Psychoanalysis gained popularity as a response to intensified state and social coercion on individuals.
Evidence
- Psychoanalysis and its enormous diffusion since the war, as the expression of the increased moral coercion exercised by the apparatus of State and society on single individuals, and of the pathological crisis determined by this coercion . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1041
Categorization
- DEFINE: Gramsci’s distinctive reading of psychoanalysis: it is not inner liberation but the symptom of heightened moral coercion by state and society.
- XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopower and the technologies of self, and to the broader question of how modern bureaucratic rationality disciplines individuals. — connects to: Ego psychology spread because individuals mirrored society’s objective trends. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1551; Psychoanalysis normalizes patients into a sick society rather than curing it — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 674