I had to find my friend. The search seemed to go on for a long time, now marked by frightful incidents, now by moments of relief and even inexplicable humor. When I finally did come across him, my friend was in his lair at the center of this labyrinth, holding court before servants and sycophants, who were the shadowy figures from earlier. He had a hard-to-place but unmistakably wicked aspect and was boasting of his villainy to the delight of his audience.

Then I awoke and managed, against my usual habit, not to check my phone — a habit that almost always erases my memory of dreams, no matter how vivid. A few moments of groggy reflection, and I knew exactly what the dream meant. In waking life, I face a difficult decision in this friendship. The details are irrelevant, but the upshot is that if I can fully trust my friend, then I must take X course of action. If I can’t trust him, if he is indeed a false friend, then Y.

The trouble is, the situation is shot through with ambiguity. I can’t know for sure. My nightmare, however, eliminated all doubt by framing my friend as a monster. This, I had to admit, served a psychic purpose: because Y is my preferred path. The dream, then, granted me leave to choose the course of action that best serves my interests, thus fulfilling a deep-seated wish.

If he were still around, Sigmund Freud would no doubt agree with my general way of thinking about dreams as a sort of wish-fulfilling nighttime hallucination. This, even as he’d caution that my interpretation of this particular dream might be a little too easy, too accepting of its manifest content at the expense of the truly hidden meanings it might encode. To get at the latter, I’d probably need to undergo a lengthy psychoanalysis — these days, a boutique treatment preferred by an aging and wealthy few in Upper Manhattan and North London. 

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Meanwhile, many of my 21st-century contemporaries would tell me that my dream probably means nothing at all. Just a random outpouring of stress and mental dross. And they’d urge me not to bother with the pseudoscientific, perverted theories of a coke-addled Viennese doctor who, in the absence of modern experimental methods, drew his picture of the mind from his overactive imagination. Leave the couch and follow the science.

You might be surprised to learn, however, that some of the world’s most authoritative neuroscientists are increasingly parting ways with the anti-Freudian herd. They see psychoanalysis as a fundamentally rigorous enterprise that “takes the life of the mind seriously [and] takes subjectivity and tries to bring it into science,” as the South African neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms tells me in a recent video interview. 

Credited with discovering the forebrain mechanisms of dreaming, Solms has spent some four decades testing Freud’s insights against cutting-edge science. The results of this lifetime of research are detailed in Solms’s artful new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. The upshot is that, although Freud got many of the details wrong, his big-picture account of the mind accords with modern brain science to a degree that is downright embarrassing to his many haters.

While the general public still largely thinks of Freudianism as a discredited relic, neuroscience is quickly circling back to it. Sometimes, this return to Freud is explicit, as in the work of Karl Friston of University College London, among the world’s most-cited neuroscientists (and Solms’s occasional collaborator). More often, though, brain scientists and psychiatrists independently reach conclusions that are identical to Freud’s, or nearly so, but present them under new names, with their debts to psychoanalysis carefully airbrushed out of view.

This new scientific interest in Freud might just renew how we understand and address a mental-health crisis that, in the United States, swallows nearly $300 billion a year — even as Americans become more anxious, more depressed, and more addicted to drugs and destructive vices like online gambling. 

Psychoanalysis — unlike the drug-based models that dethroned it and are now being cast into doubt, in turn — insists that mental suffering has meaning. Less an incorrect response to external stimuli or an organic imbalance in the brain than a human riddle to be solved. To cure the patient, as Solms argues, calls for uncovering “the story of his life” and “actually understanding the disorder.” This links psychoanalysis (now assisted by brain science) back to the great humanistic tradition, running from the ancient Greeks, which says that we can’t get better until we see ourselves as creatures who are both biological and meaning-bearing.

Solms’s chief proposal has been to bring this quest for meaning, launched by Freud, into an experimental frame. It has proved astonishingly successful. Large segments of the old psychoanalytic edifice — which Freud himself could only construct on the basis of what his patients told him — are now mirrored in ultra-modern, experimentally and prospectively tested brain science, as we will see shortly.

