Colonizing the American Psyche

Abstract

While large swaths of US news media routinely underline oppositions between Right and Left, what each holds in common is psychologically more compelling, namely, an unquestioned commitment to a social system designed around consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism in the US is not only seen but more importantly experienced to be simply “the way things are,” though, as economic sociology has long pointed out, the basic components of capitalism are historically contingent and a far cry from the intrinsic nature of things. For the psychoanalytic practitioner, the fact that consumer capitalism has such a hold on the American collective imagination invites consideration of its nature as a psychological force and raises several psychologically important questions. In this chapter, the author first considers consumer capitalism as a psychological problem for individuals and, with the help of traditional critical theory, elucidates some of the ways in which collective assumptions and intentionally produced psychological habits seem to merge to form a collective complex around consumer capitalism in the US. Second, the author describes some of the psychological mechanisms by which individual Americans become infected with this complex and some of the consequences of this situation in the clinical setting. Finally, the author turns to an ancient concept largely unmined by psychoanalysis, that of virtue as a notion that can potentially benefit psychoanalytic practitioners working with patients suffering under the influence of this cultural complex.