Writing about social movements since the 1960s, Nancy Fraser (1997) has argued that social policies have to address two different but overlapping kinds of problems to create a just society:  inequalities in wealth (problems of redistribution), and social inequalities between, for example, whites and nonwhites, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals (what she calls problems of recognition).  The liberal state, she says, is only willing to redistribute wealth on a surface level so as not to disrupt the capitalist status quo.  Because of this, its social policies, for example, affirmative action, tend to heighten group differences and create new antagonisms, premised as they are on the assumption that the dominant group, through its largesse, is giving a gift, one that rightfully belongs to them, to the subordinate group.  These policies are further premised on the notion that the very identities of the two groups are discrete and dichotomous.  Psychoanalytically speaking, in the liberal paradigm the dominant group does not have to look at the neediness, want, dependency that its members have split off and projected in order to attain a privileged identity.

In what follows, I want to look at what brings about change in the psychoanalytic treatment of individuals and how that might carry over to thinking about social change.  Keeping in mind Fraser’s challenge to restore the link between problems of redistribution and problems of recognition, I examine what kind of individual difficulties a capitalist system seems to create.  My argument is that bourgeois ideology splits the individual from the social, and in so doing fosters narcissistic character, an impoverishment of individuality in which dependence is repudiated and difference not tolerated.
 
Many who have written about Western ideology, whether from a Marxist or feminist, a psychoanalytic or non-psychoanalytic perspective, have argued that the ideological cornerstone of bourgeois capitalist democracies is the sacrosanct belief in the free individual.  Slavoj Zizek (1994), for example, writes that the ideology of the free individual is the main symptom of capitalist society, a symptom produced by denying  a system of exploitative relations premised precisely on the lack of freedom of the wage laborer.  In the 40s, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) already saw that “pseudo-individuality” was rife.  And Althusser (1971), too, argued that ideology exists in institutional practices that instantiate the fantasy that the individual is free. The new social movements of the 50’s to 70’s taught Marxists that these exploitative relations do not operate in the economic sphere alone but in all hierarchies, such as those of race, sex, and gender (which are of course intertwined with economic hierarchies).

The ideology of the free individual is, particularly in the U.S. context, closely connected with self-reliance and an extreme individualism that denies connections of all kinds.  As Barthes (1957) and others have written, two of the main tropes by which bourgeois ideology operates are dehistoricization, which involves naturalizing and universalizing what is actually specific to a given historic moment and a given constellation of relations, and what Barthes calls ex-nomination, by which the class that has the most economic and symbolic power refers to itself as “man” or “human,” anything but white or upper middle class or owners of the means of production.  As Barthes writes:
 

 . . . practised on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident
 laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its
representations, the more naturalized they become.  The fact of the bourgeoisie
becomes absorbed into an amorphous universe, whose sole inhabitant is Eternal
Man, who is neither proletarian nor bourgeois. . . .The same “natural” varnish
covers up all “national” representations:  the big wedding of the bourgeoisie,
which originates in a class ritual (the display and consumption of wealth), can
bear no relation to the economic status of the lower middle-class:  but through the
press, the news, and literature, it slowly becomes the very norm as dreamed,
though not actually lived, of the petit-bourgeois couple.  The bourgeoisie is
constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not
have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination, that is, at the
cost of an immobilization and an impoverishment of consciousness.  By spreading
its representations over a whole catalogue of collective images for petit-bourgeois
use, the bourgeoisie countenances the illusory lack of differentiation of the social
classes:  it is as from the moment when a typist earning twenty pounds a month
recognizes herself in the big wedding of the bourgeoisie that bourgeois ex-
nomination achieves its full effect. (140-141)

Both dehistoricization and ex-nomination are ideological forms of decontextualization, the unlinking of things that, if experience is to make sense, need to be linked.  Indeed, what primarily sustains the ideology of the “free individual” is an active and continuously constructed process of decontextualization, most obvious in the media but clear as well in every one of Bush’s speeches, in most discussions of corporate wrongdoing, in the medicalization of psychological problems, in discussions of what is wrong with our schools and in most discussions of social policy.  Dominant ideology works very diligently on a number of fronts to hide the systemic nature of inequalities of all kinds, to make sure that an individual’s problems seem just that, individual.

