This being an age of reflexivity and self-scrutiny, I will begin with some reflections on the institution of the inaugural lecture. For one thing, it is quite an indulgence for the lecturer: freedom to talk about whatever you like, no conference agenda or student learning outcomes to worry about, and a drink immediately afterwards. In this privileged context, I am refusing the temptation to show off my Powerpoint skills, which admittedly would not take very long. Instead, much as I am in favour of new educational technologies, I will risk a return to the basic form of the lecture, which consists simply of speech.

In other ways, the inaugural is an especially difficult lecture to write. Is it for looking back on work you have done, or - as the term ‘inaugural’ suggests - for looking forward to what you will be doing in the post (which in fact I have occupied for some three years now)? It’s also an open event, so your audience is potentially very mixed, and some people will know something of your work and others won’t. I’ve tried to put together the right blend of material, guided by the principle that whatever else it does a lecture should provide some materials for thinking with.

I have promised to offer a ‘psychosocial’ analysis, and would like to say what that means. It means an approach which requires a continuing dialogue between psychological and social levels of understanding. We know that we can never completely integrate the levels; it is inevitable and desirable that different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities speak in different voices and register different realities. But while this will probably continue to be the case, the growth of interdisciplinary work in many areas, and the emergence of new ‘disciplines’ which are themselves composites, testifies to the inadequacy of  the traditional intellectual division of labour for posing and answering today’s questions about what kind of society we live in and what kinds of people we are, and about where we might all be heading. For psychosocial studies, there is one major boundary in that division of labour which we insist must be made much more permeable if adequate ways of exploring and understanding some vital questions are to be developed. This is the boundary between on the one hand those disciplines and sub-disciplines which examine the subjective, the personal, and the internal world of the individual, and on the other those which are concerned with material conditions, and with the shared social world of institutions, roles and meanings, in short with the external world of society and culture. Psychosocial studies is about the constant traversing of this boundary, and the infusion of agendas on each side of it with the concerns of the other side.

I feel very privileged to have participated in the development of this intellectual project at East London over the last twenty years or so, and in the establishment of a department in which most of our teaching and research activity is primarily based upon it. We believe that psychosocial analysis can contribute powerfully to the development of policy and practice in many areas, most obviously in relation to the family, education, mental health care and the organisation and delivery of health and welfare services generally, but also in relation to crime and responses to it, the development of the media, the analysis of consumer markets and of marketing practices, and the management of change in organisational and political cultures. In the Department of Human Relations we have ongoing work that is oriented to practical issues in a number of these fields.

However even within our department there are a number of theoretically different realisations of the psychosocial agenda. Interdisciplinarity does in a sense bring people together, but it also multiplies the numbers of perspectives from which to choose. In psychosocial studies the differences concern the choice of frameworks from each side of the psychology/sociology boundary. One can study the subjective inner world using psychoanalysis or narrative psychology or person-centred psychology, and so on, while someone’s framework for understanding the external world may be drawn, for example, from theories of what ‘postmodernity’ is, or from some more traditional body of sociological theory, or from an orientation to a specific policy context. My own preference has been for a combination of various psychoanalytic ideas with concepts drawn from the sociology of cultural change. My reason for pursuing psychoanalytic lines of enquiry is this: however bizarre or uncongenial they may at times seem to be, psychoanalysis more than any other psychological theory offers resonant ways of thinking about the turbulence and the longings that are at the heart of every individual, and rich ways of capturing the complexity of experience. At the same time it has to be said that psychoanalysis is all too easily satisfied with its own discourse, and needs a far more open and informed relationship with other bodies of knowledge.

A psychosocial analysis of any kind requires that the inner and outer dimensions of whatever one is studying are each explored and that the results of those explorations are then brought together in some way. With this background in our minds let me move on to the general concepts of authority and popularity. What I will be trying to say is this: what is often thought of as a crisis of authority may be less of a terminal crisis than a deep change in the nature of authority. Some developments in the political culture, such as the increasing attention being paid to the private lives of politicians and the prominence of  so-called ‘spin doctoring’, are not signs of a regrettable (and possibly reversible) corruption or collapse of political authority, but are an integral part of how our culture is changing in quite general ways. As such they are an open-ended development, and they may be related to political values in complex but positive ways, rather than being symptomatic of an overall decline in values.

