Daniel Tutt

“To get at the heart of the social superego, we must locate its effects in the way subjects believe in the same command of its dictates. What distinguishes the break Lasch aptly points out, between the Fordist era of stable ego ideals to the rise of the social superego of neoliberalism, is how belief in the injunction serves as a pre-condition of the social superego. This point is illuminated by the anti-liberal polemicist and French intellectual Jean-Claude Michéa, who argues that today’s superego is the bad mother: possessive and castrating. The superego functions in two forms: the first is to establish a disciplinary order of submission, and the second is to cede the desire of the subject. The maternal has no other way of expressing its devotion other than by “love and sacrificial devotion.” Hence, the cruelty of the superego today resides in the ambiguous and necessary internalization of injunctions. Instead of the same repressive “double bind” of the father’s injunction in the prior era: “follow my advice, don’t follow my advice,” presenting a contradictory law, the contemporary period presents injunctions which follow a different logic: “you will visit your grandma, and you will like it.” There is thus an extra demand to internally act as if the subject conforms with the injunction itself.”
― Daniel Tutt, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation