"The Politics of the Psyche": Part 2

The New Left, Neo-Freudian Feminism, & Cultural Revolution

In the Part 1 of this series, I outlined how Christopher Lasch in The Minimal Self (TMS) used the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis to articulate a taxonomy of political ideology that he felt aptly characterized the then-emerging confusion of cultural politics in the early-to-mid 1980s (TMS was first published in 1984) and which I believe still directly applies—perhaps even moreso—to the prevailing political schizophrenia that characterizes our present-day cultural politics. Drawing on the work of American sociologist and personality psychologist Sherry Turkle, I believe Lasch’s use of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic constructs, most directly the structure of the psyche in the form of the id, ego, and superego, provided “robust and useful, down-to-earth objects-to-think with” in making sense of our modern-day political chaos.

In Part 1, traditional notions of ‘right-conservative’ and ‘left-liberal’ were described in the context of the ‘superego’ and ‘ego’, respectively. In some contrast, the New Left was described briefly as the synthesis of the superego and ego ideal, and more nominally as “The party of Narcissus.” In part II, we look more closely at the evolution of this New Left ideology, it’s ideological origins and motivations, and why its namesake “Narcissus” evokes the notion of personality, and more broadly personality psychopathology.

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The New Left as the Party of Narcissus

https://x.com/obscuralucida/status/248528963096428545

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The Ideological Assault on the Ego: Neo-Freudian Feminism as Prodromal Woke Progressivism

In The Minimal Self, Lasch writes:

Freudian feminists advocate more than an expanded role for men in child-care. In company with many other kinds of feminists, they call for the collectivization of child-rearing, on the grounds not only that the nuclear family oppresses women but that it produces an acquisitive, aggressive, authoritarian type of personality…Because technological progress seems to have reached a dangerous dead end, it has become imperative to identify an alternative to the ‘patricentric’ personality in the form of a narcissistic, Dionysian, or androgynous personality type. Now that Promethean man apparently stands on the brink of self-destruction, Narcissus looks like a more likely survivor. What some critics condemn as cultural and psychological regression looks to many feminists like a long overdue ‘feminization of American society,’ as [Stephanie] Engel calls it.