Because dominant cultural discourses conspire in this decontextualization, the systemic unlinking begins to operate not only on a conscious but on an unconscious level.  But it operates differently depending on one’s position in various social hierarchies.  For example, while it may not be terribly difficult for African Americans or Hispanics to be aware of the systemic nature of racial discrimination, whites of all classes seem actively to work against making links between the free individual and social systems.  On the individual level, ideology takes hold as an unconscious resistance to making links that threaten privilege.  Indeed, the ideology of the free individual is so ubiquitous in American institutions that even members of subordinated groups often buy into it, contributing further to their own oppression.

The decontextualized, free individual that functions both best and worst in the contemporary world is one with more or less severe narcissistic character problems (see Livesay 1985; Sloan 1996).  Narcissism refers to the difficulty experiencing oneself as simultaneously a separate center of initiative and empathically and intimately connected to others.  In my view, it is a disorder marked by a split in the relation between attachment capacities and agentic capacities, a split that emerges because of the mutually exclusive way each set of capacities is defined and because of the higher value placed on agentic capacities.  Once the two sets of capacities are artificially split in accord with dominant ideology, all sorts of symptoms emerge.  Again, the way the splits are lived out symptomatically vary depending on one’s position in a variety of social hierarchies. If the ideology of the free individual highly values self-reliance, then the psyche of those at the top of any hierarchy will be formed by wanting and needing to be associated with that and those at the bottom will have projected onto them the rejected opposite--and to a greater or lesser extent they will live the projection out:  for instance, many theorists (Benjamin 1988) have noted that the classic white upper middle class male position is marked by a kind of self-reliant autonomy that denies its roots in attachments, whereas the classic white upper middle class female position has, at least until recently (see Layton 2002a), been defined by the projection of the unwanted traits of emotionality, dependence, vulnerability.  Attempts positively to revalue the female position note the way this kind of attachment can provide rich connections with others but note also that such a form makes it hard to carry out other kinds of autonomous pursuits.  I have argued elsewhere (Layton 1998) that these dominant versions of masculinity and femininity are two subtypes of narcissism, and further, that the psyches of those from subordinated U.S. subcultures have to take up some kind of position relative to these dominant constructs, be it rejection or embrace.  Black dependency and self-reliance are marked by their relation to white ways of defining the terms; indeed most social identities are marked by the particular ways that agency and dependency are split asunder and associated with all kinds of other attributes, such as laziness, mastery, emotionality, etc.  All of us are marked psychically by a dominant discourse that pulls for narcissistic character and relating.

Other symptoms of the narcissism characteristic of the free individual (see Kohut 1971, 1977), symptoms that follow from the impoverished definition of autonomy as self-reliance and of attachment as submission, and from the mandated split between them, include a harsh, punitive superego that makes it difficult to have empathy either for the self or for others, an oscillation between grandiosity and self-deprecation, an oscillation in which one either absorbs difference into sameness or rigidly dichotomizes us and them, an oscillation between demands for merger and withdrawal from relationship, and a relation to one’s object that oscillates between idealization and devaluation but has difficulty finding middle ground.  Indeed, difficulty finding middle ground may be the most striking characteristic of the disorder.  And could it be otherwise in a culture that itself knows no middle ground?  This constellation makes the free individual, whether of the self reliant or the dependent subtype, anything but free.

Narcissistic pathology is mediated by the incapacity of parents to see their children as separate from themselves and nurtured by a society in which parents have fewer and fewer social supports that would enable them to do so.  Because of their own disappointments, their own difficulties individuating, their own historical circumstances, narcissistic parents project onto their children their hopes, their dreams, their defects, their rage, and their children come to feel that they must be the right kind of child to be lovable.  Narcissistic parents tend to use humiliation to get the child to take on a proper relation to class, race, gender, sexuality.  This sets us up to hate something in ourselves in order to be loved, another version of what Patricia Williams (1997) has referred to as learning hate in a context of love.  Often, what we come to hate is associated with weakness and dependence, and the conflict this produces is too often resolved by projecting what is hated onto others.  A friend of mine whose early life was dominated by a father who wanted him to go to medical school and take his place among the upper class, was repeatedly asked, whenever he did something that did not show enough scholarly promise, whenever he wasn’t serious enough,  “So what do you want to be, a truck driver?”   The hate learned here is certainly, as Williams argues, for the truck driver and all those at the lower end of the class hierarchy.  But the hate is psychically sustained by my friend’s hate for the needy and not “serious” parts of self.  This kind of shaming ritual creates identities based in narcissistic injury, injury that splits the self.

