Irrational exuberance: Neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of truth

Abstract

Drawing on Freud's late work, I argue that the social traumas created by neoliberalism bring about perverse modes of subjectivity. When a truth is too painful to bear, Freud argues, we substitute for truth a less painful lie, a disavowal that, when regularly practiced, can issue in perversion. I argue that irrational exuberance, the shared delusion in the United States that, for example, housing prices and the stock market must always go up, ought not be attributed to the greed of ‘human nature’ but rather must be understood in its social context: as a response to the abandonment of the citizenry by government and by the free market fundamentalism that, after the mid-1970s, no longer provided even the bare minimum of security and safety offered by the US form of the welfare state. Clinical material illustrates some of the ways that neoliberal versions of subjectivity appear in symptoms and in the relational dynamics of treatment.