The Belaboured Economy of Desire

Abstract

On Friday 17 April 2015 a letter appeared in the Guardia. newspaper signed by 442 psychotherapists, counsellors and academics, addressed to the major political parties of the UK who were at that time preparing to fight a general election.¹ The letter condemned the austerity policies of the Conservative-led coalition government and damningly described the ‘profoundly disturbing psychological and quality-of-life implications’ of a ‘society thrown completely off balance by the emotional toxicity of neoliberal thinking’. As those that found themselves working at ‘the coalface in responding to the effects of austerity politics on the emotional state of the nation’, the cosignatories explicitly drew a link, despite the somewhat pervasive biopsychological reductionism of the psy-complex and the dominance of the medical model of mental disorder, between arrangements of social order and organisation on the one hand, and the development, impact and prevalence of mental disorder on the other. Society, it seems, can be pathogenic. To be fair the typical effect of the asymmetric binary had never suggested otherwise but rather tends to filter the impacts of social organisation through the central concept of ‘stress’, which is regarded as one of the main, proximate causes of mental disorder, albeit conditioned by genetic, temperamental factors.