The Crisis of Authorityin Modern Societies a Psychoanalytic Perspective

Authority is a difficult subject to think about - and this has a lot to do with our ambivalence about it. On the one hand, we recognize its importance in terms of delineating moral boundaries - and agree with the diagnosis found in many treatises about authority, including Hannah Arendt's seminal paper on authority from 1954, that its decline in both the private and public realm represents a crisis. A similar viewpoint has been adopted for the psychical realm, specifically by those psychoanalysts who, following Lacan's reading of Freud, link the mental capacity of symbolization, ergo of psychical differentiation, to the early experiences of triangulation in the context of the Oedipus complex, therefore to the role of paternal authority (hence the famous dictum of the nom/non du père). On the other hand, we fear the association between authority and authoritarianism and rightly ask to what extent this may be built-in so that any form of authority ultimately leads to authoritarianism or to even worse forms of political rule such as tyranny or totalitarianism. Against this background, the paper explores the potential contribution of psychoanalysis, as method and a meta-psychological theory, on our understanding of the crisis of authority in the private and the public realms. The ideas of Plato, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Sigmund Freud are explored in dialectical manner.