DESCRIPTION: Why crumbling empires would rather rage than mourn. Part 2 on Freud’s mass attachment, the manic and melancholic poses, redemption as postponement, the imperial superego and the romance of decline.

The loosening bond: Why crumbling empires would rather rage than mourn

Underlying the visible dramas of scapegoating and nostalgia lies a silent process: the fraying of that libidinal bond which enables a crowd to act as a single entity. This second part follows Freud’s group psychology through to the denial of grief, to the manic and melancholic postures that take its place, and to the punitive superego that favours autocracy in times of crisis.

The bond that makes many into one

Freud placed at the centre of his group psychology a bond, a libidinal tie that enables a crowd of individuals to act as a single unit. He described this bond as twofold. There is a vertical bond, in which the members of a crowd substitute a common object (a leader, an ideal, an institution, a notion of the nation) for their own ego-ideal, so that each measures themselves against the same yardstick and finds themselves magnified by this shared standard. And there is a horizontal identification, in which the members, having placed the same object in the same inner space, recognise one another as comrades, as manifestations of a common type. The love for the shared object in patriotism enables mutual recognition. I can regard you as my compatriot because we both revere the same thing.

The Empire as a ‘ ’ Identification

An empire is, amongst other things, a colossal apparatus for establishing and maintaining these two bonds on a grand scale. Its ceremonies, its symbols, its historical narratives, its schools, its language and its everyday rituals all work to keep the shared object simultaneously anchored in millions of minds, thereby enabling millions of strangers to recognise one another as belonging to a single body. This is what essentially constitutes imperial power. Coercion and surveillance are costly and can never be comprehensive. Identification is cheap and enduring, and it is this that fosters allegiance even where coercion cannot prevail. Those who have made the ideal of the empire their own need not be monitored.

The Decline of Power

At this level, decline is a loosening of the bond, long before the territory or the state coffers shrink. The shared cause loses its appeal. The ideal becomes hollow or hypocritical, or simply meaningless to the lives it claims to organise. As a result, the mutual sense of ‘we’ that sustained it also crumbles. Fellow citizens no longer appear, as a matter of course, to be companions. The shared internal yardstick, and the members of the group, no longer bound by a common ideal, begin to perceive one another as strangers or as enemies – but in any case, increasingly as isolated individuals. Unity disintegrates into a field of competing entities, each with its own object, its own ideal, its own claim to be the true bearer of the whole.

Panic

That is why the loosening of bonds arouses fear verging on panic. Freud observed that the sudden collapse of bonds within a mass is followed by a wave of fear that is out of all proportion to the external danger. His example was the panic in an army whose leadership has collapsed. The individual, deprived of the identifications that had held them together, is overcome by fear that the situation itself cannot fully explain. Something similar occurs on the scale of a crumbling empire. The unravelling of the shared ideal unleashes a free-floating fear that attaches itself indiscriminately to all available objects: to enemies, to traitors, to conspiracies, to prophecies of doom. Much of the frantic search for new objects of identification in times of decline is an attempt to anchor this loose anxiety and find something new around which the disintegrated group structure might rally once more.

The leader who embodies the collective

It also explains the peculiar appeal, in such times, of the leader who offers to embody the collective directly. When the abstract ideal has lost its power to hold the group together, a concrete figure who claims to be the group in person can seemingly restore that bond in a single stroke. The upward-directed bond, which was previously distributed across institutions, laws, and diffuse ideals, is gathered and concentrated into a single body that promises to embody what the community can no longer find within itself. This is a powerful and dangerous promise. It can resolve the problem of the weakened bond in the short term. But it does so by making the entire bond dependent on a mortal, fallible and often cynical entity, and by dissolving those institutional mediations through which a society corrects its own mistakes and overcomes the failings of individuals.

Grief and resignation

The deepest problem, however, is not the loss of power, but the inability to mourn it. From a psychoanalytic perspective, mourning is a difficult and specific process: the work of accepting that an object is truly lost and of gradually reorganising one’s own attachments around this fact, without denying the loss or being consumed by it. Mourning is the slow, painful and ultimately liberating process in which the psyche withdraws its investment from what can no longer be had, and becomes free to invest in what remains and what might yet come to be. This has nothing to do with resignation. On a collective level, grief would mean accepting that hegemony, territorial reach, material abundance, and cultural primacy are not guaranteed in the long term, and continuing to act wisely and even ambitiously within this framework.

The refusal to grieve often masquerades as the only alternative to passivity, as if accepting loss were tantamount to submission. A political order that has grieved can adapt, renew itself, reform its institutions, foster genuine alliances rather than relationships of tribute, redistribute its resources and rebuild its legitimacy on more honest foundations. However, it can do all this only if it has abandoned the underlying demand that reality return to a former state of unchallenged supremacy. It must be able to distinguish between adaptation and defeat, a distinction that is particularly difficult for imperial cultures.

