the Sufferer

"This appeal to disavow the link between social forces and personal life reflects not only a defense against psychic overwhelm but the ethic of individualism as well that is at the heart of our social surround" (635)"My aim in this paper is to challenge the tendency within psychoanalysis to separate the social and the individual, the public and the private, the clinical and the political" (636)"prevailing psychoanalytic theories overly focus on the family in the etiology of psychic conflict and its affective and defensive dynamics at the expense of the historical and sociopolitical specificities within which the family evolves and through which both the subject and intersubjective relations are constituted. Their restrictive gaze misses the larger ideological and institutional contexts that frame the frame and saturate the psychoanalytic process. Might this focus on the private domain of the family function as a refuge, a container that protects both analyst and patient from anxieties provoked by a threatening world? Is it a barricade of disavowal that limits the potential of the psychoanalytic process to create more critically reflexive subjects?" (636)"I expand Winnicott's felicitous claim that "there is no such thing as an infant" (Winnicott 1960, p. 587) in arguing that there is no such thing as an intersubjective experience that exists outsides our insertion within a particular history of hegemonic social forces and ideology" (636-637)"In Lacanian terms, it is within the Symbolic Order that each subject is born and upon whom identity is inscribed with ideological and institutional force. The process that creates the subject is called subjectivation. This term captures the paradox of its impact. While it enables individuals to acquire a coherent self-image that covers over the original state of decenteredness characteristic of early life, it also creates subjects who uncritically identify with the social order's repressive and constraining asymmetrical power relations and the ideologies that rationalize them (Althusser, 1984; Guralnik & Simeon, 2010). Althusser famously referred to the process of subjectivation as one in which we are "interpellated" or hailed to our place in the social order. To the extent that we uncritically identify with its foundational values and institutional arrangements, we reproduce them in the realm of ideas and affectively in the concrete behaviors of everyday life (Hollander 2010, p. 12)" (638)"Hegemony is never absolute; the ruling bloc and its ideological institutions must negotiate with a number of competing ideologies, the least offensive of which can be absorbed and the most threatening of which are controlled through coercive power. The ruling bloc's design of the dominant social symbols of the culture are powerful because they are constructed as universal and abstractand are thus experienced by the majority of individuals as the common sense of an entire social order (Boggs, 1984), one that is internalized and shapes their identifications, whether or not these function in their real interest. Judith Butler (1997, p. 3) put it this way: "...power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject's self identity"" (639)"Neoliberalism's intellectual roots date back to the 1930s with the Freiburg School of economists who were critical of the statist model of fascism and several decades later among the Chicago School of economists who adamantly rejected Keynesianism and its redistributive principles associated with the welfare state (Foucault, 2004, p. 172; Palley, 2005)" (639)"In Latin America, US-sponsored neoliberalism was imposed by terrorist states that violently repressed politically progressive ideas and the robust movements they mobilized (Hollander, 1997). While it was a continent-wide phenomenon, in Chile the Pinochet dictatorship in league with economist Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" remains the symbol of the marriage between authoritarian governance and economic austerity policies. In the United States, neoliberalism achieved consensual support because its central tenants are syntonic with our culture's sacrosanct values of individualism, private property, and competition" (640)"On the contrary, the term suggests a direct link to classical liberalism that emerged in the late 18th century as a critique of the aristocracy on behalf of the economic and political interests of the emerging new bourgeois (capitalist) class that advocated a philosophical belief in progress, the autonomy of the individual, and a self-regulating market. The term "neoliberalism" is meant to indicate continuity with 18th- and 19th-century liberalism in that it constitutes an attack on an activist state, the policies of which are viewed as antithetical to the unfettered movement of capital and the freedom of economic actors to behave in their own interests and thus the interest of society in general" (640)"Classical liberalism construed laissez-faire principles and the abolition of government intervention as the best strategy for a nation's economic growth because competition was understood to be a primary characteristic of the human species. Liberal discourse also recognized that the conditions of inequality and exploitation generated by competition were to be addressed in the domain of politics, through struggles to actualize principles of inclusivity and ideals of equality, freedom and popular sovereignty (Brown, 2015, pp. 44-45)" (640)"Further, neoliberalism abstracts the model of the market to all spheres of life and configures human beings always and everywhere as "homo oeconomics" (Brown 2015, p. 