"The Politics of the Psyche": Part 1
"The Politics of the Psyche": Part 1
The heuristic power of a cultural psychology for understanding our present-day macrosocial identity crisis and political schizophrenia
If you have come to this essay, you likely share in the view that our present-day politics, our sense of political identity, and the current political climate are defined by chaos and disorientation. The labels “left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative” no longer reflect their classical meanings or interpretations—whether with regard to economic, social, or foreign policy. The chaos and disorientation has especially intensified since the summer of 2020 when the death of George Flyod accelerated what had been described as the “Great Awokening,” itself linked to a similar incident in 2014 when Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Missouri police officer, sparking what would later be commonly referred to as the Ferguson riots. Indeed, the cartoon created by the evolutionary biologist and cultural commentator
has become a well-known cultural avatar of this tectonic change in our sense-making of politics and political ideology.
In order to make sense of this ‘political schizophrenia’ a readily implementable conceptual framework—a heuristic or taxonomy—is urgently needed. One that not only provides a sense-making classification framework, but also ideally one that provides a cogent account of the historical, political, and cultural forces that explain the development of each typology. Fortunately, one already exists and can be found in the writing of Christopher Lasch. Specifically, in The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, originally published in 1984, Lasch drew upon psychoanalysis as a framework to make sense of the then emerging political confusion. As Lasch wrote:
For many purposes, psychoanalytic terminology now provides a more reliable guide to the political landscape than outmoded distinctions between left and right, not because controversies about contemporary culture are necessarily conducted in psychoanalytic language—though they often are—but because they address issues best illuminated by Freud and his followers. In order to provide ourselves with an accurate map of the geography of cultural politics, we can distinguish three positions, each with its own diagnosis of the cultural malaise, its own set of remedies, and its own affiliation with one or another among the psychic agencies distinguished by Freud in his structural theory of the mind.
Perhaps because The Minimal Self was overshadowed by his earlier popular writings, including The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy and The Culture of Narcissism, this work has relatively been little discussed by contemporary political pundits and commentators, as well as those discussing Lasch on social media. Yet, it is perhaps this work that provides the most insight into what many are desperately seeking: an understanding of the macrosocial forces and influences that have led to our current political and cultural turmoil and disorientation. This essay is an attempt to bring Lasch’s brilliant insights to readers and into the larger public consciousness.
Freud as a Cultural Psychologist
At its core, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is a theoretical framework that seeks to understand the manner in which individuals successfully or not integrate and assimilate ‘instinctual’ (i.e., biological) drives into a coherent self identity (i.e., free of neuroses aka mental illness). Originally, Freud believed neuroses of character development (i.e., mental illness) were largely the consequence of unresolved traumatic experiences or sexual conflicts with parental figures in childhood that were ‘repressed’ or outside of conscious awareness because they were unacceptable; they were put out of the mind by an act of will due to their painful affect or because thoughts or feelings associated with them brought about feelings of guilt, shame, or internal conflict. Hence, psychoanalysis was a clinical theory. The key to the resolution of character disturbance was to ‘unlock’ the repressed memories via a process of free association in the therapeutic encounter. Perhaps his most recognizable contribution to those with only a superficial knowledge of Freud was his introduction of a structure of the human psyche: the id, the ego, and the superego.
Psychoanalysis continued to be developed by Freud until his death in 1939 and there were a number of variants of psychoanalysis that departed from Freud’s original formulation in greater or lesser degrees. Most importantly, however, for purposes of the current essay, ‘neo-Freudians’ divorced biology (Freud’s instincts) from his work while foregrounding ‘cultural factors’ aka ‘social determinants’ in modern-day parlance. This was because neo-Freudians were focused on psychoanalysis as an agent of ‘social progress’ and biological determinants (i.e., Freud’s instincts), often resistant to social engineering or change, would reveal individual disparities in behavior and functioning which cut against the meliorism of the progressive ethos.