Firstly, authority. Much of theoretical sociology is implicitly a sustained rumination on the disintegration of traditional authority over the last two hundred years or so, yet there is not much sociological writing on authority as such. A number of political philosophers have written about it in recent decades, but in sociology there has been a relative silence, broken only occasionally as in Richard Sennett’s fine essay on authority of 1980. Sennett suggests that this silence is because there is in liberal democracies a deep distrust of authority. Authorities are figures on whom we depend, and Sennett argues that in the modern era of market relations dependency has become a source of shame and insecurity. This results in our anxious antipathy towards authority. We might add that in the left-liberal culture which dominates social science there is a particularly marked antipathy to the idea of authority. This has affected social psychology as much as sociology. The only work which I was asked to study in my undergraduate psychology curriculum explicitly on the subject of authority was Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, reported in 1963 - the ones in which people are told to administer electric shocks to someone else (who is actually an actor), and to increase the voltage to what they believe is a fatal level. However well-meaning it might have been, that work now has to be seen as a piece of theatrical manipulation, a dramatisation of preconception masquerading as scientific enquiry. In it, the portrayal of  ‘authority’ is a postwar technophobic residue of the experience of Nazism; it is limited to madmen in white coats insisting that people kill others, and cannot envisage the possibility of a good authority. Here as elsewhere in postwar social science we find that authority is conflated with authoritarianism, and moreover with a particularly malign form of authoritarian domination.

Secondly, popularity. The category of popularity has also evaded much direct attention in mainstream social theory, and has been left by lofty academics to the grubby empirical labours of the psephologists and the market researchers. Again deep social and political prejudice is at work; Raymond Williams records that the word ‘popular’ has always had unfavourable associations, stemming from elite disdain for the masses and the common people. Despite the rise of cultural studies and of more positive evaluations of ‘popular culture’, the elitism which runs through British culture seems still to mean that most academics view many objects of popular affection in an ironic if not an outrightly critical way.

There has also been a powerful socio-political reason for left-liberal academia’s discomfort with the two categories of authority and popularity. This is to be found in the uncomfortable experience of the neo-liberal ascendancy of the 1980s, of  so-called ‘Thatcherism’, a crucial quality of which was captured in Stuart Hall’s phrase ‘authoritarian populism’. In the background to my argument today is the assumption that it is both possible and necessary to define benign forms of authority and popularity, clearly distinguished from authoritarianism and from demagogic populism respectively.

I will eventually work towards a focus on contemporary political authority. I will suggest that political authority needs to be understood now in the context of the gathering transition to therapeutic culture. This is a key element in what is often called postmodernity, or in the terminology which I prefer, late modernity. These are terms sociologists and others use as shorthand for a complex of features characteristic of our society today, including its strong orientation to consumption, and the fragmentation of the old class structure on which many structures of authority were based.

Much of what more recent sociological writing there is on authority registers the contemporary crisis of authority with the coming of post- or late modern society. The depth of this crisis led the political philosopher Hannah Arendt to conclude as long ago as 1956 that authority should be talked about in the past tense. And this was at the start of rock and roll; no doubt many of the parents who since 1956 have been trying to lay down the law with increasing difficulty would say she was right.

To render the idea of a crisis in authority more precise, we can turn to the classic sociological ideas on authority as set out by Max Weber in work published posthumously in 1922. Weber distinguished between three kinds of authority, in the sense of the capacity to induce consent, and to exercise power or influence without coercion. The types are: traditional, in which the authority is sanctioned by traditional rules; rational-legal, in which authority is derived from a consistent set of abstract rules; and charismatic, in which authority is not based on rules but on a devotion to the person of the leader, on a belief that the leader is right and must be obeyed. Institutional religion is a major type of traditional authority, bureaucracy is the main expression of rational-legal authority, while the prophet is a clear example of charismatic authority. Traditional authority of various kinds has been waning since the dawn of modernity, while in the more recent times of late modernity the attack on the universalistic pretensions of rationality and the state has fatally weakened the second, rational-legal, type. That means, according to a commonly-held view, that we are more vulnerable to the third, most unstable and potentially destructive kind of authority, the charismatic. According to political taste, either Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, or perhaps both, can be seen as examples of charismatic authority and its dangers.

Let us turn now to the psychological dimensions of authority. It may seem likely that the main contribution of psychology will be to understand authority in a different sense, not as the capacity to induce consent from others but as the individual’s inner readiness to exercise authority. Indeed if we turn to psychoanalysis we find that Freud saw this ‘inner’ authority at the centre of selfhood, an insight which he captured in the concept of the superego. The superego is the internalisation of external authority. It is the basis of the individual’s capacity to act as a moral agent, and to carry ordinary authority with others.

