The Mass Psychology Of Misery * (1994) * Part 2
by John Zerzan

It has been the failure of earlier forms of social control that has 
given psychological medicine, with its inherently expansionist aims, its 
upward trajectory in the past three decades. The therapeutic model of 
authority (and the supposedly value-free professional power that backs 
it up) is increasingly intertwined with state power, and has mounted an 
invasion of the self much more far reaching than earlier efforts, "There 
are no limits to the ambition of psychoanalytic control; if it had its 
way, nothing would escape it," according to Guattari.

In terms of the medicalization of deviant behavior, a great deal more is 
included, than, say, the psychiatric sanctions on Soviet dissidents or 
the rise of a battery of mind control techniques, including behavior 
modification, in U.S. Prisons Punishment has come to include treatment 
and treatment new powers of punishment; medicine, psychology, education 
and social work take over more and more aspects of control and 
discipline while the legal machinery grows more medical, psychological, 
pedagogical. But the new arrangements, relying chiefly on fear and 
necessitating more and more co-operation by the ruled in order to 
function, are no guarantee of civic harmony. In fact, with their overall 
failure, class society is running out of tactics and excuses, and the 
new encroachments have created new pockets of resistance.

The setup now usually referred to as "community mental health" can be 
legitimately traced to the establishment of the Mental Hygiene Movement 
in 1908. In the context of the Taylorist degradation of work called 
Scientific Management and a challenging tide of worker militancy, the 
new psychological offensive was based on the dictum that "individual 
unrest to a large degree means bad mental hygiene." Community psychiatry 
represents a later, nationalized form of this industrial psychology, 
developed to deflect radical currents away from social transformation 
objectives and back under the yoke of the dominating logic of 
productivity. By the 1920s, the workers had become the objects of social 
science professionals to an even greater degree, with the work of Elton 
Mayo and others, at a time when the promotion of consumption as a way of 
life came to be seen as itself a means of easing unrest, collective and 
individual. And b the end of the 1930s, industrial psychology had 
"already developed many of the central innovations which now 
characterize community psychology," according to Diana Ralph's Work and 
Madness (1983), such as mass psychological testing, the mental health 
team, auxiliary non-professional counselors, family and out-patient 
therapy, and psychiatric counseling to businesses.

The million-plus men rejected by the armed forces during World War 11 
for "mental unfitness" and the steady rise. observable since the 
mid-'50s, in stress-related illnesses. called attention to the immensely 
crippling nature of modern industrial alienation. Government funding was 
called for, and was provided by the 1963 federal Community Mental Health 
Center legislation. Armed with the relatively new tranquilizing drugs to 
anaesthetize the poor as well as the unemployed, a state presence was 
initiated in urban areas hitherto beyond the reach of the therapeutic 
ethos. Small wonder that some black militants saw the new mental health 
services as basically refined police pacification and surveillance 
systems for the ghettos. The concerns of the dominant order, ever 
anxious about the masses, are chiefly served, however, here as 
elsewhere, by the strength of the image of what science has shown to be 
normal, healthy, and productive. Authority's best friend is relentless 
self-inspection according to the ruling canons of repressive normalcy in 
the Psychological Society.

The nuclear family once provided the psychic underpinning of what Norman 
O. Brown called "the nightmare of infinitely expanding technological 
progress." Thought by some to be a bastion against the outer world, it 
has always served as transmission belt for the reigning ideology, more 
specifically as the place in which the interiorizing psychology of women 
is produced the social and economic exploitation of women is legitimated 
and the artificial scarcity of sexuality is guarded.

Meanwhile, the state's concern with delinquent, uneducable and 
unsocializable children, as studied by Donzelot and others, is but one 
aspect of its overshadowing of the family. Behind the medicalized image 
of the good, the state advances and the family steadily loses its 
functions. Rothbaum and Weisz, in Child Psychopathology and the Quest 
for Control (1989), discuss the very rapid rise of their subject while 
Castel, Castel and Lovell's earlier The Psychiatric Society (1982) could 
glimpse the nearing day hen childhood will be totally regimented by 
medicine and psychology Some facets of this trend are no longer in the 
realm of conjecture; James R. Schiffman, for instance, wrote of one 
by-product of the battered family in his "Teen-Agers End Up in 
Psychiatric Hospitals in Alarming Numbers" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 
1989).

