A Critique of Binion on European Identity

In speculating on “What Made Europeans European,” Professor Binion focuses on group-organisms (which are now nations) that differ in many ways from each other, yet have come to self-identify as European. We know that the French, the English, the German, and the Russian groups have behaved very differently from each other in history and their individuals have tended to behave in ways we roughly stereotype as French, English, German, and Russian. Yet all agree to call themselves Europeans.

I agree that the trauma of the Black Death (1347-1352) was of great psychic importance, and that it affected Europeans as Rudolph Binion suggests. What I find particularly important in this article is his emphasis on the influence of psychic trauma on group minds—a factor that virtually all other historians have ignored or minimized. This directly relates to my own research and writing. In 1965 and 1969, I wrote two articles and a book about formative trauma and

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growth-stresses that shaped the minds of groups, very like the way that trauma and growth-stresses shape the minds of individuals. Also, group organisms (such as nations) are giant, potentially immortal, human organisms with minds very much like the minds of individuals, and with motivations that are their own (but which are very similar to our motivations), about how and why a group mind differs from the mind of any single individual, and although individuals create conceptual advances, it is group-minds that choose group-leaders and philosophies according to group-needs.

I discussed about how the group-mind and the interactions of groups shaped history. For example, how powerfully the thinking of French, English, and German groups (and their individuals) were shaped by certain specific traumas and growth-stresses such as the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, and the remarkable influence of the longbow on the English and French thinking. Professor Binion’s book, Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History, extended some of those theories in detail.

Binion writes that the initial reaction to the plague was more Christian than European. He discusses some of the ways people tried to cope with it psychically—and how they tried to master it by magical modes. He discusses responses to the plague, through “dance, music, verse and image”—and how Europeans even “sneaked a sexy pagan revelry” into the process through the Dance of the Dead and the creation of the Death and the Maiden theme (with a skeletal rapist, and often a nude woman). Misogyny, sadism, and other elements were also enlisted in first coping and then in exploiting that trauma toward other purposes.

Rudolph Binion relates later “plagues”—of popular revolts and revolutions since 1847, and especially in 1848, as “social and cultural re-enactments of it, then re-editions of these enactments”—to the great plague of the Black Death. The Professor implies that the European collective mind was

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unified enough to make such connections operative within Europe. He suggests that there was some relationship to birth control, first in France, then throughout Europe; and to the guilt with regard to sex for sexual pleasure rather than the use of sex for reproduction. He connects that guilt to the guilt of centuries before, when people believed that the Black Death was punishment for their sins. I entirely agree with his emphasis on guilt and the fact that it connected the many European groups.

There is only one significant point of disagreement with Binion’s erudite article and it stems from our varying disciplines: Binion is primarily a historian focused on the period from the late Middle Ages to the present and I am a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist looking to the much earlier period and the psychic development of our ancestors. I am convinced that Christianity is by far the most powerful source of European self-identification. It was the remarkable successes of Christian European groups that led to that proud self-labeling as Europeans.

First, a little history of the evolution of the sense of being European. The pagan mindset gave way to the monotheistic one of the Jews. The pagan competitive-aggressive and competitive-sexual life—and that of their gods—was different than that developed by the monotheists.

But what changed history was the unique relationship between this new god and his people. The Jewish God monitored the conscious mind of every Jew. And he would condemn and punish any conscious evidence of the phallic fantasies and impulses that drove pagan behavior, which exists in all of us. Obsessive-compulsive characteristics came to predominate, leading to enormous success of the monotheistic civilizations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. High levels of sublimation would heighten Christian successes. Much sexual pleasure also ended with that obsessive-compulsive control as sex was sacrificed for productivity and conquest.

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The quality of individual life was sacrificed to the benefit of group successes.

The pagans had squandered enormous amounts of psychic energy (libido) in virtually automatic warfare, sex, spectacle, and other self-indulgence. Jews, Christians and Muslims repressed that energy—which thereby became available for other uses. Real and ongoing progress began as they increasingly used that energy to create complicated sublimations.

I believe that especially in this context we can appreciate Professor Binion’s emphasis on the traumatic effects of the Black Death—and on its greater psychic influence on Christian groups than on pagans, Muslims, Buddhists, and others. As he implies, Christian guilt played a major role.

An interesting bit of presumptive evidence may support my suggestion that the self-identification of “Christian” was more fundamental than “European”—and not the reverse. We have intuitively labeled that period “The Christian Era”—and not “The European Era.”

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