Some psychic effects of neoliberalism: Narcissism, disavowal, perversion

Abstract

Neoliberalisms promote the development of certain versions of subjectivity, certain character structures, defenses, transferences, and countertransferences. Foucauldian theories go only so far in being able to account for the way neoliberal versions of subjectivity are lived. The paper elaborates on the individual, group, and relational effects of social repudiations of vulnerability and dependency needs and describes the perverse effects of the widespread disavowal of the interdependence of privileged and marginalized populations.

Authentic feminist? Authenticity and feminist identity in teenage feminists’ talk

“…The position of ‘authentic feminism’ is a potentially persuasive counter to punishing mainstream representations of feminism that make a feminist identity difficult to inhabit. Indeed, being a confident, independent feminist has further appeal in a cultural context where admissions of inauthenticity, low confidence, vulnerability, and conformity attract shame and censure (Bay‐Cheng, ; Dobson, ; Layton, ).…”

“…Individualizing values of authenticity and individuality emphasize individual agency and personal transformation in a manner that can obscure wider questions of politics and structural power relations (Baker, ; Layton, ; Rottenberg, ). Indeed, individualizing arguments have been associated with a ‘postfeminist’ disengagement with feminist politics (McRobbie, ) and a repudiation of feminism more generally (Scharff, ).…”

“…Alongside the capacity (and responsibility) to be one's true self sits another structuring imperative: to be one's best self. Many scholars argue that the advent of a neoliberal mode of social, political, and economic governance has led to an ‘extension of market rationality into social life’, calling a new kind of self into being (Brown, ; Layton, , p. 163). Neoliberal discourse renders the self within in a morally inflected language of self‐improvement, capacity, and strategy.…”

About Being in Time: Response to Commentaries by Dinshaw, Auerbach, and Pellegrini

“…Dean does not describe impending death alone changing lives but instead it is the capacities to create space in time, to render the potentially strangling linear unidirectionality to become filled instead with spaces for diversions. It is not linear time, then, that closes down possibilities but the collapse of space (Layton, 2010;Gentile, 2013Gentile, , 2014b). It is not the linearity that proves generative, or the certainty of an end.…”

“…Ending with psychoanalysis, Layton (2014) writing about neoliberal culture cited Bion's (1962) notion of the importance of creating the capacities to feel pain versus to suffer pain. "When we are unable to suffer unbearable pain, we substitute a pain that we are better able to control" (Layton, 2014, p. 170).…”