Therapy is a key ritual of our prevailing psychological religion and a 
vigorously growing one. The American Psychiatric Association's 
membership jumped from 27,355 in 1983 to 36,223 by the end of the '80s, 
and in 1989 a record 22 million visited psychiatrists or other 
therapists covered to at least some extent by health insurance plans. 
Considering that only a small minority of those who practice the 
estimated 500 varieties of psychotherapy are psychiatrists or otherwise 
health insurance-recognized, even these figures do not capture the 
magnitude of therapy's shadow world.

Philip Rieff termed psychoanalysis "yet another method of learning how 
to endure the loneliness produced by culture," which is a good enough 
way to introduce the artificial situation and relationship of therapy, a 
peculiarly distanced. circumscribed and asymmetrical affair. Most of the 
time, one person talks and the other listens. The client almost always 
talks about himself and the therapist almost never does. The therapist 
scrupulously eschews social contact with clients. another reminder to 
the latter that they have not been talking to a friend, along with the 
strict time limits enclosing a space divorced from everyday reality. 
Similarly, the purely contractual nature of the therapeutic connection 
in itself guarantees that all therapy inevitably reproduces alienated 
society. To deal with alienation via a relationship paid for b the hour 
is to overlook the congruence of therapist and prostitute as regards the 
traits just enumerated.

Gramsci defined "intellectual" as the "functionary in charge of 
consent," a formulation which also fits the role of therapist. By 
leading others to concentrate their 'desiring energy outside the social 
territory," as Guattari put it, he thereby manipulates them into 
accepting the constraints of society. By failing to challenge the social 
categories within which clients have organized their experiences, the 
therapist strengthens the hold of those categories. He tries, typically, 
to focus clients away from stories about work and into the so-called 
"real" areas-personal life and childhood.

Psychological health, as a function of therapy, is largely an 
educational procedure. The project is that of a shared system: the 
client is led to acceptance of the therapist's basic assumptions and 
metaphysics. Francois Roustang, in Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go (1983), 
wondered why a therapeutic method whose "explicit aim is the liberation 
of forces with a view toward being capable 'of enjoyment and efficiency' 
(Freud) so often ends in alienation either...because the treatment turns 
out to be interminable, or...(the client) adopts the manner of speech 
and thought, the theses as well as the prejudices of psychoanalysis."

Ever since Hans Lysenko's short but famous article of 1952, "The Effects 
of Psychotherapy," countless other studies have validated his finding: 
"Persons given intensive and prolonged psychotherapy are no better off 
than those in matched control groups given no treatment over the same 
time interval." On the other hand, there is no doubt that therapy or 
counseling does make many people feel better, regardless of specific 
results. This anomaly must be due to the fact that consumers of therapy 
believe they have been cared for, comforted, listened to. In a society 
growing ever Colder, this is no small thing. It is also true that the 
Psychological Society conditions its subjects into blaming themselves 
and that those who most feel they need therapy tend to be those most 
easily exploited: the loneliest, most insecure nervous, depressed, etc. 
It is easy to state the old dictum, "Natura sanat, medicus curat" 
(Nature heals, doctors/counselors/therapists treat); but where is the 
natural in the hyper-estranged world of pain and isolation we find 
ourselves in? And yet there is no getting around the imperative to 
remake the world. If therapy is to heal, make whole, what other 
possibility is there but to transform this world, which would of course 
also constitute a de-therapizing of society. It is clearly in this 
spirit that the Situationist International declared in 1963, "Sooner or 
later the S.I. must define itself as a therapeutic."

