The modern leader image is a collective self-projection, not a father figure
Evidence
Identification is ‘the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person, “playing” a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex’. It may well be that this pre-oedipal component of identification helps to bring about the separation of the leader image as that of an all-powerful primal father, from the actual father image. Since the child’s identification with his father as an answer to the Oedipus complex is only a secondary phenomenon, infantile regression may go beyond this father image and through an ‘anaclitic’ process reach a more archaic one. … Moreover, the primitively narcissistic aspect of identification as an act of devouring, of making the beloved object part of oneself, may provide us with a clue to the fact that the modern leader image sometimes seems to be the enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective projection of himself, rather than the image of the father whose role during the later phases of the subject’s infancy may well have decreased in present day society. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 188
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- QUESTION: Worth later clarification: how did objective historical decline of the father’s role enable the replacement leader-as-self-projection in post-fascist consumer culture?