The prospects appeared dim in the 1980s. That’s when Solms, already a neuroscientist, began considering psychoanalysis. He couldn’t have picked a more inauspicious moment. Freudianism, after half a century of dominating psychiatry, was beset by opposition on all sides: from civil libertarians who deplored the supposedly autocratic reign of Freudian doctors over the state asylums; progressives who accused him of heteronormativity; conservatives who saw him as the fount of modern perversion; radical thinkers who questioned the very existence of mental illness; and insurers and health administrators who groaned at the high expense and long length of Freudian treatment.

The deepest challenge, however, had to do with the scientific status of psychoanalysis. As Solms tells me, when he informed his brain-science peers that he was decamping for London to train as a psychoanalyst, one of them scoffed: “A neuroscientist training in psychoanalysis is like an astronomer training in astrology.”

Yet the prevailing brain science and clinical methods failed to extinguish the “burning mysteries” raised by an early tragedy in his family. When Solms was 4, his older brother, then aged 6, sustained severe head injuries as a result of a fall. The damage derailed his brother’s development, and he became “my embarrassing little brother” (though older in age), as the author recounts in The Only Cure. “What is a mind?” he wondered in the wake of the accident. “How does it arise from within the body, and make people who they are?” 

The sheer ambition of Freudian analysis — its claim to unlock just these sorts of mysteries and at a deep level — proved irresistible, notwithstanding the skepticism of his fellow scientists. 

Beginning in the late 19th century, Freud’s treatment of patients suffering mental distress led him to a conclusion that he saw as comparable in importance to Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. It was that conscious mental activity isn’t the only kind. There were also, it seemed, unconscious processes that only revealed themselves in dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, forgotten appointments, misremembered names, “accidental” mishaps that really weren’t so, and the like. 

Early childhood development, Freud thought, powerfully shaped the unconscious, which, in turn, determined adult personality. In the case of the mentally ill, the unmet needs and confusions and libidinal tensions of that early period expressed themselves in the form of psychic distress: the symptom. By having patients talk freely in his treatment room at 19 Berggasse — at length, under an objective gaze seated behind them — he could help them achieve a new understanding of their lives. In time, this freed patients from the symptom, from the compulsion to repeat the same behaviors that sabotaged their lives and relationships.

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Freud’s teaching, of course, went far beyond this core set of insights (about the existence and formation of the unconscious, its role in mental distress, and how analysis can bring it to light). He also offered an expansive metapsychology — a theoretical framework for the mind — that encompassed larger questions about religion, literature, and civilization. This set of ideas proved enormously influential, to the point that Freudian concepts have become part of the cultural air we breathe: resistance and projection; id, ego, and super-ego; castration anxiety; the Oedipus Complex; the pleasure and reality principles; and so on. Freud is thus a touchstone even for those who claim to revile him.

But sheer ambition, intellectual inventiveness, and cultural influence don’t make a science. If this were all that Freud were up to, he would still be celebrated as a major cultural critic, who happened to couch his interesting-but-unfalsifiable ideas in pseudo-medical terminology. Indeed, that’s exactly how many even sympathetic readers receive Freud. Yet as Solms contends, Freud was up to something else. He was, Solms says, a “dedicated and serious scientist,” a daring neurologist determined to study the subjective life of the mind as a part of the natural world.

It’s often forgotten today that Freud spent years as a neurologist and neuroanatomist before he ever invented psychoanalysis. For Solms, it’s impossible to understand Freud the scientist — and psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise — without paying attention to this phase of Freud’s work. His contributions to brain science during this period are still considered foundational in the field. His account of cerebral palsy, for example, held up as the standard for decades — “yes, really!,” one is tempted to shout in the face of the multitudes who dismiss him as a quack or worse without having ever cracked a page. 

Freud, to take another example, laid the groundwork for the neuron theory: the recognition that the nervous system runs on billions of specialized cells called neurons. He also pioneered the functionalist account of the brain, according to which the various functions of the nervous system, such as language and memory, are spread across multiple parts of the organ, rather than being localized in single areas, as had previously been thought. That latter insight was later adopted by Alexander Luria, the Soviet founder of neuropsychology, who, as it happened, began his career as a Freudian before renouncing psychoanalysis, likely under political pressure. (Stalin banned Freudianism as a “bourgeois science” and exiled its great Soviet patron, Trotsky.)

