A Journey into the Eye of the Hurricane

My journey owes its origins to my work in our Düsseldorf peace group “Psychology and Peace”, which has set itself the goal of not only exhausting peace work in protest against missile deployment, but also to contribute to the development of peace perspectives. Already two members were in Nicaragua as construction workers. Also significant was Hannelore Pott , whose call to support the only psychological faculty in Nicaragua , at the University of Managua , reached me in mid 1985 .

Jaime Whitford , former dean of the humanistic faculty, has an affinity for Germany precisely because of his psychology studies in Munich in 1975/76. Due to the great poverty in Nicaragua, he is both interested in material support (in the form of books or money) and in people coming to the university and teaching there.

In order to understand that the trip was so well organized, one must know that Jaime Whitford was one of about 500 active members (militants) of the Sandinistas in Managua and prepared my stay there with much love and care. This also explains why so many doors were opened to me and why I was also able to do supervision work in Nicaragua’s only psychiatric military hospital. I would like to thank him once again for his support and trust.

During my stay I had various tasks : conducting workshops on analytical group psychotherapy and short and emergency therapy at the Jesuit University “Central America” in Managua with professors from the only psychological department in Nicaragua , with established psychotherapists and psychologists , with psychiatrists from clinics and mental health centres and with members of the only psychiatric hospital of the military ;

the organisation of a self-awareness group with a part of this group of participants;

Working with 3rd year psychology students at the university, doing role plays and teaching the technique of the first interview.

I also held a supervision group at the psychiatric military hospital in Nicaragua, where acute problems with hospitalized patients were discussed and treatment plans prepared, and conducted a course on milieu therapy.

I was also called in to advise the department’s psychologists on changing the curriculum for the next five years. It turned out that the previous tendency was to teach as much as possible, but only theoretically. There is a great need and a great need to teach more practice in the form of self-experience groups, role-playing and if possible even therapeutic work.

During my stay in Managua I lived in the guest house of the university. That I could live there, turned out to be a very big advantage, because otherwise I would have had to spend a lot of time buying me my rations together. So there was a very nice Nicaraguan woman in the guesthouse who relieved us of the daily queuing and the fight for food. We were four Cuban agronomists, a Uruguayan speech therapist, a German German specialist and a German psychoanalyst. As a typical Nicaraguan woman from the lower class she had, as I was often assured, already a typical Nicaraguan women’s fate behind her. At the age of 24, she had four children, all from different fathers, but they had to live with their family so that they could do the job the priest had arranged for them. The connection between the power-preserving, oppressive attitude of the Catholic Church towards birth control, the feelings of guilt produced by Rome, and the vicious circle of dependence of this Nicaraguan woman, which certainly has existed for generations, which was so “generously” handled by the church authorities, seemed to me only by chance. Now she is an ardent Sandinista! A glimmer of hope to break the vicious circle!

To give you an insight into my work, I would like to give you some examples from my supervision work at the beginning, which can also give you a feeling for the central conflicts Nicaraguans are experiencing today.

On the second morning after my arrival a large military truck stood in front of the house around 8.30 a.m. . Out rose, armed with a pistol, a military psychologist. A paradoxical picture that made me feel the same contradictory sensations! The feeling of being very close to the Sandinista movement, but also feelings of anxiety and doubt, whether I was appropriate here as a psychoanalyst and group therapist, whether I could even overlook what I was getting myself into here, whether I wanted to do that and could answer for it. These questions moved me still often, but at the end of my stay I could affirm them from the bottom of my heart.

The military hospital is located about 10 km outside Managua, very idyllic, surrounded by a small park, and has 18 beds. Since it was the only psychiatric hospital of the military, I got here the best insight into the conflict side of Nicaragua. With approx. 60,000 – 80,000 soldiers 18 beds are naturally very little. The patients live very simply with the doctors together, there are therapeutic talks, as well as a kind of milieu therapy. There are also drugs administered, nevertheless, it is very humane overall. I had a good impression of the doctors and therapists; you could tell that they really live and work with their patients. Many had already taken part in workshops with the Austrian-Mexican psychoanalyst Marie Langer and were very concerned about her own therapeutic development. In the supervision, various patients were presented with their medical histories, and everyone could comment on how he experienced the patient, what relationship he had with the patient, etc. … The central conscious and unconscious conflict situations in the mirror of the group resulted from this. I remember, for example, a patient about 18 years old: he came from the poorer areas of Managua, lived together with four other siblings in a schizophrenic family situation in which the father was mostly absent. He had not manifestly schizophrenic so far. At the age of 16, he joined the army, where he developed a strong affection for his company commander, whom he loved quasi as a father whom he had never really had. This man was then one day shot by the Contras, which was a double shock to the young man, under which he collapsed: the loss of his beloved person in the here and now, but also the loss of his father, who repeated himself here.

