Total Transference
The clinic engulfed by capital
Luke Ali Manzarpour
Clinical psychoanalysis is today confronted with the collapse of a core phantasy that has sustained it. The clinic, it’s said, exists in a space barricaded off from the social, political, and historical. Nevertheless, theories of gender, race, culture, religion, sexual identity, class, dis/ability, coloniality, and other sites of personal domination have hacked their way through the consulting room door. Encompassing these, a broader force remains to be conceptualized and contended with clinically: what of abstract domination, whether conceived as the automatic obedience to economic mute compulsion or an invisible political leviathan? What havoc has this automatic subject wreaked upon the unconscious minds of everyone under its ephemeral reign, which is to say almost everyone alive today? Worse, how has it birthed, nurtured, and afforded meaning to each of us? And how is the psychoanalytic clinic implicated in its perpetuation and supersession?
To begin, it is necessary to consider how the individual is taken to be an eternal reality by psychoanalysis, instead of existing at the historically peculiar moment of commodity exchange. What can psychoanalysis do if it places the emphasis on the latter? Here, she is driven by a desire for a particular commodity, including analysis, which she pays for with money. In the process, she is split between what she is doing and her consciousness. While her mind is concerned with the thing she buys and what use may be made of it, her action is involved in what Alfred Sohn-Rethel once called “real abstraction”: the extra-psychic process in which a commodity’s tangible, material reality is stripped away in exchange, leaving only proportions of an abstract quantity. To illustrate this generically, x pairs of Mod A Go-Go stretch-elastic pants are equal to exactly y minutes of psychoanalysis and z antimalarial tablets—a thought that would be repellent were it not the basis of our social reality. Anything that falls outside of this purely quantitative equivalence—that is, anything that cannot be exchanged—is nothing to capital, regardless of what use may be made of it by mere mortals.
In what follows, though it requires some extensive throat-clearing, some reacquaintance with the Marxian critique of political economy will be offered before we turn to the psychoanalytic. After all, where exactly does our social character come from on this account of impersonal and personal domination? Does the Marxian problematic help us further along into a more robust contemporary psychoanalytic theory, one that countenances how the political economy sets conditions and limits, engendering its own suffering in this life? These are notes toward answering this and other questions. Extracting the delicate shifts of cognitive, affective, and somatic attention of the clinic into the rough and pressing world of politics is inevitably to do violence to them. Equally, any introduction of psychoanalysis to radical praxis risks reducing social malaise to individual psychological factors, so diluting robust political action with contemplation. Such eventualities can be somewhat mitigated by centering the extrapsychic genesis of real abstraction, while attending to the dignity of each individual response to life under its dominion. The question of whether anti-capitalists might benefit from heeding any lessons from the clinic is an open one. I will proceed on the assumption that they might.
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In Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s account, to start with, this material practice of abstracting from concrete reality in exchange gives rise to the separation of the mental from the material. Cognition becomes freed from the body into the myriad forms of symbolization, calculation, and abstraction that we know today as discrete disciplines of labor. For “[a]nybody who carries coins in his pocket and understands their functions bears in his mind, whether or not he is aware of it,” Sohn-Rethel argues, “ideas which, no matter how hazily, reflect the postulates of the exchange abstraction.” This abstraction functions regardless of whether it is thought at all—a background reality that, through habitual exposure to the price abstraction, encourages the notion that things have separate essences. This counterfactual fact is absorbed pre-consciously as the embedded metaphysics of everyday life, where it develops into a profuse human capacity for science, mathematics, poetry, and other abstractions. The mental and the material are further torn: through the divisions between commodity production, management, circulation, and financialization, society is increasingly divided between concrete and cognitive labor—between the head and the hand. The individual, in turn, is riven along the same lines, and her mental faculties are felt to be increasingly distinct from her physical embodiment.
Like commodities in exchange, the formal equality of money ownership renders everyone perfectly equivalent before the universal law. As Étienne Balibar puts it, “each individual presents himself to the other as the bearer of the universal—i.e. of purchasing power as such. He is a man ‘without any particular quality,’ whatever his social status (king or ploughman) and personal wealth (banker or wage-earner).” The split nature of the commodity, Moishe Postone writes, “is not solely one between individuals and their alienated social contexts: it also can be seen as one within the individuals themselves.” Like the commodity, an individual is both the embodiment of the universal and a particular person. She is socially meaningful only as an instance of the abstract. Possession of money forms a boundary, within which the subject experiences herself as a distinct entity. Equally, property makes for formal recognition by the state: the universal source of justice ushered in with monetization. Being an owner of money thereby confirms one’s personhood, and so the foundation upon which to develop one’s unique sensibilities. As Gillian Rose puts this, “‘Personality’ is an abstraction of the law, and the claim to possess is the basis of the right to be recognized by law.” This is the foundation of what Clifford Geertz describes as the “bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes”—a “rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s culture.”
“Being an owner of money thereby confirms one’s personhood, and so the foundation upon which to develop one’s unique sensibilities.”
Money then, paradoxically, is a ruthlessly homogenizing unit that affords one individuality; within capitalism, individuation is equally the most extreme denial of personal idiosyncrasy. As Marx writes, “the individual is not objectified in his natural quality, but in a social quality (relation) which is, at the same time, external to him.” “Money, as purely abstract wealth,” he elaborates, “comes under the power of the individual likewise as an abstract person, relating to his individuality as totally alien and extraneous.” As Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch put this doubled quality:
“On the one hand it has created a particularistic and individualistic social universe in which each social unit is in competition with the other. Yet at the same time, such individualism implies a sort of equality, the equivalence of each unit.”