Yet Freud struggled to connect the “stuff” of human subjectivity, as he encountered it in his work as a practicing physician, with his findings as a brain scientist. How did the experience of being a mind interface with having a mind? The problem has bedeviled philosophy down the ages. Freud himself suspected that the two are the same thing under different aspects — one subjective and internal, the other objective and external. (Students of the classical tradition might recognize here a faint echo of the Aristotelian-Thomist idea that the psyche is the “substantial form of the body,” as Aquinas taught; Freud, curiously enough, had studied under an Aristotelian philosopher who’d abandoned the Catholic priesthood.)

In putting this conjecture to work, however, Freud only had access to the subjective mental stuff as it disclosed itself on the treatment couch and in patient case histories — and in dream reports and “accidental” (but telling) mistakes, his own and others’. From there, Freud built a model of what he called the “mental apparatus,” while resisting the temptation to pin its workings on brain anatomy, given the limitations of the science in his time. All along, however, he maintained that “all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably someday be based on an organic substructure,” as he wrote in a 1914 essay.

Solms’s project — neuropsychoanalysis — aims to unearth that organic substructure. Freud comes out looking very good, indeed.

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Let’s count the ways. A good place to start would be the interpretation of dreams (as wish-fulfilling hallucinations). Dreams formed Freud’s central piece of evidence for the existence of the unconscious. But for generations of anti-Freudians, as Solms notes, Freud’s dream work has served as the “paradigmatic example of a theory that didn’t meet the standard” of falsifiability. That’s in reference to the philosopher of science Karl Popper’s idea that truly scientific theories are open to being disproved by empirical observation. Freudian dream interpretation, Popper and his followers charged, can’t even be falsified — his theories “always fitted” the case at hand, as Popper wrote, and thus amounted to pseudoscience.

Is that still true? Or has the picture changed?

For a good while, the leading post-Freudian theory of dreaming belonged to Harvard’s Allan Hobson. It was based on the well-known observation that dreaming coincides with the rapid-eye-movement, or REM, phase of the sleep cycle, when we can observe the dreamer’s eyeballs darting about under the eyelids. REM sleep, in turn, is brought about by a part of the brainstem shooting a chemical at regular intervals (about every 90 minutes to 110 minutes). 

So it turns out that Freudian dream interpretation could be falsified, contra Popper, and it was falsified: for Hobson, his finding debunked Freudian dream interpretation. After all, he wrote, “the physiological substrate of consciousness is in the forebrain.” That’s where wishing happens — not in the brainstem, which causes dreaming. Thus, wish fulfillment and dreaming arise from different parts of the brain and can’t be linked together.

But not so fast. Beginning in 1985, Solms began work on the study that made his name. He set out to determine how “damage in different parts of the brain” correlates “with changes in dreaming.” It thus brought together the objective or bodily aspects of having a mind with the subjective aspects of being a mind in just the way Freud predicted, and hoped, that science would one day be able to do.

What he found was astonishing. First of all, patients dreamed even after damage to the part of their brains that injected the REM chemical. Other patients, meanwhile, showed rapid eye movement, even though they could no longer dream, seemingly owing to damage to other parts of their brains. REM and dreaming coincide, in other words, but the REM mechanism doesn’t cause dreaming. Then Solms discovered the part of the brain that does cause dreaming. It’s known as the medial forebrain bundle, which also shelters the “wanting” part of the brain, associated with chemical dopamine. Dreaming, wanting: I wish my friend were a bad guy…

To recap: the effort to debunk Freud’s wish-fulfillment account of dreams had itself been cast into doubt. More than that, as Solms concluded, “if the brain’s dopamine reward system did generate dreaming, that looked good for wish-fulfillment theory.” 

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that brain science has cleanly vindicated Freudian dream interpretation. For one thing, as Hobson himself pointed out in a subsequent debate, linking dreaming to the forebrain’s dopaminergic mechanism doesn’t — without more — get us to Freud’s account of dreams as disguising their latent content behind the manifest. What was demonstrated was, first, that a key Freudian theory was indeed falsifiable; and, second, that the Freudian edifice wasn’t nearly as shaky as once assumed. There appeared a nexus — provisional and far from fully understood, to be sure — between the brain’s wishing drive and the tendency of our dreams to fulfill our embarrassing wishes.

