Nation-self

The third of the six circles, developing between roughly the age of two and 12 in the usual sequence, and containing the relationships that belong to a nation rather than to a household. Since a nation is layered, overlapping and persists across generations, the relationships in this circle include people long dead and people never met, which is what distinguishes it from the caregiver circle beneath it. Marsh describes how it was historically produced, and the method is not gentle. The national self is created by causing severe depletion of the original animus through ascetic ritual and then transferring life from a group or anima bank, such as a totem or a priest, through euphoric celebration, which reduced the debt to the earlier self and established the new one. That is initiation, and it is the same mechanism that produces endogroup sublation, which is why the circle is so readily captured. The trap named in the definition is the state endogroup, with the chief or state leader occupying the endo-ideal position at this level. Capture converts something layered and overlapping into something bounded with an inside and an outside, and this is the conversion Marsh has in mind when she says states ensure every part of the world is recognized only as another state endogroup, placing even uncontacted peoples inside one. Failure at a higher circle sends a person back here, since failure at the discovery-self may produce xenophobia in an attempt to recreate the nation-self.

National identity is studied in social psychology as one group identity among many, with attachment measured separately from chauvinism, and developmental research documents children acquiring national categories in roughly the age range Marsh names. Nationalism studies asks how such attachment is produced, through schooling, ritual and what Michael Billig called banal nationalism. Marsh's version differs by treating the attachment as a genuine circle of expansion with real value rather than as an artefact to be explained away, while identifying its capture by the state as the failure, which lets her distinguish a loved nation from a state endogroup in a way that the psychological literature generally does not.