Where mourning fails, a loss of influence is experienced as annihilation. Compromise feels like surrender; a more plural, multipolar world feels like a plunge into chaos. The simple realisation that another power has its own interests appears to be a betrayal, as if the world had sworn an oath to remain organised around a single centre and had now broken it. This inability to grieve gives talk of decline its characteristic oscillation between two postures, each of which is a way of not grieving.

The manic stance: speaking out louder

The first is the manic posturing, and it is triumphalist. It insists that the established order remains uniquely strong, that any difficulty can be overcome through sufficient willpower, that doubt itself is a form of betrayal. That renewal requires nothing more than a more forthright and forceful assertion of power. The more evidence accumulates that circumstances have genuinely changed, the more strident the rhetoric of invulnerability becomes, precisely because it now has more to drown out. This has nothing to do with confidence. It is manic defence in the sense described by Melanie Klein: activity against grief, a refusal to remain still long enough for the loss to become conceivable. Mania is loud because the silence it fears would be full of grief.

The melancholic pose: downfall as a mark of distinction

The second is the melancholic pose, its mirror image of the first. It declares that everything is already lost, that corruption is complete and irreversible, that restoration is impossible, and that the coming catastrophe might even have a purifying effect. This attitude offers its own perverse satisfaction. Those who foresee the collapse may be the ones who have seen through the collective illusion, who were too clear-sighted to be deceived. Downfall becomes a badge of superiority; despair becomes a form of knowing. And, like the manic pose, it shirks the actual work. The manic refuses to acknowledge that anything has been lost; the melancholic transforms the loss into a complete and enduring identity and bears the ruin as their very self. Neither is prepared for the more arduous task: to ask patiently, without denial and without fatalism, what must truly come to an end, what can be preserved, and what new forms of communal life might be built in the space that is opening up.

Redemption as Postponement

The melancholic pose has a twin that appears to be its opposite yet avoids the same labour. Once decay has been interpreted as guilt, restoration becomes atonement, and atonement can be demanded rather than worked out. Nietzsche called the mechanism that accomplishes this ‘imaginary causes’: a closed system of guilt, punishment and redemption, whose parts explain one another and whose movements never touch reality at any point. Those who think within it have an answer to every question but no grasp of any situation.

Politically, this means that the promise of restoration is not a programme. It names no recipient, no costs and no timeframe. It demands that no one give up any particular advantage, and therein lies its appeal to those who would have something to lose. A return to greatness can be promised without ever having to consider whether it might fail to materialise, for its failure is attributed to the very same betrayal that has already been invoked to explain the decline. The circle is complete.

Thus, alongside these two postures, there is a further way of evading grief, and it is the most effective because it masquerades as action. It promises to reverse the loss by a date that never comes and allows one to keep moving without giving anything up.

‘Rome has fallen’ as an emotional template.

This is another reason why historical analogies of decline are so dangerous when handled carelessly. The phrase ‘Rome has fallen’ can cease to function as a historical statement and instead become an emotional template – a ready-made sense of decadence, exhaustion and impending invasion – available for import into any troubled present. It transforms complex structural upheavals into a moral drama in which decline appears to stem from weakness, corruption or a lack of willingness to be cruel. Depictions of collapse, both ancient and modern, persistently resort to such moral explanations, even though structural pressures and sheer chance account for far more of it. A moral explanation identifies a culprit and prescribes a punishment, and both are emotionally more satisfying than the diffuse, authorless truth of a system overwhelmed by interlocking pressures.

The popularity of the apocalyptic analogy is itself the most revealing symptom. It allows a society to experience its crisis as fate rather than as responsibility. If decline is inevitable, if it is inscribed in an iron law of civilisational ageing, then no one needs to face up to the specific decisions through which institutions were hollowed out, inequalities entrenched and conflicts deliberately exacerbated. In this sense, fatalism is a comfort. It is more reassuring to believe that one is witnessing the fall of Rome – a grand and impersonal tragedy – than to believe that one is experiencing the consequences of decisions that could have turned out differently and might still do so. The romanticism of collapse is an escape from one’s own agency, disguised as clarity.

The imperial superego and its impossible command

An empire does not merely flatter itself; it also disciplines itself, and the two processes are closely intertwined. The very same idealised image that promises the collective its greatness also demands sacrifices in the name of that greatness. Citizens are told that security requires perseverance, that honour requires obedience, that dissent in times of crisis is a form of treason, and that deprivation itself is proof of moral worth. At this point, the idealised self-image has hardened into something more coercive: a political superego. This inner authority no longer merely inspires the collective but judges it, deeming it too weak because it fails to live up to its own myth.

