autism has quite a varied use from Eugen Bleuler's first use in 1911 as a central symptom of schizophrenia over Sigmund Freud's equation of autism with narcissism, and all the way to today's everyday use to refer to persons with an excessive self-centeredness and who are in need of help because of their living mostly in their own imagination. While it may certainly be seen as objectionable to pick a term of individual pathology to draw analogies to political strategies, one may decide to provisionally accept this manoeuvre - and be it ''faute de mieux'' until some more appropriate term emerges. | If we try to find a way to describe the Syrian situation today, we have to look for an antonym to the Mühlmannina term of agonal partnership - a search that could produce a term like "agonal autism". That would refer to the lack of communality, and the non-functioning of social communication and interaction including a basic lack of reciprocity. In people with an autistic personality disorder this comes to show in the problems that appear in everyday rituals like meeting and leaving, asking, giving and thanking, reciprocal smiles, frowns etc. - To be sure, the clinical term of autism has quite a varied use from Eugen Bleuler's first use in 1911 as a central symptom of schizophrenia over Sigmund Freud's equation of autism with narcissism, and all the way to today's everyday use to refer to persons with an excessive self-centeredness and who are in need of help because of their living mostly in their own imagination. While it may certainly be seen as objectionable to pick a term of individual pathology to draw analogies to political strategies, one may decide to provisionally accept this manoeuvre - and be it ''faute de mieux'' until some more appropriate term emerges. | ||
Agonal autism lacks the prerequisites of agonal partnership, i.e. it lacks the option to change from a first level of antagonism (fighting each other) to a second one consisting of communication about the conflict). Lacking such a normative framework on a meta-level, a party to a conflict is condemned to a radically self-centered perception, conceptualization, and action within a conflict. Parties fight each other, but with regard to the codes of right/wrong, good/bad, legal/illegal, etc., their autism confines them within the conceptual walls of their own subjective world view and reality. All of this would be innocuous were it not for the fact that - as the Thomas theorem goes - "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences" (Thomas & Thomas 1928: 571-2). In other words: If a party to a conflict believes that the enemy is "really" neither willing nor able nor worth to negotiate, then there will the real consequence that there will be not negotiation - even if in the objective world the enemy were of a kind that did want to negotiate, were able to do it and were worth dealing with peacefully. The "real consequences" of the mere belief then could be the annihilation of the enemy believed to be unable, unwilling and unworthy negotiations. | |||
Extreme self-centeredness is a natural developmental phase in the first months of a human baby's life. According to Sigmund Freud, the Ego-Ideal can be seen as its inheritance in the adult (just like the Super-Ego can be seen as the inheritance of the Oediupus conflict). In developmental criminology, some theorists (e.g. Kaplan 1980) contend that the need for a defense against low self-esteem (brought about by low performance in school) can be seen as a motivating factor for delinquent behavior (with defensiveness operationalized as a discrepancy between scores on measures of high conscious self-esteem and low unconscious esteem). In social psychology, a certain self-centeredness in the service of the defense of self can be seen manifesting itself in husband-wife conflicts. Here, each partner tends to have his/her own narrative of who treated whom unfairly first. This is what interactionist communication researchers have come to refer to as the phenomenon of discrepant punctuation in a sequence of events (Watzlawick et al. 1967). Whereas stimulus-response psychologists typically confine their attention to short sequences of interchange making it possible to label one item of input as 'stimulus' and another item as 'reinforcement', while labelling what the subject does between these two events as 'response', in a longer chain of events every item in the sequence can simultaneously be seen as stimulus, response, and reinforcement: | Extreme self-centeredness is a natural developmental phase in the first months of a human baby's life. According to Sigmund Freud, the Ego-Ideal can be seen as its inheritance in the adult (just like the Super-Ego can be seen as the inheritance of the Oediupus conflict). In developmental criminology, some theorists (e.g. Kaplan 1980) contend that the need for a defense against low self-esteem (brought about by low performance in school) can be seen as a motivating factor for delinquent behavior (with defensiveness operationalized as a discrepancy between scores on measures of high conscious self-esteem and low unconscious esteem). In social psychology, a certain self-centeredness in the service of the defense of self can be seen manifesting itself in husband-wife conflicts. Here, each partner tends to have his/her own narrative of who treated whom unfairly first. This is what interactionist communication researchers have come to refer to as the phenomenon of discrepant punctuation in a sequence of events (Watzlawick et al. 1967). Whereas stimulus-response psychologists typically confine their attention to short sequences of interchange making it possible to label one item of input as 'stimulus' and another item as 'reinforcement', while labelling what the subject does between these two events as 'response', in a longer chain of events every item in the sequence can simultaneously be seen as stimulus, response, and reinforcement: | ||