After a stay of several months in the clinic, he was home again until he could no longer bear it and he had to return to the clinic. We could understand his catatonic reaction as an expression of his impotent anger and his simultaneous inability to express it and together we could look for ways to help him out of his impasse. By the way, it quickly became apparent that the hard clinical essentials, such as working with destructive aggression or group and psychodynamic understanding, are also applicable and therapeutically useful in the Nicaraguan Catholic culture. The supervision work we did together was very open and was one of the most intensive I have done in Nicaragua. She was much more open to the psychological, family dynamic and social factors and aspects of the patients than is the case in most of our predominantly biologically oriented psychiatric hospitals.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the doctors and psychologists of the military hospital can at any time be transferred to front areas in order to become therapeutically active there, which makes the handling of separations incredibly difficult for them. The dates of the transfers are kept secret for security reasons. With separation is extremely difficult to work as psychotherapy in a war situation is very difficult to perform at all : the attacks happen from outside , so the whole aggression can be projected into the enemy . We have therefore often discussed the importance of preparing now for peace in Nicaragua. The problem, which will arise then, i.e. the breaking open of psychic tensions, which are now still absorbed by the state of war and enemy images spongy, is recognized by some however also already now clearly.

At the university I also conducted a supervision group for staff of outpatient mental health centres and various counselling centres. From this group comes the report of a psychologist who brought in the following problem and that seemed to contain some of the typical Nicaraguan conflicts. A young woman had visited the counselling centre because of psychosomatic complaints, was able to open herself during the second or third conversation and revealed the story of a painful relationship to the psychologist. Her first husband had been drafted into the army, when she visited him after a few months in the border area, she learned that he had a mistress. She was speechless and returned home without having spoken to him. After a week, she received the news that he had fallen in battle. To me, but also to the military psychologists and psychiatrists present, the connection between his death and his obvious feelings of guilt seemed only too obvious. After approx. 2 years the woman met another man, who wanted to marry her also absolutely and with whom she also fell in love. But only a few months after her wedding she noticed an increasing coldness of feeling and apathy.

Well, it turned out that she was still living with her parents, her husband, since he worked in another city, could only see her even on weekends and this was beyond her parents also not particularly appreciated. She did not dare to move out from home and follow him, as she did not want to hurt her parents on the one hand, but did not dare to take this step into self-employment either. In the ensuing discussion of this fate several members of the group assured me that typical problems of Nicaraguan women’s fates and personality structures were addressed, the striving for independence and at the same time the fear of it, but also the problem of the frozen mourning, the mourning work not performed over the man who was even twice lost in this example.

Losses have to be accepted by the people of Nicaragua on a daily basis, in such large numbers – someone is shot here, children murdered there by Contras laying mines – that processing is no longer possible.

One must bear in mind that it was not only in the last five war years that such divisions occurred, but also in the 40 years of the dictatorship of the Somozas that the Guardia could come every day and pick up someone who was simply gone with it. Separations have become a trauma here that is hard to get to. These feelings were most likely to be felt and most tolerated by people in the sheltered setting of the military hospital, while in the self-awareness group it was very difficult to get involved. The members, most of whom had not known each other before, had great difficulty in opening up. A favourite saying of the Nicaraguans, which I met again and again and was noticed as a typical reaction formation to the tension-laden basic situation of the country: “Yo me siento tranquillo” (I feel calm, relaxed).

I would like to present three dimensions of my experiences in particular, as they seem to me to be of general importance. The first concerns the confrontation with the ideological division of the world into East and West, which is certainly internalized by all Germans, albeit to varying degrees. Whoever sincerely observes himself will inevitably sense it in himself when he comes into contact with the imaginary intersection of this world.

During my subsequent stay in Costa Rica, at the UN Peace University, I had the opportunity to follow the news there. Nicaragua was presented as a totalitarian regime. Also the North American representation in “Voice of America” I heard in Managua was: “Communism prevails, everything is strictly regulated.”

My personal impressions completely contradicted the “official” reporting. They were absolutely contrary to my everyday Nicaraguan experiences. Except for one compulsive border official, I did not run into anyone, everyone was very open-minded, the military in Managua marching from time to time practiced only for the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the FNLS. On Nicaraguan television, for example, a visit by President Ortega to the nationalized Coca-Cola factory was broadcast live. He was attacked not only by the workers of the Coca-Cola factory, but also by those of the surrounding factories with questions and complaints, which were also shown openly on television. During my stay, for example, there were no domestic flights for two weeks because there was no gasoline. The director of the university also told me about a conversation with the Minister of Education in which he had complained that the number of illiterates would increase again because there was no money left to continue the literacy programme for the population on a sufficient scale.

Problems are dealt with openly. During my stay, there were daily uncensored television broadcasts from Parliament, where various parties discussed very controversially about a new constitution , which issues such as the social position of women , the importance of the family , the integration of the Atlantic coast , etc. deals . And this in a “totalitarian” system?! All this is not mentioned at all in the media of Costa Rica and the USA !

The personal confrontation with unreflected, adopted prejudices and attitudes, guided and manipulated by ideologically influenced media, and a reality that completely contradicts this, instils profound insecurity and fear, especially when one feels how much one is oneself involved in these ideologies and how little one can rely on the media information, which is ideologically influenced, but also how little flexibility one has in dealing with “unexpected” reality.

The fears triggered by the confrontation with internalized ideological structures and the resulting questioning of one’s own values and beliefs could be observed at the summit talks in Reykjavik. The American conference participants could no longer hide their insecurity, which was triggered by the unexpected Soviet willingness to talk, contact and openness for unconventional solutions. The internalized reality of the enemy image USSR no longer coincided with the perceived reality in the here and now ! The Americans could no longer hide their insecurity and fears (see, for example, in the television interview with Secretary of State Schulz) and could only lower their level of fear by withdrawing to their primitive, encrusted ideological structures (see Reagan’s address to the American soldiers stationed on Iceland).

It is my deep conviction that one must not avoid this confrontation and these fears, as Jutta Dithfurt, for example, propagates with the Greens (in principle no coalition and thus no confrontation with the other one’s different views). Thus, through own fears of contact, or through fears of being swallowed up or drowning, a further development is prevented as well as through the unreflected and distanceless identification with an ideological party.

I am convinced that only through a group-dynamic self-awareness in the encounter with both ideological worlds in the broadest sense can one succeed in crossing this ideological border. For it is necessary to recognize, endure and transcend the fear of inner collapse, which culminates in rationalization “rather dead than red”, in order to overcome the encrusted ideological structures and to be able to really tread new paths.

The encounter with his internalized conscious and especially unconscious ideology is a valuable experience which will surely enrich every Nicaraguan traveller.

The second dimension, the encounter with poverty or perhaps better with an unimaginable deficiency situation, seems to me much harder to put into words.

It touches the state of mind described by some picture reporters during the Vietnam War who the day before had experienced the torn bodies of Vietnamese children burned by napalm, and now dined on 5th Avenue in New York in the prosperity of an affluent society. The speechless effect lies in the horrible horror of one experience, but perhaps even more in the contrast experience, which surpasses that of the “normal” culture shock by several quantum leaps.

I have a vague idea that this dimension is the deepest spiritual realm of the North-South.

conflict and we have not yet dared to face this experience. It also reminds me very much of the descriptions of emotional deafness described by the North American psychiatrist Lifton as a typical reaction of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb victims to their unspeakable experience.

This dimension of experience leads to the encounter with “structural” violence. To demonstrate what I mean by this, I would like to report an interesting encounter I had with a black nurse who came from the English speaking Atlantic coast where three Indian tribes still live with their own cultures. This woman told me that this part of the country had a completely different culture, in no way comparable to the Managuas, the city would still be as foreign to her after 5 years as abroad. Somoza had largely ignored the people of the Atlantic coast, but had offered any intellectual who rebelled there a scholarship in the USA or Spain in the hope that he would be seduced by the higher standard of living there to stay there, so that the “peace” in Nicaragua would not be threatened. Also the brother of my conversation partner had received such a scholarship: he now lived in Florida. In this way, for decades the country has been systematically deprived of any possibility of developing a school or health system. A case of structural violence, as I experienced it to be typical for the country ! It also makes itself felt at the university through the lack of an established academic tradition.

A typical example of structural violence in Latin America today that I see as vividly embodied are the agricultural workers of El Salvador. In the course of a land reform they received their own land, which had belonged before to their patron, and/or large landowner. Today, however, they ask to be allowed to return the land to the patron and to work under his dominion. How come? First, they lack the know-how. In many cases, they know too little about how to effectively farm the land. Second, they lack credit to buy quality seeds and third, they lack an effective sales organization so that they can sell their crops profitably. So it is to be understood that they call today helpfully for the patron because they were relatively better during their “serfdom”.

This example already suggests that structural violence must also have an impact on the personality structure of the individual. Because one could very well imagine that other farm workers would have managed to build up their own agricultural >operating system. Structural violence always involves an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities on the one hand and, on the other hand, differently pronounced deficit personality structures. Whoever wants to effectively change structures of structural violence must create conditions under which both are changed.

Whoever tries to reduce this structural conflict, which must also be overcome in Nicaragua, to an ideological one, stands behind the existing power structures and supports the previous dictatorship and oligarchy. Literacy , health care for everyone , the development of psychological centres , land reform , education are among others projects which oppose structural violence . These are experienced by the exercise of structural violence in Honduras , El Salvador , Guatemala and last but not least the USA as a massive threat to the power structures they represent. They are also a threat because they make the oppressed aware of their fate. Hiding this behind the ideological cloak of democracy against communism is hypocrisy and deception. Why have the United States remained loyal to and supported Somoza and his clan for 40 years when they were so concerned about the development of democracy?

In order to effectively counter structural violence, which has also found its expression in personality structures, Nicaragua is now also concerned with educating the people and making room for democratic structures. The Director of the Psychology Department, for example, is particularly concerned with launching an information campaign on child education in order to put a stop to the corporal punishment of children, which is still widespread in Nicaragua today and was only banned after the revolution, at least in schools.

During a televised discussion between President Ortega and factory workers, the theme of Hasenfus , the US mercenary who had been locked up in Nicaragua, came up. The majority of the workers were of the opinion that he should be imprisoned immediately without trial – in Nicaragua there has been no death penalty since the Somoza fall, the maximum sentence is 30 years – and the President replied that it was important that this man should be given a fair trial, also to make the difference with the times of the dictator Somoza clear.

The contrast between democracy and communism is also completely misleading. Because is it not more democratic, if already on community level and enterprise level the ability for the social participation of the citizens is demanded and promoted, than that 37% of the US population go to vote every 4 years!

By the ability to social participation I understand the ability of a person to be interested in his social environment, in other social groups, to have an awareness of his historical So-Gewerd-Sein, to participate in the “res publica” and to join large social groups, which enable individual encounter, discussion and growth, which perceive the different point of view of the other and can lead a non-violent constructive discussion about it.

This capacity for social participation is deficient if a person’s horizon of interests is narrowed, e.g. if his interests are limited to a new car, a video system and his own home, if he is neither interested in communal issues nor in national or international issues and has no awareness of the history of his people.

As destructive and destructive I would like to describe the ability to social participation when an individual joins totalitarian, fascist groups, which give him a pseudo-feeling of power and self-esteem without giving him real possibilities for an individual’s own growth. This goes hand in hand with the splitting off of strong destructive-aggressive feelings, which are delegated to the leader or the leading group and directed at an external enemy.

In our research group on “Peace and Psychology” we have repeatedly discussed and worked out the connection between the constructive capacity for social participation, constructive large social groups and constructive adolescence. Here teachers, youth organizations and often also the military have a decisive influence. Whether a creative, self-confident person grows up, or a broken, always adaptable person, a symbiosis-dependent person stuck in his childhood, or an “uncanny” creative, untenable person.

