Abstract
Drawing on Freud's late work, I argue that the social traumas created by neoliberalism bring about perverse modes of subjectivity. When a truth is too painful to bear, Freud argues, we substitute for truth a less painful lie, a disavowal that, when regularly practiced, can issue in perversion. I argue that irrational exuberance, the shared delusion in the United States that, for example, housing prices and the stock market must always go up, ought not be attributed to the greed of ‘human nature’ but rather must be understood in its social context: as a response to the abandonment of the citizenry by government and by the free market fundamentalism that, after the mid-1970s, no longer provided even the bare minimum of security and safety offered by the US form of the welfare state. Clinical material illustrates some of the ways that neoliberal versions of subjectivity appear in symptoms and in the relational dynamics of treatment.
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Notes
Schell does not mention the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and I think that such omissions of traumatic events make it difficult to account fully for the psychological complexities of popular and even political response.
When, following Freud and Bion, I use the terms ‘truth’ and ‘lying’, I do not mean to imply that the turn away from painful experience is conscious; nor does my use of ‘truth’ imply transparency. Indeed, I am not speaking here of facts that can be labeled true or false. As I shall elaborate, I am speaking about relational interactions and interactions with the environment that are painful and defensively managed or avoided rather than, to use Bion's term, ‘suffered’ (see Abel-Hirsch (2006) for a connection between perversion and Bion's distinction between feeling pain and suffering pain). Hoggett (2000) has usefully distinguished between delusional dogmas and creative illusions. Drawing on Winnicott's (1974) use of transitional phenomena, Hoggett understands illusion to be a subject's way of negotiating the inevitable tension between what is internal and what is external. This is a felicitous way to handle the postmodern problem of speaking naively about truths. And yet, in the clinic, one is constantly faced with the patient's and therapist's habitual modes of self-deception, the resistance to acknowledging what, at some level, one knows to be true or will discover to be true. The power of resistance is in no small measure due to the fact that often what we take to be the most central aspects of the identity we have constructed, our very way of being in the world, relies on sustaining such deceptions.
Distinguishing between an ethic of justice and an ethic of care, Hoggett (2000, pp. 159–160) has pointed out that the British welfare state never adequately concerned itself with care, that is, with attention to the emotional needs and vulnerabilities of the population (as opposed to a focus on material needs). Thus, he finds it not surprising that the Thatcher/Reagan backlash against the welfare state centered on an attack against the so-called culture of dependency (pp. 164–165, 179). The attack was further executed by Blair and Clinton, who promulgated what became the widely shared fantasy that economic growth is the only way to address scarcity and vulnerability.
Note Esping-Andersen's (1990) contention that the UK welfare state, which once might have been characterized in his schema as a social democratic welfare regime, now more resembles the liberal regime characteristic of US welfare capitalism.
Of course, it is quite possible that the symptomatic part of this picture will re-emerge elsewhere in Sally's life. But I have been struck by how, at times, a change in circumstances can make something that has looked unconscious and deep-seated (see, for example, Volkan, 1988) seem rather easily changeable when the environment changes. For example, research by social psychologists Gaertner and Dovidio (2005) has shown that a change in environmental conditions makes a kind of unconscious racism seen in liberal subjects who consciously understand themselves to be non-racist (what Gaertner and Dovidio call aversive racism) seem to disappear.
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Layton, L. Irrational exuberance: Neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of truth. Subjectivity 3, 303–322 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.14