Society Against Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction. Howard Schwartz. London:  Karnac, 2010.

In Society Against Itself Howard Schwartz offers a fascinating, disturbing, and at times exasperating critique of modern society and, in particular, the manifestation of its pathological drift in the form of ‘political correctness’. He takes us far beyond commonplace understandings, into a deep exploration of the psychological dynamics that underlie the troubling organisational malaise and dysfunction that is so common today. Because Schwartz has the courage to question cherished assumptions, this book offers an opportunity to grapple with essential issues in a fresh and authentic way. By calling widely accepted customs and institutionalised norms into question it embodies, to my mind, one of the basic tenets of the psychoanalytic tradition - the importance of challenging prohibitions to thought. He makes a compelling argument that ‘political correctness’ is one such prohibition, a contemporary expression of societal conventions that inhibit thought and impair mature functioning.

Society Against Itself frames the political correctness mentality as producing an infantile level of functioning. I use the term infantile in the sense that it views political correctness as a kind of magical thinking, a wishful return to childhood's lost paradise that is substituted for critical thought, for confrontation with often frustrating reality, and for the inevitable deprivations involved in sophisticated work. It is a model of escape in which anxiety is managed through repression rather than reason or mature relatedness, and one in which organisations become preoccupied with providing psychic shelter and warmth for employees. It involves an ordering of experience that prevents the types of feeling, forms of object relatedness, and qualities of engagement that are necessary for effective organisational functioning.

Schwartz bases his argument on the role of the Oedipal triangle in human development and how it creates a gestalten, or template, through which we construct meaning in la