“Woke Culture” on the Couch

Of course, one should fight for the victims, if however, this were to prevent one from investing one's love elsewhere, what would be the point of such fighting?

“Si se non noverit (so long as he does not get to know himself), he will have a long and happy life” is what the ancient seer Tiresias prophesied (according to the Latin poet Ovid) to the nymph Leriope, regarding her son Narcissus, and in this one single sentence he summed up the fundamental incompatibility that exists between a narcissistic psychic organization thriving in a state of “blessedness of the poor in mind”, and any kind of torturous self-knowledge, i.e. insight. Freud had been aware of this clash from very early on, and had despaired of applying his newly discovered method on such pathologies. Following in Freud's footsteps André Green (p. 299) intimates that the degree of mis-recognition (méconnaissance) acting as a substitute for genuine recognition (and most particularly self-recognition) is directly proportional to the degree of precariousness of the psychic organization in question.

When approximately half a century ago, the sociologist Christopher Lasch, was publishing his well-known book The Culture of Narcissism, his main preoccupation was to shed light to trends in social psychology that tended to prevail in the post-war Western world. In other words, his aim was to highlight the prevalence of personal ambition and the insatiable pursuit of satisfaction, at the expense of a concomitant collapse of social cohesion and social responsibility. The relentless pursuit of immediate personal gratification and the increasing denigration of the necessity or even the value of anticipation (the investment – we might say – in the pain of waiting (according to how Marilia Aisenstein has defined erotic masochism) or in frustration tolerance (a term preferred in the English language literature) which would engender illusion as a precursor to creative thought, in parallel with