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.
Our 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 dolor.”
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. After the Scottish war of independence against England, led by 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 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. 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 the most important event 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, some nationalist Scottish leaders called for staying in the E.U.
Nations often have the same unconscious meaning for their adult members as the early mother has for its child. The very word nation comes from the Latin word for birth, natio. Could there be a psychological connection between the wish of the Scottish nationalists to separate from 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 Cypriot-Turkish-born American psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan has shown 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 psychological fit between the leader’s narcissistic needs and those of his followers. The Scottish affair deserves a major psychohistorical study (see http://vamikvolkan.com/Large-Group-Psychology-in-Its-Own-Right.php).
Scotland has voted 55% to 45% to stay in the U.K. which seems to show a degree of political maturity. In such a complex phenomenon as secession and separation from the “mother country” there are both conscious and unconscious motives, real and rational reasons, fantastic and irrational drives, individual and group needs, leader’s and followers’ psychology. The conscious and “rational” motives such as economics, ethnicity , ideology or religion are of course important, but each of them has its unconscious and irrational aspects as well. Identity, both individual and group, is a very complex phenomenon about which entire books have been written.
Hi, Avner.
Question: do you see all such nation separations – not only Scotland- as subconsciously deriving from the same reason?
The US also separated from Britain. Uruguay ( where i am from) separated from Argentina. Etc. In most cases it seems that either economics, ethnicity , ideology or religion, in short, identity, are the compelling reasons. Is all desire for individuation an indication of a subconscious desire to separate form a mother entity?
Shana Tova
Gisele
There are many conscious and realistic reasons for wanting to separate from England, the economic ones being only part of them. However, some economists say Scotland will be worse off if it goes its own way. I am naturally referring to the unconscious motives, both on the individual and on the large-group level. Consciously, Great Britain may not be the same as the Great Mother for many Scots; unconsciously, it may be.
The question of why now is very important, of course, but there have been many movements for Scottish independence before (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_independence). And let us not forget that Alex Salmond began his campaign for Scottish independence from Great Britain many years ago. Now is the peak of his decades-long effort, the high point of his entire political life. He fully identifies himself with Scotland.
Am not clear about this, Avner: “Could there be a psychological connection between the wish of the Scottish nationalists to separate and individuate from England and their internal mother image and the wish to separate from Great Britain and create a separate identity?” Isn’t the separation from the one also the separation from the other? And anyway, why now? Why not earlier in the past 300 years. There is a speculation that abundant oil off Scotland could make the country prosperous.
Etc.