However let’s consider as well the other major structures of the mind as Freud described them: the ego, or rational, reality-oriented part, and the id, the domain of sensuality and desire. By the way those of us with strong post-Freudian leanings may benefit from revisiting this tripartite model of the mind, which is largely set aside in much post-Freudian discourse. This model has been through the mangle of countless simplistic renderings of Freud, many of them hostile to psychoanalysis. It has some serious conceptual limitations, but it may still be of use in the development of psychosocial understanding. In research recently completed in the Centre for Consumer and Advertising Studies, we have found that a three-category system for classifying values, based on the tripartite model of the mind, is of considerable use in the analysis of public communications such as advertisements.

It is not difficult to see that there is a degree of equivalence between Freud’s three mental structures, and Weber’s three types of authority. The superego is linked to traditional authority, the ego to rational-legal, and the id to charismatic. Given this affinity, and that Weber was developing his ideas at the same time as Freud was gestating the theory of mental structure, and for a while was in the same city, it is a striking reminder of the depth of disciplinary divides at that time that neither was apparently aware of the work of the other.

Linking Weber’s categories to Freud’s shows that we have to see authority as a function of all parts of the mind, not just the superego; we can ‘follow the leader’ with any part of our minds. Although the superego is the basis of authority ‘from within’, authority ‘from below’ can be grounded in any kind of psychic function. From within the super-ego, we accept any external authority onto which we have transferred some image of parental authority which in early development we reluctantly came to accept (though Freud saw the super-ego particularly in terms of the father, which is an issue I cannot go into now.)  From within ego-functioning, we can accept the authority of the official or the bureaucrat, by accepting the rational system of rules which the official represents - for traffic control, or student assessment, or whatever it is. From within id-functioning, we accept the authority of the charismatic leader because we invest that leader with some libidinal meaning. The leader is in some way an object of desire, or expresses a desiring part of the self.

In all three kinds we can say that there is a projection of a particular part of the self into the authority figure. The concept of projection is fundamental to understanding the psychosocial interface, linking as it does the private inner world with the public outer one. Projection is in part a way in which we can distort our experience of the external world, by seeing in it some expression of our selves. Nonetheless, projection is also a way in which we contribute to making the world as it is; social institutions acquire their meaning and their power for us partly because of what we project into them. Furthermore, projection is one half of a deep and complex inter-relation between inner and outer; the other half is introjection, the taking in and making a part of the self of some element from the experience of the outer world. In the endless cycles of projection and introjection, reprojection and reintrojection, it can become impossible to say what originated where. Does a national audience get the television it deserves, indeed created, or does television create the audience it needs? It’s both, but that’s not a useful question. What matters is that deep homologies can be established between internal and external worlds.

This mutuality between mind and society means that social institutions are involved in the emotional regulation of the individual. All of us are held together at the deeper emotional levels of the psyche by the society of which we are members, and whose institutions and culture serve to structure our emotional lives and support us in our task of emotional self-management. So far, I’ve been laying out and commenting on ideas which have considerable currency in psychoanalytic sociology. From here on, I’m pushing the boat out and trying to enlarge on the conceptualisations we already have. Thus we can say of any society that it will incorporate a mode of emotional management. In the scenario I’ve outlined, putting together Weber and Freud, there is in general seen to be a clear division of labour between social institutions in the psychic functions which they support. To put that another way, we differentiate clearly between social institutions in the projections that we make into them, that is to say in the parts of ourselves which we see in them.

The projective and introjective arrangements that make up this mode of emotional management are based on clear differentiations and boundaries. We look to some institutions and cultural forms for moral restriction and guidance, to others for practical direction, and others for release and pleasure, and we don’t mix the categories up very much. Projective-introjective circuits dealing with different feelings occur in different social locations.

I suggest we think of this as the classical modern mode of emotional management, and see it as one which was operative until around the middle of the twentieth century. To represent it we could draw a map of society and its component institutions and use different colours in different parts of the map to represent the different psychic functions served by and associated with each. What remained of traditional authority would be located in some clearly demarcated institutions and people - parents, teachers, the judicial apparatus, public figures, certain professionals, and so on. Thus the superego could be clearly mapped on to specific locations, with which it was fairly exclusively identified; we did not also associate these locations with ‘id’ values such as sensuality and libidinality. When that boundary was transgressed, and an individual in authority was publicly associated with desire, for example through an irregular sexual relationship or activity that became public knowledge, sanctions came into play and that individual lost authority. By the same token, those social locations associated with sensuality and pleasure, such as many areas of popular culture and leisure, were not experienced as sources of authority. Iconic figures in popular culture such as film idols and the early stars of post-war pop music were typically highly sexualised, and not invested with ego or superego functions. The darker side of libidinal life, represented by madness, was notoriously separated off from the rest of society in segregated institutions, while various maternal, nurturant functions would be heavily located in the welfare state and welfare professionals.

