I am interested in the ways that these landmark works in political theory are applicable to individual psychology, particularly within a framework that supports the continuation of the false self along with the divestiture of individual power that accompanies mass movements. There is a question that is always pertinent at both the individual and social or national level. We must ask what it is in a particular context that drives the mechanism of maintaining the false self for the sake of a maladaptive connection? This is a connection that makes us repeatedly relinquish our autonomy to the very forces that will harm or destroy us. It is the fear of allowing the authentic self to emerge. It is the necessary grieving process for absolute merger with an all-good introject that must accompany it that is painful. It is painful enough to keep individuals enmeshed in habits, systems, relationships, and beliefs that are patently harmful to them. As Arendt writes of totalitarian organization (in one of the many German editions not translated into English):
The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with the reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the leader who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality (Arendt, 1951).
It is the false self, predicated upon the same fiction, that aids in this victory, precisely because of the feeling of strength that accompanies the idealizing merger. The fragile self is subsumed in a mass, whether that mass is socially or ideologically driven, that impedes the access which individuals have to their inner strength and authenticity.
Psychoanalysis and “the Clinic”
At its outset, both psychoanalysis and social progressivism “conformed to the social-democratic political ideology that prevailed in post-World War I Vienna” (Danto, p. 2). Services were provided to the working classes and the poor by the early psychoanalysts. Psychoanalytic treatment centers promoted the idea that “psychoanalysis was supposed to share in the transformation of civil society” (Danto, p. 3).
In the face of our current opioid crisis, which is inextricably if unwittingly tied to this nation’s political and economic agenda, we would do well to revisit the idea of analytically oriented interventions. That the atomization of the individual and the intergenerational trauma of poverty, as well as the various financial and political agendas of the pharmaceutical industry, have resulted in mass addiction warrants addressing inequality from both a psychoanalytically informed and psycho-social perspective.
The Emergent Self
That the purpose of life is to self-actualize is a tenet of Existential, Humanist, and many other schools of psychoanalysis, spirituality, and philosophical thought. However, if we are operating within the framework of the false self, we cannot self-actualize, because there is no authentic self that can be operationalized. A primary goal of psychotherapy is to uncover an emergent authentic self. We are to provide nurturance and support for new growth, until that self can be stable enough that the client or patient can take responsibility for it and ownership of it. This idea of the authentic contains within it echoes of what mass movements appeal to—idea of an unsullied self (or nation) prior to contact with dangerous or disabling admixtures.