But this raises the question: could other lines of neuroscientific inquiry fill in some of that “without more”? Solms’s answer is a resounding yes. 

Consider the unconscious. Freud described human memory as stored between several different memory systems: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The standard neuroscientific picture of memory today is analogous to this, and it may bridge the gap between the wanting circuit and the censorship mechanism that leads to bizarre dreams, slips of the tongue, etc. 

Modern neuroscience uses “short-term memory” or “working memory” to describe consciousness. This is the system that holds “what you are aware of right now,” as Solms writes. Space is necessarily limited — you can only access so much information at one time — and so consciousness is constantly trading content with the preconscious system, or what brain science now calls “declarative long-term memory.” To get through life, our brains constantly consolidate and reconsolidate new and existing information, sending material up from declarative long-term memory to short-term memory and rewriting both in light of each other.

But there is a third system, called “non-declarative long-term memory,” because its content “cannot be brought back into consciousness,” as Solms says. Freud called this the unconscious. It isn’t, as is commonly believed and portrayed in Hitchcock and David Lynch films, a “shadow realm full of trippy detritus.” Rather, it’s best thought of as a set of “policies” that regulate behavior in light of what the subject believes, often mistakenly, to be the most efficient means of meeting its needs. It can be thought of as an automatic process of prediction — prediction being closely linked to wishing and wanting. The unconscious determines how we predict.

Thus, for example, the subject who only received loving parental affection in the breach, when acting out or falling into crisis as a child, may develop an unconscious policy of acting out or generating crisis in her grownup relationships, recapitulating the destructive pattern set down from an early age. She must lose her keys to get her boyfriend to leave work early and help her — right away. And even his anger is welcome; better than being ignored. That is, until the boyfriend gets fed up, and the relationship breaks down. 

Repetition, constantly tracing the same circuit set down by childhood trauma, is of the essence of the psychiatric symptom. It is the form of the symptom. 

Classic Freudianism almost stereotypically linked all this to the sexual life. Yet Freud’s singular focus on sexual pleasure is one of several areas in which Solms parts ways with the master. “It wasn’t,” he tells me, “that Freud focused too narrowly on sex. It’s that he widened the meaning of that word too much. He said, all of these things we do are for the purpose of pleasure. Therefore, sexuality is not synonymous with reproduction; sexuality is synonymous with pleasure for its sake. And then he said, therefore, anything you do for pleasure’s sake, I’m going to call sexual.”

Thus, we get the almost cartoonish Freudian tendency to discern a sexual motive in the most mundane and innocent of daily activities. Why do we like chocolate? Because it generates oral sexual pleasure. Drawing on modern brain science, by contrast, Solms discerns multiple categories of pleasure, of which the sexual is but one. (In the case of chocolate, it’s the pleasure associated with nourishment and replenishing the body’s energy supplies; sometimes a Cadbury bar is just a Cadbury bar.)

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And this is one of several areas where Solms is perfectly prepared to revise orthodox Freudianism. There are aspects of the classic theory which are clearly the result of the scientific limitations of Freud’s time or the man’s own overconfidence in his total theory of the mind. What matters more, for Solms, are the broad structures. And it is critically important to treat even these as scientific theories, which means: subject to revision in the light of evidence.

Sadly, such an attitude wasn’t always normative among analysts. Freud himself, though hopeful of one day putting psychoanalysis on a firm biological footing, was too often quick to dismiss efforts to empirically test the talking cure. One early empirical researcher, as Solms notes, approached him in 1936 with limited evidence in favor of psychoanalysis, only to be gently shooed away by Freud on the grounds that what happened in the treatment room spoke for itself.

Then, too, he sometimes embellished his case histories with just-so stories that vindicated his theories and the treatment. Take his famous study of the “Wolf Man” — Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat who suffered from a debilitating obsessive disorder, supposedly as a result of having witnessed, as an infant, his parents copulating “doggy-style.” This “primal scene” had created in Pankejeff a terrible fear that his father would castrate him, as he had apparently done to his mother. 

