Ever since my youth I have been fascinated by Scotland. In the late 1950s I read William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth for no less two years in my high school English class, and I visited Scotland, including the Shetland islands, in 1982. I could never forget Macduff’s anguished cry, “O Scotland, Scotland!” in Act IV, Scene iii of Macbeth, nor Fife, Dunsinane, Scone or any other place names in the play. Ross’s lament “Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself” came back to haunt me in 2023, during the mass protests in Israel against the autocratic government’s attempts to turn the country for a democracy into a dictatorship. 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 “Each 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.”

Scotland’s 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 “petty kingdoms” of the Picts, the Scots of Dál Riata, the Britons of Strathclyde and the Angles of Northumbria, Scotland was united under Cínaed mac Ailpín, the king of the Picts, whose name was later anglicized to Kenneth MacAlpin. In the thirteenth century King Edward Longshanks of England, the “Hammer of the Scots,” conquered Scotland.

In what the Cypriot-Turkish-born American psychoanalyst Vamık Djemal Volkan calls “chosen glory,” 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’s right to be an independent kingdom, which was later recognized by the Papacy. In 1328 Robert the Bruce achieved the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton, in which England formally recognized Scotland’s independence. One of the key figures in the Wars of Scottish Independence was William Wallace (Mel Gibson’s Braveheart).

There followed several more bloody wars between Scotland and England. Ireland 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.

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 “Brexit” 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.

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. 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. 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?

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, “identification with all humanity” (IWAH) “universalism-tolerance,” openness, “right-wing authoritarianism” and “collective narcissism” in relation to the subjects’ attitudes toward Scottish independence. “Collective narcissism” was defined as “an 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.” They found that IWAH was a “predictor” of support for independence, “while xenophobia and right-wing authoritarianism were predictors of less favorable attitudes to independence.

These scholars thought that their findings “complemented previous research linking support for secessionist movements with non-nativist thinking and “positive” personality traits such as agreeableness and extroversion.” Most importantly, “collective narcissism was the strongest predictor of support for Scottish independence, hinting at a narcissistic distortion in secessionist thinking” (see here).

The connection between “collective narcissism,” 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. The Scottish story is fascinating. The psychoanalyst Vamık Djemal 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’s need for a self separate from that of the mother. There is also a subtle psychological fit between the leader’s narcissistic “mirroring” needs and the “idealizing” narcissism of his followers (see http://vamikvolkan.com/Large-Group-Psychology-in-Its-Own-Right.php).

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’s population has changed so much that today its First Minister and the leader of the Scottish National Party is a Muslim named Humza Yousaf, born to Pakistani immigrants in 1985, who succeeded Nicola Sturgeon in 2023 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 is to treat the next UK general election as a “de facto referendum” on Scottish independence. If the pro-independence Scottish political parties win a majority of the Scottish seats in Westminster, that will be used as a mandate to ask for a referendum. 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 Holyrood Palace, both of them properties of the British Crown. There is also Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire, a private property of King Charles III, where the British royal family goes on vacation, and where Charles like to wear a green kilt. Will Scotland break away from Mother England and join the European Union? Will the British royal family keep its palaces and castles in Scotland?