Psychoanalysis And Politics: Historicising Subjectivity

Young-Bruehl

In her article, “Psychoanalysis and Social Democracy,” Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (2011[29]) constructs a narrative about the historical relations between psychoanalysis and post-WWII social democracy (with particular focus on the UK). Shaping this narrative is her view of the two most important post-war developments in left-wing psychoanalytic theory. The first is a realm of instinct theory that, she argues, Freud left under-theorised once having committed himself to the dual instinct theory of life and death: The ego-instincts, which include dependency needs, attachment needs, needs for love, care, and security. Post-war UK attachment theorists and British independents are the heroes of Young-Bruehl’s narrative, for they not only brought to the fore the importance of such needs, they also influenced social democratic policy. In so doing, these analysts contributed to what Young-Bruehl calls the general principle psychoanalysis and political progressives both came to champion: “Human beings cannot live well or happily in their families or communities or political arrangements unless these do not thwart their ego instincts” (p. 192).

The second psychoanalytic realm of theory to which Young-Bruehl draws attention is characterology, a field to which Freud contributed but which found its deepest elaborations in the work of left-wing analysts and theorists such as Reich, the Frankfurt School, and others concerned with problems of social inclusion and exclusion (problems that Young-Bruehl places under the umbrella term of “prejudice”). The neglect of the ego instincts again enters the narrative in her claim that Freudian characterologists were limited by a sole focus on sexual instincts. The post-war characterologists, on the other hand,

convinced post-war pragmatic socialists that they needed to focus their attention not just on class conflict and class struggle, but on all forms of social and political exclusion, as well as production of inequality – on all forms of prejudice considered as a social disease. Social democracy came to mean, in this sense, maximally inclusionary democracy, and the European social democrats designed programmes for bringing excluded peoples into citizenship and into the welfare states. (Young-Bruehl, 2011[29], p. 193)

Young-Bruehl goes on to discuss theorists who focus on dominant types of character within a society (for example, Adorno et al., 1950[1], and the authoritarian personality), as well as on the intergenerational transmission of dominant character types. Her narrative ends with the suggestion that the two realms, ego-instincts and characterology, need to be thought together. As she puts it, ego instinct theory tells you what humans need and characterology focusses politics on “equality and maximal inclusion of once-excluded groups, on human rights, and on political structures moving beyond nation-states and exclusionary sovereignty” (p. 194). Young-Bruehl’s own life work was in fact dedicated to the elucidation of different kinds of prejudices and the character types most closely associated with each kind. Her final work (2012[30]) took up a prejudice she felt she had overlooked in her earlier work (Young-Bruehl, 1996[28]), one closely connected to the thwarting of ego-instincts: the prejudice against children.

Alternate histories of modernity and subjectivity

Comparing historiographies

In Rose’s argument, that “love” became thought of as the element that would produce normal children in the two decades after World War II, we find a historiography that is diametrically opposed to the ones offered by both the individualisation theorists and by Young-Bruehl. Where Beck, Beck-Gernsheim, and Giddens suggest that an increasing “disembedding from tradition” promotes individual autonomy and particular kinds of intimate relationships, Foucaultian theorists argue that experts and their expertise have become the new tradition. In this view, post-war subjects feel free and yet are increasingly regulated by regimes of what is considered to be “normal”:

The representations of motherhood, fatherhood, family life, and parental conduct generated by expertise were to infuse and shape the personal investments of individuals, the ways in which they formed, regulated and evaluated their lives, their actions, and their goals (Rose, 1989[25], p. 132).

In Young-Bruehl’s account, Winnicott and others in the independent psychoanalytic tradition developed their theory, practice, and public policy in response to the trauma, devastation, and abandonments of World Wars I and II. Rose, on the contrary, places Winnicott’s work in the context of a long history of expertise, the primary effect of which was to abet and normalise a self-regulation designed to bring the individual into harmony with the culture’s institutions – an effect Rose describes as “governing the soul.”

In suggesting that an important element in the history of Western modernity has been the kind of normalisation that supports prejudices, the governmentality literature challenges both Young-Bruehl’s thesis as well as her historiography. This literature raises several important questions: are the positions and practices that define the good and the healthy those that work in the service of regulating the poor or unruly, those that normalise and optimise middle-class opportunity? Are they practices that fit subjects for a certain kind of society, one in which alternative practices are pathologised? These questions perhaps challenge Young-Bruehl’s assertions that humans need a certain kind of care to thrive and to be more resistant to prejudices. But Rose skirts the question central to Young-Bruehl’s project: Are there basic human needs that must be met for a democratic society to exist? If so, is there an important role for psychoanalysts to play in policy formation? Are psychoanalysts doomed simply to be lackeys of state and corporate power or might they offer a counter-discourse to contemporary social and political discourses?