Unfortunately, the great communal causes later in the decade acquired a 
specifically therapeutic cast mainly in their degeneration, in the 
splintering of the '60's thrust into smaller, more idiosyncratic 
efforts. "The personal is the political" gave way to the merely 
personal, as defeat and disillusion overtook naive activism.

Conceived out of critical responses to Freudian psychoanalysis, which 
has shifted its sights toward ever-earlier phases of development in 
childhood and infancy, the Human Potential Movement began in the mid-60s 
and acquired its characteristic features by the early '70s. With a 
post-Freudian emphasis on the conscious ego and its actualization, Human 
Potential set forth a smorgasbord of therapies, including varieties or 
amalgams of personal growth seminars, body awareness techniques, and 
Eastern spiritual disciplines. Almost buried in the welter of partial 
solutions lies a subversive potential: the notion that, as Adelaide Bry 
put it, life "can be a time of infinite and joyous possibility." The 
demand for instant relief from psychic immiseration underlined an 
increasing concern for the dignity and fulfillment of individuals, and 
Daniel Yankelovich (New Rules, 1981) saw the cultural centrality of this 
quest, concluding that by the end of the '70s, some eighty percent of 
Americans had become interested in this therapeutic search for 
transformation.

But the privatized approaches of the Human Potential Movement, 
high-water mark of contemporary Psychological Society, were obviously 
unable to deliver on their promises to provide any lasting, non-illusory 
breakthroughs. Arthur Janov recognized that "everyone in this society is 
in a lot of pain," but expressed no awareness at all of the repressive 
society generating it. His Primal Scream technique qualifies as the most 
ludicrous cure-all of the '70s. Scientology's promise of empowerment 
consisted mainly of bioelectronic feedback technologies aimed at 
socializing people to an authoritarian enterprise and world view. The 
popularity of cult groups like the Moonies reminds one of a time-tested 
process for the uninitiated: isolation, deprivation, anticipation, and 
suggestion; brainwashing and the shamanic visionquest both use it.

Werner Erhard's EST, speaking of intensive psychological manipulation 
was one of the most popular and, in some ways, most characteristic Human 
Potential phenomena. Its founder became very wealthy by helping Erhard 
Seminars Training adepts "choose to become what they are." In a classic 
case of blaming the victim, EST brought large numbers to a 
near-religious embrace of one of the system's basic lies: its graduates 
are obediently conformist because they "accept responsibility" for 
having created things as they are. Transcendental Meditation actually 
marketed itself in terms of the passive incorporation into society it 
helped its students achieve. TM's alleged usefulness for adjustment to 
the varied "excesses and stresses" of modern society was a major selling 
point to corporations, for example.

Trapped in a highly rationalized and technological world, Human 
Potential seekers naturally wanted personal development, emotional 
immediacy, and above all, a sense of having some control over their 
lives. Self-help best-sellers of the '70s, including Power, Your 
Erroneous Zones, How to Take Charge of Your Life, Self-Creation, Looking 
Out for #1, and Pulling Your Own Strings, focus on the issue of control. 
Preaching the gospel of reality as a personal construct, however, meant 
that control had to be narrowly defined. Once again acceptance of social 
reality as a given meant, for example, that "sensitivity training" would 
likely mean continued insensitivity to most of reality, an openness to 
more of the same alienation-more ignorance, more suffering.

The Human Potential Movement did at least raise publicly and widely the 
notion of an end to disease, however much it failed to make good on that 
claim. As more and more of everyday life has come under medical dominion 
and supervision, the almost bewildering array of new therapies was part 
of an undercutting of the older, mainly Freudian, "scientific" model for 
behavior. In the shift of therapeutic expectations, a radical hope 
appeared, which went beyond merely positive-thinking or empty 
confessionalist aspects and is different from quiescence.