Of course there would always have been something artificial about such a map. Psychic processes cannot be distinguished and separated absolutely - regressive tendencies are present in ego-functioning, the superego is infused with libidinal charge, and so on. Nor can types of authority be cleanly separated; Weber after all was describing ‘ideal’ types. However there was a substantial reality to the differentiation of psychic functions between social institutions in this classical modern mode of emotional management.

With the decline of the social institutions embodying traditional and rational kinds of authority, which were in projective/introjective interplay with the corresponding psychic functions, it might well seem as if authority is in crisis. Moreover, the main spheres of society which are growing in scale and intensity, namely the spheres of consumption and leisure, are associated with irrational, desire-driven kinds of psychic engagement conducive only to charismatic authority.

However this is not necessarily what is happening, because at some point, this mode of emotional regulation began to dissolve and to give way to the ‘late modern’ mode, in which there are different relationships between psychic functioning and authority. In keeping with some influential accounts of the cultural changes heralding so-called postmodernity, I would speculatively locate this point around mid-century, with the post-war intensification of consumer culture.

In the late modern mode, there has been a shift towards a much less boundaried and differentiated organisation. There has been a dispersal across the social field of all psychic functions; the projection of different parts of the self into the external world no longer follows regular channels.  Let us consider this in the case of the superego. It is commonplace to note the family’s weakening hold on the socialisation process, and the way in which the vacuum of authority created by detraditionalisation has been filled by a variety of extrafamilial institutions and influences, especially of course the powers of the mass media and of consumer culture. In this context, superego supports and general resources to assist the individual in the task of emotional self-management are increasingly found in the sphere of ‘mediatised’ popular culture.

To illustrate this point I will do something I haven’t done for some time, which is to quote Bruce Springsteen. The line is this:

‘We learnt more from a three-minute record than we ever learnt at school’.

I think there is a truth in this, though whether or not the same could be said for what we learn at university is another question which I won’t go into now. Springsteen is registering the idea of emotional learning, well-known to psychotherapists, and stressing the role of popular music in facilitating that learning. The location of authoritative guides to the conduct of emotional life in the publicly available resources of pop music is an important example of how superego functions have been dispersed, and can now be found in areas of cultural life once reserved more exclusively for projections of libidinal need.

The idea of emotional learning is a relatively recent one, and is an indication of why it is now appropriate to call our culture a ‘therapeutic’ one. Therapeutic culture is marked by, amongst other things, a preoccupation with feeling and relationships and a belief that emotional life can be better managed through a process of learning about one’s feelings and one’s relationships. Therapeutic culture is not necessarily a culture in which everybody is in therapy, though an increase in the influence of professional therapists is another feature of it. It is closely linked to the rise of what Anthony Giddens and other sociologists have called ‘reflexivity’, part of which is the tendency for people to try to live their lives in more deliberate, planned ways guided by reflection upon themselves and their situations, including and especially their emotional development.

I will come back shortly to the theme of the therapeutic. For now, I want to note that
through the growing breadth and depth of popular culture, the resources for superego support are now more diverse, fluid and dispersed than they were. While traditional authority may be declining, the mental and cultural spaces it occupied are being reshaped, and influence now emanates from new places. Thus the contemporary ‘crisis of authority’ can be redescribed in terms of the shift from one mode of regulation to another. It is a ‘crisis’ only if viewed from within the passing mode.

Similarly, the scope for libidinality is much greater. Strongly sexualised themes and images are routinely present in everyday experience, in advertising and the general discourse of the media. Despite the ways in which anxieties about relations between parents and children, and between the sexes, have been expressed in concerns about child abuse and about harassment, with the consequent development in some particular respects of a climate of greater behavioural restraint, despite all that noone should need a sociologist to tell them that the ‘permissive society’ is very much with us. Crucially, however, it is not just that many forms of sexuality can now flow almost untrammelled across the surface of culture, but that many if not all areas of basic psychic need can now be publicly spoken of in ordinary tones of voice. Dependency needs, vulnerabilities, cravings for nurture: all can be told, and all can be integrated into the everyday worlds of work, home and responsibility. This expressive tendency is another component of therapeutic culture; whether it adds up mainly to exhibitionistic narcissism, or represents real gains in honesty and self-confrontation, is an important question but not one I can go into now.

