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The recent shifts in political and cultural landscapes of the United States and Western Europe—including the realization of populist and nationalist discourses within government, and heightened xenophobia and racism—have ushered in a renewed interest in the contributions of psychoanalytic theory to the public sphere. Such interest has varied from attempts to diagnose President Trump, to building on existing analytic thoughts on race, class, gender and domination, to interrogating the function of free speech. It is unsurprising, then, that among the returns to massenpsychologie is an effort such as Ben Fong's Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism, which arrives on the scene to revive the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School. Such a dialogue aims to interrogate the problem of how citizens come to actively participate in—even desire—their subjection.
Fong's project aims to resuscitate Freud's underappreciated and ambiguous concept of the drive to mastery, which appears in the Gesammelte Werke as bemächtigungstrieb and bewältigungstrieb. Noting Freud's tendency to collapse the terms, and finally to conflate them in 1920, Fong suggests clarifying two senses of mastery: 1) “a stability and equanimity that allows us to get through the day” and 2) “excessive and controlling stability that is brought at the expense of others” (Fong, 2016, p. 1). It is the former sense of mastery, as a kind of skill or managing in the world with others, that Fong sees as especially promising in the context of a revitalized drive theory. Of particular interest to Fong is Freud's introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955). The model provided by Freud in this work is of life as a contingent, accidental perturbation of the inorganic, and a subsequent tendency to return to such a state of rest—a zero point. In an attempt to master the frustrations and traumas of living, this organism develops a protect