Can psychotherapy prevent fascism? We can only answer that question by exploring the dynamics of fascism and group narcissism. What role does nostalgia play in this problematic dialogue in which those with vulnerable narcissism (I don’t live up to my idealized self-states? intersect with pathological narcissism (I require you to mirror me because I have no self at all)? The major advances in our understanding of mental health tend to coincide with seismic shifts in the economic environment, with the collapse of empires or systems that seem fixed. These advances occur among a community of practitioners who exist in often quiet opposition to the prevailing order and yet require this very opposition to properly assess their environment and the pathologies that it creates. Like all utopian projects, this oppositional stance melds the what-is with the what-might-be. In other words, thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
So, what should our current economic crisis and the very real possibility that permanent affluence was illusory——that the boom-and-bust cycle is an unavoidable aspect of capitalism——be telling us about the next phase of development or even what the concept of a normative standard of emotional well-being should look like? What should a psychology that is not just reflective of our times but is proactive consist of? The client base of mental health is no longer to be found among an articulate middle class because the trappings that supported that class no longer exist.
To carefully tease out, as one of my training analysts once put it, “the tiniest tendrils of growth” involves the development of a therapist-client relationship——not a cost-effective prospect. In an age of managed care, fiscal crises, the relegation of the middle class to the status of the working poor, and over-medicated children, we may have the responsibility to devote ourselves to these tendrils, but do we have the luxury to do so? It seems hard to make an argument that such an investment is justifiable, let alone feasible. And as the world of verbal one-on-one interface loses ground to soundbites and texting, is “the talking cure” being dumbed down along with everything else? Skype and Facetime sessions are now available not only from therapists but from healers across a range of modalities. The intimacy that characterizes a therapeutic relationship——that is to say, the very thing that creates a space for healing——would seem to be lacking in such an arrangement. This is what we are facing on the micro level.
On the macro level, one may wonder why we aren’t employing political psychology consultants? We have become the “smart” people in the way that jazz is the “smart” person’s music—inevitably elitist or impenetrable. You don’t fight a mob with a reasonable argument and a group of nuanced individuals. Is political psychology a taboo subject and if so, why the Right uses it all the time. Bannon has an institute devoted to it. But it is associated with the Left and carries with it the imprint of, specifically, the refugee Left of World War Two—i.e., Jews and communist sympathizers. Thus the legacy of the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s, with its Hegelian roots that can be called out as radical by whoever chooses to weaponize such language.