The fewer the social supports available outside the family, the more the child will be affected by the parents’ conscious and unconscious worldview.  It is not only a parent’s narcissism, however, but many forms of social constraint and taboo that collude to encourage a child to take on the attributes that would make him or her the right kind of child.  To be the right kind of child has different content depending on class, racial, sexual, and gender positions. These identity elements exist in cultural hierarchies that themselves provide numerous possibilities for narcissistic wounding. Ideology keeps cultural hierarchies in place by assigning positive attributes to certain ways of being, self-reliance, to stick to our earlier example, and negative attributes to other ways, in this case dependence.  As we saw earlier, the very dividing up of the definitional possibilities of dependence and independence in this way is ideological, premised as it is on taking the individual out of relational context.  Cultural hierarchies function ideologically by dictating the proper way to live a particular racial, sexual, class, gender position.   Cultural demands are made to split off particular attributes that do not garner love or approval.  The loss of the pieces of ourselves that we split off to take on the right identity, the one that will make us a welcome group member, and the way that process of splitting deforms both what is split off and projected and what remains that we claim as our own, disrupt the possibility of  connections based in mutuality and not in narcissism.  A social, or what I have called normative unconscious (Layton 2002b) becomes the repository in the individual of the demand to shape oneself in accord with social constraints, and that aspect of the unconscious, rooted as it is in a need for love and approval, puts up the greatest resistance to change on an individual and a cultural level.

All too few people in this culture ever feel like the right kind of person, and many enter treatment seeking to become the right kind while still holding on to the hope that they will be loved as they are.  One paradox of treatment is that they at some point or another make it very hard for the clinician to love them as they are, for if they discover that it is possible to be loved like this, they must re-write their history and really know the limits of the love offered by their parents.  This is psychically tantamount to a betrayal of their parents.  And people tend, unconsciously at least, to be tenaciously loyal to their early attachments.  The inability to mourn the deep pain experienced in their most intimate relationships produces symptoms and is a hallmark of narcissistic disorder. To mourn requires a kind of re-contextualizing that is both painful and that goes very much against the grain of common sense.  The resistance to mourning produces the repetition compulsion that causes the clinical couple to repeat the same relational dance over and over again.  As frustrating as that repetition can be, therein lies the hope for change, because each repetition is a little different, and each is followed by reflection on what happened and the surprise of discovering that the relationship endures, that the dance did not destroy it.

The following vignette is about a client with the kinds of narcissistic difficulties I find quite prevalent in the white middle class people I treat.  R. is a 50 year old lesbian small business owner who came into treatment because she felt dead inside, did not feel that she had any attachments that really mattered, indeed, felt that if she died that day five years ago few would come to her funeral and those who did would have nothing to say, so little had she lived and so little did anyone know about her.  No one took care of R., nor did she seek care-taking.  In the split system of attachment and autonomy, R. had pretty much repudiated attachment and constantly squelched her longings for it.  Although she identified as female and lesbian, she rejected all sorts of things culturally called “feminine,” including dependency.  The denial of attachment needs was experienced symptomatically as boredom  in social settings:  she would frequently say that she never remembered things about people she met socially, even those she had known over several years, because she just wasn’t interested.  This was surprising because in very short order she became interested in every small movement I made, every change of clothes, every item I had in my office.  In part, this interest derived from an assumption that we were the same, an anxious wish, because if we weren’t the same either she or I risked being judged deficient.  Difference always denoted a relation of inferiority and superiority as it so often does in the dominant discourses that support this character structure.  For R., every interaction was a performance, usually one she expected to fail.  For years she felt that I already knew the answer to most of the questions I asked her, and, equally important, she thought there was only one right answer to any question.  Everything felt either/or to her and every act had the potential to be judged negatively.
 
