"And the powers of hell rushed to the earth"

Reflections of a psychoanalyst on the current catastrophe.

What happened - the invasion of Ukraine - is terrible, but not unexpected. Another question is why it happened and whether it could not have happened. My answer is no. It would have happened anyway. I am not talking about political, economic, etc. factors. I am talking about the drama that unfolded on the stage of the Unconscious.

About the difficult and terrifying undercurrent of the forces that are now running amok in Ukraine. Because these are forces. Not people. The thing is that the Unconscious, being a container of infinite meanings, manifests itself in its specific private forms. And it is in these forms that resistance to the infinite semantic potential of the Unconscious is born. Resistance of different levels and different strengths. And the limit of this resistance is regression to the fetal state, complete absorption in the womb. From the inside, this state is perceived as maximum pleasure.

And the truth is that this is hell in its purest, most terrifying form. Freud called it the "Kingdom of Mothers." The terrifying gravity of blissful nothingness, amorphous immortal ancestral plasma. To preserve blissful nothingness at all costs is the only motivation of these forces. Any existence, any transgression (going beyond this false and limitless world) is perceived by these forces as a mortal danger that must be eliminated. The bearers of the "Kingdom of Mothers" forces themselves, of course, never realize this motivation.

They will talk about the dangers of global capitalism, NATO, Western values, and so on. But this is just rationalization. When the forces of the "Kingdom of Mothers" are embodied at the level of human communities, their only goal is the complete destruction of differences, the destruction of multiple states of being, and the reduction to "dead zero." For the sake of the bliss of nothingness, everything must disappear, turn into a radioactive desert. Therefore, one must understand that if these forces are not stopped in time, if they are not locked up, the destruction of everything is the only and inevitable prospect.