I have offered a psychoanalytic reading of some well-documented social and cultural changes, and suggested that the late modern mode of regulation is characterised by a dispersal of psychic functions across the social body. As a consequence of this, any specific location in society can now embody different psychic elements. One institution, or one person, can represent to us, for example, both desire and restraint, pleasure and authority. To introduce another metaphor, there is a compression of psychic functions at specific social locations: different, sometimes opposing qualities are brought together. A free-ranging dispersal of psychic functions results in the coming together of different functions at the same point, rather than their segregation into different social spaces. To call this compression enables us to link it with the concept of time and space compression used in the sociology of postmodernity. In an influential description of postmodern society, David Harvey elaborated the concept of time and space compression. He argued that the development of modern transport and communication systems underpinned a radically altered experience of space and time, which lose their power to separate people and events and to maintain barriers and boundaries. I am suggesting that in a similar way, and perhaps as a consequence of space-time compression, we can see a tendency for different psychic functions and agencies to be compressed and intermixed.

The outstanding example to date of this sort of compression is Princess Diana. I make no apology for wanting to prolong the analysis of the Diana phenomenon; although some glib punditry and soothsaying may have poured forth in the wake of her death, the public reaction to it was one of the major mass-psychological phenomena of our time, and it may be some while before we can understand it adequately. In her persona were compressed an array of libidinal values - glamour, wealth, hedonism, anorexic neediness and so on - and a gathering of more superego related ones such as compassion, world citizenship, and parental responsibility. This fusion of values distinguishes Diana from an earlier icon with whom she was compared: Marilyn Monroe, whose meaning for the public was rooted solely in the sexuality and emotional hunger which she embodied, without any countervailing values that might have endowed her with some elements of authority.. The compression I am pointing to is in the public image rather in the inner life of the individuals concerned, though where the values combined are in extreme tension, as was the case with Diana, there may be considerable stress experienced by the individual or institution concerned.

I am reluctant to give more examples from the world of celebrity; it is always easy to find some cultural icon to interpret in support of whatever theory one happens to be advancing. More substantial evidence for the ideas I am putting forward would have to come from a series of careful analyses of everyday culture and of institutional change.  As well as considering  famous individuals, we can also look at trends in corporate imagery and institutional identity. Banks and building societies, once heavily clothed in images of prudent and restrictive authority, are now gaily bedecked with messages of  pleasure and release, while also trying to retain some of the containing functions of authority in the support and advice they proffer. In this as in many other examples the compression can be seen to result from the increasing influence of consumer culture, drawing all sectors of life into its pleasure-oriented agendas, but it is important to note that the process is not one-directional. At the frontiers of consumer culture, in advertising, some recent innovations have seen moral and political agendas inserted explicitly into commercial messages, as for example in ads for film, biscuits, phones, and clothes. While one may be sceptical of the contribution of Benetton ads to the cultivation of global citizenship, the broad development of ethical consumerism is a substantial development which is having a major impact on marketing, and is an important instance of how authority is being reconstituted in consumer culture.

There are other ways in which the domains of pleasure are being interwoven with elements of moral authority. Band Aid, for example, and similar ventures since, are a significant fusion of the libidinality of pop music with a rudimentary sense of global citizenship, of hedonism with a reparative wish. On many fronts, then, the sensual is becoming serious, and the serious is becoming sensual.

Compression of other kinds of elements is transforming our society. Foremost amongst these would be the way in which, under the slogan of ‘integration’, many kinds of disorder and disability have been brought into everyday life, as with the attempt to include disturbed children or those with special needs in normal schools, and most controversially the strategy of returning the mentally ill to the ‘community’. The idea of the ‘community’ as an inclusive, diverse and curative entity has put an agenda of compression at the centre of social policy.

Of course in the case of Diana and in other individual cases I could have mentioned there is a powerful narrative of cure at work, which is another feature of the therapeutic. These are people who are believed to have faced the demons inside themselves and overcome them. In the image of the damaged but recovered person there is both a central motif of therapeutic culture, and a key instance of  compression. Images of vulnerability and resilience, and of pleasure and duty, are compressed into this kind of persona, which is becoming a prevalent type in present-day culture. While on the face of it we may seem in such cases to be dealing with purely charismatic qualities, the compression of different psychic values into one persona means that more composite and complex forms of authority are being developed.

