But from a psychoanalytic view, they are also stories about how these “new communal modes” are founded, in truth, on regression. In short, this whole analytic nexus is bound up with women at work (“taking the jobs of men”), and how in periods of economic crisis masculinity can triumph through new extra-liberal communal modes of (anti-)social organisation founded on the hatred of women and violence against them, and from which women and their work is excluded. And needless to say too that these developments have prospered in particular in circumstances of male mass-unemployment or the mass fear amongst men of unemployment. And more significantly they have come about as those economic crises have instantiated dominant social modes of the hatred of women, not so much by some abstract patriarchy but by new developments of homosociality, bound up in warriorship, male cliques and confraternities. Needless to say, these are turns that have been made necessary - albeit through the darkest and most labyrinthine paths - by social and economic crisis.
Indeed, you can see a longer history of this sort of quantitative ego-analysis as significant to attempts understand the Nazi phenomenon reaching through to the late 1940s. It happened again in the writings of Reich, Fenichel, and Freud in the 1930s. It happened in 1921 in ‘Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, the sister book of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ now not amid war but instead subsequent social and economic ruin. There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and ego weakness) at key moments.
My ill-advised tuppenceworth on ’ Cat Person’:
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