Psychoanalysis, culture and contemporary discontents: a time of technology; fanaticism and pandemics

Abstract

‘A man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries’ (Mann, 1962/ 1924, p.32). In terms of its broad sweep of contemporary cultural concerns, compression of argument, and clarity of exposition, this is a deeply impressive book. It is also, I think, an important one. Its title is intended in memoriam of Freud’s psychosocial treatise Civilization and its Discontents. Freud’s book can be viewed as a contribution to an established literary and philosophical tradition on the social contract between rulers and their subjects. Writers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau sought to define the transactional nature of power within the political state, its limits and obligations, and in some cases to propose remedies for perceived ills. Things take a distinctly psychological turn with Freud. Extrapolating from his instinct theory of drives and structural model of the mind, Freud concludes that there is an uneasy pay off between the needs of individuals and the demands of the societies in which they live. In order to be able to live together at all, individuals must repress a considerable portion of their sexual and aggressive drives. The state is empowered to regulate their behaviours by other means, ensuring predictable social, legal, political and economic structures, and to reduce conflict to a minimum. Too much repression, however, increases the individual’s share of neurotic misery – the ‘discontents’ of Freud’s title. In Freud’s later metapsychology, the prohibitive pronouncements and aspirational ideals of an individual’s family and wider culture are internalised by the superego and ego ideal respectively. Civilization and its Discontents did not attempt to investigate contemporary sources of discontent at the time of its publication. Rubinstein’s book, on the contrary, examines some of the dominant issues of our time, as he sets out to explore the interplay between rapid development in digital technologies, the rise in fanatical ideologies, the Coronavirus pandemic, and their combined, unravelling impact upon the integrity of human subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Contemporary Discontents (Rubinstein, 2023) contends that psychoanalysis must critically engage with transdisciplinary