Although R. had a domestic partner of 14 years, she had taken on the gendered, raced, and classed position of defensive autonomy, working 6 or 7 days a week with little break.  While anyone in the outside world would have seen her as self-reliant, she was so worried about doing something stupid, saying the wrong thing, not getting it right, that she usually felt at my mercy psychologically (the real reason she avoided relationships, not the alleged reason, that she finds them boring).  The work with R. was marked by constant iterations of the doer-done to scenario, in which she either felt criticized by me or launched her own attack either of rage or pushy intrusiveness.  There were also moments of utter lovingness and generosity, moments that got us through more than one tough stretch (one counts on there being some parts of the psyche that have not been damaged by narcissistic relating, see Layton 1998, Ch. 2).

R.’s parents were deeply narcissistic.  Father was a my way or the highway kind of guy, explosive with rage.  Her only way to assert herself was to slam her bedroom door in his face.  Mother was much more benign and loving, but she also was quite judgmental and R. never felt she was doing things the right way for her mother.  Her spontaneous outbursts of any kind—crying, exuberance—were often met with mockery. Either she did things as her parents wished or she was unlovable.  In this atmosphere, R. never experienced what it is like to negotiate, work out a difference of opinion or a difference in ways of being.

R. was chronically dysthymic through her life, as are most people with severe narcissistic injury, and when she was in a bad state she could remember nothing positive about herself or her work with me.  When she felt good, she felt very, very good—hopeful that things were changing and that she just might someday feel that she had actually lived her life.  In these periods, she might take an art class, start a friendship, take a day off from work and go out shooting pictures.  But when she was in a bad state, she felt very, very bad, certain that this state was “her,” and that she would always return to this particular square one.  In such a state, she was absolutely brutal to herself, convinced she was a shameful failure who had done very little right in her life.  At these moments, I, too, could do very little right.  If I reminded her of her other state, an attempt at contextualization, she felt I wasn’t with her emotionally.  If I empathized, she’d say something devaluing about that just being a therapy technique.

In a recent session she was castigating herself, as she is wont to do, for not getting enough done.  Like many small businesses, hers has not been doing well in the past year, but she never understands her failure in that context.  She, after all, is part of the Smith family, and Smiths are winners, not losers.  She suffers in a special way, one that doesn’t seek affinity with other forms of suffering and makes it seem as though to suffer or not depends on her capacity to get it wrong or get it right.  She is failing, she thinks, because she isn’t organized enough, isn’t getting enough done during the day.  Having approached this particular omnipotent/devaluing split hundreds of times with her analytically, I chose on this day to take a cognitive behavioral approach and gave her a few time management suggestions, including doubling the time she thinks something is going to take.  Then I threw in a self-disclosure and told her that I often think it’s going to take me an hour to read something that takes two.  She said, in a tone that implied that anyone would agree, “Don’t you get furious with yourself when it takes two?”  Since that’s hardly how I feel, I returned to an analytic stance to explore with her why she gets furious with herself, an inquiry that led back to childhood scenes.  In these scenes, she was a very special person by virtue of being a Smith, but there was always a particular way to be a Smith if you wanted love, and that way included wearing your hair and your shirt collars a certain way, not reading when you’re supposed to be out playing with friends, in short, figuring out what it entailed to be the right kind of person.  The psychic cost of living the ideology of the free individual is precisely in living this paradox:  self-reliant, what common sense calls independent, but always unsure of oneself and therefore utterly dependent on the outside for clues as to how to be (a dependency consumerism is only too happy to manipulate).

What worked with this patient?  I would say that there have been several motors of change, all intertwined, all in the service of recontextualizing what had been decontextualized, integrating dependent and emotional vulnerabilities that had been split off.  Primary is probably the fact that the relationship endured all her attacks, disappointments, moments of hopelessness, and it endured not because I didn’t get defensive and/or retaliate sometimes, but because, unlike what happened in her home, we talked about the ruptures and she knew I wanted to repair them, that it mattered to me how she felt.  I frequently pointed out to her how brutal she was to herself, how comfortable she was with self-denigration and with hoping for little from life, and eventually my questioning made it no longer seem quite as “natural” to feel that way.  I often disclosed to her that her assumptions about our being the same were not correct, and, over time, as we talked about the fear of inferiority that lay behind her need for us to be the same, she began to say she felt more and more like an equal with just a different way of doing things.

