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It seems to me what's important about neoliberalism, is that it doesn't manage directly; it manages from within the soul. That is to say, it makes each of us into specks of human capital who must appreciate their value in order to survive, and by “appreciate” I mean “increase.” And so the idea of being managed directly seems to me to refer much more to the immediate post-Fordist period — the ′70s, the ′80s, the ′90s. And it seems to me we are entering a period — I see this in my students — where they don't need to be told or managed directly in order to be extremely instrumental in relationship to their education, their future, their choice of a mate, their idea about how to do things on a particular timeline. It's a very internalized set of norms about how to survive and thrive in a neoliberal fashion. To be sure, everything is managed but I wonder if it's increasingly managed at the level of internalized norms.
The defense is against primitive, archaic (“unthinkable”) anxiety produced by environmental failure in the stage of the child's near-absolute dependence. Without the defense there would be a breakdown of mental organization of the order of disintegration, disorientation, depersonalization, falling forever, and loss of sense of the real and of the capacity for relating to objects. In the defense the child isolates what there is of himself, and attains a position of invulnerability through introversion. In the extreme of this defense the child cannot be traumatized, and at the same time cannot be induced to regain vulnerability and dependence.
Encountering psychoanalysis was a boon for Rose as an undergraduate in