Let us take these considerations and apply them to the area on which I would like to focus, which is political authority. When Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S., this could have been taken as a confirmation of the most anxious predictions about the collapse of authority into its charismatic form: here was an actual star of the screen, whose only political talent seemed to be in his ability to promote himself as likeable, who was now the leader of the western world. I must say I would not find it possible to be as positive as I am about some aspects of the present situation had Reagan been replaced by another President of that type. But how can we situate Clinton in relation to the developments I have been describing?

It was often said in the last years of his office that Clinton was a very ‘compartmentalised’ President and person, referring to his ability to continue conducting the business of state in a focussed way while often having to break off to attend to those aspects of his private life which have become public, not to mention attending to the consequences of all this within his family. I would like to offer a different spatial metaphor, which is that Clinton was a ‘compressed’ President, indeed was the world’s first fully compressed national leader. His image became an inseparable fusion of the political and the sensual; he is both a politician still widely respected for his policies, especially domestic ones, and is also seen as a person of intense libidinal need. The libidinisation of the Presidency may have begun with Kennedy and his glamorous image, but in that time most of it was a secret. A great deal more sexual activity may have occurred in and around the White House then, but it was not in the public domain. In the compressed public culture of the millennial era, however, it was possible for the electorate to be as fully acquainted with the President’s need for sexual intimacy as they were with his welfare policies, and for his authority to be undimmed by this.

It may be argued that the electorate’s continuing support for Clinton, and the consequent failure of the impeachment, expressed a popular decision that the private life of the individual is irrelevant to the discharge of public duties. Such a decision to bracket off the public from the private would not fit with the model of compression which I have proposed, because it would consign the personal sphere of sexuality back to the private domain, and demand that we cease to be interested in what our leaders get up to in private. This is not feasible; in this therapeutic age we are all too interested in what people feel and do in all areas of their lives. Rather, the continuing popular support for Clinton could have been read as a forgiveness, an acceptance of the carnality of the President rather than an attempt to ignore it. It was a rejection of the prurience of the official inquiry into his misdemeanours. Sex is now forgiven, even using the office of state to secure indiscreet extramarital sex is forgiven. If there had been evidence that poor judgement in the conduct of extramarital affairs was linked to poor judgement in the conduct of affairs of state, the outcome might have been different. You might want to argue that such a link must exist, but that argument appears to have been rejected by the majority. It was determined that in the absence of such evidence, the President be allowed to continue as President, with a public image into which a profuse imagery of his disorderly carnal being had then been compressed.

If you will bear with me there is one last piece of theory I would like to recount before moving on to some more discussion of authority in contemporary Britain. One of the many important developments in psychoanalytic theory since Freud is the concept of containment. This concept was originally formulated in accounts of what took place between analysts and patients, and between mothers and babies. (‘Mother’ here means the person responsible for the baby’s care, which is usually the woman socially identified as the baby’s mother). It is seen as the key emotional transaction between mother and baby, as the basis of the process by which the individual acquires the psychic resources to lead a reasonably healthy life as an emotionally viable individual. The heart of the concept is in the idea that babies are inevitably assailed by anxieties of intense and potentially catastrophic kinds, in which the discomforts and pains of ordinary bodily existence can trigger profound existential and persecutory fears. These fears are, in psychoanalytic language, projected into the mother; the baby will use its vocal chords, muscles and all means at its disposal to convey its terror and to seek relief. The mother, if she is receptive to the baby’s communications and can ‘accept’ the projections, will herself experience something of the terror and panic involved. This device, by the way, of trying to get rid of intolerable feelings by getting someone else to experience them, is seen by psychoanalysts (who call it ‘projective identification’) as a common occurrence between adults in ordinary social life; it is not a peculiarity of the mother-infant set-up. The mother’s task is to communicate back to the baby that yes, you are feeling like this, but it’s alright, because you do not die of these feelings, and you’re not mad to have them, and they will go away. The mother in other words has to recognise the projected feelings and to process them in such a way as to enable the baby to feel that it is in safe hands. As the analysts say, the feelings which the baby has are ‘detoxified’ and returned to it in more manageable form, along with a demonstration of how to live with these feelings. This is the process of containment, the containment of anxiety, in the developmentally fundamental context of the mother-baby relationship. Thinkers and practitioners influenced by psychoanalysis have extended this notion to the relationship between individuals and social institutions, and have developed the idea that institutional settings can be more or less containing of the anxieties of their members.

