fascism in the head...

"It is clearly not incidental that Freud is developing the analytic setting - exploring what Lacan calls the 'analytic opportunity' - against the rise of fascism. 'Fascist regimes,' the historian Robert Paxton writes in his The Anatomy of Fascism,

tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labour Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism ... Although authoritarian regimes oiften trample civil liberties and are capable of murderous brutality, they do not share fascism's urge to reduce the private sphere to nothing.

The private sphere retreats under pressure until it is called the other scene; [Freud's term for the unconscious] and it requires a new form of privacy to let it speak. And it speaks in the least publicly accessible form called free association. if language represents our ineluctable publicness, then language as free association is the closest we can get to speaking that contradiction in terms, a private language, a language of desire."

Adam Phillips, Doing It Alone, in Side Effects (2006)

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some musings...

if the mind is society, with authoritarian voices censoring and controlling the public voice, then is it democracy we are moving towards in seeking to have peace of mind? is democracy of the mind ever possible? I have been part of conversation in a past professional guise that explored a theory that there has never been famine in a state which had a press free of state control... that somehow seems pertinant...

when the authoriarian voice of the super ego exerts extreme silencing pressure on the self, the private is reduced, the individual retreats, until only sleep brings safety. the only alternative state being self annihalation, voicelessness.
is this because such a battle for control in a public sphere can become almost unbearable to an animal called human whose being is built on language, on public discourse? all human interaction potentially becomes a battle ground of control and fear, not simply without, but within. even if the individual strives for democracy, there are border sentinals keeping away that which threatens. and when fear becomes too great or the state wields its control unceasingly the system gives itself over to the regime. for in annihalation at least one need not fight. the regime wins. only then in sleep can the private still small voice speak.

the oppressive authorities we carry within us are somehow toppled bit by bit when we enter psychoanalytic conversation. when we speak what it is the censor is trying to prevent us from speaking. maybe free assocaition is thus a form of free press for our inner society...

hmmm.

LB