21), rejecting political consciousness and engagement that collectively address issues of social justice. Neoliberalism reduces the functions of the state essentially to the protection of the conditions that are supposed to generate economic growth, which is promoted as the essential guarantor of prosperity. Hence the neoliberal politics of austerity, which include the marketization and outsourcing of all social projects; the dismantling of public institutions and political spaces; and the shift of responsibility from the state to the individual citizen for survivability in an atmosphere of permanent joblessness and recessionary conditions. The theory tends to limit the state's role to organizing the military, defense, police, and legal structures and functions necessary to guarantee property rights and, by force when required, the proper functioning of markets (Harvey, 2005)" (640)"According to one study sponsored by the United Nations, the neoliberal privatization of the care of the very young and old, the sick and disadvantaged, by relying on the invisible safety net provided by the (unrecognized and unappreciated) unpaid and low paid labor of women (Elson, 2015), continues to handicap over half the population in this increasingly Hobbesian economic world" (641)"The hegemonic view of human beings as essentially homo oeconomicus rather than "homo politicus" has replaced other views of what it means to be human, including, for example, that we are essentially political, religious,ethical, social, or moral" (641)"In psychological terms, the subject is conceived of as an enterprise whose individual success is achieved through a commitment to pure enterprise in which others are experienced more as resources to be utilized rather than as others in whom a psychological investment yields emotional security and mutual satisfaction" (641)"Foucault argued that the neoliberal stress on values of primitivsm is responsible for the shrinking of communal ties and community responsibility. As policy and ideology, it requires that citizens develop an identity based on an entrepreneurial ethic and a moral autonomy reflected in the capacity for "personal accountability" and "self-care" (Lemke, 2005)" (641)"In 1997, Pierre Bourdieu began to speak of "precarite" to name the foundational characteristic of neoliberal society. Today, precarity is a ubiquitous concept used by sociologists to refer to the economic uncertainty and existential angst produced by the dissolution of fixed employment, social bonds, occupational identities, social protections, and a collective consciousness of self-worth based on the pride of labor. Some (Seymour, 2012; Standing, 2013) have argued that precarity is a traditional characteristic of working-class life experience that has been exacerbated today" (642)"Many disenfranchised citizens identify with this psychology to the detriment of their ability organize or engage in counter-hegemonic struggles on behalf of social responsibility and community solidarity. This is a traumatogenic third, no longer outside the range of normal experience; rather, it is the new normativity. The danger is that denial and disavowal create a bystander population that though inaction reinforces the very conditions that prompt these defenses in the first place" (643)"Gramsci recognized that while the "ruling bloc" is able to absorb most competing ideologies, there are historical moments in which oppositional movements arise whose articulation of subjects' inchoate dissatisfactions can crystalize into a new consciousness to promote change" (644)"As psychoanalysis, our clinical work is the site of our optimistic belief that our patients may potentially alter their intrapsychic and interpersonal discontents that foreclose their capacities to become critical subjects. This includes our ability to mourn our losses; face uncertainty; and tolerate ambiguity, paradox, and vulnerability, in ways that stimulate the development of resistance, but not the intrapsychic kind that we generally think about" (643)"We can expand the horizons of psychological remediation in our clinical work when we seek to locate where and how neoliberal patterns of responsibilization, privatization, marketization, and othering are manifest in and disturb the subject's affective experience of self and others. The social phenomena I have described in this paper are, I believe, hidden in plain sight in patient material. Our own increased literacy with respect to the traumatogenic constituents of our social surround can provide rich opportunities to interrogate symptoms as codes of psycho-political afflictions. Such knowledge enhances to interrogate symptoms as codes of psycho-political afflictions. Such knowledge enhances the possibility that we might be able to facilitate a process toward disidentification with hegemony and toward the expression of individual and intersubjective freedom and desire" (644)what is the traumatogenic?"This shift in B's attitude can be understood as a benefit of his growing political awareness of his personal situation" (647)"A growing consciousness is producing resistance movements, a new counter-hegemonic impulse in this country, one that signifies the resurrection of homo politicus. The values of citizenship are being activated on behalf of social justice and human rights to deeply assaulted by neoliberal policy and ideology. If politics is the struggle over the institution of social meaning, we are witnessing in the current outburst of progressive as well as conservative movements a tumultuous rejection of a social system the priorities of which are so profoundly destructive" (648)why suffering?