Having unraveled the mystery of the primal scene, Freud claimed, Pankejeff was cured (this, even though in the very same case history, Freud conceded that he couldn’t be sure if the primal scene involved the patient’s parents or animals he’d seen on the family estate). Decades later, when Freud was long dead, Pankejeff went on the record with a journalist to claim that he couldn’t be sure if the primal scene wasn’t, in fact, the analyst’s invention. Plus, contrary to Freud’s assertion of a definitive cure, Pankejeff remained in therapy almost to the end of his life.

In such instances, Freud himself laid down traps that would later ensnare his successors. “Hubris on the part of the psychoanalysts was a big part of it,” Solms tells me, “an overestimation of themselves, by themselves and by the public.” Some analysts pronounced oracularly, vainglorious in their position as “the subject supposed to know” — the role that, according to the French analyst Jacques Lacan, patients incorrectly ascribe to the therapist. It is, in fact, the unconscious itself that “knows” — the analyst merely helps to draw it out.

But many of the external attacks were indeed underhanded, and reflected the broader intellectual poverty — and steady marketization of all realms of life — that have characterized the West in recent decades. Psychoanalysis, Solms tells me, also fell out of favor because its slow pace and emphasis on deeper causes and deeper meaning were out of tune with an age that demanded “quick fixes.” And one in which “it’s much easier to believe that you can take a pill and change your life — but you can’t.”

Speaking of pills: overconfidence wasn’t the exclusive domain of the Freudians. As Solms points out, when powerful psychiatric drugs emerged beginning in the 1950s, their proponents, too, thought they had hit upon an unimpeachable method. Now, drug-based therapies too are facing a reckoning as patients increasingly speak out about the downsides of SSRI anti-depressants, and as prescriptions, Big Pharma profits, and rates of misery seem to rise in tandem. 

Solms isn’t categorically opposed to drug therapies. For some forms of severe mental illness, such as psychosis, the best that can be done is to manage the worst of the symptoms with drugs. But emphasis on manage: psychiatric drugs, he argues, can’t cure mental illness, period. In the case of a psychotic patient, for example, “the mere fact that the withdrawal of a drug that has been taken chronically causes the person — more or less immediately — to flip … that shows that the drug hasn’t cured the condition,” says Solms.

His “bugbear,” he goes on, “is the claim that the cause [of mental illness] is a chemical imbalance, and that you can therefore treat the cause by giving a drug that replaces the missing chemical, as it were. … The reasoning there is the same as saying that if you take an opiate when you’ve got a headache, and it takes the pain away, that means pain is caused by opiate deficiency. It’s as stupid as that.” 

Fair enough, but even if insurers and HMOs could be persuaded to cover psychoanalytic treatment, is it a feasible solution on a mass scale? It’s surprisingly effective, for starters. Contrary to all those Woody Allen jokes about being in therapy for years and years, to no good effect, numerous studies now show that psychoanalytic therapy far outperforms drugs and treatments-as-usual. Writes Solms, “For certain conditions, even short courses of psychoanalysis seem as dependable as, say, insulin for managing type 1 diabetes, or the HPV vaccine [for] preventing cervical cancer.” Not all patients need to undergo the full classic analysis, but some of the principles can be imported into other treatments.

That should include elements of the Freudian ethic or philosophy, which Solms the neuroscientist somewhat eschews. That ethic can be highly demanding — again, contrary to a pat, simplistic line of thinking in which Freud is to blame for a “therapeutic culture” that for generations has robbed people of moral agency. On the contrary, insofar as there is a Freudian ethic, it can be strikingly conservative — not in a culture-warring Right-wing sense, but a tragic one: it describes people as caught between powerful drives, not least the erotic, and the limits imposed by reality, including our species’ need for order and self-perpetuation. The biological and cultural landscape of Freudianism isn’t infinitely malleable, it isn’t open to infinite emancipation.

It can be, as Solms says, “a rather dark philosophy.” Its founder’s strident atheism is an affront to believers like me, though, over the decades, there have been plenty of religious analysts, and fruitful dialogue between the great faith traditions and the talking cure — starting with Freud and his friend and fellow analyst Oskar Pfister, who was also a Protestant pastor. The overlaps, though of course rejected by Freud himself, aren’t accidental. At its best, psychoanalysis calls us to responsibility; teaches us to compromise with reality; and to strive for a mature, genital (in the full sense) personality, capable, as Freud is said to have put it, of “love and work.” And capable, too, of confronting its own darknesses in dreams as in waking life.

