You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Benjamin Fong's work Death and Mastery is basically in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, utilizing psychoanalytic insights into human nature in order to attain critical perspective on contemporary destructive societal, cultural, and political influences. Fong joins a number of other authors (e.g., Alford, 1988; Sherratt, 2002; Whitebook, 1995) who have been engaged in similar social critiques.
Among the distinctive features of Fong's work are the following:
He draws heavily on Loewald's (1980) psychoanalytic model of human development.
He provides excellent critiques of alternative psychoanalytic models of development, such as those of Lacanian theory and the Relational School.
He reinterprets Freud's death drive as the drive to resolve the tension of separate identity by reverting to infantile fusion with the maternal figure, which, via personal maturation (conceptualized as the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the establishment of a mature superego) evolves into harmonious mastery of the interpersonal tension between self and other.
This model of maturation is then applied to the views of crucial Frankfurt School theorists (e.g., Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse) as well as to features of contemporary culture (e.g., the culture industry and modern technology) to show how problematic aspects of society's impact on the individual—both in terms of theoretical understanding and in terms of practical management—are addressed by the model.
This model has strengths and weaknesses. The core of it entails the distinction Fong makes between identification and internalization. As he conceptualizes it, prior to resolution of the Oedipal complex the intrapsychic relationship of self and other is one of identification, such that the tendency to revert to infantile merger to deal with tension between self and other is all too prevalent. More internalized separation between self and other guards against identity merger, while the mature superego guides th