Let me pause here for another reflexive moment. In the last few minutes I have been talking about the care of babies and the infantile experience of disintegration. This is meat and drink to many psychotherapeutic practitioners and to many of my colleagues here, and familiar terrain for many students in the Department of Human Relations. But for others of you it may be a surprising and even baffling departure, perhaps an odd line of thought for an otherwise apparently more or less sensible person to be pursuing in an analysis of contemporary society. We are encountering here one of the problems for the field of psychoanalytic studies, which at one level is the sheer unexpectedness and lack of face validity for some of its formulations. The only way to deal with this is to try to show by example and further argument that the ideas in question are indeed of relevance.

We have the further problem though that psychoanalysts themselves may object to the application in the societal field of concepts originally developed in the study of one-to-one relationships. After all social institutions are not subjective agents in the ways that individuals are, and cannot respond empathically as a mother can to a baby or an analyst to a patient. Nonetheless, the formal and informal cultures of organisations and the actions of managers and leaders do constitute an active and relational environment within which the individual will have experiences of being more or less contained by what is going on around. Moreover the individual has relationships to inert material objects within which we can see some process of containment at work, since the cycle of projection and introjection can and does occur all the time in relation to the non-human environment, and it is possible for us to be contained by inert objects if we endow them with the meaning of a container. It is therefore quite defensible for us to proceed with the application to social institutions of such concepts as containment.

A psychosocial theory of authority now needs to attach considerable importance to the idea of containment, since another feature of therapeutic culture is the increasing demand for containment, and the greater involvement of authorities of various kinds in its provision. This conception of authority as being in part about containment is a very ‘therapeutic’ one; it implies a therapeutic dimension to the exercise of authority. Authority has taken on this colouring because we now inhabit a therapeutic culture, characterised by a high level of concern with and investment in emotional management. This is to a considerable extent a work of self-management; another feature of therapeutic culture is the fundamental importance attached to the self and its potential degree of autonomy. However, authorities - sources of prescription and influence for individuals in their tasks of self-management - are still needed. Indeed, as the task becomes more fully engaged with, its scale and complexity is such that the need for authoritative help increases even though the sources of it are to be found in people and places we would not normally think of as being authorities in a more traditional sense of the word. I mentioned earlier, and have argued elsewhere, that the work of containment by social institutions is now increasingly carried by popular culture.

A positive image of authority is now of someone or something that can contain.  Authority can be credible only if it has attuned itself to the anxieties of its subjects and is able to receive their anxious communications and to demonstrate how to live with their fears. Thatcher and Reagan were perhaps the last examples of pre-therapeutic authority.

In what I think was perhaps his least well-judged statement since becoming Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s insistence on one occasion that genetically-modified foods were safe to eat, and that he was quite happy to eat them himself, completely failed to recognise the potential depth of public anxiety. Whatever the health risks of GM foods (which personally, despite being a regular consumer of organic produce, I do not expect to be very great, though the risks to the environment might be greater), it has to be recognised that food can be a particularly sensitive topic in politics, as it can be in family life, because the infantile anxieties it can evoke will be very basic ones. A huge amount of trust is needed for the baby to feel that what it is being given to eat is good, and will not harm it, and when this trust falters, as it inevitably will at times, powerful fantasies of badness will be released. In its overall regulatory role in relation to agriculture and the food industry the government perhaps comes closest to enacting the parental role in relation to the citizen-as-baby, though the National Health Service is also a prime site for the evocation of images of parental care - which is one reason why it has become such an iconic political issue. Blair’s comments on GM foods risked evoking fantasies of a crazed parent being prepared to sacrifice children to belief, not images of a caring parent trying to understand and contain a child’s anxieties however groundless in reality they may be.

Despite Blair’s uncontaining contribution to the debate about GM foods, I think that the present Labour Government is more attuned than any other previous government to the new mode of containment and to therapeutic authority. Indeed this is what is new about ‘New’ Labour, aside from any arguable novelty in the substantive policies of the ‘Third Way’: what is new is an understanding that political authority must henceforth seek to connect itself with the popular, in the sense of linking with the containing institutions of popular culture, and in the sense of seeking to identify and manage/contain popular anxieties. In the late modern or therapeutic mode of emotional management, political authority must be popular, which is not to say that it will always stand in the position favoured by the majority, but that it is interwoven with popular culture and oriented to the recognition of popular fears and hopes.

This is the real meaning of ‘spin’; whatever the merits and demerits of individuals such as Peter Mandelson and Alasdair Campbell, the prominence of concerns with the ‘message’ is an indication of the importance now seen to reside in the management of the emotional dimensions of the political process. Like many other aspects of therapeutic culture, this prominence has been gathering since the 1950s, and  - again like other therapeutic features - is (for obvious reasons) closely linked to the emergence of television.