This was not, in fact, a fictional plotline, but reportage from the pretrial hearing of Mango heir Jonathan Andic, accused of murdering his father Isak, and whose therapist, Julia Lüderwaldt, faced questioning for her unconventional methods. Lüderwaldt had, at first, resisted police questioning, citing client confidentiality in line with therapeutic norms. When it transpired that Lüderwaldt, who described herself as a “prestigious doctor, psychologist and psychoanalyst”, appeared to lack formal registration in any of those fields — and therefore risked prosecution for misuse of protected titles — she changed her mind.

In Spain, as in Britain and the US, all manner of self-styled therapists and coaches proliferate on social media, building their brand on TikTok or Instagram and selling their one-to-one services to a parasocially captured audience. But Lüderwaldt wasn’t flogging life coaching or dodgy diagnoses to frazzled mums; she was high-end, her marketing limited to word of mouth among Spain’s ultra-high-net-worth. If she wasn’t a proper therapist, what was she?

From shows like White Lotus and Succession, we’re familiar with the shadowy hinterland of helpmeets and fixers that subsists around the powerful and rich. Masseurs, meditation coaches and sex workers are variously employed to meet needs that prove more existential than physiological: there is something about the condition of being unconstrained by material concerns that messes people up, and confidants can emerge in unexpected places. Not that this is just a TV fantasy. Cherie Blair’s personal trainer Carole Caplin became her stylist and wellness advisor too, purveying crystals and quantum healing. The exact methodology of the court advisor, whether it’s fashion, Freud or craniosacral release, doesn’t necessarily matter so much as their charisma and the dependence they can foster in their client base. Even Rasputin started out as a wandering healer.

The Rasputin figure is a timeless archetype. The history of ancient Rome is peppered with astrologers and ex-slaves who slide into key decision-making roles. Rasputin himself filled a vacant position with the Romanovs after his predecessor, the French mystic-turned-physician Maître Philippe, got expelled from Russia for practicing medicine without a license, just as Spain’s courts might eventually come for Lüderwaldt. The Romanovs wanted a metaphysical shortcut to a viable male heir, but they also needed to offload their deepest anxieties outside the enforced secrecy of the family. A faith healer treating hemophilia already knew too much, and could therefore be told more, and the relief of speaking freely is a force in its own right, placing the listener in a position of formidable power.

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Today, the confessional relationship is no longer part of the spiritual domain. Lüderwaldt’s self-ID into psychotherapy is specific to our materialist times: we see ourselves as rational creatures whose suffering can best be met by science, and we yearn for the magic-bullet framework that can help us fix it.

The problem is that most of the putative science of our inner life is bunk. Academic psychology has well-documented problems replicating findings. Freud’s claims about the invisible mechanisms of the mind are shrouded in pseudoscientific language but largely unfalsifiable. This can sometimes be convenient: the “death of the father” was only ever a metaphor for one’s individuation into adulthood, at least if they ask in court. Besides, this reading is, if anything, a more sober take than Freud’s own musings, which argued that the drive to kill the father was rooted in sexual jealousy of his command of the mother or the harem of women-in-general, depending on which Freud you’re reading.

Point to a wilder element of psychoanalytic theory, such as penis envy, and the refrain is generally that true psychoanalysis no longer takes it seriously, rather like proponents of a religion argue that you’re only looking at the problematic passages in their holy book and not the bits about peace and love. True, Lüderwaldt may have been an uncredentialed maverick. Yet the actual ideas that actual therapists advocate, like polyvagal theory, internal family systems or Bessel van der Kolk’s popular trauma narratives, are often pretty dubious too.