Although not technically a ‘variant’ of psychoanalysis, John Bowlby formalized the link between psychoanalysis—at least insofar as psychoanalysis acknowledged instinctual drives and the importance of early social experiences with parents—and Darwinian evolutionary theory in his development of Attachment Theory (along with Mary Ainsworth). For his efforts, Bowlby was unceremoniously rewarded by being booted out of the British Psychoanalytic Association and Attachment Theory evolved as a distinct theory of personality development despite having some theoretical roots in psychoanalysis. I mention Attachment Theory here for two reasons: (1) it should be clearly understood as legitimate science of human psychological development1; and (2) I was trained in the developmental tradition of Attachment Theory, with much of my published academic scholarship addressing questions of attachment in human development. But I digress…
In light of the evolution of psychoanalytic epistemology described above, one could make a case that Sigmund Freud was perhaps the first evolutionary psychologist in absentia. That is, despite couching his theory in terms of instinctual impulses, all of which centered around sexual conflict and tensions with parental figures, the negotiation of which determined one’s character development and personality adaptation, Freud fundamentally, albeit unknowingly, understood the pivotal role of biology and genetics in human development. Nonetheless, I believe that his constructs of the id, ego, and superego as intrapsychic structures reflect his most important contribution—as a cultural psychologist.
Cultural psychology has been described as “the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche. This results less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion." It is a field that examines long-term secular trends in politics, the Overton window of sociocultural discourse, and more generally the interplay between individual behavior and cultural constraints. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, itself a synthesis of his psychoanalysis framework with cultural psychology, is considered one of his most important works and no doubt served as a shaping influence on Lasch’s use of Freud’s work in articulating his taxonomy of political factions outlined below.
Contemporary Cultural Debate: An Ideal Typology
In The Minimal Self, Lasch presents a taxonomy of contemporary political factions using psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework. Specifically, using Freud’s concepts of the id, the ego, and the superego. What’s important about this conceptual framework is that it does not necessitate you are a realist about any of these concepts (i.e., think they truly exist in some concrete or metaphysical way) or think Freud’s work matters at all. Rather, the brilliance of using these constructs is that are generally well-known (i.e., the terms have word recognition salience at least in a superficial way) and they ‘make sense’ in a rather intuitive way when applied to the politics of our time. I think you will agree.
I. The Party of the Superego: Traditional Conservatives
Representative figureheads: Philip Rieff, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling.
General description: The party of the internalized moral values. Compelling universal truths. Traditional values passed down through generations. Conservative. Religious traditionalism.
However, as Lasch notes, it is a mistake to cast the party of the superego in the same light that opponents of them do:
Those who see a strong social superego as the only reliable defense against moral anarchy—Rieff, Daniel Bell, and Lionel Trilling to name only three of the most prominent exponents of this position—stress the importance of moral consensus and the internalization of moral constraints. They do not advocate a repressive apparatus of laws and moral dogmas designed to enforce moral conformity…They stand for the superego: that is, for a morality so deeply internalized, based on respect for the commanding moral presence of parents, teachers, preachers, and magistrates, that it no longer depends on the fear of punishments or the hope of rewards. It is for this reason that the party of the superego does not coincide with the contemporary political right, though it includes people on the right…According to the conservative indictment of modern culture, society’s failure to uphold authoritative moral commandments or ‘interdicts’ to use one of Rieff’s favorite terms, opens the gates to a riotous horde of impulses demanding immediate gratification.
However, taken to the extreme, the party of the superego lends itself to a mentality of punitive, rather than rehabilitative, punishment.
In fact, the superego never serves as a reliable agency of social discipline. It bears too close a kinship to the very impulses it seeks to repress. It relies too heavily on fear.
That is, it relies too heavily on fear in the sense of an ethos of Protestant Fundamentalism and the Retributive Doctrine of Punishment. Fire and brimstone.
Nineteenth-century authorities on punishment sometimes confused the issue of vindictive punishments, as Abbot called them, with that of corporeal punishment. (So do many historians today.) Those who did not grasp the distinction between retribution and remedial justice welcome Abbott, because he did not object to corporeal punishment as such, as an ally in their campaign against the new ‘indulgence.’
Its relentless condemnation of the ego breeds a spirit of sullen resentment and insubordination. Its endlessly reiterated ‘thou shalt not’ surrounds sin with the glamor and excitement of the forbidden. In our culture, the fascination with violence reflects the severity with which violent impulses are proscribed.
II. The Party of the Ego: Classical liberals
Representative figureheads: John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Lawrence Kohlberg.