The much-scorned so-called ‘focus group’, that is the use of discussion groups of ordinary people to explore public attitudes, is in itself a neutral technique, but is potentially a means by which popular feeling and anxiety can be explored and identified, with the results of that inquiry being fed back into the intensified management of communications and potentially to the work of containment.

The message of the ‘spin doctors’ - not the message they want people to stay on, but the underlying message contained by their activities as a whole - is that authority has changed. You can shoot these messengers if you don’t like them, but their underlying message will arrive in other ways. Spin is the realisation that the exercise of political authority cannot proceed purely on the bases of rational argument about policy and the orderly contest of value systems. It is the realisation that political choices, like others, are now embedded in emotional narratives, and that these narratives are negotiable and subject to continual revision as they circulate in the public domain and move back and forth for each of us between external world of newspapers, television, conversation and so on, and the internal world of need and phantasy. Like other aspects of emotional life in a therapeutic world they can be studied and - up to a point - managed. At the present time this function of narrative management is located primarily in a poorly-regarded cadre of specialists within the political class, but this need not be its permanent location; it could become more integrated with other aspects of the political process, and no longer attract such specific and suspicious attention.

There is obviously another cultural trend operative here, alongside the therapeutic one: what the sociologist Andrew Wernick has called promotional culture, the increasing involvement of all social institutions in the promotional techniques of the marketplace. Spin is obviously about the promotional imperative when applied to politics, but I am arguing that the promotional imperative has to be understood in the context of therapeutic culture, because it is changes in culture ‘outside’ of the market place which determine what is valued in the market, and many social values are now heavily influenced by the therapeutic ethos.

I will try to move to a conclusion by summarising some of what I have been saying in the form of some predictions. I have been discussing two factors: what I’ve suggested calling the increasing compression of public figures, and the increasing importance of containment as a dimension of credible authority. These are distinct factors, but are both part of the burgeoning of therapeutic culture, in which there is an increasingly explicit concern with the emotional self and its regulation, and in which the role of social institutions in supporting emotional management has become more fluid and more intense. I have described this in terms of a shift from a classical modern to a late modern mode of management.

One very important topic I’ve not had time to go into at all is how all this relates to ‘management’ as usually defined, that is to managers, especially senior managers in large organisations. The logic of my argument would suggest that the authority of the manager is subject to the same changes as political authority, though less intensely because organisational management is not usually conducted in the public space of the media.

But in the political sphere, I would predict the following. Firstly there will be more compression of public figures. The images, the public personae, of politicians will be infused with elements of the emotional and sensual being of the leaders as persons, and in the public domain a web of analysis, fantasy, judgement and speculation will surround these elements. Authority figures will be placed like everybody else in complex psychosocial narratives, in which strength and weakness, virtue and failing are closely and explicitly interwoven, and the everyday qualities of political discourse will come to reflect this. The same will be true of other aspects of the public domain; large commercial organisations, especially those involved in basic consumer provisioning  such as retailing and financial services, will seek to acquire more compressed and containing corporate images, on the assumption that authority is valued in consumer markets.

At the same time as public interest in the personal life of public figures will increase, the threshold for demanding resignation over a range of issues concerning personal life will continue to rise. In a recent case when the disorderly carnality of a government minister came to light, he was forced to resign. Rightly or wrongly, the government judged that he had lost authority, and might damage that of the whole government by staying in office. The loss of authority in this case though was possibly due to the security risk which was part of the story, not its libidinal nature, and we can expect that a compression of Clinton-esque proportions may soon occur in Britain.

Another phenomenon which the analysis I’ve presented would lead us to expect is the coming of a damaged leader, someone who as a person has been damaged and healed. Their history of damage and repair would give hope that the leader can understand and contain the anxieties of others.

Fortunately my time is up so I can’t give any more hostages to fortune. I’m sorry for having spent so much time on theoretical matters; personally I find most social and psychological theory to be, in itself, very boring. It is only of interest when it can help us to think creatively about our situation, when we can use it as a way of both releasing and disciplining the imagination. I fear I’ve had to spend too much time on simply outlining some theoretical ideas, and not enough on how they can contribute to imaginative work. In any case the imagination needs to be grounded, and the grounding for the sort of ideas I’ve been talking about will have to come from an extensive process of testing against evidence, especially from all kinds of studies of public attitudes. The theoretical imagination also needs grounding in values, and if I haven’t spoken very explicitly about values today it’s because I think that especially in relation to the kind of cultural change I have been discussing, it is important for us at the moment to be more clear about what is happening, and why, before we make value judgments about it.