Political Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Freud’s position on the relationship between individuals and society, expressed most fully in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), is that the requirements of society are always opposed to the desires of individuals, with human instincts having to be controlled so that the collective can survive. In this view, it is inconceivable for a society to be based on principles of pure pleasure, the unfettered expression of sexual impulse; reality must enter into the organisation of the psyche, both to protect the social fabric against the destructive fury of people’s desires and to ensure the mobilisation of psychological energy for the work of civilisation. Thus, a link is formed between the restrictions of society and the direction that repression takes within the individual mind. Through the child’s developmental experiences, such as in the trauma of the Oedipus situation and its consequences (for example, the formation of the super-ego), expression of basic instinctual desires becomes modified and inhibited and a psychic structure is formed along lines which are compatible with the maintenance of social order. The impact of this process can be seen most clearly in the way the primitive possibilities of the new-born infant become organised around socially viable axes, notably those of gender and admissible sexuality. This is a description of how ordinary development takes place, but it is also, in Freud’s hands, a statement concerning the limitations of any programme of social reform. For Freud, all attempts to theorise alternative social configurations must founder on the necessary opposition of society to individual desires, because these desires are essentially anti-social, seeking pleasure for the individual in a blind and mechanistic way, or containing the potential for rampant destructiveness.