Marx’s account of this peculiar reality preceded its radical generalization in the twentieth century. Societies of commodity production and exchange came more closely to resemble his theory. Thomas Hardy’s characters, for instance, lived in Marx’s late nineteenth-century world “where your neighbour is everybody in the tything, and where calculation is confined to market-days.” Some half-century later, all relations—unneighborly or neighborly—were subsumed by market calculation and turned into a community of commodities. This anthropomorphized capital engendered our “material community.”
Per Jacques Camatte, this transformation signals a total subsumption in which all aspects of human life are absorbed by capital and shaped to its needs. Camatte’s periodization corresponds to that of Ernest Mandel for whom our stage of capital, from the 1940s onwards, becomes total. This is a period defined by fluidity: highly flexible production and labor processes, with an incessant, accelerating demand on everyone to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the market, globalized production, offshoring, financial speculation, as well as temporal compression—material boundaries of distance and time are perpetually overcome. Frederic Jameson elaborates Mandel’s thesis to include, significantly for our purposes, fluidity’s “new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious.” In Camatte’s account, “capital reconstructs the human being as a function of its process,” molding the mind “into a computer which can be programmed by the laws of capital.”
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It is worth turning briefly to an overview of how capital has come to occupy this position. Marx terms the substance of the exchange abstraction “value,” which represents the only concept of wealth known to a system of generalized commodity production and manifests in the form of price. The root of value, in Marx’s account, is labor in the abstract: the duration of time that it would take to produce the commodity under current levels of productivity, or “socially necessary labour-time.” In exchange, the commodity is taken to have been produced in a given amount of such time, endowed with a monetary representation, although it is only the latter form that enters human consciousness. To say two commodities are the same price then is to say that it would take society on average the same amount of time to produce both, regardless of how much time, in fact, went into their production. Money, thus, bestows value on the concrete labor that went into producing a commodity in a temporal après-coup: retrospectively recognizing whatever time was actually spent as having been of a particular duration and recognizing the particular labor of production as homogenous labor in the abstract. Concrete labor that is not validated in exchange as a quantum of abstract labor has no social reality for capital.
Regardless of individual (un)conscious motivation, it is necessary for one’s production to occur at a certain velocity and, indeed, to contribute to the acceleration of production if one is to realize profit and so survive. Producing for a period greater than socially necessary would be unprofitable, while producing for less time than is socially necessary is the source of competitive advantage. This is the essence of capitalist enterprise and the cause of the expansion of productivity: namely, the investment in technology to gain advantage over one’s competitors by reducing labor-time. By so investing in labor-saving technology, the capitalist inadvertently contributes to the density of socially necessary labor-time once the labor-saving technology is inevitably adopted by her competitors. Hence Marx holds that the devaluation of each commodity— and the greater amount of production—must be achieved as each unit of time “becomes manifest as the desire of the capitalist who, in his wish to render this law ineffectual, or to outwit it and turn it to his own advantage, reduces the individual value of his product to a point where it falls below its [currently] socially determined value.”
Greater levels of productivity are needed to continue generating profit. Every producer, then, comes to find that their commodities now represent less value. This constitutes what Moishe Postone and Barbara Brick term the “treadmill dynamic,” whereby “capitalism necessarily must constantly accumulate to stand still.” The amount produced increases while compulsively repeating the core dynamic of the reproduction of self-same units of abstract labor. This becomes a logic that “acquires a life of its own,” as labor “gives rise to a social structure that dominates it.” Production for the sake of greater production takes on an autonomous form of domination. Marx writes how this conflictual process creates “an alien social power standing above them . . . a process and power independent of them.” For Postone, this manifests at the most abstract levels of society in two forms, corresponding to the two dimensions of the commodity: a series of distinct, concrete historical epochs characterized by the prevailing forms of labor-saving technology (“historical time”), and the perpetual self-same abstract logic of value expansion (“abstract time”). Taken together, these constitute the two interconnected forms taken by impersonal domination.
Though Postone posits this as the true real abstraction in place of Sohn-Rethel’s exchange abstraction, we may think, instead, of each being a distinct moment of the same social process. Each can be taken as a moment of the same process: the abstract reasoning of the individual due to exchange is part of the same process as the productivity treadmill of overworked social relations. Accordingly, the commodity and the labor process coordinately give rise to abstractions that originate in human activity—not the mind. Given the unity of production and consumption, it is unwarranted to choose between these moments. Instead, Postone offers a compelling account of the generation in the production process of impersonal domination, while Sohn-Rethel alerts us to how the material practice of abstraction in exchange gives rise to forms of thought.
In any case, the expansion of value, in the form of monetary growth, appears as a self-expanding and animate being. The social relations of production and exchange seem to be then, in Marx’s words, “consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself”: “money which begets money.” This represents the core fetish of capitalism, where value appears to enter “into a private relationship with itself” as “self-valorizing.” Monetary expansion is assumed to be an autonomous process. “The independent and external money-subject” is “a very mystical being,” Marx writes, for whom its own expansion seems to derive from “a power springing forth from its own womb.” The greater return on money lent for a specific period of time, interest appears to be “a specific kind of surplus value generated by the mere ownership of capital and therefore by an intrinsic characteristic of capital.” That money reproduces money is, thus, “the mother of every insane form.”