A current form of self-help which clearly represents a step forward from 
both traditional therapy, commodified and under the direction of 
expertise, and the mass-marketed seminar-introduction sort of training 
is the very popular "support group." Non-commercial and based on 
peer-group equality. support groups for many types of emotional distress 
have quadrupled in number in the past ten years. Where these groups do 
not enforce the 12-step ideology of "anonymous" groups (e.g. Alcoholics 
Anonymous) based on the individual's subjection to a "Higher Power" 
(read: all constituted authority and most of them do not-they provide a 
great source of solidarity, and work against the depoliticizing force of 
illness or distress experienced in an isolated state.

If the Human Potential Movement thought it possible to re-create 
personality and thus transform life, New Ageism goes it one better with 
its central slogan, "Create your own reality." Considering the 
advancing, invasive desolation, an alternative reality seems 
desirable-the eternal consolation of religion. For the New Age, booming 
since the mid-1980s, is essentially a religious turning away from 
reality by people who are overloaded by feelings of helplessness and 
powerlessness, a more definitive turning away than that of the 
prevailing psychologistic evasion. Religion invents a realm of 
non-alienation to compensate for the actual one; New Age philosophy 
announces a coming new era of harmony and peace, obviously inverting the 
present, unacceptable state. An undemanding, eclectic, materialistic 
substitute religion where any balm, any occult nonsense-channeling, 
crystal healing, reincarnation, rescue by UFOs, etc.-goes. "It's true if 
you believe it."

Anything goes, so long as it goes along with what authority has 
ordained: anger is "unhealthy," "negativity" a condition to be avoided 
at all costs. Feminism and ecology are supposedly "roots" of the New Age 
scene, but likewise were militant workers a "root" of the Nazi movement 
(National Socialist German Workers Party, remember). Which brings to 
mind the chief New Age influence, Carl Jung. It is unknown or irrelevant 
to "non judgmental" bliss-seekers that in his attempt to resurrect all 
the old faiths and myths, Jung was less a psychologist than a figure of 
theology and reaction Further, as president of the International Society 
for Psychotherapy from 1933 to 1939, he presided over its Nazified 
German section and co-edited the Zentralblattfur Psychotherapie (with 
M.H. Goring, cousin of the Reichsmarshall of the same name).

Still gathering steam, apparently, since the appearance of Otto 
Kernberg's Borderline Conditions and pathological Narcissism (1975) and 
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1978), is the idea that 
"narcissistic personality disorders" are the epitome of what is 
happening to all of us, and represent the "underlying character 
structure" of our age Narcissus, the image of self-love and a growing 
demand for fulfillment, has replaced Oedipus, with its components of 
guilt and repression, as the myth of our time-a shift proclaimed and 
adopted far beyond the Freudian community.

In passing, it is noteworthy that this change, underway since the '60s, 
seems to connect more with the Human Potential search for 
self-development than with New Age whose devotees take their desires 
less seriously. Common New Age nostrums, e.g. "You are infinitely 
creative," "You have unlimited potential," smack of a vague 
wish-fulfillment sanitized against anger, by those who doubt their o n 
capacities for change and growth. Though the concept o narcissism is 
somewhat elusive, clinically and socially, it is often expressed in a 
demanding, aggressive way that frightens various partisans of 
traditional authority. The Human Potential preoccupation with "getting 
in touch with one's feelings," it must be added, was not nearly as 
strongly self affirming as narcissism is, where feelings-chiefly anger- 
are more powerful than those that need to be searched for.

Lasch's Culture of Narcissism remains extremely influential as a social 
analysis of the transition from Oedipus to Narcissus, given great 
currency and publicity by those who lament this turning away from 
internalized sacrifice am respect for authority. The "new leftist" Lasch 
proved himself a strict Freudian, and an overtly conservative one at 
that, looking back nostalgically at the days of the authoritarian 
conscience based on strong parental and social discipline There is no 
trace of refusal in Lasch's work, which embraces the existing repressive 
order as the only available morality. Similar to his sour rejection of 
the "impulse-ridden" narcissistic personality is Neil Postman's Amusing 
Ourselves to Death (1985). Postman moralizes about the decline of 
political discourse, no longer "serious" but "shriveled and absurd," a 
condition caused by the widespread attitude that "amusement and 
pleasure" take precedence over "serious public involvement." Sennett and 
Bookchin can be mentioned as two other erstwhile radicals who see the 
narcissistic withdrawal from the present political framework as anything 
but positive or subversive. But even an orthodox Freudian like Russell 
Jacoby (Telos, Summer 1980) recognized that in the corrosion of 
sacrifice, "narcissism harbors a protest in the name of individual 
health and happiness," and Gilles Lipovetsky considered narcissism in 
France to have been born during the May, '68 uprisings.

