Psychoanalysis and its variants have been mobilized by many authors as an enriching corrective to what Kovel (1978/1988) above identified as a Marxist “psychological indifference and shortsightedness” (p. 110). Such is its role here. To Marxism informed by psychoanalysis, “the cultural dimension of human life,” says Barham (1984),
. . . is neither secondary nor epiphenomenal [as “classical”, economistic Marxism woul hold] but in crucial respects determining, and progress is therefore more likely to come from a rigorous examination of how the forms of liberal-individualist culture sustain their hold, and of what is most intimately involved in seeking to reach from one form of human project to another. {pp. 38-39)
Following the lead of thinkers such as those just surveyed, the argument that is here presented aims to demonstrate the validity of two observations, First, that there is a complex, subtle, normally unarticulated, but understandable congruity to the fundamental nature of many American societal problems; and second, that apprehending this fundamental nature as alienation between many individuals and the institutions, beliefs, meanings, and other people of their society both will clarify many problems and will encourage problem solutions that might otherwise not be found.
Some further support for the strategy is formulated in the upcoming section outlining the history of a notion regarding alienation.
Alienation and Its “Inevitability”
Implicit or explicit in many world views, including sometimes psychoanalytic theory, is an argument that alienation is historically universal, inevitable to some degree as a product of the unavoidable separation from the primeval object(s) of our desires. As Lasch (1979) says:
. . . each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood–the trauma of separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother’s love–in its own way, and the manner in which it deals with these psychic events produces a characteristic form of personality, a characteristic form of psychological deformation, by means of which the individual reconciles himself to instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence. (p. 76)
The hyper-utopian argument that a blissful unalienated state is closely approachable or attainable will be part of this dissertation primarily to illustrate its regressive allure. Rather, the specifics of American capitalism that might realistically be altered toward a lesser alienation are of prime attention here. People will inevitably have hunger as well; this neither justifies starvation or malnourishment, nor does it make it quiescently inevitable.
I offer three intertwined observations regarding alienation. First, I propose that subjects’ relationships with objects are paradigms for subjects’ relationships with objectivity; and, dialectically. that the structures and conventions of objectivity are paradigms for subject-object relationships and.’ meanings. In short, subject-object relations and subjectivity-objectivity relations are intermingled much more thoroughly than capitalist culture’s belief and practice acknowledges. Among many possible manifestations of this statement, one vital one is that parent(s) and child(ren) constitute each other; the totality of their-psychosocial surroundings constitutes them and is constituted by them and by the sequalae of their interrelationship.
