Only Psychiatry can Explain What’s Happening in Russia and Elsewhere, Kadyrova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 11 – Moscow psychoanalyst Elena Kadyrova says she is not a fan of employing psychiatric terms to explain political phenomena but sometimes as now there is no other choice because only by considering mental imbalances can one understand what is going on, especially but not only in Russia today. 

            The psychiatrist who recently discussed how archaic imperial ideas have affected Russian consciousness (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/11/russias-archaic-imperial-consciousness.html) now discusses how “total propaganda” affects people and what they can and must do to resist (newizv.ru/article/general/11-12-2019/zaschititsya-ot-razrusheniya-na-kogo-ne-deystvuet-totalnaya-propaganda).

            Kadyrova’s point is that change has become so great and the possibilities of using media to exploit that so large that many people have become detached from the values they learned as children and, feeling lost, are ready to defer to elites who exploit this situation by imposing external controls on others while feeling free to act without any on themselves.

            But her argument contains many elements that are even more intriguing and suggestive than that. “The Russian Empire as it existed in the last days of the USSR,” Kadyrova says, “was associated and continues to be associated by those who remember those times with the symptoms of the senior dementia of its leaders.”

            “It is completely natural that age is always accompanied by the destruction of the organic character of the work of the brain,” and “the empire completed its karmic embodiment, in the form of the USSR, by a predictable disintegration and death from old age,” the Moscow psychiatrist says.   

            But many younger people at that time kept the empire alive in their minds and acted as if their dreams about it were reality, thus leading to “a complete loss of contact with reality” and “a psychotic situation.” As a result, rational thought “was replaced by a distorted reality … which imitated logical thought” by exploiting “conspiratorial versions of images of the world.”

                In this situation, she continues, many wanted to restore control over the chaos they were experiencing by having external norms imposed and some cynical leaders were all too willing to give them what they want by coming up with ever more hyperbolic and absurd laws and programs that seem to promise that the chaos can be tamed. 

            Indeed, these elites may even seek to produce more chaos in order to have the chance to impose such order on others, thus remaining uncontrolled by any values other than their own self-satisfaction and viewing others invariably as a means to that end rather than ends in themselves.

            Such elites “recognize only the right of the strong. For them, another person is always an object for the satisfaction of their own needs and self-assertion. If they are capable of empathy, then they use it chiefly as an instrument to manipulate others” rather than as something that leads them to reflect about the value of others as such.

            This attitude is typically accompanied by a radical narcissism, an attitude that the leader is all important and that others are not and can and must be sacrificed to his or her purposes, Kadyrova continues. And it means that such leaders do not feel constrained in their actions in the way other people normally are. Such people do not respond well when they encounter reality.

            These people in many respects resemble children who have not grown up but having reached adulthood, they have powers to wreak havoc far greater than any child. And that makes them dangerous even if they appear to some unsettled by change as saviors who can provide them a safe harbor in a dangerous and troubling world.

            There are of course two kinds of people who resist such leaders and the propaganda they use to promote their power: those whose childhood training has left them with a stronger and more stable set of moral coordinates an those who “constantly form their own moral guideposts on the basis of their life experience and great internal work.”

            In Western countries, Kadyrova suggests, there are more such people who will resist than there are in Russia, but even there, she adds, “judging from the recent elections of the president of America,” there are reasons for concern that their numbers aren’t sufficient to prevent developments analogous to those in Russia with a desire for external regulation over the masses and unrestrained behavior by the elite.

            As a result, she says, “at the state level of two nuclear powers” this is leading to two “diametrically opposed” sets of values and strategies even though they have a common psychological source in a desire to pull back from the chaos they see. In Russia, Putin is seeking expansion; while in the United States, Trump is calling for retrenchment and withdrawal.

            These apparently opposing values which at base are seeking to satisfy the same needs of masses and elites reflect the fact that the most prominent figures in each era reflect, respond and help shape “social consciousness as a whole,” something that at present “alas” does not give cause for optimism.

            One can only hope against hope that those who have stronger moral compasses or who can see what such leaders risk leading the world to will prove equal to the task of pulling these countries and others back from the brink. If but only if that happens, the world could see a new civilizational “leap forward.”