General description: The “Party of Science". A focus on rational thinking. The classic academic left and educated elite. It is important to point out that classic liberals as a class, despite having different politics than the party of the superego (i.e., broadly, conservatives), should not be conflated with our modern-day conceptualization of ‘liberals’ which conjures imagery of the radical progressive emotionally dysregulated pink-haired white woman. This latter prototype reflects the New Left, the party of Narcissus, described in section III below.
Taken to the extreme, the party of the ego leads to the ideology of science. Ego psychology emphasizing the ‘rational ego’ lends itself to a pure focus on rationality and the ‘ideology of science’ itself. In turn, this provides the impetus for a technocratic elite to potentially form that oversees a technocratic state that is detached from the working class population. This is what author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has described as the psychopathology of the elites. Here, an analogy readily available to everyone reading this is the ‘COVID tyranny’ installed by public health COVID ‘experts’ who told the public to ‘trust the science’ and unquestioningly accept and tolerate lockdowns, school closures, and mandatory vaccination. Here is how Lasch would have described such an extreme in his introduction to The Revolt of the Elites
A Theory Explaining the Emergence of a Cultural Revolutionary Movement
Psychoanalysis:
refuses to dissolve the tension between instinct and culture, which it regards as the source of the best as well as the worst in human life. It holds that sociability not only thwarts but at the same time fulfills instinctual needs; that culture not only ensures the survival of the human species but also provides the genuine pleasures associated with collective exploration and mastery of the natural world: that exploration, discovery, and invention themselves draw on playful impulses; and that culture represents for man the life ‘appropriate to his species.’
Moreover:
Neither liberalism nor Marxism provides an adequate explanation of the destructiveness that has erupted in the twentieth century. The violent history of our epoch makes it impossible to accept the liberal formula according to which aggression is a response to frustration or the Marxist version of this formula, which traces it to economic exploitation and class rule. The problem goes deeper than capitalism or economic inequality.
Enter:
III. The party of the Ego Ideal; The party of Narcissus: The New Left & Radical Progressivism.
Representative figureheads: Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney (neo-Freudians) to Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse (cultural revolutionaries).
In general, the ego ideal, like the superego, consists of internalized representations of parental authority; but the superego internalizes the forbidding aspect of that authority, whereas the ego ideal holds up admired, idealized images of parents and other authorities as a model to which the ego should aspire. Because the ego ideal helps to sublimate libidinal [instinctual] impulses into a desire to live up to the example of parents and teachers or a striving for ethical perfection, some analysts see it as a more highly developed and mature formation than the superego, better integrated, and closer to reality.
The New Left: Woke Cultural Revolution as the Synthesis of the Ego Ideal and Superego.
The new left’s suspicion of large-scale social organization; its rejection of democratic centralism; its distrust of leadership and party discipline; its faith in small groups; its repudiation of power and ‘power trips,’ work discipline, and goal-directed activity in general; its repudiation of ‘linear’ thinking—these attitudes, the source of so much that was fruitful in the new left and of so much that was futile and self-defeating as well, originated in the central contention (as the San Francisco Redstockings put it in their 1970 manifesto) that ‘our politics begin with our feelings.’
General description: In their search for replacements for a “contemporary social theory” that accounted for the terrible events of the 1930s and 1940s and what Norman O. Brown termed “the real problems of our age”, the New Left, including Neo-Freudians and neo-Freudian feminists, turned to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. This return to psychoanalysis and a therapeutic ethos was most cogently chronicled by Rieff in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic. But, that return too had limits as Rieff and others, such as Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, pointed out. This was due in part to the fact that this “neo-Freudianism” diverged from Freud’s original work, which offered man no hope; “the profound pessimism of Freud’s later work.” It did so by “by trying to press psychoanalysis into the service of social reform by emphasizing cultural instead of biological determinants of personality.”
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In part II of this series, I will describe in detail how the theoretical work of neo-Freudian feminists and radical cultural revolutionary figures, like Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, were merged and gave rise to a New Left Woke Cultural Revolution—a party of Narcissus—that advocated total and complete liberation as the only way to usher in social change that promised the ideal utopian world. It is this cultural revolutionary agenda and vision that persists and is what we are living through today.
This is not meant to undermine psychoanalysis per se as a legitimate field of psychological inquiry, but rather to differentiate Attachment Theory from psychoanalysis, as the two schools of scientific inquiry are vastly different with respect to empirical methodology.