Psychoanalysis has founded critical theory and still is an authoritative voice of it. The thesis that I propose in this article, with a view to ‘updating’ Freud's diagnosis of the malaise of civilization, is that both individual and social suffering arise from mechanisms of splitting that are used to cope with anxiety and fear. The spiritual needs of individuals and groups are sacrificed to the need for security and the satisfaction of material needs. Just as an internal critical agency is formed in the individual, so in society it can take the form of a power that no longer obeys ethical principles and becomes self-referential. What makes this kind of power particularly dangerous is that it uses advances in technology to exercise increasingly invasive and alienating forms of control.