Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“Winnicott, Phillips suggests, helps us to understand what motivates the perfectionism, materialism and ruthless drive for ever-increasing efficiency that define our age. He asks us to think about what drives the narcissistic tendencies prevalent in contemporary society”-the motivations behind the actions; what do they get out of it, what do others; who are the actors“in relation to the idea of ‘counter-culture’, itself an unstable and contested term, admittedly”-what was once counter culture is can become the norm; it’s dependent on the schemas of the time“The bourgeoisie, instead of discovering the class enemy in its factories, finds it across the breakfast table in the person of its own pampered children’ (p. 34). Emphasising the revolutionary importance of intergenerational antagonism, Roszak insists that American youth – ‘technocracy’s children’ – were in revolt against the instrumental reason characteristic of their society, wherein the development of and esteem for nuclear and military technologies betrayed an impoverished morality and pathological constitution.”“New technologies in which the younger generation were fluent gave them an advantage over their parents, and the balance of power shifted to reflect the increased purchasing power of educated young people. This saw the growth of a consumer culture geared towards conspicuous consumption as a vehicle of self-realisation.”-I think about this often as I find myself not knowing or finding interst in certain social media that is geared towards younger audiences; the awareness of no longer being the person most marketed to“The changed experience of this generation also led young people to see themselves as radical political and social agents who occupied a marginal position in relation to the dominant social order.”-recognized their power and autonomy in the larger systems“Through its rich historical legacy and continued representation as a mode for expression of ‘‘otherness’’ from a ‘‘mainstream’’ ideology, the term ‘‘counterculture’’ now occupies a special place in the popular imagination […] Counterculture has become part of a received, mediated memory that bespeaks a reaction to a series of pathological issues still very much at large in today’s world (p. 25).”“‘Mothers and children were emblematic figures throughout British culture and politics in the first half of the twentieth century’, Alexander (2013) writes, but ‘no one gave the mother as much psychic power as Winnicott’ (p. 166).”-a power that has persisted in all psychological work that emphasizes the mother-child connection as the most important/influential; restricts the lens; so much of this with attachment theory-of course Bowlby is mentioned in the next section“The need for stability in the caregiver-child dyad would make reliable social institutions necessary, institutions capable of sheltering the family unit from extremes of poverty and insecurity, through social insurance and children’s allowances. If the caregiver, most often the mother, is to provide the child with a good-enough holding environment, then the home itself must have a similar holding environment, provided by the welfare state.”-attachment security“The experience of relative stability and freedom in the post-war period has allowed the younger generation’s ‘true selves’ to flourish, producing subjects capable of critiquing, and resisting, the norms of their society, as well as experiencing hate for their parents. This is no bad thing; for Winnicott, compliance is the very thing to be warded off.”“Hobsbawm (1995) describes these alterations as a ‘cultural revolution’ evident in ‘family and household’ that changed ‘the structure of relations between the sexes and generations’“For Mitchell, the emphasis object relations psychoanalysis placed on maternal care chimed well with a post-war drive to re-establish pre-war gender roles”-a convenient way to backtrack after the war relied on women and their contributions; needed the security of realigning motherhood with children and gendered work“Certainly, women’s domestic role was ‘reinforced by the progressive currents of thought of the period’ (p. 190), but the basis of their popular appeal lay in ‘the flowering of love for children in a war-torn world’, and a celebration of working class maternal spontaneity and warmth in opposition to austere forms of upper-class child-rearing (p. 190). Riley (1983) employed the idea of ‘popularisation’ to capture the somewhat ephemeral and dialectical relationship between the production of theory and the social sensibility of the time (p. 91).”“Winnicott’s sustained association of women with motherhood and his preoccupation with women’s apparently ‘intuitive’ mothering when in a state of ‘health’ (never guaranteed, however) certainly did little to challenge traditional gender roles. The post-war welfare state depended on women keeping up this unpaid care work, and Winnicott’s idea of the ‘ordinary good home’ – protected by, yet separate from, the outside world – only naturalised this arrangement.”-because this was the most beneficial stance for heteropatriarchy societies“wrote that ‘from its inception until today, many feminists have argued not […] for the end of the family but for, in whatever kin or communal form it occurs, an equality of reproduction with production; producing people should be as important as producing things’ (p. 200). Mitchell is certainly right in her assertion, though as Wilson (1980) notes, it is unclear how it might sit with a Freudian theory of sexual difference that seems to reify the existing sexual division of labour in capitalist societies (p. 199).”“Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s set about dismantling the collective institutions of the welfare state, and returning responsibility to individuals under the guise of increasing individual agency and autonomy”-all about how it’s framed, even when it’s actually hurting the people the agenda posits to protect“Yet the marketisation and commodification of care is only possible because of the need for care: the fact of human dependence on others, most often women, which was Winnicott’s (1991b) abiding concern”-as it should be---care that has been historically viewed as women’s work is devalued and does not receive compensation from the State even though it’s necessary work that keeps capitalism going;“Social responsibility for care depends on the expansion of public goods, which in turn depends on taxing wealth or profits. Compensating workers for time spent in caregiving (e.g., paid parenting leave) expands paid compensation at the expense of profits. In addition, requiring (either by regulation or by contract) that workplaces accommodate and subsidize employees’ caregiving outside of work interferes with employers’ control over the workplace and tends to be resisted in the private sector, where jobs continue to be organized as if workers have very little responsibility for care. (p. 36)”-it’s not enough to just acknowledge an awareness of the problem, but actively work to dismantle, which means reckoning with the current system and being willing to deconstruct it