But humans are fallible creatures who like ego-validation even more than the sciencey vibes that prop it up: give us a story, any story, that absolves us of blame, or that, even better, makes us victim rather than offender in our interpersonal power games, and we’re captivated. The twin themes of Lüderwaldt’s most high-profile work seem to be family and money. Tennis star Arantxa Sánchez Vicario accused her family of mismanaging her earnings; Lüderwaldt reportedly intervened. The husband of a Spanish royal was convicted of embezzlement of public funds; Lüderwaldt helped the family adjust to the news. The backdrop of Jonathan Andic’s cliff-top confrontation was a disputed inheritance: a reasonably modest advance, and a charitable foundation that would have swallowed the remainder. Lüderwaldt reportedly pressured Isak Andic into giving his son a figure of €40 million.

We can only speculate whether Lüderwaldt’s genius involved reframing the ugly realities of familial money tussles into the language of inner conflict. Certainly, with the right therapeutic prodding, fighting over money can be turned into a tale of emotional betrayal. Your drive to manage your reputation in the midst of scandal is a trauma in which you, not the taxpayer, are the ultimate victim; your resentment over not being handed enough unearned wealth is a need for reparation, without which the primal wound of your father’s dominance will continue to fester.

The laundering of human greed and vanity into morally palatable tales of victimhood is therapy culture’s contribution to our times. We can’t lay all of this at Freud’s door. Much of it stems from the pay-to-play financial dynamic of the therapeutic relationship. Financial security stems from happy customers, and while therapists are supposed to swim upstream against the tendency to people-please, many don’t. The client holds the purse strings and, in return, the therapist shapes the client’s perception of their world. A strange thing about our current moment is that this practice of employing court flatterers is no longer limited to kings or magnates — it turns out we all want one in our lives.

If the inbuilt asymmetry of the therapeutic relationship lends itself to power games, the psychoanalytic tradition is a particularly rich repository of strategy for the master manipulator. Analysis claims that the patient cannot know his unconscious mind; he can only come to understand it, and what he really thinks, with the analyst’s interpretation. The core clinical concept of psychoanalysis, transference, requires the patient to redirect powerful unconscious feelings about his parents onto the analyst, who becomes an authority figure invoking intense emotions in the client.

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Once you accrue this kind of power, you have people over a barrel. Lüderwaldt is reported to have left former clients feeling guilty and tearful, totally dependent on her to make decisions. If, as reported, her tactics were to ramp up to more sessions with more family members over time, so that she was enmeshed within the family unit, her distorted version of psychoanalysis offered a route in. The family is the locus of your problems, and the analyst can take on that familial role to fix them.

In more religious times, Rasputin’s charisma was bolstered by his status as a holy man. The priesthood, whether within the official hierarchies of the Church or in the diffuse spiritual circles outside of it, wielded power. Some priests were good, but priests who were bad could do a lot of harm, unchecked by a credulous congregation.

Therapists are Rasputins, private priests-for-hire. Most of the therapeutic churches, or “modalities”, have rules to keep their congregations safe, such as boundaries that forbid therapists from seeking controlling stakes in family finances. Still, rogue priests are everywhere, including ones with certificates. The recovered memory and satanic ritual abuse movements were, for example, driven by impeccably credentialed, experienced practitioners who committed terrible harms to patients and their families.

What we should not do, therefore, is treat therapy with religious deference. Some therapists are bad, and some are good. Some therapeutic ideas, like listening to what people are saying without interruption, are sensible. Some, like the Oedipus complex, or orgone accumulators, or recovered memories, are really stupid.

Shows like The White Lotus were hits because they showed us that the rich and powerful are as naïve and fallible and weak as the rest of us. They invited us to laugh at their frailties. We felt very comfortable poking fun at Carole Caplin, the upstart with her woo-woo ideas about healing who somehow got an immensely powerful and well-educated QC to fall for her bullshit. We remain reticent when it comes to psychotherapy, though, even though it too is riven with laughable nonsense.

These events might appear only loosely related. Some — like Trump’s X-Files-style memes or Johnson’s obsession with scientifically optimizing his girlfriend’s reproductive health — elicit uncomfortable laughter. Others, especially Anthropic’s claims, have an undeniably disquieting aspect. But all are expressions of a much deeper shift, one that most of us aren’t acknowledging, much less discussing (even if we all feel it): we’re living through a series of stochastic ontological shocks that amount to a Second Copernican Revolution. And we’re far less prepared to meet its demands than the earlier generations who met the first.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life, the expansion of human habitation into outer space, the prospect of enhancing the body and expanding its life span, and the stupendous achievements of artificial intelligence call into question our privileged sense of mastery and belonging in the world. 

