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to Kernberg (2003) and Green (2002b), this uncontrolled powerful regressive potential toward primitive defensive operations centering on splitting to deal with primitive aggression may be the most important evidence of the basic motivational system Freud designated as the death drive , the counterpart of libido. Similarly, Louis Brunet (2007, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019) and Casoni and Brunet (2005, 2007) describe the complex regression processes in violent cult groups and in radicalized or terrorists’ groups allowing individuals to commit individual and mass murders. Partly based on the study of the Rwanda genocide and a violent religious cult, interviews with radicalized young people who became terrorists yielded a model of the effects of group regression on the individual psychic apparatus, favoring the enactment of extreme violence. One proposition was that a group, whose members share ideals or passions, creates the equivalent of a “group mind”. One of the many mechanisms involved is radical regressive reversal of the investment of the superego and the ideal ego. This radical reversal makes it possible to disregard the usual moral convictions and thus allow the individual to act as if he was above the law. The ideal ego, as the reservoir of omnipotent fantasies, aims at total and unlimited satisfaction of all desires and drives, eclipsing the restrictive, repressive, ‘forbidding’ superego. Casoni and Brunet (2005, 2007) argue further that the strength of a person’s use of identification with the aggressor is fueled by the subject’s own destructive drives , rendering any acting out based on this mechanism liable to degenerate into extremely cruel behavior because of his or her regressed social functioning. In addition, the unconscious use of manic defenses often appears for less regressed protagonists of mass social violence as a most efficient means of warding off lingering feelings of guilt because of the gratification of powerful component drives that the use of manic defenses permits. The unconscious potential for primitive aggression available in different degrees in every individual may be activated rapidly in regressive group processes . Throughout history, group activated aggression, in turn, may be amplified by the combination of the collective internalization of historical trauma ( Volkan 1999, Papiasvili and Mayers , 2013). Also relevant is Morris Nitsun’s (1996) concept of the “ Antigroup ”, a confluence of unconscious destructive elements that threaten the functioning of the group , be it a therapy group, organizational or institutional group, or a macro-social group context. Nitsun (1996), as well as Papiasvili and Mayers (2013), emphasize both the limitless destructive and creative potential of the group’s irrational and regressive, yet enlivening and regenerating, unconscious contents and processes.
VII. C. ARTS AND LITERATURE Leonardo “converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge; he then applied himself to investigation with the persistence, constancy and penetration which is derived from passion,
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