Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

Alain Ehrenberg’s essay (2014, 311–23), “The American Self versus the French Institution,” describes the emergence in France of what Ehrenberg calls a new discourse on psychological suffering. The kind of ‘suffering’ is not examined in detail, other than suggesting that it is experienced as social and moral misfortune, and represented in psychiatric diagnoses and interventions. If I understand Ehrenberg correctly, these misfortunes are products of a changing social reality: the progressive weakening of social ties (including familial ties), a diminishing sense of community and shared obligation, and the valorization of personal autonomy and separateness. Ehrenberg is describing a historical pathway that would seem to lead to the ‘Americanization’ of both French society and the French psyche.

Much of the essay is devoted to contrasting moral economies that were, at one time, characteristic of France and the United States. Ehrenberg’s perspective centers on the position of institutions in these two moral economies. He concentrates on a single institution, the State. I am not altogether certain what ‘the State’ represents in the American setting. The term is rarely used in everyday discourse and would seem to designate different abstractions on different occasions, depending on the speaker’s rhetorical needs: the federal government, the federal bureaucracy, the POTUS (the ‘president of the United States,’ an acronym popular among right-wing writers). Although both French and American moral economies value the rights of the individual, they operate with different conceptions of the ‘individual.’ In the French case, the role of the State is to protect the natural rights of the individual. In the American tradition, the individual is sovereign and, from the perspective of many right-wing Americans, the proper role of government is to protect the individual from the State, that is, from encroaching on his autonomy. The uncertain legitimacy of the State in the United Sates is bound up with the rhetoric of autonomy, self-reliance, and safeguards won against unwarranted intrusions. And Ehrenberg suspects that French society is moving in this direction, pairing an increasingly impotent State apparatus with an emergent Americanized psyche.

But the rhetoric of autonomy and self-reliance is, indeed, largely rhetorical or cynical advice directed to the vulnerable poor and the declining middle class. The most passionate advocates of self-reliance and a ‘live free or die’ civic culture are, with a few exceptions, equally passionate in their pursuit of government subsidies and largesse. ‘The government’ is a polymorphic signifier, and so too is ‘the individual.’ Take the example of the contest over abortion rights. Abortion opponents justify their position explicitly as protecting the [End Page 361] natural rights of the individual against the State. The individual they have in mind is the undeniably vulnerable ‘unborn individual,’ and they conveniently ignore that other individual, represented in a woman’s rights to her own body. These claims and counterclaims are debated publicly, out in the open. Ehrenberg is correct when he writes that French society and the Spirit of 1793 are incomprehensible to most Americans. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the fractiousness and incoherence of American visions of their own society, notwithstanding the undoubted political utility of the rhetoric of ‘self-reliance’ and ‘autonomy.’

Ehrenberg suggests that France’s departure from the past has led to a crisis, and he cites Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents in this connection. Freud’s theme in this book is well known: the antagonism between the irremediable demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.

The commandment, ‘Love they neighbour as thyself’, is [Western Civilization’s] strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological proceedings of the cultural super-ego. … ‘Natural’ ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others.

(Freud 1930/1961, 90)

However, Freud’s irony is facile: narcissistic wounds and satisfactions entail multiple possibilities that include the creation and humiliation of the despised ‘other.’ And this possibility engenders a characteristic (but not unique) “pathology of contemporary democratic societies of individualism” (Ehrenberg 2014, XX). To understand the current significance...