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This apparently self-propagating being takes the place of Mother Nature, gods, monarchs, and customs as the primary societal object. As purveyor of social meaning, writes Roberto Finelli, this selfreproducing process acts as “a single dominant factor, a single Subject that pervades, organizes and orients all of reality, articulating and connecting to its needs.” It is the wager of this essay that this mysterious entity looms as a maternal-social imago—the universalization of a particular instance of what Laplanche and Pontalis describe as the “unconscious prototypical figure which orientates the subject’s way of apprehending others.” This Subject represents for each individual a social instance of Christopher Bollas’s unthought known: “the object setting in which he developed, and is a part of him, but . . . has yet to be thought,” eluding conscious recognition as it forms the fabric of reality.
Specifically, this imago forms a narcissistic developmental environment within which everyone only has meaning as one appendage among others. Individuals exist, in David McNally’s words, as “appendages of this ‘animated monster,’” dismembered body-parts activated by the motions of the grotesque corpus of capital. Individuals born of this system are for capital—nothing more than incarnations of itself. Within this totality, social validity is only afforded to that which serves the expansion of money and value. This, per Lukács, “becomes a category of society influencing decisively the objective form of things and people . . . their relation to nature and the possible relations of men to each other.” It is thus, writes Jappe, “not limited to being a form of production; it is also a form of consciousness.” Or as Moishe Postone puts this, a “unified field of social being” serves as a “preconscious structure of consciousness”—the very condition of what constitutes rationality, nature, desire, and meaning.
For Christian Lotz, the system of monetary circulation is “the condition of the possibility for the meaningfulness by which individuals find themselves surrounded—even if, in most cases, individuals are not aware of this and unconsciously and unintentionally reproduce the form.” Money is “the form under which everything is encountered within capitalism,” and accordingly, it is the “universal social framework under which things are meaningful.” Ultimately, we find that only the abstract dimension of the commodity has recognizable social meaning—uncannily formless in exchange. As Patrick Murray writes,
“the social form of the product or the production process bizarrely and necessarily expresses itself as a separate thing, whether money per se, money capital or interest-bearing capital, leaving the impression that what remains lacks social form altogether.”
Monetization–commodification, in turn, becomes the very condition of the social meaningfulness of each individual’s psychic and corporeal experience.
If this produces a colonization of the unconscious, as Jameson characterizes late capitalism, the logic resonates in the transhistorical site of separation from a primary state of psychic undifferentiation. More simply, capital is pervasive, and full separation from its processes is foreclosed. The animated monster of capital thereby simulates and usurps what Italian psychoanalyst Riccardo Lombardi calls the primary object’s “function of facilitating representability and dimensionality in the primitive sensory world.” An orientation to individual psychic and somatic experience is imposed as either monetizable or else superfluous. Psychical differentiation and separation are everywhere hampered by their automatic reintegration into the circuits of capital.
“Psychical differentiation and separation are everywhere hampered by their automatic reintegration into the circuits of capital.”
The foregoing aims to give greater psychodynamic substance to Erich Fromm’s notion of “social character,” a Weberian ideal-type defined as “that syndrome of character traits which has developed as an adaptation to the economic, social, and cultural conditions.” For Fromm, a social character is “the nucleus of the character structure which is shared by most members of the same culture in contradistinction to the individual character.” Fromm names this ascendant character in post-WWII society as the “marketing personality,” in which the individual is subjected to an “anonymous, invisible, alienated authority . . . [that] operates behind the backs of man and forces him to do things without giving him the freedom to decide.” This is a “system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix” while “nobody is an authority except ‘It.’ What is ‘It’? Profit, economic necessities, the market, common sense, public opinion, what “one” does, thinks, feels.”
Fromm holds that this impersonal demand has given rise to a character “rooted in the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one’s value as exchange value.” For the marketing personality, the “market [and] others are experienced as commodities like oneself; they too do not present themselves but their saleable part.” Dyadic relations have become relations “between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other.” This logic applies equally to all members of society: “the character differences between the various social classes, especially those living in cities, have almost completely disappeared.” Worker and capitalist alike are subjected to the authority of the “great It.” To reach into the “internal world” of the marketing personality, I turn to two psychoanalysts writing at the same time as Fromm—José Bleger and Masud Khan—both of whom discerned a marked shift in clinical presentations of those born around the advent of late capitalism.
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Bleger and Khan are, in one sense, arbitrary choices. The social is present in every psychoanalytic moment, whether discerned dialectically or positively, but these analysts are uniquely suited to consider the psychodynamics of the individual under abstract domination. Principally, both are concerned with the primary psychic functioning mobilized by abstract domination. They both situate their clinical findings in a social and historical context, while standing within the decisive shift when those born into society’s total subsumption by capital were coming of age. They had a certain alertness to novelty that today is experienced as the norm. Bringing together a wide range of psychoanalytic traditions, they are representative of clinical observations that traverse sectarian loyalties, although both hold an uncommon belief in what will be defined as “primary undifferentiation.” Bleger was operating from the Global South and Khan was keenly aware of the peculiarity of Western modernity. Inhabiting the point of contact between the pre-capitalist feudal life of prepartition India and the high capitalism of his chosen home in London, Khan writes from an awareness that psychoanalysis is the “inevitable result of a long sociological process of the evolution and alienation of the individual,” while his colleagues write as if their notion of the individual exists as some eternal reality. Writing in 1960, Khan draws on his clinical experience and a review of the contemporary psychoanalytic literature to categorize “a new type of patient that has come into prominence in the last two decades.” The novelty of this patient, whom he called the “schizoid personality,” consisted in a pronounced experience of emptiness and meaninglessness, a spectatorial and exhibitionist mode of relating, and the profound phobias of both separateness and dependency—all rooted in a precarious sense of existence and the perpetual fear of dissolution. Throughout Khan’s works, this figure reappears in a range of guises with a tendency toward enactment to manage the twin anxieties of fusion and atomization.