Second is that, very slowly, over much time she came to see that her depressed  states did not occur out of the blue as she had insisted for years.  Rather, she realized that they were always precipitated by some emotional slight.  To recognize this was to recognize for the first time the significance of attachments and the costs of defensive autonomy.  This free individual had bought her freedom by eliminating from consciousness the relational events that would have made her loneliness and depression make sense.  Her recognition also entailed acknowledging that the good states were as much “her” as were the bad states, that melancholia was not her biological fate.  One day she realized that she had the option to hear something I said as critical or to hear it as an offer of help, a way of giving her, as she put it, a leg up.  This realization was startling to her and she began to notice more and more that she had this choice in other contexts.  After years of showing her how she engineered things in her life and in the relationship between us to be either/or when they could be both/and, she began to experience things as possibly both/and.  Her questions to me about my own personal preferences or how I do things began to feel less intrusive, and I could begin to love her less ambivalently.  As these things began to happen, she would have periods of sadness in which she was in touch like never before with the years that had gone by unlived.  Like Henry James’s John Marcher (1903), she realized that the beast in the jungle she feared would get her some day had already sprung long ago, condemning her to an unlived life until she took the risk of relationship—which, unlike the very narcissistic Marcher, she had done by the act of entering and staying in treatment.

We are still working, and I have noticed that as her narcissism eases up, as she is less brutal to herself, she can let in things about the social world, things that put her experience in a broader, less personal context.  For example, she can occasionally recognize that other people with small businesses are also currently having a hard time keeping afloat (whereas a year ago, she saw no societal relation between the bankruptcy of the small business that was one of her customers and her own business troubles).  My guess is that a greater tolerance for her own vulnerabilities allowed her to see the systemic aspect of her woes and so to empathize with others similarly suffering.  In a recent session in which she was talking about her difficulty finding time to do all she needs to do and still have time for a life outside work, I said off-handedly, “What if it’s not you that’s insane but the world?”  She stopped dead in her self-deprecating tracks and started to talk about capitalism and corporate greed, not in a way that was a distraction from treatment but in an emotionally engaged way that by putting what belonged outside out, freed up emotional energy within.

So how might what we have learned about change from clinical experience be applicable to social change?  Sadly, I do not think that narcissistically disturbed individuals will truly be free so long as capitalism’s free market requires a split between autonomy and dependence and holds the monopoly on freedom.  Indeed, cultural resistance to change is perhaps most obvious in responses to any social problem whose solution requires a redistribution of wealth.  Time and again, for example, we find the same liberal responses to the fact that school test scores are highest in the wealthy suburbs and lowest in poor urban areas:  better teachers, stronger principals, curriculum change but never the obvious need for redistribution of emotional and financial resources.  I am suggesting that the splitting off and repudiation of dependency needs plays a role in this cultural blind spot. I sat in disbelief during the Anita Hill hearings when senators could not comprehend how Hill could have followed her boss to a second job if he had actually harassed her.  What denial did they have to practice not to remember what it is like to be a subordinate in a job, or in a family for that matter?  My guess is that this was a prime example of the normative unconscious protecting privilege by splitting off awareness of dependent feelings.  Indeed, all positions at the top of hierarchies seem to share a repudiation of dependency needs, and the more one participates in privilege, the less one is able to tolerate dependency.  In part, this is because, as we have seen, the splitting of autonomy and dependence makes dependence a frightening state equated with little autonomy.  Dependence is projected onto the poor, onto blacks, onto women, such that hatred of the Other and hatred of one’s own dependency are tightly interwoven, and distance must be maintained between the self and the Other who holds the dependency needs.

If what we see in such instances as Hill-Thomas does have an unconscious component, it is important to know that—if it isn’t just a cognitive limit, you’ll need more than a “just say no” social policy.  You will need social programs that focus on creating a different relation between autonomy and dependence, ones that positively revalue vulnerability and need, ones that build on simultaneously seeking sameness and valuing difference.  Without that, all rhetoric and programs that ideologically link poverty and race to dependence without taking up the way dependence is repudiated by dominant ideology are bound further to entrench the psychological distance between rich and poor, black and white.

