And although its novelty and inscrutability might explain why some physicians of the late 1800s were so obsessed with the phenomenon of hysteria, I think it’s still fair to say it appears to have been much more common than today. Psychoanalysts still diagnose patients as hysterics, but today the most commonly seen maladies increasingly relate to narcissism and so-called narcissistic deficiencies. Changes in incidence rates for physical illness might be explained by changes in diet or other environmental factors, but how about changes in mental illness?

One answer might be that certain social structures produce corresponding psychic structures. So, as the shape of our broad societies change, so do the kinds of character structures and attending forms of suffering. This holds implications within the clinic, but also outside it. For Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, for example, understanding what sort of character types were most typical of a certain society at a specific time was helpful for understanding the way politics unfolded. Actually, the notion of a “social character” might be the most interesting single contribution these psychoanalysts developed, as far as we are concerned today. For them, the notion of a social character was an answer to the question of how fascism came to gain such broad mass support in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Germany.

As Reich would put it: “the structural reproduction of a society’s economic system in the psychology of the masses is the basic mechanism in the process of the formation of political ideas.” (MPF, 54).

Fromm and Reich were most interested in the extent to which the success of the NSDAP could be found in its support amongst the lower and lower middle classes. So, the task for them was to explain what it was about the economic and social conditions of these class strata that produced pro-fascist personalities. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno would briefly maintain that there was such a thing as a fascist personality, and that such a personality type could be sussed out in accordance with the “F-Scale,” a personality test that sought to isolate authoritarian tendencies, basically.

These attempts to produce a scientific psychology of authoritarianism were more or less discarded as pseudoscientific later. And from a political scientific perspective, it might make more sense to argue that political currents are not attributable to rigid, given character structures, but instead to much more volatile socioeconomic conditions that provoke predictable reactions from any and all character ‘types,’ if those even exist. But still, living as we are in a time of ascendant authoritarianism worldwide that seems to hold widespread support, and living as we do in a time where the connection between social conditions, social pathologies, and individual pathologies seems to be tacitly accepted by clinicians and fellow travelers, one might wonder whether these ideas might be worth revisiting. Is it possible that along with the structural transformation of the public and private spheres, there might be a corresponding structural transformation of the psychic sphere? And might such a parallel process of transformation hold any insights for the analysis of the political phenomena of our times?

I’ve argued elsewhere that this approach might be especially fruitful for those seeking to draw on psychoanalytic ideas for clarifying political happenings, at least when it comes to one crucial aspect of character structure: our defenses. Writers from Freud through Zizek suggest that so much in our cultural life can be understood as a form of defense. Just as in any one of our psyches, many of them are healthy ‘mature’ or even necessary defenses. But the analysis of defense can help us discover, if guided by a psychoanalytic intuition, what it is that we are avoiding, ignoring, or denying. And if one can speak of such things as social defenses – defenses belonging to a culture or large group as a whole – one might be able to shed light not only upon what we are socialized to disavow at a large cultural level. The argument I’ve made, following many others, is that tuning into defenses in this way can help us clarify how certain forms of political discourse become possible. What do we need to ignore or suppress both as individuals and as a society in order to sustain an ideological narrative?

April 2nd, 2025