Meanwhile, from his Buenos Aires consulting room, Bleger was developing an account of the rise in clinical prevalence of a markedly similar character structure that he terms the “ambiguous personality.” He distinguishes this character as possessing “a different type of ego and a different sense of reality” to the classically encountered patient. He argued this was due to an excessive prominence in the patient’s psychic life of a primary developmental position of undifferentiation. He names this latter position “glischro-caric,” from the Greek glischro meaning viscous and karion meaning kernel. Posited alongside Melanie Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, Bleger proposed a tripartite structure to the psyche. Thomas Ogden would come to describe very similar clinical phenomena some twenty-two years later in his The Primitive Edge of Experience with the concept of the “autistic-contiguous” position, which similarly captures the simultaneity of monadic withdrawal and engulfment.
An elaboration of Freud’s primary narcissism, the glischro-caric position has an “agglutinated nucleus,” the earliest manifestation of psychic life where differentiation between self and environment has yet to develop. It is characterized by equivocation, “in which different terms co-exist without contradiction or conflict because they have never been discriminated.” The ambiguous personality’s psychic world is dominated by this position—“as empty of interiority as it is of exteriority.” They are characterized by “furtive behaviour, inauthenticity, lack of autonomy, naivety, vagueness, disorientation, oscillation, inconclusiveness, inconsistency, changeability, and sometimes of being indecisive and vacillating.” Bleger traces the increased prevalence of this character to life in a “formless” or “amorphous” society, wherein “the world and the subject become homogenised.” “This social phenomenon,” he writes, “is the reason we no longer find the traditional clinical pictures of psychiatric pathology, but more and more frequently meet with different and often more polymorphous pictures.”
While similarly attentive to socio-political context, Khan traces the genesis of this character structure to the rise of a primal dyadic relationship marked by cumulative impingements by a seductive and narcissistic mother. The mother’s relation to the infant is such that he experiences certain aspects of himself as her idolized appendage, and all other aspects of himself as devoid of meaning for her. To survive, he would have to become her “created-thing” by indulging her in the phantasy that he is merely an extension of her, lest she withdraw the cathexis of the idolized self-image upon which he depends for his sense of selfhood. This effects a pronounced split between different dimensions of self-experience:
“[T]he child very early on begins to sense that what the mother cathects and invests in is at once something very special in him and yet not him as a whole person. The child learns to tolerate this dissociation in his experience of self and gradually turns the mother into his accomplice in maintaining this special created-object. The next step in this developmental schema is that the child internalises this idolised self that was the mother’s created-thing.”
Such a child of narcissistic primary caregivers, writes Eva Seligman, is “merely the agent of their narcissistic needs, their appendage. He is trapped in a permanent fusion with them, or else he becomes walled off.” This is, I suggest, the generalized dilemma that characterizes the internal life of all those who must subjugate their particularity in the face of a socially validating abstraction in order to survive. This environment allows for individuals to exist, Lotz writes, “only insofar as they fit into the abstractions of a monetized world, [where] that which is specific to someone or something no longer fits within the abstract world and thus it becomes invisible.” This system—like the narcissistic mother in Ogden’s account—conveys to the individual:
“If you are not what I need you to be, you don’t exist for me.” Or in other language, “I can see in you only what I put there. If I don’t see that, I see nothing.”
The parents, in Fromm’s words, are “primarily the agents of society.” By the same token, children, per Joel Kovel, have “the quality of capital invested for a future yield.” To tie this together, it only requires a little stretch to understand how the newly dominant manner of primary relating is a microcosm of the relationship between abstract domination and the individual—the familial manifestation of what Bleger recognizes in the wider environment. The psychic benefits of identification with the status of the special created-thing relate to the foreclosure of paranoid-schizoid, depressive, and Oedipal anxieties. What is precluded is the awareness of separateness, of the fear and hatred of abandonment, of dependency, of one’s destructive envy, of the pain of having attacked a loved object in phantasy, and the recognition that the people upon whom one depends on are not subject to one’s omnipotent control.
The private possessor of money—who, writes Marx, “carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket”—experiences oneness with the money-subject and, thereby, she is afforded something of the phantasy of the alchemical experience of potentially infinite multiplication and the transcendence of limit, dependency, and separation. As a special created-thing of capital, the individual is promised the experience of fusion with the omnipotent process. The phantasy of being the omnipotent anal child who is born of her own self reproduction is reassured. She is “self-made”—and so supplants her actual caregivers— such that, in Charles Levin’s words, “like the alchemical transubstantiation of lead into gold, like the priest’s invocation of Christ from wafer and wine, all is digestible into a universal substance, which can in turn be refashioned into anything else.” Here, writes Bleger, “anything can be anything.” In this perpetual equation of distinction, we find potentially infinite forms of monocultural singularity—a “pure indivisible mode, where everything is everything else . . . The endless number of things tend to become, mysteriously, only one thing,” per Ignacio Matte-Blanco. The representation of capital is, Marx adds, in “constant movement to create more of the same.” The contiguous colonization of external objects and inner experience alike serve merely to multiply the self-identical. The money-subject perpetually gives birth to itself by way of its human surrogates in a parthenogenetic frenzy.
