If the wishes of today’s neurotics were not subject to repression, who is to say what relevance grammatically incorrect personal pronouns would continue to bear.
Political Preferences and Unrealizable Hopes
A politics grounded in personal preference not only extends the pervasive commodification of life; it is a practical hindrance to mature, strategic political action.
The Return of the Lonely Crowd
How David Riesman’s theory of traditional, inner, and other-directed character types helps explain the new range of psychological symptoms hobbling today’s young people.
Alienation as EBP
Evidence-Based Psychotherapy reifies neoliberal subjectivities, rendering psychotherapy complicit with efforts to manage the poor by rationalizing inequality and privatizing responsibility.
Remain in Light
In paranoia, as opposed to in psychoanalysis, things always have a deeper meaning.
Tomorrow Never Comes
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of class.
Clean
Fantasies of disembodiment defend against the calamity of the contemporary world.
The Anus: An FAQ, Part Four
Obsessives fear that without the silly rituals, their own anality might seep out in the form of paranoia.
Wilhelm Reich, Sex-Pol, and the Virtuous Circle of Marxism and Psychoanalysis
Wilhelm Reich’s “Sex-Pol” helps us understand the ingrained obstacles to sexual and social revolution.
Behind Our Backs, Part Three
Moishe Postone on theorists of culture and society.
Behind Our Backs, Part Two
Moishe Postone on theorists of the self.
Behind Our Backs, Part One
An interview with Moishe Postone on “Self, Culture, & Society,” and the value of general education requirements.
The Anus: An FAQ, Part Three
The act of restricting one’s own pleasure in deference to the pleasure of others is, for Marx, the precondition of relating to others in an exchange society.
A New Type of Educational Illness in Brooklyn Public Schools
In consistently “failing” schools, the competitive spirit is always present, but with an estranged character.
The Psychoeducational Middle School
The introduction of a therapeutic element in the absence of any explicit acknowledgment of the social and material context in which tensions arise intensifies repression rather than relieving it.
The Competitive Personality Then and Now
If anything has changed in the theory of the “competitive personality” since Mills’s time, it is that the kind of social personality it outlines is more ubiquitous and embodied more spontaneously.
The Competitive Personality
Mills’s classic essay on the “alert, obsequious instrument” of the competitive personality.
On the Persistence of Left Hegelianism
Left Hegelianism has survived healthily into the present because the maintenance of the status quo demands a forum for deflecting oppositional forces.
The Anus: An FAQ, Part Two
When it is held back for too long and too forcefully, badness has a way of finding an exit, and in the most unseemly of manners.
Depressed Losers on the Verge of Destruction
The depressive’s neurons are appropriately withering, along with the possibility of a human future.
The Medicalization of Psychiatry
Patients are reduced to containers for diagnoses and psychiatrists to abstract functionaries.
From Avant-Garde to Sociologized Art, Part Two
Art’s desire to endlessly demonstrate its compromised place ultimately makes it as monotonous as the commodity culture from which it tries to distinguish itself.
From Avant-Garde to Sociologized Art, Part One
The “political” is contemporary art’s idée fixe.
Race and Class
Only when we see the working-class as a class-for-itself may we say anything concrete about its supposed “racism.”
The Anus: An FAQ, Part One
When we call someone “anal,” we typically understand what is meant, but we do not understand as well what it is that we are understanding.
On the Need for a Language of Psychopathology (and its Critique)
Bureaucratic pseudo-difference prevents us from engaging in a critique of the language of psychopathology by simply denying that that language is available.
“Action Will Be Taken”: Left Anti-intellectualism and its Discontents
“Activistism” combines the political illiteracy of hyper-mediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance crusade.
The Phenomenon of Agitation in the Psychiatric Milieu
In the hallucinatory process, we see the collapse of the world turn into a system of reference.
Lumivance Reveals New “Literally Viral” Marketing Campaign
On the genesis of “Brake Light Repair Clinics.”
The Knowledge Industry
Academic knowledge is entirely reducible to the endogenous dynamic of the capitalist mode of production.
Introduction to Damage
Capitalist society damages us, in ways both adaptive and otherwise.
A Report on Neoliberal Psychology, Part Two
On the difficulties that arise in any attempt to trace social character to neoliberalism.
A Report on Neoliberal Psychology, Part One
On the difficulties that arise in any attempt to trace social character to neoliberalism.
The Digital Claustrum
Our contemporary social media ecosystem is both the product of and the producer of the accelerating destruction of social bonds.
Dialectics of Racial Categories
The concept of race is often thought to be logically prior to that of racial distinction. It is necessary here to “straighten the dialectics out.”
Everything All of the Time
The left is committed to fighting for everything to the extent that it is in denial of the fact that it is currently in a position to win nothing.
We Are All Very Bad Materialists
The Institute for Precarious Consciousness has engineered theoretical “machines” for their own confusion.
The Politics of Evidence-Based Practice
Evidence-Based Practice provides a “scientific” rationale for providing less service while garnering greater profit.
Clinical Encounters with the Entrepreneurial Self
College students today are engaged in a relationship with their own objectified image of themselves.
Politics as Affirmation
Undoubtedly the most insidious ploy of late capitalist society is the channeling of genuinely human impulses into a resolute commitment to political impotence.