#daniel tutt

The rise of the social superego gives way to a different form of self-making, which for Lasch meant that secondary narcissism—or pathological narcissism—is released as a normalized form of social personality. In other words, narcissism breaks down and undergoes a crisis wherein more pathological forms of “secondary narcissism” become more common: aggressive identifications instead of self-love tend to be the more dominant form of mediation of ideals. Primary narcissism for Freud is akin to Spinoza’s conatus or the necessity of striving and self-preservation. In general, narcissism is marked by a libidinal form of self-love that is sexualized. Lasch replaced the Oedipus complex with the “Narcissus Myth” as the guiding form of subjective life in the early neoliberal period. In so doing, he pointed to this subjective shift in the process of primary narcissism, more precisely, to a pervasive stunting of primary narcissism.

This stunting is directly correlated to the socialization of the family and the increasing dominance of the market intervening in more and more areas of individual psychic life. Socially determined ego-ideal and ideal-ego identifications break down in this situation of pervasive “pathological narcissism,” and the subject perceives the rules of the game in terms of the superego, not the ideal ego grounded in more concrete social relations that are less hampered by capitalist marketization. There was thus a certain reprieve or distance from marketizing logics within the family prior to the rise of this hyper-marketization that meant subjects could manage authority more thoroughly; that is, they could more adequately work through the paternalistic identifications that are constitutive of any family structure. The breakdown of stable ego ideals is what leads to the emergence of the irrational and cruel pre-Oedipal archaic superego, that is, the “social superego.” In this dynamic, the “social” becomes, as Simone Weil wrote, “the only idol,” that is, the social envelops collective life in ways that are all-enveloping and suffocating (Weil, 1955, 117). We can thus understand Thatcher’s dictum “there is no such thing as society” as giving way to the precise opposite reality. Everything is socialized, even the core of our psychic life."

In a matter of days, Tennessee's state legislature is expected to pass a bill ostensibly designed to combat radical Islamic terrorism in Tennessee known as the "Material Support" bill or HB 1353. While the bill has removed direct references to Islam or Muslims at the pressure of civil rights groups such as the ACLU and others, if it is passed, it will seriously harm our security by alienating our biggest allies in combatting homegrown terrorism: our fellow American Muslims.