{"id":29,"date":"2014-09-18T16:16:28","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T16:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.avner-falk.net\/?page_id=29"},"modified":"2025-11-30T15:37:58","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T13:37:58","slug":"scotland","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/?page_id=29","title":{"rendered":"Scotland\u2019s Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ever since my youth I have been fascinated by Scotland. In the late 1950s I read William Shakespeare\u2019s Scottish play Macbeth<\/em> for two years in my high school English class, and I visited Scotland, including the Shetland islands, in 1982. I could never forget Macduff\u2019s anguished cry, \u201cO Scotland, Scotland!\u201d in Act IV, Scene iii of Macbeth, nor Inverness, Fife, Dunsinane, Scone or any other place names in the play. Ross\u2019s lament \u201cAlas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself\u201d came back to haunt me in 2023, during the mass protests in Israel against the autocratic government\u2019s attempts to turn the country for a democracy into a dictatorship.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Israeli government, headed by a man who had been indicted for several crimes, including bribery and breach of trust, already had almost total control of the legislature. It politicized the police and attempted to take over the Israeli judiciary as well. Its fascist efforts never let up, despite (or because of) the interminable wars it waged in Gaza, in Lebanon, and as far away as Iran and Yemen. We Israelis feared to lose our fragile democracy. It was almost as bad as Scotland under Macbeth, where \u201cEach new morn \/ New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows \/ Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds \/ As if it felt with Scotland and yelled out \/ Like syllable of dolour.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Scotland\u2019s relationship to England has always been complex and ambivalent. By Scottish tradition, in 843, after centuries of internecine wars among the Scottish clans and among the \u201cpetty kingdoms\u201d of the Picts, the Scots of D\u00e1l Riata, the Britons of Strathclyde and the Angles of Northumbria, Scotland was united under C\u00ednaed mac Ailp\u00edn, the king of the Picts, whose name was later anglicized to Kenneth MacAlpin. In the thirteenth century King Edward Longshanks of England, the \u201cHammer of the Scots,\u201d conquered Scotland in rivers of blood. <\/span><\/p>\n

Since then, Scotland has been thoroughly anglicized. The vast majority of Scots speak English rather than Scots or Gaelic. Scottish personal names and place names are anglicized. Scottish writers like James Boswell, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson have been at the forefront of English literature. The British Royal Mail does not include the name of Scotland in Scottish postal addresses any more than it does the name of England in English ones. The British royal family has castles in Scotland. Nonetheless, some Scots insist that they have nothing to do with the English…<\/span><\/p>\n

In what the Cypriot-Turkish-born American psychoanalyst Vam\u0131k Volkan calls \u201cchosen glory,\u201d Scottish nationalists proudly remember Robert the Bruce (1274-1329), who was crowned King of Scots at Scone in 1306, led the Wars of Scottish Independence against England (1296-1328), won a decisive victory in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and oversaw the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, a landmark document asserting Scotland\u2019s right to be an independent kingdom, which was later recognized by the Papacy. In 1328 Robert the Bruce achieved the Treaty of Edinburgh\u2013Northampton, in which England formally recognized Scotland\u2019s independence. One of the key figures in the Wars of Scottish Independence was William Wallace (Mel Gibson\u2019s Braveheart).<\/span><\/p>\n

There followed several more bloody wars between Scotland and England.\u00a0Ireland had already been conquered by the English Crown. In 1603 the Union of the Crowns finally joined the two nations under one king, James Charles Stuart, who was King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England and Ireland. In 1707 the Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Even as Scots served in the British armed forces and mingled with Englishmen, however, they still had their unique Scottish identity; their accent often betrayed their ethnic difference. Each Scottish clan wore different kilts. The kilts of the Scottish soldiers and their bagpipes were the marks of their identity. The Scottish people had adopted the English language, but it was not their native Gaelic tongue.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Scottish referendum of September 2014 on separating from the United Kingdom, which the nationalist separatists lost by a a vote of 55.3% to 44.7%, seems to have been one of the most important events in Scottish history since the Union of the Crowns. In 2016, after the \u201cBrexit\u201d faction defeated the pro-Europeans by a small margin in the British referendum on leaving the European Union, nationalist Scottish leaders called for leaving Britain and staying in the E.U.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nations have the same unconscious meaning for their adult members as the mother has for her child. The very word nation comes from the Latin word for birth, natio<\/em>. Every person must go through a phase of separation and individuation from the infantile symbiosis with the mother in his or her early life. Some achieve their individuation successfully, because their mothers are able to let go of them. Some remain stuck in an infantile symbiotic relationship which they repeat wit their love objects throughout their lives. <\/span>Could there be a psychological connection between the wish of the Scottish nationalists to separate from Mother England and their collective internal mother image, between their wish to secede from Great Britain and their unresolved self and identity issues?<\/span><\/p>\n

