Everything is Permitted, Restrictions Still Apply

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Social Dislocation, Narcissism, and Post Truth

Ian Thurston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429777981
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book applies historicised psychoanalytic thinking in a non-reductive way to better understand the dominant emotional trends in contemporary cultural and socio-political life, with a specific focus on the relationship between social dislocation, narcissism, and "post truth".

Rapid social dislocation and change are ubiquitous in late capitalist societies, though these processes may be felt unequally. Following the work of the late Christopher Lasch, Everything is Permitted, Restrictions Still Apply suggests there are powerful narcissistic trends in contemporary life mitigating against the capacity to acknowledge and face these changes; in other words, against the capacity to face reality and to mourn. There is a tendency to assert the primacy of a compelling emotional narrative over the claims of evidence and expertise, and to relate to others, past and present, as alternately idealised and/or denigrated aspects of the self. These trends permeate across socio-cultural divides and the political spectrum – underpinning phenomena as apparently divergent as free-market fundamentalism, certain forms of anti-capitalism, and contemporary identity and victim politics of both nominal right and left: movements that have more emotional and intellectual underpinnings in common than their proponents may care to admit. The contrast between liberal progressiveness and post-truth populism ignores the inter-relationship of these phenomena and begs the question of those powerful subjectivist and relativistic trends amongst sections of radical and "progressive" opinion that have long sought to problematise the very notion of truth. This book links these phenomena to contemporary social defences against facing limitation, loss, and internal conflict. More specifically it argues that in a pseudo-therapeutic culture preoccupied with narratives of victimhood, the losses associated with "traditional" manufacturing and its attendant associational cultures have neither been acknowledged nor mourned.

Everything is Permitted, Restrictions Still Apply will appeal to all readers interested in history, politics, and socio-cultural analysis, and in new ways of thinking about contemporary issues. It will be of particular interest to researchers applying a psycho-social perspective on contemporary conflict and to a psychoanalytically informed readership.

Chapter 1
Psychoanalytic perspectives on subjectivity

The mode of the European Enlightenment was, as the literary critic Ian Watt (1957) has pointed out, “critical, anti-traditional, and innovating, its method has been the study of the particulars of the experience of the individual investigator, who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs” (p. 13). In setting itself against the old hierarchies of birth, rank, and class, against the primacy of tradition, and the vested interests of property and church, the bourgeois Enlightenment had as its centrepiece the empirical investigation of external reality, of nature. No longer would truth be conditional upon abstract reasoning, arguments from authority and from ancient texts. As the motto of the newly established Royal Society in London put it, “Nullius in verba”, loosely translated as “Take nobody’s word for it”.

The industrial revolution was strongly linked to these rationalistic progressive and democratic developments, to the belief in a world where the productive capacities of men could be set free, setting in train a world of potentially endless growth and development. This combined both academic and practical methods, scientific investigation and theory, artisan skills and experience, natural philosophy and technical innovation. Many of the protagonists of the early world of capitalist development were radical, self-educated men of modest or low background, progressive in social attitudes, tolerant, democratic, and able to bring their energies and talents to fruition in the new conditions. This was the case on my native Tyneside, for example. The Stephenson Brothers, William Armstrong, Charles Parsons were amongst the heroes of this age of capitalism, an era built on scientific innovation and the skills of the workforce in producing things. Indeed it could be argued that globalisation started with Robert Stephenson, and the revolution in transport, and the development of the railways. These men created a historic transformation, as artistically represented in the apocalyptic biblical paintings of the Tyneside artist John Martin, in what Marshall Berman (1982) and, later, Christopher Lasch have termed the Promethean transformation of nature and reality through technological development.

As Ernst Gellner (1983) has noted, the changes involved in industrialisation embodied rationality, efficiency, and, at a deeper structural level, “a universal conceptual currency” (p. 21) in which “all facts are located within a single continuous logical space” (p. 21), so “that in principle one single language describes the world and is internally unitary” (p. 21). This was very different from a premodern agrarian world in which multiple “hierarchically related sub worlds” co-exist, often with specialised language and rituals, but were not integrated or subject to the expectations of a putative “ordinary reality” (p. 21). Indeed, such integration and subjection to “reality” would have been regarded as blasphemous or outrageous.

These profound socio-cultural changes in the West found expression in new cultural and literary forms (Watt, 1957). In contrast to the classical and renaissance workings and reworkings of myth and past history as means of fidelity to more general and universal truths, separate from the mere contingencies of historical time and place, the new form of the novel placed unique and irreducible individual experience, and consciousness, at the centre, in terms of both form and content. The novel as a genre brought with it originality of plot, the importance of time, attention to individual characterisation, and the delineation of the specific social environment. The “bourgeois novel” thus aimed at verisimilitude to individual experience, to life as it really was. Correspondingly Daniel Defoe’s heroes, for example, were also ordinary unheroic Everymen, and Everywomen.