Yet, the omnipotent satisfactions of these phantasies are accompanied by distinct terrors, described variously across the literature as “anxiety of annihilation, infestation, mush, and faeces”; “the feeling of leaking, dissolving, disappearing, or falling into shapeless unbounded space”; “infinite falling”; “a chaos of indistinct physical sensations”; a “dark and formless infinite”; an “amorphous mass of unconnected and undifferentiated elements”; and “the dismemberment of spatio-temporal coordinates and the patient’s collapse into the black hole of formless infinity.” In social relations of generalized commodity production and exchange, this innate human terror meets what Chris Arthur calls the “void at the heart of capital,” where “the practical movement of exchange absents the realm of use-value to leave nothing.” At moments, one is capital’s special created-thing, but “no individual object can fulfil its voracious appetite, as it hunts its way restlessly from one to the other, dissolving each of them to nothing in doomed pursuit of its ultimate desire,” in the chilling words of Terry Eagleton. The core dilemma of the marketing personality, then, is between engulfment and being discarded as socially meaningless, whatever omnipotent and narcissistic phantasies are mobilized along the way.
Bleger traces how the individual beset by these twin anxieties of fusion and atomization has recourse to what he conceives as enactments of the “factic ego”: concrete activities and sensations that afford a sense of control over their competing demands. In this balancing act between fusion and atomization, material reality is used to protect against the self of total engulfment, while predictable physical rhythms, sensations, and shapes provide the reassurance of fusional connection with the environment. “In the factic ego,” Bleger writes, “we are dealing with a subject of ‘action,’ a personality in permanent ‘contact’ with events, persons or activities, from which it does not discriminate itself as a distinct subject.”
Such enactments function as a way “of preserving symbiosis in the most acceptable, least destructive and most protective form possible.” Factic egos, thus, “maintain extreme dependence on their work” and “always feels pressured and working.” These egos are consigned, as Ogden writes, to “imprisonment in the machinelike tyranny of attempted sensory-based escape from the terror of formless dread.” Objectrelating here is characterized by what Francis Tustin terms “adhesive equation,” whereby animate and inanimate objects alike are used to provide a sense of containment of inchoate and undifferentiated experience. The world is not seen as separate but as offering surface forms with which to align and achieve some sense of shape, though not so much as to suggest separateness. This constitutes the deepest sense in which individuals are psychically tied to laboring activity, and the core psychic commitment to the reproduction of the logic of capital. Ogden captures the internal experience:
“The ‘deadline’ is elevated to the position of a continually felt pressure in the patient’s emotional life that can be a felt presence at every moment, whether or not the patient is consciously focused on it. These patients describe the anxiety of the approaching deadline as a pressure that they hate, and yet at the same time continually seem to create for themselves: ‘A due date is something to push up against like a wall in front of me.’”
Such is the logic of Postone’s treadmill dynamic, in which capital “necessarily must constantly accumulate to stand still”: all that exists melts into air, only to congeal again into deathly solidity. Bleger registers the psychic manifestation of this sped-up stasis:
“[F]acticity makes them feel sometimes confined and pressured, as if time were ‘hurrying’ them; time is ‘hurrying them’ but they feel stopped or paralysed.”
Capital’s function as a generalized object of adhesive equation finds further, material form in the means of production—“the shapes of capital itself,” to turn Marx’s phrase. The individual aligns herself with the form of the prevailing productive technology, the concrete manifestations of abstract domination. Whether as a mechanized worker of the factory or as a digital subject of the microchip era, writes Lotz, “the overall driving force behind the expansion of capitalism is the industrialization of mental activities and abilities.” Members of societies in which commodity production is universalized are concretely subsumed by capital’s ephemeral soul in an eternal present. Through the usurpation, on Ogden’s terms, of the “sensory-dominated mode in which the most inchoate sense of self is built upon the rhythm of sensation” and its body, capitalist social relations “degrade [her] to the level of an appendage of the machine,” on Marx’s.
To restate, the maternal–natural–social environment emerges as an eternally expansive, homogenizing, omnipresent, parthenogenic being, possessed of a phantasmagorical body. It manifests both as qualitatively bounded and quantitively unlimited. A seductive totality, it is both indifferent to, and subsumptive of, anything other than itself. It births the paradoxically atomized-fused individual, whose individuality is only socially meaningful to the extent that she is adhesively equated with capital’s logic and material forms. Consequently, in the wake of the death of nature inaugurated by modernity, there arises a generalized reconception of the non-human environment on the model of this omnipotent subject. Nature itself regresses in the mind from pre-modern ambivalence to a terrifying ambiguity along the same lines. We can redeploy older metaphors for nature here: in Nietzsche’s words, capital is “prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain”; or in those of de Sade, capital trades on the “cauldron of nature” in which human life figures as a meaningless collection of shapeshifting molecules, swallowed up in the manner of the eponymous villain of 1958’s The Blob.