We must be careful to distinguish between individual and collective psychology. In 2023 two Scottish psychologists published an interdisciplinary study of personality traits associated with the wish for Scottish independence. They had 430 subjects fill out a personality questionnaire and checked the results for the presence of xenophobia, \u201cidentification with all humanity\u201d (IWAH) \u201cuniversalism-tolerance,\u201d openness, \u201cright-wing authoritarianism\u201d and \u201ccollective narcissism\u201d in relation to the subjects\u2019 attitudes toward Scottish independence. <\/span>\u201cCollective narcissism\u201d was defined as \u201can unrealistic belief in national greatness: specifically, the belief that the nation is unfairly judged to be less great than the individual believes it to be.\u201d They found that IWAH was a \u201cpredictor\u201d of support for independence, \u201cwhile xenophobia and right-wing authoritarianism were predictors of less favorable attitudes to independence. <\/span>These scholars thought that their findings \u201ccomplemented previous research linking support for secessionist movements with non-nativist thinking and \u201cpositive\u201d personality traits such as agreeableness and extroversion.\u201d Most importantly, \u201ccollective narcissism was the strongest predictor of support for Scottish independence, hinting at a narcissistic distortion in secessionist thinking\u201d (see here<\/a>). <\/span>The connection between \u201ccollective narcissism,\u201d meaning that the person felt Scotland to be a greater nation than it was allowed to be within Britain, and the need to secede hints at unresolved issues of separation and individuation that unconsciously give rise to the wish to secede. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Scottish story is fascinating. The psychoanalyst Vam\u0131k Volkan has demonstrated that large-group psychology is very different from individual psychology; but the need of the large group for clear boundaries may unconsciously echo the individual\u2019s need for a self separate from that of the mother. There is also a subtle psychological fit between the leader\u2019s narcissistic \u201cmirroring\u201d needs and the \u201cidealizing\u201d narcissism of his followers (see http:\/\/vamikvolkan.com\/Large-Group-Psychology-in-Its-Own-Right.php<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Scottish nationalist history deserves a psychohistorical study. Like other European countries, and like England, Scotland has taken in large numbers of immigrants from the former colonies of Great Britain in Asia and Africa. Scotland\u2019s population has changed so much that in 2023 its First Minister and the leader of the Scottish National Party was a Muslim named Humza Yousaf, born to Pakistani immigrants in 1985, who succeeded Nicola Sturgeon after defeating Finance Minister Kate Forbes by roughly the same margin the pro-Brexit British voters had defeated the pro-European ones. His political plan was to treat the next UK general election as a \u201cde facto referendum\u201d on Scottish independence. If the pro-independence Scottish political parties won a majority of the Scottish seats in Westminster, that would be used as a mandate to ask for a referendum. In 2024 a \u201cwhite Christian\u201d politician named John Swinney took over the SNP leadership. As First Minister of Scotland, Swinney has made \u201cfinishing the task\u201d of independence his \u201curgent priority.\u201d In 2025 public opinion polls found that anywhere from 52% to 56% of Scots favored independence.<\/span><\/p>\n

The<\/span> Scottish\u00a0 nationalists want to break out of the United Kingdom and stop being subjects of the British Crown. <\/span>There are formidable legal and constitutional obstacles to Scottish independence. The British Scotland Act of 1998 limits the power of the Scottish parliament in Holyrood. The issue of the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England is reserved to the British parliament in Westminster. A Scottish referendum that would unilaterally declare Scottish independence would not have legal effect. The Supreme Court of the U.K. has ruled such a bill ultra vires.\u00a0<\/em><\/span>Under domestic and international law, Scotland would likely become a \u201csuccessor state\u201d rather than both Scotland and the remainder of the U.K. being treated as new states. <\/span>That means complex negotiations with England, Wales and Northern Ireland would be needed over division of assets, liabilities, treaty obligations, institutions, currency, defense arrangements, etc.\u00a0<\/span>The logistics and complexity of disentangling Scotland from centuries of shared institutional, legal, and international commitments is itself a significant obstacle.<\/span><\/p>\n

One wonders what the medieval Scottish kings and clan chiefs, or Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, would have felt had they seen what modern Scotland is like. Since 1603 the British monarch has had royal castles in Scotland. The Royal Mile in Edinburgh separates Edinburgh Castle from the Palace of Holyroodhouse, both of them properties of the British Crown. The Scottish parliament in Holyrood is across the road from Holyrood Palace.There is Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire, a private property of King Charles III, where the British royal family goes on vacation, and where Charles, who has no Scottish ancestry, likes to wear a green plaid kilt as if he were a true Highlander. Will Scotland break away from Mother England and join the European Union? Will the British royal family keep its palaces and castles in Scotland? Above all, will Scotland\u2019s soul be at peace with itself?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since my youth I have been fascinated by Scotland. In the late 1950s I read William Shakespeare\u2019s Scottish play Macbeth for two years in my high school English class, and I visited Scotland, including the Shetland islands, in 1982. I could never forget Macduff\u2019s anguished cry, \u201cO Scotland, Scotland!\u201d in Act IV, Scene iii […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-29","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}