Infantilisation
We frequently hear succinct comments in the News, or even social studies, about our lifestyle – waste products, pollution of our water, obesity, abusive use of social media, etc. You know the list. We may still be surprised to learn that something new has been added to it. Of course, all this is accompanied by “new symptoms” of various sorts. Work-burn-out – well, working hard is at the core of self-worth, it is even called ethics, work ethic actually! ADHD – well, being agitatedly busy is the least we should be doing to deserve a holiday and abate the overdrive! Addictions of all sorts, the aetiology of which is rarely considered – indeed, why is it that so many people resort to an array of stimulant or analgesic beguilement, chemical or else? Here again it may be tedious to stretch a list which piles up descriptive syndromes promoting most often the same kind of expert dressings. Let us say that it is obvious to all that some “dis-eases” may be, if not caused, at least influenced by the general functioning of what we call society, or, shall we say, the master discourse by which we are summoned.
Yet there is one aspect of this general hurried overview that I want to highlight. Besides the decline of the Name-of-the-Father, and the ironically coincidental passionate criticisms of patriarchy, it may be worth considering the infantilisation that is spread right, left and centre by both politics and commerce – for reasons that may or may not be consorting…
Let us start with children, our little treasures. They need to be protected, dangers are everywhere, domestic accidents, domestic abuses, and that is only for starters because the outside world is even worse. To this are added the expectations put on their shoulders by parents who from birth (even before actually) hope that their offspring will have everything they need to succeed or at least enough not to struggle too much. Through nursery and schools, many years spent to swallow a curriculum, like a scientifically well studied diet to give kids the best chance to become successful and economically useful citizens thoroughly monitored and evaluated – it is never too early to get used to it. From a very early age bureaucracy, auditing, regulations will keep track of the performance of everyone, children, parents and all, in all possible aspects of life that can enter statistics. Health, skills, achievements, track records, will follow how the evolution of evaluations follows “the right path”. Of course, not everybody is equal but each should fulfil their “potential”. After qualifying more or less, in one way or another, comes the quest for a job. One starts painting the famous ladder that one is expected to climb. How else could anyone gain self-esteem from a society so keen to distribute value judgements, and classify people vertically? So life becomes a long trail of self-improvement, self-realisation, the value of which is weighed on the scale of an ideal image promoted by… Yes, by what? by whom? Productivity? Degrees of alienation? What is the right, just, adequate way to assess the value of your life? Is it how eager you are to get up every morning? How much you made this year? When, and how far is your next holiday? How comfortable you feel about your future, about next week perhaps? How not anxious you have been this month? How well insured you are against every possible misfortune? How many friends you have? Good friends, that is. Whether you have sufficient sexual activity, whether you take sleeping tablets, tranquilisers? Whether you remember why you bear all this?
One the one hand you are kept in a perhaps low and diffuse but permanent state of anxiety about the uncertainty of income, love, health, etc. On the other you are reassured by comfort, distractions, promises of protection, cuddly toys, and happily ending stories… if (and only if) you live as you are advised, counselled, told… The appraisal will let you know how to adjust your behaviour and expectations, how to improve your life capital. You don’t always like it, you don’t always agree, but you know there is little point to argue or to rebel as long as it is not too bad. But if the promises of security were not kept, if you were to be let down, betrayed, taken for a ride, then you may protest, revolt, even go to court or inform the media of another instance of abuse of… trust.
Who do the promotion of individualism as freedom and the promise of happiness (be what you want, you can be whatever you want) serve? How is it that individualism generates so much conformity? How much do the benefits of technology offset the enslavement with which they come? Without their smartphone, one no longer knows how to get where they are going; without this or that application, one doesn’t know how to live anymore. What one needs to organise one’s life does not even belong to them any longer, as one is actually renting all these services without which they really don’t know how to cope. And one is not even renting from services that are public services, one depends on the good will of their private lifelord. As long as there is enough competition, one gets the best price – good value for money, you know! But what will happen if the diversity of choices dwindles?
Infantilised people can only be conservative (this not a matter of political party), that is the political consequence of anxiety, of threat. And anxiety is opposite to love.
Now, what has psychoanalysis to do with all this? That is only a question for people who confine psychoanalysis to the Oedipal matrix, or even to the relation to the primeval almighty mOther. If we take seriously the fact that life takes place in language, yet not only in language considered as structure but language as discourse(s), then important primary relations take place within a discourse, a master discourse that has a determining influence on ways whatever structures are expressed. Do we believe that there is an essence of motherhood, fatherhood, femininity, masculinity that is identical or equivalent anywhere, at any time, and from all eternity? And if we did, do we at least consider that society in early nomadic tribes of Patagonia, may not be orientated in the same ways, according to the same ideals, same order than, let say, in Wuhan, Sao Paulo, Adelaide, Phoenix, Bologna, Poznan, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Kochi, Gaborone, or Kumasi today? Just as a mother in aristocratic 18th century Kent might not conceive her world in the same way as a Pict mother of early Middle Ages in Scotland would hers. Enough platitudes. Psychoanalysis came out of the master discourse that saw its birth. And the same goes for its diverse orientations, the North American example is blatant in that regard. Yet if, for some analysts, psychoanalysis is the reverse of the master discourse, shouldn’t every direction of an analysis consider how an analysand is caught in the master discourse of their time? Capitalist discourse included. After all capitalism is a deleterious arrangement of jouissance, at least in its neoliberal oligarchic version.
It would not be the first time the impact of social discourses caught the attention of psychoanalysts. Freud already… It may be interesting to analyse how psychoanalysis situates itself politically, urbis et orbis, with respect to the devastating effects of “exploitation”, this master signifier of the discourse of capital-jouissance. The time has come when we do not know how to protect our children from the exploitation that we have adopted.
Knowledge through devastations to paraphrase Henri Michaux’s Light Through Darkness.
Photo by Nicolas Duchenne