According to our state of knowledge, constructive large social groups are characterized in particular by the fact that they avoid building up enemy images, and that aggressions that arise are carried out in conflicts within the group and are not projectively shifted to external enemy images. This makes it possible for large social groups to recognize even the healthy and constructive parts of adversaries and to try to ally themselves with them.

Over the last four decades, Nicaragua has done everything it can to prevent the development of a constructive capacity for social participation, and only after the revolution has a positive development begun.

The same applies now to humanization. This means the struggle for the realization of human rights , the abolition of the death penalty , the abolition of corporal punishment of children , the introduction of a regulated fair judiciary and the abolition of torture as milestones along this path .

We must not forget that in recent years the North Americans have been increasingly using the death penalty against their will, have introduced death by lethal injection and that destitute ‘death candidates’ in some states do not even have a rudimentary opportunity to appeal their death sentence in a promising manner (see Virginia ) .

One evening I was invited to the Annual General Meeting of the German Development Service where Jaime Whitford gave a lecture on the psychological effects of the war on the population of Nicaragua. On this occasion the situation of Nicaragua was presented in a very realistic way from the point of view of the German embassy there. Interestingly enough, the official government policy of the Federal Republic of Germany often propagates a completely different view ! For example, it was argued that the attack on Koberstein was a coincidence, as the mines were laid at night and the first person to pass by in the morning would be caught, it was not a question of deliberately killing foreigners. Further mentioned was the land reform, which was judged to be the only realistic way to bring the farmers back to land, some of whom have not owned any land for three generations, because they had pledged their land more and more until it was finally completely taken away from them. The advantages and disadvantages of the destruction of the trading system by the government were also explained: the traders paid the farmers very little for their products, the goods were sold very dearly in the cities and thus became very rich, the farmers, however, poorer and poorer. On the one hand it is over now, on the other hand there is currently no continuous and reliable distribution of food. This explains why Managua only has meat or milk once or twice a week. Another reason for the inadequate distribution is the shortage of spare parts for trucks, which are needed to distribute the goods evenly. So it’s an absolutely poor country! As far as the nationalized industry is concerned, there are only a few branches, e.g. the Coca-Cola plants, which probably have far fewer state enterprises in percentage terms than in the Federal Republic of Germany. Here in Latin America, the form of the state-owned enterprise is still being hailed as communism. Also to the Contras still very critical remarks became officially loud, which move them rather toward Somoza bandits, in contrast to local government publications.

On this evening there was an exciting discussion about the lecture about the effects of the war on the population. Jaime Whitford presented in his lecture the situation of the population as an absolute stress situation: On the one hand the war, on the other the great economic hardship. Even if there is more medical care and more literacy than before and nobody starves to death, there is great economic shortage. The question arises why the Nicaraguans are not worse off than they are now under these circumstances. Whitford explained this by saying that the aspiration of the population to regain a national identity lends a certain psychological strength to the individual.

This interpretation follows on from research published by our peace group and myself on “National Identity and Peace Capability”, where we came to the conclusion that positive, constructive national and historical identity and peace capacity are mutually dependent.

In this sense, the capacity for peace means the ability to identify oneself with the identity-promoting and identity-strengthening aspects of one’s own nation, with its peculiarities, to be aware of them and to draw strength from them. At the same time, this goes hand in hand with a critical perception of the destructive and identity-denying aspects of one’s own national culture.

This also includes a feeling for the historical So-Gewerd-Sein of one’s own large group, one’s own ethnic group, the ability to experience this history without having to experience oneself as a passive plaything of history.

But a constructive national and historical identity also includes the ability to expand this identity and to express the basic human need to make contact with other groups and peoples, to expand and realize oneself and one’s abilities.

In Nicaragua in the last century, the fascist Somoza regime and the US intervention systematically prevented the development of a national and historical identity and systematically built up structures of structural violence. Now that we are talking about the transformation of society and the struggle for a national and historical identity, ideologizing this as an East-West conflict means denying the past and denying the Nicaraguans their right to their own national and historical identity. It is rather a matter of supporting them in processing their past 40 years of fascism and dictatorship . But this is perhaps particularly difficult for us Germans due to our only inadequately dealt with fascist past. For working through here means to understand the causes, why it was the way it was then, and how it could happen, but at the same time also to feel and endure the criminal actions of the fascist time with all the consequences that caused to stand and perceive the feelings that arose from the failure.

