RETAIL THERAPY: THE ENJOYMENT OF THE CONSUMER

Abstract

abstractThe discourse of economics and consumerism has not only penetrated into the clinical setting; it has had a pervasive effect upon each of us and upon the society in which we live. This state of affairs is taken up by reference to the now commonly used phrase ‘retail therapy’, in order to examine the implications of the promotion of this concept. These ideas are further elaborated through an examination of the consumerist bent our societies have taken, promoting as they do an unfettered enjoyment of consumer goods. But for society to function and for desire to take root in the subject, it is proposed that there is a necessary loss of enjoyment which from psychoanalysis we can designate as castration. The contemporary difficulty to undergo such a loss is tied here to a prolongation of the state Freud described as polymorphously perverse. It is here that the psychoanalyst has an ethical responsibility to unveil whatever discourses function to alienate the subject from his or her desire.