The superego does not merely prohibit, as psychoanalysis understands it; it can also command pleasure, and its commands, in the imperial register, are relentless and impossible: be great, be strong, be pure, be victorious, restore what has been lost. What makes these commands so corrosive is that they cannot be obeyed, because the object they demand—does not exist and never has: absolute security, complete sovereignty, an unbroken and unambiguous unity. The gap between the impossible command and the inescapable reality generates a constant frustration that must find an outlet somewhere. It finds it in the assignment of blame. Leaders, minorities, intellectuals, foreigners, internal ‘traitors’: someone must be held responsible for the unbridgeable gap between ideal and reality, for to admit that the gap is unbridgeable would be to condemn the ideal itself.

Why crises tend towards autocracy

This mechanism largely explains why crises so often lead to autocracy rather than reform. As uncertainty grows, the demand for a figure who can embody unity and resolve becomes ever more tempting. The leader offers to eliminate ambiguity by embodying the nation, and to replace the exhausting diversity of a divided society with the simplicity of a single will. Set against this promise, institutional checks and balances appear as mere weakness, pluralism as division, and complexity itself as a conspiracy. The collective projects its unbearable anxiety onto a sovereign who claims to know with certainty what must be done, and who frees everyone else from the burden of not knowing.

Yet the fantasy of sovereignty is structurally fragile, and it fails in characteristic ways. It can maintain the appearance of unity only by suppressing precisely those conflicts that require mediation, and suppression is no solution. The more the leader concentrates authority in his own person, the more he tends to weaken independent institutions, local capacities, public trust and, above all, the channels through which unwelcome news can reach the centre. A political system built on displays of loyalty gradually loses the ability to hear the truth, and a system that cannot hear the truth cannot correct its own mistakes. The concentration of power and the loss of self-correction are not coincidental companions. They are the same process viewed from two sides.

The result is one of the strangest and most revealing features of late-imperial life. The state may appear more centralised, assertive and spectacular in its displays of authority, precisely when its actual reach is waning. Public ritual, ideological insistence and punitive severity all intensify to compensate for a waning confidence which they cannot admit. The gap between representation and reality widens, and this too is denied. What persists and even intensifies is not effective power, but the compulsion to appear powerful: a display of strength that stands in for the substance that is quietly ebbing away, and does so most emphatically when least of it remains.

What psychoanalysis may claim here, and what politics lie within the diagnosis

A psychoanalytic interpretation of all this must resist the temptation—which it is better equipped than any other interpretation to diagnose—to read every crisis as proof of inevitable collapse. No historical sequence unfolds with the orderly regularity of a clinical mechanism. Empires decay gradually and also suddenly; they reform and thereby also fail; they break up into successor states, persist in altered and unrecognisable forms, or retain considerable power long after their obituaries have been written. The mechanisms described here — denial, splitting, the loosened bond, denied mourning, the punitive superego — are real and recurrent, but they are pressures and temptations, not laws. They describe how orders tend to fail, not that they must fail. To forget this would be to repeat, within the realm of theory, the very fatalism that theory is meant to uncover.

Nor should the word ‘empire’ be reduced to a mere moral shorthand for everything one rejects. Political systems have been imperial in fundamentally different ways, and the populations living within them have never been passive vehicles for the fantasies of the elite. They resist, adapt, reinterpret, build their own forms of solidarity and institutions, and often wrest real benefits from circumstances designed to exploit them. Any serious analysis must take account of material realities (class, background, gender, law, ecology, the balance of power between states), rather than dissolving them into metaphors of narcissism and repression. Psychoanalysis is one tool amongst many, not a master key that renders economics and history superfluous; it deserves its place only where it sheds light on something that the others leave in the dark.

The same reservation applies to the witness called earlier. Nietzsche’s *Genealogy* is a polemic, and it suffers from the very fault it accuses others of. It cannot be refuted, because every finding serves to confirm it. His portrayal of Israel is unsuitable as a historical source; his attack is directed at a type and ultimately targets Christianity, and for a hundred years the passage has been a goldmine for readers seeking something other than what he wrote. The mechanism survives these objections. Anyone who adopts it should cite its origin, rather than tacitly presenting it as history.

Psychoanalysis reveals that rational consciousness is not enough. A society may possess ample, well-documented and widespread evidence of its own peril and yet prove incapable of acting, because action would threaten an ‘identity ’, a privilege or an ideal to which it is more attached than to its own future. It may know, in the fullest cognitive sense, that its order is failing, yet remain trapped in the fantasy that the order will somehow repair itself, without anyone in particular being asked to give up an advantage. This is the specific contribution of a psychoanalytic perspective, and it is not comforting. It dispels the reassuring belief that better information would, of its own accord, lead to better action. The obstacle is, first and foremost, not a lack of knowledge. It is an excess of attachment.

