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The central theme of Howard Schwartz's latest book, Society Against Itself, is the chronically suicidal attack on thinking, social organization and reality that he considers to underlie the cultural and moralistic phenomenon called political correctness (PC). For Schwartz, ‘the operative element in PC is the use of emotionally charged accusations’ (p. 5) - sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia - as ad hominem disqualifications of any thought, speech or action that dissents from an assumed superior, enlightened point of view asserting that the identity of members of certain social groups is essentially defined by their victimization and that, consequently, the choices and actions of such victim-group members are beyond criticism. Schwartz's examination of such ‘irrational processes in organizations’ (p. xii) traces the emotional forces of which PC is a symptom to a phantasy-fueled pursuit of utopian ends that expresses an unconscious longing for merger with the ideal, omnipotent mother. PC, according to Schwartz, attempts to alter ‘the basic framework through which we give sense to our lives’ (p. xiii) and ultimately to abolish organization and external reality per se. From a wider psychoanalytic perspective, I believe that Society Against Itself can be considered as a profound extension of Bion's (1961) discovery in working with groups that ‘ideas existed vested with reality by force of the emotion attached to them’ (pp. 146-147), ‘ideas’ that, unless recognized and contained by the work group, lead to total evasion of reality.
Through a series of in-depth case studies of American organizations - chapters are devoted to the New York Times (written with Larry Hirschhorn), the United Church of Christ, and Antioch College - many institutions, including the police, Harvard College and the British monarchy, are discussed. All are illuminated by a psychoanalytic focus on aspects of the Oedipus complex and of psychosexual development from a Lacanian perspective. Schwartz