“Social character,” writes Alan L. Grey, “is a construct that presents probabilities, not certainties. It is best used as an orienting device against which to view the actual person.” In this spirit, I have presented the above account of social character under abstract domination. This serves as one link between generalized commodity production and the atomized individual of modernity, conceived as Khan’s schizoid personality and Bleger’s factic ego. I have suggested that capitalist social relations encourage the hypertrophy of the most homogenizing dimension of the personality—and its attendant pleasures and terrors. This effects a generalized arrest at the earliest stage of psychic development, the formless dread of which is organized in the factic activity of labor—what psychically binds the individual to the expansion of capital.
The soul of capital takes the form of the abstract imperatives of a hurried eternal present, and its material body takes the form of prevailing technologies of production. Particular rhythms and shapes, automatically and collectively coordinated, constitute a pre-linguistic and pre-symbolic object of adhesive equation. This impressionistic hypothesis is posited neither in opposition to the paranoid-schizoid, depressive, linguistic articulations of psychical life under capital, but nor does it dismiss the conscious rational aspects of adherence to generalized commodity production. Nevertheless, as a core tendency, this dynamic plays a significant role in orchestrating “higher” modes of functioning.
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The framing proposed here suggests possible key psychic obstacles to the supersession of capitalism. Clinical accounts indicate the psychic turmoil associated with abandoning a narcissistic object and the compulsive factic activity that maintains the phantasy of fusion with it in manageable form: the terror of separation, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties that are inevitably provoked as greed, envy, and guilt, are allowed to emerge. Hence Bleger’s patient sought desperately to maintain factic activity “precisely because of the possibility that her greed and envy at the primal scene might make an appearance” once she relinquished it. Similarly, once a patient of Khan’s moved away from compulsive, mechanical practices towards the recognition of separate others and developed the desire “to be dependent himself and be loved and taken care of,” his “state of imperturbability gave way to fits of raging jealousy and a crazy sort of possessiveness.”
The money-subject protects the individual from such anxieties by reducing the infinite complexity of competing human needs into the monotonous need for itself. In this account, the core phantasy of capitalism consists in what has been said of communism by psychoanalytic authors: “a drastic (if unconscious) attempt to deal with the Oedipus conflict by abolishing the Oedipus situation,” in the words of Fairbairn. Communism, Brink contends, “provides for each individual a share in a homogeneous sanctuary, a passive participation in a harmonious existence.”
In addition to the terrors of separation, clinical experience suggests the inevitable guilt at having attacked our fusional social object. As Andrea Celenza observes, “differentiation in the context of psychic merger is experienced as a psychologically aggressive act.” The undermining of an omnipotent maternal imago generates the inverse vision of a helpless, depressed, ill, and inhibited mother. Harold Searles describes the phantasy attendant to separation in situations of pathological symbiosis as having a “connotation of murderous dismembering, or lethal abandonment.” Such patients “cannot bear to grow out of the relationship and leave her there, tragically crippled.” Of course, it is materially true: failure to expand capital results in depressive collapse. This offers an alternative account of “left-wing melancholia”: not as the inability to mourn lost opportunities for realizing communism, but as self-recrimination for having ever wanted to abandon the subject upon whom selfhood and meaning has hitherto depended, however unequivocal one’s conscious revolutionary zeal.
Moreover, once separation is established, the guilt of abandoning an object that has defined us is liable to be transferred to the communist movement itself. The Oedipalized capitalist subject fantasizes a hostile figure who attacks the link with the idealized mother. Symbiosis may then be sought anew through adhesion to this father, now perceived as equally omnipotent—the psychic meaning of counterrevolutionary authoritarianism. To impose a new symbiotic system would be to replace one fusional reality for another by personalizing abstract domination, rhyming here with when Rosa Luxemburg noted “Lenin’s overanxious desire to establish the guardianship of an omniscient and omnipotent Central Committee.” As Adam Phillips writes of the Leninist, his “omniscience, as omniscience must, extends over time” such that “politics means behaving as if, speaking as if, you know what you want.”
The rushing in of alternative certainties is a risk inherent in the abolition of value, which would radically expand social complexity and uncertainty—not limit it. Social character risks shifting to the “extreme polarization” of the “authoritarian personality,” which Bleger posits as the looming alternative to the factic ego. The avoidance of such counterrevolutionary psychic retreats would depend upon the generalized openness to what Wilfred Bion terms negative capability: the capacity to live without “imposing readymade or omnipotent certainties.” Writing in this vein, Eugene Wolfenstein avers that
“[t]he question is can we bear the uncertainty and anxiety that must necessarily attend to the struggle to give up our fetishisms and addictions, to transform the structures of selfhood and the social practices that dominate us and tend toward our mutual destruction?”
By contrast, capitalism is perverse in Phillips’s sense of “knowing too exactly what one wants.” Can the psychoanalytic process—at its best, the unpredictable meeting of two minds—inform the abolition of value? Communism, in these terms, might be the radical unraveling of certainty about what we need and desire. Promotion of the communist ethic would entail a kind of counter-proselytizing, where “the best direction change can take is the direction in which we cannot know where our change will take us.” It would then be a kind of giving up—letting leave of the phantasies that have animated capital, mourning them and abandoning their presumed realization.
“Can the psychoanalytic process—at its best, the unpredictable meeting of two minds—inform the abolition of value? Communism, in these terms, might be the radical unraveling of certainty about what we need and desire.”
