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Is psychoanalysis a mere tool of the establishment? Are the activists who reject it trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater? If so, why are they doing it? What are the roots, and the possible outcomes of the current clash of the various frames of reference?
Such questions were coming up when I was trying to conceptualize the dynamics of a relatively new type of patient whom my colleagues and I have observed in recent years. This person has contributed to his neurotic development by joining one or another social action group for specific neurotic reasons. While some people may attempt to derive secondary gains of prestige, feeling of power, or identity, such an individual unconsciously reaches for a more ambitious neurotic goal. That goal is to use the group's essence, its ideology, in camouflaging his central mechanism of defense. In other words, he attempts to hide within the context of the group's goals and movements, the very core of his neurosis by making it appear indistinguishable from the group's core.
Why should this type of neurotic adaptation which I call pseudo-activism, occur at this time? Such a neurotic adaptation requires a group of people who are united by aspirations of a high order - a form of idealism. Such groups have been few and only faintly heard. I am referring here, for example, to religious groups, especially tightly organized ones, like monastic orders. Political groups, often prominent in any nation's affairs, with exceptions of some brief periods, have been little concerned with ideology. The American political system, on the whole, has been geared to selection of administrators, not ideologists. There are many reasons for this, but the central fact is that such a system no longer suffices. The country is faced for the first time with problems of such complexity that they demand active participation of citizens rather than, taxpayers. Increasingly, political activity, whether liberal or conservative, becomes political activism. As