Critical Perspectives on Personality and Subjectivity 189psychoanalyst as a kind of ideal social model to be duly emulated. As
Goodwin (2017) notes,
The ego psychologists exploit Freud’s description of ego formation
and transform it into a prescription for ideal therapeutic outcome and an
imperative for late-capitalist living. In its theorisation of narcissism as a
fundamental stage in psychical development, psychoanalysis “indirectly
favoured narcissism’s cultural primacy,” giving way to a “troubling cult
of one’s own psyche” (Benvenuto & Molino, 2009, p. 18) where the
pains and frustrations of conflict are no longer engaged with as a
fundamental instability in the subject but are defended against with the
ultimate goal of their resolution and removal...An original decentring of
human subjectivity often succumbs to a counter-tendency that re-centres
the individual according to new psychical agencies. This creates a
psychoanalytic project that not only fits more readily into an institutional
mould but is also its greatest betrayal. The ego and id psychologies that
Freud vacillates between are two sides of an inward turn that tempers the
radical edge of the psychoanalytic revolution by ignoring the social,
relational and contextual factors that produce and yet put in question the
sanctity of the individual. (p. 89)Although some traditions in psychoanalysis, such as the Kleinian and
Lacanian orientations, have energetically resisted the turn away from the
unconscious evident in Ego-Psychology, the role of social asymmetries of
power in conditioning psychical conflict has not often enough been
highlighted in the historical trajectory and development of psychoanalysis.
One important exception to this trend is found in the writings of Frantz
Fanon who explored the link between colonization/decolonization and
psychopathology, and who emphasized social asymmetries (in the form of
racism) as conditioning unconscious conflict. For example, in Black Skin,
White Masks, Fanon (1986) writes:
If society makes difficulties for [the black man] because of his color,
if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to
change color, my objective will not be that of dissuading him from it by
advising him to “keep his place”; on the contrary, my objective, once his