Thus narcissism is more than just the location of desire in the self, or 
the equally ubiquitous necessity to maintain feelings of self-identity 
and self-esteem. There are more and more "narcissistically troubled" 
people, products of the lovelessness and extreme alienation of modern 
divided society, and its cultural and spiritual impoverishment. Deep 
feelings of emptiness characterize the narcissist, coupled with a 
boundless rage, often just under the surface, at the sense of 
dependency felt because of dominated life, and the hollowness of one 
starved by a deficient reality.

Freudian theory attributes the common trait of defiance to an immature 
"clinging to anal eroticism," while ignoring Society just as Lasch 
expresses his fear of narcissistic resentment and insubordination" in a 
parallel defense of oppressive existence. The angry longing for autonomy 
and self-worth brings to mind another clash of values that relates to 
value itself. In each of us lives a narcissist who wants to be loved for 
himself or herself and not for his or her abilities, or even qualities. 
Value per se, intrinsic-a dangerously anti-instrumental, anti-capital 
orientation. To a Freudian therapist like Arnold Rothstein, this 
"expectation that the world should gratify him just because he wishes 
it" is repugnant. He prescribes lengthy psychoanalysis which will 
ultimately permit an acceptance of "the relative passivity, 
helplessness, and vulnerability implicit in the human condition."

Others have seen in narcissism the hunger for a qualitatively different 
world. Norman O. Brown referred to its project of "loving union with the 
world," while the feminist Stephanie Engel has argued that "the call 
back to the memory of original narcissistic bliss pushes us toward a 
dream of the future." Marcuse saw narcissism as an essential element of 
utopian thought, a mythic structure celebrating and yearning for 
completeness.

The Psychological Society offers, of course, every variety of commodity, 
from clothes and cars to books and therapies. for every life-style, in a 
vain effort to assuage the prevailing appetite for authenticity. Debord 
was right in his counsel that the more we capitulate to a recognition of 
self in the dominant images of need, the less we understand our own 
existence and desires. The images society provides do not permit us to 
find ourselves at home there, and one sees instead a ravening, 
infuriating sense of denial and loss, which nominates "narcissism" as a 
subversive configuration of misery.

Two centuries ago Schiller spoke of the "wound" civilization has 
inflicted on modern humanity-division of labor. In announcing the age of 
"psychological man," Philip Rieff discerned a culture "in which technics 
is invading and conquering the last enemy-man's inner life, the psyche 
itself." In the specialist culture of our bureaucratic-industrial age, 
the reliance on experts to interpret and evaluate inner life is in 
itself the most malignant and invasive reach of division of labor. As we 
have become more alien from our own experiences, which are processed, 
standardized, labeled, and subjected to hierarchical control, technology 
emerges as the power behind our misery and the main form of ideological 
domination. In fact, technology comes to replace ideology. The force 
deforming us stands increasingly revealed, while illusions are ground 
away by the process of immiseration.

Lasch and others may resent and try to discount the demanding nature of 
the contemporary "psychological" spirit, but what is contested has 
clearly widened for a great many, even if the outcome is equally 
unclear. Thus the Psychological Society may be failing to deflect or 
even defer conflict by means of its favorite question, "Can one change?" 
The real question is whether the 
world-that-enforces-our-inability-to-change can be forced to change, and 
beyond recognition.