Staking a claim

I write and think in a relational analytic tradition that is very much influenced by both the Budapest psychoanalytic school of Ferenczi and Balint and the British Independent tradition on which Young-Bruehl bases her analysis. Yet, at the same time, my work differs from Young-Bruehl’s, particularly in our understandings of social character. In this domain, I have been more influenced by the Frankfurt School and its heirs than by Freudian notions of character. From the 80s on, I have written, for example, about the relation between capitalism and narcissistic personality. Much of my work is related directly to the clinic and focusses on how the normalising practices of both the psychoanalytic field and of class, race, sex, and gender identity production are replicated in unconscious collusions between patient and therapist (Layton, 2002[13], 2006a[16], 2007[18], 2008[19], 2009[20]) – replications that I have referred to as normative unconscious processes. But, like Young-Bruehl, I also assume in my work that humans need reliable caretaking to thrive and to be able to negotiate among their dependency needs, needs for self-assertion, and needs for recognition. In different ways, both the individualisation literature and the governmentality literature suggest that such negotiations are not basic to being human but are rather a product of a particular historical formation. For example, as the Foucaultian tradition moves into researching post-welfare state subjectivities, we find arguments about how subjects now have to wrestle with the demands of neoliberalism. Binkley (2009[4]) argues that in order to produce the “enterprising” selves necessary to function in a world in which responsibilities for the population’s welfare have shifted from the public sphere onto the individual, people have to disidentify with the practices that had made them comfortable with dependency on the state (and dependency in general) and identify instead with practices that enable them to thrive in neoliberal free market and socio-political conditions. Looking at self-help books, the field of coaching, and positive psychology, Binkley (2011a[5], b[6]) persuasively identifies some of the practices that experts encourage people to adopt – and most of them work in the service of demonising dependency and interdependence.

While I find this work quite valuable, I think about these same phenomena somewhat differently. In my view, agentic strivings and strivings for connection are likely universal and basic to being human, but I believe such strivings are negotiated quite differently depending on prevailing norms for what a “proper” human in a particular time and place needs to do to get love, social recognition, and a sense of belonging.

From my 1990’s papers on gender to recent papers on neoliberal subjectivities (Layton, 2009[20], 2010b[22]), central to my work has been the effects of the cultural repudiation of what Young-Bruehl includes under ego instincts (most of which have been historically associated with femininity). I concur with Young-Bruehl that the classical psychoanalytic literature and the ego-psychological literature that was dominant in the US until recently generally valued most highly an autonomy based in separation from the other and denial of or overcoming of dependence.

This way of conceptualising an autonomy that splits off attachment needs connects quite directly with characterology, and so, like Young-Bruehl, I believe that the thwarting of “ego instincts” does indeed produce certain kinds of character. But, unlike Young-Bruehl’s version of characterology, which is rooted in Freudian character types and the defences particular to each type, I focus on the way character is formed by socio-historical conditions of inequality and the intergenerational transmission of the effects of inequality. More particularly, character, in my view, emerges in part from the social possibilities for negotiating autonomy and dependence that are available and/or denied to particular social groups, and with the way that inequalities of race, gender, class, sexuality inform practices that inflict humiliations and other psychological damage. In any culture or subculture, some ways of being and acting are recognised as “proper” by the social groups and families to which one wants to belong and be loved by, and some “improper.” What is unrecognised or felt to be improper is often split off. Disavowed “not-me” states have to be repeatedly defended against in identity performances and relational enactments that affirm the norm that caused psychic pain in the first place. Various kinds of character – or versions of subjectivity – or versions of living dependency and autonomy – are produced and sustained by these unconscious repetitions that I refer to as normative unconscious processes (Layton 2004a[14], 2006a[16], 2007[18]).