If the rise of the novel was part of a movement towards philosophical and literary realism, and active engagement with the world, at the same time, however, it was also part of a move towards subjectivism and solipsism. It is this contradiction that is at the heart of the work of Defoe (1719). As Watt pointed out, whilst the prototypical Robinson Crusoe might be self-reliant:

His inordinate egocentricity condemns him to isolation wherever he is. The egocentricity, one might say, is forced on him because he is cast away on an island. But it is also true that his character is throughout courting his fate and it merely happens that the island offers the fullest opportunity for him to realize three associated tendencies of modern civilization – absolute economic, social, and intellectual freedom of the individual.

(p. 96)

This is the line stretching right through the form and content of the novel, from Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), a dystopian science fiction in which the cloned narrator, Daniel24, lives alone in a compound with his cloned dog.

The spirit of rational enquiry and individualism of the bourgeois Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, thus pointed in two directions: one towards public engagement and improvement, to “good works”, and the other towards solipsism. Richard Sennett (2003, p. 105) points out that “individualism” was in fact a term first used by De Tocqueville in the 1830s to invoke the social isolation he observed in America, a situation where people might love their family and friends but be indifferent to wider social relations. Back in England the young Frederick Engels (1845) wrote of the atomised and egoistic crowds of people in London, their indifference to, and isolation from, others in the face of their common humanity.

Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1907), has his anarchistic and nihilistic terrorists with their idealisation of destruction and death as a purifying force, moving in unhappy isolation around a phantasmagorical London – a place that is presented as overwhelming, alienating at the same time as being crushingly banal. Conrad’s darkly impressionistic portrayal of London is that of a city as an impersonal force, forever changing and of reach, as implacable in its indifference to human wishes as a force of nature. Conrad’s view of the revolutionaries is that of atomised individuals, who, though they speak in the name of the people, are of no more substance than the world they inhabit.

Or as T. S Eliot (1922) later put it:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Gellner (1983) argues that industrial society is, in historical terms, the only society ever to be based on the notion of perpetual growth, of “expected and continued improvement” (p. 22), and in this way “its favoured mode of social control is universal… buying off social aggression with material enhancement”. Such a homogenised world appears open to endless possibilities and combinations. The danger of this situation, as Gellner points out, is of loss of legitimacy, “if the cornucopia becomes temporarily jammed and the flow falters” (p. 22). In such a world there is a need for mobility, adaptability, and the capacity to move away from “traditional” roles and occupations. There is no place for unchanging stratification based on rank and hierarchy. However, if this world is, in formal terms, more egalitarian than pre-capitalist societies, the price to be paid is in terms of the omnipresence of social dislocation, of material and psychic insecurity.

From these perspectives capitalism was, and is, a constantly revolutionising process, utilising pre-capitalist and “traditionalist” structures (for example, of family, the Protestant work ethic) and then discarding or undercutting these as they become less adaptive to workings of the system. In the post-war years this inherent turbulence was balanced by a broadly social democratic settlement, itself a reaction to the conditions that helped foster the rise of Fascism. To be clear, capitalism, or certain versions of it, can be supremely creative. Left to their own devices, however, that is, without adequate checks and balances, and effective opposition, the forces of the market and commodity value tend to hollow out, undermine, and commodify “traditional” social bonds and patterns of attachment – bonds that have themselves arisen as bulwarks against the vicissitudes of the market, and of life.

I write this book from the perspective that any genuinely progressive political response to the contemporary manifestations of these dislocations must have its foundation in the rationalism and universalism of the bourgeois Enlightenment. It was the practical application of these values that created, for the first time, the chance for the mass of the population to have a life that was something other than nasty, brutish, and short. It was these principles that underpinned the heroic but savage era of early productive capitalism, and it was the same traditions that created the basis for critiques centred on the application of reason and principles of human equality, of the inequities of unregulated capitalism and imperialism. And, in the context of the rise of emotionally motivated identity politics, it is more important than ever to maintain the rationalist distinction between historical claims, subject to evidence, from those that are not.

It is essential, however, that such a project has foundations in a realistic and robust understanding of human subjectivity. A psychoanalytic perspective on the ubiquity of emotionally motivated irrationality in organisational and group life, particularly during periods of change and dislocation, is an essential component of such an understanding.

A common contemporary cultural response to Freud and psychoanalysis, a response influenced by subjectivism and the postmodern relativisation of all truth claims, is that psychoanalysis universalised the particular socio-cultural milieu of late bourgeois Vienna; and a historically specific character structure was used to generalise about “the human condition”. However, it is a basic contention of this book that truths about the world are not dependent on perspective (Bell, 2009), and that there are existential “facts of life” (Money-Kyrle, 1968) that exist in all cultures, albeit that they may be represented and expressed in different ways.

