Resolving the Other

The phenomenon of war is a tragic, amplified cultural exaggeration of our individual psychological issues surfacing from the reality of the ego’s encounter with the Other, and developed by an inability to resolve the issues that this encounter entails.

In other words, the roots of war are embedded in the psychological question of the Other, and because of that, in these tragic times, with the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is in full swing, it might do well to reflect on how that problem can be resolved.

If we can believe Freud, then our first other is our oedipal opponent, the father. He is the first challenge to our central position in the universe established by our enclosed condition of self that gives us a feeling of being essential – or, as Hegel called it, the essentially real.

The problem of the Father-Other or this First-Other, as well as the Lacanian Real Other (the Mother) are resolved by the family.

The concept of the family is a unifying balm for the tremendously conflictive relationship between the self-contained individual and the others that challenge the inherent solipsism of our early experience of the world.

However, once the issue of the first others has been resolved by absorbing the self into those others within the family, the family itself finds itself surrounded by others – those other families, the neighbours.

This second phase of confronting the Other can either be resolved by the families allowing themselves to be absorbed into a community of families that communicate and share their experiences of reality, or the confrontation can be exacerbated by building fences behind which each family unit hides itself and experiences the Other as something unreal, because never truly experienced and only appreciated through judgements made from mere glimpses over the fence or fleeting superficial encounters in the street.

The community is therefore the second solution to the problem of the Other, just as the family was the resolution at the primary level.

The process of resolving others expands outward until we get the political geography of the world today delineated by the borders of nation states and empires. Nation states have been around for hundreds of years and we have had kingdoms and empires for thousands, but the big leap to the Big Resolution which would dissolve the problem of the Other in Humanity has always been overlooked, undermined or quite simply resisted through ridicule and the presumption that such a development is impossible.

Impossible or not, the only way that the tragedy of war and the existential threat it is today will ever be overcome is through a conscientious grappling with this problem of the Other and a serious political will to resolve it through an authentic globalisation of humanity, not economically but psychologically via a striving toward an authentic human community that would be the Big Resolution that would end wars forever.