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.

About the Author :
Ian Thurston is a Principal Adult Psychotherapist at the Regional Department of Psychotherapy in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He is registered with the UKCP as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and is a member of the Forum for Independent Psychotherapists in London. He hails from north-east England and has a first class degree in English Literature. He has extensive experience of working in public and voluntary sector mental health care, initially as a psychiatric nurse. His paper, 'Developing the Therapeutic Alliance in Acute Mental Health Care', based on his experience as clinical manager of an acute day hospital in East London, won the inaugural APP quarterly journal 'Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy' prize for the best essay applying psychoanalytic ideas to the public sector. His interest has focused on the practical application of psychoanalytic ideas to generic mental health care, and to socio-cultural analysis.