Such a “traditional” psychoanalytic view, emphasising the universals of human experience rooted in biology and human vulnerability, rather than what is culturally specific, has become unfashionable. The obvious truism that there are biological as well as social limits to human aspiration – that we have to acknowledge generational and sexual difference, the reality of ageing and loss – sets itself against the many forces in contemporary intellectual, cultural, and social life that seek to present human beings as Protean, self-inventing, shape-shifting, changing identities at will, or as disembodied minds or selves. These ideologies of the independent autonomous self are reinforced by medical and technological innovation that promise to liberate human beings from the presumed burdens of the human body and the biological.

Meanwhile the idea of a dynamic “unconscious”, with repression as it main agency, can still attract opprobrium in the wider cultural sphere, as if the notion of the unconscious was “socially constructed” by psychoanalysis. However, that beliefs, emotions, and wishes can motivate human behaviour whilst they are partially or fully out of conscious awareness is the stuff of literature and folk culture the world over – “the heart has its reasons that the mind knows not”.

In this chapter I introduce a condensed and necessarily simplified description of some of the central themes of the psychoanalytic perspective on human mind and development, as they relate to the themes of this book, with the immediate caveat that there are many different psychoanalytic schools of thought; though a degree of pluralism is desirable, not all approaches are amenable to meaningful integration – in other words there are some schools that are mutually exclusive. An attempt, for example, to integrate contemporary American self-psychology with Freudian drive theory would lack the internal conceptual coherence necessary to offer a credible explanatory account (Hanly, 2009). I have endeavoured in my summary to bring together ego psychology – born out of Freud’s work, and continued by Anna Freud, focusing on the functioning of the ego in managing, modifying, and expressing drives and impulses – and object relations theory, emphasising relational development.

There are four areas of the psychoanalytic theory of the mind that I want to highlight. The first is that all mental events and phenomena are potentially meaningful and intelligible, within the context of the life history of the individual. This applies even to the most apparently bizarre and meaningless psychotic symptoms. The second is that of unconscious mental functioning, of a part of the mind that is omnipresent and dynamic, outside of awareness. The third is of inherent psychic conflict between different parts of the self: although there is, usually, a supra-ordinate “I” of subjective self-consciousness, the self is not a unitary subject. The fourth concerns a compulsion to repeat the relational patterns derived from early relationships throughout life, to transfer feelings initially aroused in relation to early attachment figures on to people in the present. Sometimes this is in the service of communication and development, a process that can become, particularly in a treatment setting, subject to reflection and modification. Sometimes, however, in what Freud termed the “compulsion to repeat” (Freud, 1920g), this is in the service of a destructive and/or self-sabotaging impulse.

If what makes us characteristically human is the capacity to reflect on experience, and to employ the flexible and symbolic properties of language, we also have to acknowledge the omnipresence of a part of the psyche that remains outside of conscious awareness and which is not available, unlike that which is preconscious, for normal introspection. There is a difference between the descriptively unconscious – feelings and thoughts that are not yet conscious – and the dynamically repressed unconscious. Freud believed that this part of mind is characterised by primary process thinking, in which “everything is permitted” and the pleasure principle dominates – there is no time, there is no death, there is mutual contradiction, wish fulfilment holds sway over the frustrations and delayed gratifications of reality. In the realm of the unconscious there are no constraints – anything is possible.

The ego by contrast is that part of mental functioning that is concerned with “secondary process” thinking. This is governed by the “reality principle”, and involves the testing out of internal perceptions and thoughts with external reality, the recognition of time, limitations, and the separateness of other people. It is orientated towards external reality, reason, and “common sense”, and the need to inhibit and control impulses, exercise restraint, delay gratification, appraise evidence, and test out perception. The ego, however, is not synonymous with conscious mental functioning. In all of us there are, for example, what Freud, later followed by his daughter Anna Freud (Freud, A, 1936) called “ego defences” – repression, denial, sublimation, displacement, and so on; protecting against anxiety and the consciousness of what might be inadmissible psychic conflict.

The dynamic repressed unconscious, an implacable force that can never be known directly, nevertheless gains expression through dreams, everyday slips of the tongue, and so on, and through psychological symptoms. Such phenomena have a symbolic meaning, and represent compromise formations between the forces seeking expression and fulfillment, and the forces of repression. They are multi-determined, and their true meaning is disguised through mechanisms such as condensation, the bringing together of different images and thoughts into a single motif, and displacement, where emotions are directed to an alternative object. The meaning of symptoms requires decoding; emotions can be divorced from their conceptual and ideational content, impulses, and wishes may be turned into their opposite, or turned against the self.

