Law, psychiatry and the reproduction of capitalist ideology: A critical view

Abstract

Clarification of the role of ideology is complicated by several factors. The concepts and methods of social analysis are themselves influenced by the dominant class ideologies that mystify and obscure the actual operations of a society in systematic ways that legitimate and entrench the existing class relationships. Academic social scientists have either ignored ideology through naive positivist empiricism (“quantity fetishism”), proclaimed an “end of ideology,” or equated ideology with idealistic or utopian concepts divorced from the actual social relationships of capital. Even the Marxist tradition has until recently been grossly inadequate. Naive interpretations of his dialectical method have resulted in an economistic reductionism, akin to positivism, in which explication of the economic infrastructure was sufficient to “explain” the ideological superstructure. The relative autonomy of the state or its ideology was not considered, nor were the independent consequences of political and cultural relations. Further, insofar as ideology was equated with “false consciousness,” it was dismissed as irrelevant, which in turn led to parochial rejection of contributions from psychoanalysis, semiology, and even important insights from non-Marxists such as Mannheim. For purposes of this essay, ideology can be defined as a form of social consciousness consisting of patterns of signification and evaluation (Sumner, 1979). In class society the codes of signification, relationships of signifier (language, pictures, etc.) and significant meanings (mental images, concepts) are systematically distorted. Marx indicated the ideological mystification in the designation of the commodity form whose appearance, the exchange value of price as signifier of value, the signified, was seen as divorced from the surplus value of the alienated labor of its production. The ideas of society as reflected in its modes of signification are not only a function of material conditions, but serve to reproduce those conditions. For an economic system based on contradiction, inequality, and immiseration to endure, the privileged classes cannot depend on force or its threat; rather, they must seek legitimacy through mass support, that is, the ideology that shapes the world views must consider the existing social arrangements as ordained by “universal principles”and superior to any other system. Gramsci clarified the importance of the ideological superstructure as the means by which the capitalist