Everything is Permitted, Restrictions Still Apply: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Social Dislocation, Narcissism and Post Truth

In a highly subjectivist contemporary culture, in which the power of a compelling emotional narrative is privileged over claims to objective knowledge, there is a tendency to take defensive refuge in the politics of identity and victimhood, and to relate to others as idealized and denigrated aspects of the self. It is essential, in the face of these tendencies, to maintain the enlightenment rationalist distinction between historical claims that are subject to evidence from those that are not. There is also, however, a requirement for a robust understanding of human subjectivity, of innate resilience but also of the ubiquity of emotionally motivated irrationality particularly at times of social dislocation. In what the late Christopher Lasch described as the narcissistic culture of late capitalist society, "post-truth" tendencies, latent to varying degrees in everyone, are not confined to the populist right but exist across the political spectrum. The book links these phenomena to contemporary social defenses against facing limitation, loss and internal conflict. More specifically it argues that in a pseudo-therapeutic culture preoccupied with narratives of victimhood the losses associated with the decline of manufacturing and its attendant associational cultures have been neither acknowledged nor mourned.