Psychoanalysis can tell us much about why people hold onto privilege for dear life, and how that holding on demands splitting off so much of oneself that one becomes incapable of even cognitively understanding the links between the individual and the systemic, but psychoanalysis cannot change a light bulb that doesn’t want to change.  In my experience, nothing gets through to those most narcissistically invested in maintaining privilege.  Only a social movement that makes the links between the individual and the system clear can really force the kind of change that will bring about a “free” individual.  That said, I do think that what we have learned from treatment about how narcissistic relating works can be applied to those situations in which people want to change.  So let us imagine a situation in which participants come to work on their internalized racism, which, as I have suggested, will have something to do with splitting autonomy and dependence and associating despised attributes with the racial other.  How to combat the resulting narcissistic vulnerability?  First, a safe space must be created, one in which anything can be said, in which blaming, shaming, and even idealization are consistently analyzed.  Individual treatment suggests that behind every stereotype, behind all hostility, is anxiety, even terror—about dependence, abandonment, about being the wrong kind of person and therefore unlovable, about whether or not the unlovableness of the abject other is contagious.  If the space is safe enough that anxieties can openly be discussed, I imagine that empathy might begin to develop, a recognition of what is the same and what is different in the experience of being raced humans (Judith Jordan of the Stone Center does a lovely exercise to build empathy in children, by having them take off their shoes, put on somebody else’s, and imagine what it is like to be them).  A more difficult task is to try to help people see that what they fear or hate about the other likely has to do with some part of the self that they have disowned and need to own—difficult because, as I said, this is all bound up with loyalty to internalized loved ones.  But if people who hold rigid racist stereotypes can come to understand what it is in themselves that they hate, you are light years beyond what is accomplished by just say no programs that rely on reason.

With all of this you are on your way to breaking down the logic of either/or, the logic of shame and blame, idealization and devaluation.  In individual treatment, it is often the case that a patient only sees one or two ways of handling a situation, and these ways often involve either withdrawing or retaliating, submitting or dominating.  From where I sit, I can usually see many more possibilities that my patient cannot see.  But it doesn’t help much to tell patients what those possibilities are if they are stuck in the either/or.  For the either/or is sustained not by reason but by fantasy and fear.  What does work is to try to understand their experience—what makes it seem to them that it has to be this way and no other.  Options only become available to consciousness after people truly feel their experience is understood, and I imagine that this might hold true in large groups as well.

Change in psychoanalytic treatment is very painful and very slow, two things held in low regard in U.S. culture. Yet, people who come for psychotherapeutic treatment suffer, in a variety of ways, from the decontextualizing effects of U.S. culture.  The radicality of psychoanalysis in part consists in helping the patient re-contextualize a life in which the so-called free individual has been set adrift.  With consciousness-raising, the women’s movement discovered a wonderful tool for making links between the free individual and social systems, but even c-r comes up against the limits of consciousness.  Therapy, called upon to do so as it may be, can never replace all the communal social supports that have been gradually peeled away in the course of modernization.  Yet analysis does make systemic what at first feels to the patient purely individual.  Psychoanalysis is particularly adept at helping patients to re-integrate parts of self that have been split off, to hold and own the great range of contradictory feelings and experience endemic to being human.  As such, it challenges dominant discourses.  But at the same time, psychoanalysis, which has nothing to say about the redistribution of wealth that would be necessary really to bring about a shift in the autonomy-dependency relation, is a dominant discourse, with its own normative unconscious that operates to keep the connections between individuals and social systems out of the consulting room.  It seems to me that to combat the decontextualization from which so many suffer, we must bring into treatment what we know about the connection between individuals and larger social systems and bring into social policy what we know about narcissistic character and narcissistic relating. Good social policy and good psychoanalysis have to attend to linking again what dominant discourses have split apart.

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Copyright: The Author

LYNNE LAYTON is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School and teaches popular culture at Harvard University. She is co-editor of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, a candidate at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, author of  Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, and co-editor of Bringing the Plague: Towards a Postmodern Psychoanalysis.