To a processing belongs also to recognize the causes of the trade at that time, the events at that time and the current failure in the own person, in the own group, in the own nation. Only then is a change possible. And in the case of Nicaragua this also means that the colonial power would have to deal with itself, its actions and its crimes against humanity.

All in all, my stay was a very intense time of work, of meeting Nicaraguans in intense work situations. It was optimally organized for the conditions there, the groups lovingly and interestingly arranged. I believe that my contributions were stimulating for my Nicaraguan interlocutors and that it would be valuable to continue this kind of encounter.

What future possibilities of cooperation would be conceivable and feasible was also the subject of my farewell dinner with the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, the Director of the Department of Psychology and the Rector of the University, where he in particular raised the question of whether it might not be possible in the future to create scholarships in West Germany for interested Nicaraguan students. Well, I guess a two-way exchange wouldn’t be a bad perspective for the future.

Because we too could learn a lot from the sincere encounter with Nicaragua. It touches on the foundations of today’s Western “male” self-image. Because it touches the question of where we get our self-esteem from. From superior weapon strength and the indulgence in common warlike fantasies, as for example the war of the stars ? Or will we succeed in feeding from activities of peace, from non-warlike common symbols, a constant and pronounced positive self-esteem, which enables us to live an identity as people capable of peace, whose peace power is not exhausted in a 490000 strong army ? Only recently, the hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal in the USA have shown just how topical this far-reaching male identification conflict is and which forms the struggle for a positive self-esteem takes, to what extent people are dependent in their self-esteem on successful warlike activities.

A description of my journey to the intersection of the North-South and East-West conflicts would be incomplete if the deeper motives of the traveller were not also discussed. Because they do not form the starting point and in a certain way also the end point ! Is it dissatisfaction with the living conditions in one’s own country, the social and political conditions ? Dissatisfaction with the ruling political caste ? Is it a more or less consciously felt identification with the outsiders and oppressed of this world, whose life fate resembles that of the traveller ? Are there deep feelings of guilt about living in an affluent country and getting >day after day the suffering and dying of millions of people delivered to their homes via satellite ? Is it the fascination of rebellion against a great power that expresses the need for rebellion in a thoroughly bureaucratized, secure and controlled life ? Or are they needs for identity expansion, for encounters with different social and cultural experiences ? Is it an inner force, connected with a sense of justice, which makes a person sensitive to structural violence, not only in his own country and in the immediate circle of life, but also in international relations? Is it the healthy curiosity to get to know new things and to face these experiences unprejudiced or irresponsible thirst for adventure which arises from an inner emptiness ?

It would certainly be dishonest to use only iron motifs here. We all have without exception, certainly to varying degrees, our downsides. The question is rather whether we are in a relationship with her or whether she leads an activity completely separated from our consciousness and we can consciously make out the evil, selfish and destructive only in the other, in the other camp.

One of the leaders of the Sandinista movement, Tomas Borges, expressed this deep wisdom on the day of the victory of the revolution with the words: “The sons of our heroes deserve as much love as the sons of your murderers”. He has thus also confronted the widespread problem of the unconsciously “inherited” vindictiveness, which lets the children avenge the defeat and the shame suffered by the fathers.

I also have my share of the less noble motifs, but that’s good so, because it makes the undertaking more honest. My concern in this report, however, is to promote a more differentiated approach to the world which does not exclude one’s own person, one’s limits and one’s deeper motives from the encounter as a matter of course.

I would also like to draw the reader’s attention to a certain, widespread authoritarian style of language which relieves him of judgment, tells him where to go, avoids asking open questions and which is an essential element in maintaining and recreating structures of structural violence in our country as well.

For our world is in a state of upheaval and one of the prevailing myths which today supports structures of structural violence is that each individual is powerless and cannot do anything anyway.

The world is in a state of upheaval, but it is precisely for this reason that we must help to ensure that global dependency and communication do not lead to a massing and a reduction of the individual to a mere consumer and military strategic factor, but that we jointly achieve an expansion of our culture, our identity and our society.

But no peace that is more than the mere absence of war is acquired without active love, without a deep solidarity among peoples, to the construction of which each of us can contribute a stone.