If that is the diagnosis, it points to a specific policy, and honesty demands that we name it, rather than allowing it to be tacitly taken for granted. The interpretation presented here is not neutral, and to pretend otherwise would be a small act of precisely the denial it describes. It assumes that treating public goods as optional luxuries is a pathology rather than a preference; that private sanctuaries against public decay are part of the disease rather than a reasonable response to it; that interdependence is a state to be tolerated rather than a humiliation to be avenged; and that the distribution of sacrifices – that is, the question of who should give up what – is the very substance underlying every ‘technical’ debate on reform. These are debatable assertions, and reasonable people reject them. Anyone convinced by this psychological perspective is under no obligation to adopt this policy, and the argument is more honest if it acknowledges this than if it presents its preferred conclusions as the neutral outcome of a clinical method. What psychoanalysis is entitled to claim is narrower, yet by no means insignificant: that the denial of grief has predictable and destructive consequences, whatever political stance one brings to the ruins.

The work of mourning

Ultimately, the task is neither to celebrate imperial decline nor to deny it; both are easy paths because they evade mourning. The harder work is to replace denial with recognition: to build a collective capacity to recognise dependence without experiencing it as a shame, to accept limitation without experiencing it as annihilation, and to endure loss without transforming it into a desire for revenge. It consists in regarding the conditions of communal life as more real than the private defences against their decline, and in insisting that a shared future is a project and not an inheritance.

Set against this task is an older, harsher response. Nietzsche knows of precisely one alternative to priestly reinterpretation, and it is called contempt: not to interpret loss, but to forget it, because interpretation itself is already the movement of the weak. He cannot conceive of the work of mourning. To relinquish an ideal would, in his terms, be a sign of decline. It is precisely here that the psychoanalytic finding diverges from his. Between the manic assertion and the priestly assimilation lies a third possibility, one that requires neither contempt nor powerlessness: to relinquish the object and to reorder the bonds surrounding its loss. Nietzsche described the mechanism of evasion more precisely than anyone before him. He did not seek a way out.

Empires become most fragile when they cannot imagine a future beyond their own continued existence, when continuity is no longer a hope but a demand, and any other outcome an insult. Their decline becomes most dangerous not at the moment when power actually wanes, but at the moment when this waning is experienced as a narcissistic catastrophe rather than as a problem of political reorganisation. Then an order would rather burn the world to the ground than admit that it is no longer its centre. The alternative is the difficult and unglamorous work of mourning: the abandonment of the fantasy of omnipotence, the acceptance of interdependence as a fact rather than a wound, and the patient construction of forms of communal life that do not demand the world remain organised around a single centre to feel worth defending. There never was any imperial innocence worth preserving.

The most important points in brief

•            Freud describes mass bonding as twofold: a vertical bond to a shared object that takes the place of the ego ideal, and a horizontal recognition amongst those who share it. The first enables the second.

•            Decline, at this level, is the loosening of this bond. As soon as the shared ideal seems hollow, fellow citizens no longer appear, as a matter of course, to be companions.

•            A fraying bond unleashes free-floating anxiety, which attaches itself to enemies, traitors, conspiracies and prophecies of doom.

•            The leader who claims to embody the collective in his own person appears to repair the bond by dismantling the institutional mechanisms through which a society corrects itself.

•            Mourning is work: accepting a real loss and reorganising the bonds surrounding it. An order that has mourned can reform itself; one that cannot experiences every reduction as annihilation.

•            The manic and the melancholic postures are both ways of not grieving: one denies the loss, the other bears it as an identity.

The promise of restoration is not a programme. It names no addressee, no costs, and no timeframe, and its failure to materialise is attributed to the very same betrayal that has already been explained as the cause of the decline.

•            The imperial superego issues commands that are not to be obeyed, and the resulting frustration is deflected as blame.

•            Crises tend towards autocracy because a single will promises to eliminate ambiguity. The price is the loss of the channels through which unwelcome news reaches the centre.

•            Late-imperial states may appear more decisive, precisely as their grip weakens; the display of strength stands in for substance.

•            The obstacle to acting on what is known is not a lack of knowledge, but an excess of attachment.

Nietzsche describes the mechanism of evasion more precisely than anyone before him. The possibility of relinquishing the object does not occur to him.

Sources

·        Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) — the dual bond, vertical and horizontal

·        Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) — the distinction between mourning and melancholia

·        Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930) — the superego and collective guilt

·        Melanie Klein, ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’ (1940) — manic defence

Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Antichrist* (1888/1895), §§ 15 and 24–26 — on imaginary causes and the reinterpretation of defeat

·        Octave Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même…’, in *Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène* (1969)

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