In their tentative, uncertain, deliberating, self-correcting ways, Phillips’s figures of sanity might “sound remarkably like middle-class liberal humanists” as Terry Eagleton once observed, concluding that they are “not the most plausible candidate[s] for the political task of creating a reasonable, sane world.” Though similarly suspicious of the psychoanalytic “liberal bromides” of conversation and provisionality, Oliver Eagleton, meanwhile, finds something that the radical might consider in Phillips’s preference for free association characteristic of the psychoanalytic session—standing over and against tightly planned sureties and over-organization of so much political praxis. Indeed, Phillips’s is an account of change that resonates nicely with that of Marx, for whom revolution was not the solemn self-certainty of the bourgeoisie, but a kind of farcical repetition of the latter, splicing Hamlet’s severe dead father with the mischievous woodland creature Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “that merry wanderer of the night”; “our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the Revolution.”
In contrast to the parading pomp of bourgeois revolutions, communist revolutions
“criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to start afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, and recoil again and again from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta!’”
Marx’s revolutionaries certainly sound more scathing, but in their farcical, stuttering camaraderie of perpetual reassessment, they bear comparison with the best of psychoanalytic conversation. Moreover, the great climactic leap, given Marx’s aversion to utopian blueprints, is a lurch into the unknown. Communism is something people make up as they go about shedding capital. In each case, uncertainty and opacity are the sources of mutative possibility—not encumbrances. As Werner Bonefeld writes, “uncertainty is the very essence of a praxis that is about the establishment of a new humanity of communist individuals, a humanity in which wealth is not money but freely disposable time.” Relinquishing the expansion of money for its own sake would open up vertiginous, kaleidoscopic possibilities—a potentially terrifying prospect. What would we do with all that free time and freefloating desire? Better, we are told, to remain adhesively equated to the money-subject: malevolent gods are better than none.
*
“It is a pity,” writes Khan, “the analysts have paid so little attention to Marx.” To conclude, with no little uncertainty, I suggest some way in which clinical practice can use Marx as an object—how it might operate, as an opening for further enquiry.
The antinomies of bourgeois thought cannot be resolved in thought. They are rooted in the real abstractions that constitute our lives of commodity production and exchange. They can, however, be evaded or experienced, and they can be thought together rather than separately. Psychoanalytic reflection can allow for the holding of the paradox of the self and the distress and pleasures of its irreconcilability. It can also alert us to spurious resolutions of these real antinomies—whether of total self-sufficiency or total fusion— or their neat reconciliation in liberal “balance.” As has been suggested in different ways throughout the history of Freudo-Marxism, psychoanalysis can help us understand the unconscious commitment to commodified social relations, and the psychic obstacles to their supersession. Though it would prefer not to, psychoanalysis would necessarily reflect on its own resistance to countenancing the social, and its contradictory nature as a site of liberation and domination.
“Though it would prefer not to, psychoanalysis would necessarily reflect on its own resistance to countenancing the social, and its contradictory nature as a site of liberation and domination.”
The social is attended to already, in a pre-figurative way, by searching interpretation of the dysfunctions induced by social hypertrophy. As they encounter symbiosis clinically, Khan’s and Bleger’s respective perspectives offer guiding lights. In Khan’s account, as the patient’s symbiotic omnipotence manifests in the process of analysis, immense pressure is placed on the analyst to conform to the role of fusional object. Andre Green writes of the countertransferential experience of such functioning: “What reaches the analyst is a thick, gelatinous substance.” Interpretations at the level of separately conceived objects miss the mark. In contrast to Sándor Ferenczi, who suggests indulgence of symbiosis—akin to Harold Searles’s “therapeutic symbiosis” and Margaret Mahler’s “corrective symbiotic experience”—Khan writes:
“What these patients demand is indulgence . . . What they need is an aggressive encounter and experience in the analytic situation, through which they will be able to experience the validity of their own aggression and hate as well as that of the not-self person (the analyst).”
The stridency of this approach is tempered by Khan’s elaboration that it entails tolerating how one is used as a fusional object by the patient. Several mitigating qualifications ensue: not to include oneself in it, to co-operate with the patient’s omnipotence but not passively endorse it, to facilitate regression but not “amorphous regressiveness.” In other words, the approach is not to be a “good object” for the patient, but to create “the provision of those nutrients that are necessary for the differentiation, neutralization and structuration of the personality (ego and id) at its beginnings.”
While for Bleger there is the same need to achieve separation from others and discrimination of distinct dimensions of the self, there is a more delicate negotiation between indulgence and tentative introductions of separateness. “The paradox,” he writes, “is that, in order to solve the symbiosis, [the patient] must have a good symbiotic relationship.” This entails movement between “split and unsplit” interpretations, ones that disrupt the agglutinated nucleus and start to distinguish the range of affects congealed within it. This opens up the possibility of paranoid-schizoid discrimination. A particular difficultly arises around movement beyond paranoid-schizoid functioning, when “it is necessary not to confuse re-agglutination with the integration of the depressive position.”
Bleger’s sensitivity to the resonance between what is often taken for depressive functioning and preoedipal ambiguity—a kind of horseshoe theory—sheds light on the presence of adhesive equation to capital’s forms at the core of psychoanalysis. This is a symptom of its function as a tool of adaptation. I suggest, here, that the central tenets of a depressive-position ideology—reparation, mourning, sublimation—are related forms of moralizing commitment to the damaging social object. As Saketopoulou writes, “actual, material violences are possible to convert into psychic, privatized events that one can come to terms with if one is mature enough or works hard enough.” In other words, mourning, reparation, and sublimation can be, in the hands of adaptive psychoanalysis, forms of resignation amid the collapse inwards of responsibility. This is their social function. The valorization and villainization of symbolic “concrete” thinking, meanwhile, are the clear psychoanalytic manifestations of the subsumption of the particular by the abstraction of commodity exchange.