At the beginning of life there is only a rudimentary “ego” and the infant tends to relate to the other not as a “whole object”, or complete person, but as a “part object” or a function. At this point thinking is archaic (dominated by bodily processes and expressed in bodily terms), concrete, and dominated by anxiety and wish fulfilment. The first anxieties are those connected with helplessness and painful frustrations, somatic and instinctual tensions, and these are usually assuaged intuitively by the actions of the mother, or primary caretaker, to manageable proportions. A well-known example of this is the smiling response between mother and child. The child looks for the mother’s smiling response and when rewarded the smile broadens. When the mother does not respond in this way, the infants smile fades and is replaced with perplexity and unpleasure. Another anxiety associated with the growing bond with mother, is “stranger anxiety”, in which the infant clings to mother in the presence of new faces. A further anxiety is aroused by mother’s absence. As Freud put it, the child “cannot as yet distinguish between temporary absence and permanent loss” (1926d, p. 169). He famously described the game of peek-a-boo, played between child and mother, as a way of repeating and mastering this unpleasurable feeling state (1920g).

The origins of the ego, then, are in the mental representation of bodily experience and physical sensations. As development occurs, the growth of the ego is through a process of identification, and this becomes, in the orthodox psychoanalytic account, a way of representing the link between the individual and the social, between biology and culture (Frosch, 1987). Classically, it is the Oedipus complex that is the crucible of this process. In the male version of this constellation the child’s wish for an exclusive relationship with mother involves also his rivalry with a simultaneously loved and hated father. The wish to kill off father also provokes guilt and fear of retaliation. Normally, reality prevails and the wish is renounced and becomes subject to repression, and there is identification with father and paternal authority. These processes are complex; a part of the psyche may relinquish oedipal wishes and accept reality, whilst another part may remain in willful ignorance or outright opposition. At the same time there is also in human beings a “negative” version of the Oedipus complex, in which the desired object is of the same sex, and the rival becomes the parent of the opposite sex. This can lead, in boys, to a feminine identification, against which there may then be a masculine protest. The universal existence of such complex identifications, as Freud believed, attested to the innate psychic bisexuality of all human beings. From a psychoanalytic perspective these unconscious and often conflicting identifications permeate mental life and personality development.

The dissolution of the Oedipus complex involves the identification of son with father, and the sublimation of feelings towards mother, a process that involves the internalization of parental, and in particular, paternal authority. The heir to the Oedipus complex is the superego, that part of the psyche concerned with adhering to moral values, ideals, and prohibition. The father, representing the social order, past and present, has to be internalised in a relatively benign way. A key developmental factor is normally the strength of the superego; too weak leads to failures of conscience, and the internalisation of moral values, but too harsh and there will be savage internal judgements on self and others. Freud believed that this harshness was a sign of a primitive superego, infused with inner directed aggression, as is the case, as we shall see later, with melancholic states.

The contemporary object relations psychoanalytic understanding of human mind and development has its foundation in biology – the individual is decidedly not a tabula rasa or blank slate, the passive subject of social conditioning, but is also intersubjective and inescapably intrapersonal. The developing child requires the presence of at least another interested mind in order to internalise and identify with reflective thinking and mental functioning, in order to develop the capacity to think about rather than act on their emotions, and to imagine the mind and different perspective of another. In this way, what some psychoanalysts (Fonagy et al., 2002) have called the capacity to “mentalize”, to represent the mental state of self and others through thinking and words, is rudimentarily developed. From this perspective, relationally based emotional regulation is, optimally, gradually internalised as part of development.

In an averagely expectable environment there is instinctual reciprocity between child and mother that enables age specific maturational developments to take place. Although the child is initially unable to distinguish between self and other, it is int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Introduction
• 1 Psychoanalytic perspectives on subjectivity
• 2 Narcissism and loss
• 3 Embodied experience
• 4 Psychoanalytic perspectives on social dislocation and group regression
• 5 Destructive narcissism in history – Norman Cohn’s study of millennialism
• 6 Imagined communities – a historicised psychoanalytic perspective on the rise of nationalism
• 7 The downfall of destructive narcissism
• 8 Historical and psychoanalytic perspectives on Nazism
• 9 From the post-war settlement to the end of history
• 10 Lost worlds – the unmourned past as a psychic retreat
• 11 Problems with the defence
• 12 Subjectivism, postmodernism, and identity politics
• 13 A culture of narcissism?
• 14 Marketisation and subjectivism in mental health care – the importance of the paternal function
• 15 From dyadic to triadic – the postmodern turn in psychotherapy
• 16 Not in our name!
• 17 Everything is permitted, restrictions still apply
• 18 Post-crash, post-truth
• 19 Conclusion – a plea for a measure of universalism
• References
• Index