An example: In my early work on gender (Layton, 1998/2004[12]), I argued that the dominant ideals and ideologies of masculinity and femininity in the post-war US bred two subtypes of narcissism, each marked by cultural demands to split off some part of what it is to be human. Heterosexual masculinity, I argued (along with many other feminists), was marked by a self-centred version of autonomy produced by a denial of attachment needs and other ego instincts discussed above. The ideal of femininity was marked by a repudiation of autonomous strivings which often led, in practice, to hostile versions of dependency and severe conflicts over self-assertion. Different groups are subject to different forms of narcissistic wounding, but what gets split off and either dissociated or, as a Freudian might see it, repressed, are human needs and capacities, and character issues emerge when, for example, a man comes to feel that he cannot be both masculine and dependent. In my version of characterology, the narcissistic wounds suffered, for example, in conforming to socially and historically specific ideals of masculinity produce particular defences and ways of relating (transferences and counter-transferences) that become normative. Each social group’s ways of defending against its wounds tend to inflict wounds on other groups – and these processes of mutual wounding need to be studied always with reference to the particular power arrangements within which they unfold.

In more recent work (Layton, 2009[20], 2010b[22]), I, too, have tried to historicise what seems to me to be, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, an increasing general revulsion toward dependence and vulnerability. Before being conscious of “neoliberalism” as a form of governmentality, I wrote, for example, about the way that television shows of the 90s were normalising for middle-class women the same counter-dependent norms for subject formation that had until then prevailed for middle-class men (Layton, 2004b[15]) – again producing a particular kind of social character with particular psychosocial defences. When dependence and interdependence are repudiated and made shameful, as they have been in the neoliberal US – where the attack on the poor and vulnerable continues unabated, where social policies tear away at the containment and care offered by the welfare state, and where income inequality is at or close to historic highs – you find characteristic narcissistic defences against trauma: retaliation and withdrawal, oscillations between grandiosity and self-deprecation, devaluation and idealisation, denials of difference and the rigid drawing of boundaries between who is “in” and who is “out” (Layton, 2006b[17], 2009[20], 2010b[22]).

Psychoanalysis and progressive politics

In “normalising” dependency and interdependence as part of what it means to be human, and in critiquing versions of autonomy that deny an embeddedness in relation, contemporary psychoanalytic theory (particularly relational analytic theory and all those theories indebted to the Hungarian and British Independent traditions lauded by Young-Bruehl) offers something of a counter-discourse to hegemonic neoliberal discourses. All of the psychoanalytic theories of which I am aware certainly counter what Binkley describes as the versions of subjectivity promoted in neoliberal discourses, that is, theories and practices that have no use for looking within for understanding suffering, for thinking about an individual’s problems in the context of relationships, or for any notion of unconscious process that divides the self against the self. Where psychoanalysis certainly falls short, however, is in its continued separation of the psychic from the social, its general refusal to understand what people suffer from as having something to do with societal conditions. So I do believe in the importance of Young-Bruehl’s project to question and think historically about what psychoanalytic theories promote as the good. I do not think that the practices promoted by psychoanalysis are inherently democratic, precisely because of the way the social is dissociated from conceptualisations of subjectivity.

One effect of the way psychoanalysis separates the psychic and the social is that psychoanalysts today, in the US at least, have little impact on public policy. But the marginalisation of psychoanalysis is not the fault of psychoanalytic theory alone: It is also in no small measure due to the dominance of neoliberal discourses. Perhaps precisely because psychoanalysis has lost its hegemony and become a minority discourse, we find current trends in psychoanalysis that do connect with progressive politics, trends that likely also grew out of the progressive politics of the 60s, a time in which many of our current theorists came of age. Among these trends, I would include the radical questioning and re-thinking of the authority of the analyst and the awareness of the effect of the analyst’s unconscious on treatments (e.g., Mitchell, 1997[24]; Hoffman, 1998[11]); re-formulations of theory that acknowledge the power inequities inherent in many social norms and that thus work to challenge power and depathologise non-normative ways of being; and a commitment, in some quarters at least, to think about the ways that politics enter the clinic (Samuels, 2001[26]; Layton et al., 2006[23]).

Take home message

1. Although the theorists I discuss in this paper conceptualise the relation between modernity and subjectivity quite differently, they, and I, agree that social, political, and cultural institutions tend to produce versions of subjectivity characteristic of their time and place.

2. Human needs for assertion, connection, and recognition might well be universal, but it is important to understand how needs are negotiated differently in different socio-historical conditions.

3. Although psychoanalytic theory colludes with the dominant Western cultural practice of separating the psychic from the social, it yet offers a counter-discourse to what has been neoliberalism’s characteristic repudiation of dependency needs and denial of mutual interdependence.