The psychoanalytic veneration of “creativity” in the abstract—a meaningless notion except as “a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour”—stands out as another prominent dissemination of the logic of capital in the clinic. The most pronounced articulation of this general trend comes from French psychoanalyst and vehement anticommunist Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. Her Manichaean opposition polarizes creativity and the “anal universe” of polymorphous perversity, in which “all particles are equal and interchangeable.” In a peculiarly unaware public display of reaction-formation, she is digging into capital’s homogenizing logic—the black hole of value—as if it were the font of life. As Guattari writes and corrects, it is capital that “reduces everything to shit, that is to say to the state of undifferentiated and decoded streams out of which everyone has to take its part in a private mode and with a sense of culpability.”
Still, a paradox among paradoxes is that psychoanalysis, while being a product and proponent of capitalist reality, also offers an experience utterly at odds with life as the created-thing of the money-subject. As one of the only sites where idiosyncrasy is not automatically coopted or driven out—where dependency on separate others beyond omnipotent control might ultimately be savored—it is a rare space in which relief might be found from the relentless terror of competing demands. In this vein, Emmanuel Ghent offers a subtly shifted notion of depressive functioning, away from what Phillips calls the “peculiarly coercive moralism” of the “dogma of the Depressive position” found in much British object relations theory. Ghent emphasizes instead “the function of being able to hold onto the tension of paradox in general, the capacity for multiple perspectives, without having to arrive at a resolution where no true resolution is possible.”
A paradox on this account, following Winnicott, must be accepted without resolution, though without clinging to it and so foreclosing the possibilities that may exist beyond it. That is, as Khan writes, it must not be “resolved precipitately.” For the paradoxes of commoditized subjectivity, this would mean resolved prior to the abolition of capitalist social relations. To stay with the anxiety and affect of encountering the paradoxes of modernity, without automatically reaching for the resolutions offered by capital, is the modest aspiration of a radical practice that limits itself to free-associative conversation. The capacity for paradox entails the affective encounter with what Marx calls our “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world.” “It is very difficult,” Fromm writes,
“to experience a reality which can be experienced only in paradoxical terms. What we tend to do is to separate the two poles of the paradox, and then to feel either one. We are either completely unique; or we feel like the Christian mystics often felt, I am nobody, I have no individuality, I do not exist and I am completely dissolved in God or in mankind.”
This oscillation, as I have attempted to outline, is the core psychic dynamic in a capitalist existence that is inherently paradoxical but, paradoxically enough, averse to paradox.
It is, in other words, traumatophobic. The capacity to experience the affective dimension of irrecon - cilable oppositions is one fertile offering to anti-capitalist resistance that psychoanalysis can make. This prob lematizes utopian phantasies of total reconciliation in post-capitalist society. Irreconcilability between the particular and the universal—the broken-middle of modernity that capital has fostered—will survive in diverse constellations, after a rather inauspicious entry into the world once value leaves the scene. Other, more interesting paradoxes may then be known.
By providing space for the experience of paradox that is not immediately resolved, the clinic can serve as “a space to rehearse disalienation,” as the Red Clinic’s Rebecca Sharp puts it. Certainly, this already occurs in clinical practice, yet it is simultaneously undermined by the refusal to reflect on capital’s centrality in the clinic, even in theory— one manifestation of which is the notorious squeamishness psychoanalysts have about money. This means that each patient must face this fundamental reality alone, while allowing it to seep into sessions unacknowledged. It also means that a key dimension of the transference goes unanalyzed.
The interpretation of the “total transference situation” or the “complete interpretation” classically integrates the transference; present interpersonal conflicts in the patient’s life; and conflicts, defenses, and phantasies from infancy. This truncated notion of totality-completion—without reference to the political, social, or historical—is good indication of the regard psychoanalysis has for these realities. To include them would be to introduce experience that traverses the transference, the person, and the familial. The patient and analyst alike live within relations of universalized commodity production under the dominion of impersonal abstractions. They are both some constellation of the marketing personality, which introduces a shared reality that cannot be neatly portioned out. Neutrality, in other words, is problematized. This is not to subsume constitutional, familial, and experiential differences, but to expand the repertoire of meaning in the clinical encounter. This makes the situation more total, though “totality” might be the wrong word for such an expansively overdetermined space.
Marx can, in sum, offer an interpretative lens through which to understand what Phillips calls the “latent and lurking Procrusteanism in psychoanalysis.” Such political-economic realities arise in the disguised forms of “ordinary” life and the morality of developmental concepts. The desirable life that psychoanalysis tends to promote—laboring, reparative, knowing, sublimatory, productive, creative—is readily identifiable as the logic of capital, passed off as natural and not a strange historical anomaly. “By positioning the self as removed from or only minimally involved with the social realm,” writes Philip Cushman, “object relations theory unknowingly draws attention away from the sociohistorical forces that shaped the masterful, bounded 20th century self caught between isolation and engulfment.” I hope to have made the case for a twenty-first century psychoanalysis that can center this paradox.