Our age, in other words, is witnessing the dramatic second phase of the scientific, technological, and philosophical shift that launched modernity beginning roughly half a millennium ago with the discovery that the Earth isn’t at the center of an orderly “chain of being.”

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By Matthew Gasda

The First Copernican Revolution suggested that, far from being orderly, the cosmos is constitutively antagonistic: roiled by blind, competing forces indifferent to human ends. In doing so, the revolutionaries radically de-centered humanity, dislodging man from his former place of honor in the cosmos.

The ontological picture did not improve with time. Darwin showed that the Homo sapiens is just another species, sharing origins with all others in the relentless struggle to survive and reproduce. Marx suggested that the beliefs we hold dear form the ideological superstructure upholding modes and relations of production that are historically determined; history, in other words, conditions belief. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud, who famously called his discovery of the unconscious a new Copernican revolution, revealed the irrational appetites and unconscious drives churning just beneath our polite conventions. Psychoanalysis purported to reveal a picture of the soul that was not unified, rational, or fully conscious — but instead propelled by a hydraulic system of psychic energies formed by the libidinal dynamics of the family; Freud’s theories demolished the Victorian understanding of what it meant to be human. 

Freud’s theories of the mind were novel in that they not only stripped away another layer of dignity from the philosophical account of man, but also in registering and taking account of ontological shocks that preceded his thinking: widespread industrialization, globalized capital, the disintegration of the large multinational empires.

Yet the First Copernican Revolution was incomplete, and not nearly as radical as some of its protagonists claimed. Psychoanalysis, for example, rested upon a surprisingly old-fashioned, moralistic account of human personality, leading the later analytic thinker Erich Fromm to conclude that for Freud, “health and virtue are really the same.” Then, too, the First Copernican Revolution coincided with the age of mass literacy, which made it possible for culture to reflect on itself and for individuals to nurture a sense of interiority — “the birth of the subject” was one of the great and few consolations that accompanied the great dislocations of modernity. 

In the high-modernist works of Joyce and Proust, to cite canonical examples, the individual psyche is represented variously as polymorphously perverse, anxious, and existential; Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Proust’s narrator, for instance, are each obsessional, with a fractured sense of time and anthropological belonging; by 1922, the year Ulysses was published, to map the human meant to map the troubling disruptions, distortions, and dislocations that attended human experience and cognition. Modernism, which includes psychoanalysis, is, by these lights, a formal attempt to symbolically bridge the ultra-new with a longer humanistic tradition in which the brain was a soul, and man had a central place in the story of the cosmos. It was perhaps the last secular attempt to do so (though perhaps Carl Sagan would like a word).

“Copernican” revolutions are moments when civilizations acquire new knowledge and new means of mastery, which simultaneously empower what Freud would call the “illusions” that uphold those civilizations. They are naturally fraught. 

The shocks that are upon us, in other words, are displacing the human even further from the cosmological story. If there is no singular event like the Napoleonic Wars or World War I which reorients our inner lives, there are and have been a series of fractured crises: the pandemic, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, coupled with the sci-fi horizon of aliens, artificial general intelligence, robots. Esoteric or fringe ideas are now normal for social media scrollers or Tucker Carlson viewers; part of being alive in 2026 means wondering seriously if our species is the result of an alien genetics experiment; if AGI will rule the world; or whether biotech will enable lives as long as Methuselah. The normality, even the banality, of these discourses, is a sign that we’ve moved beyond the retrenchments of the literary modernists or the midcentury existentialists, who tried to provide intellectual structures for human beings to make sense of themselves in the wake of centuries of rapid scientific and intellectual revolution. If one or any of the possibilities on the horizon of 2026 are true, or come true, then everything is different forever.

The ontological shocks of the present are the most extreme to date because they threaten to alter the species itself; previous ontological shocks changed the explanatory framework around man, in this decade, and especially this year, narratives are changing, but so is the material of mind and body, and the aspirational trajectory of mankind. ‘Ontological influencers’ like Bryan Johnson urge followers to pursue immortal life. In the old humanistic framework of the West, it was sensible for Odysseus to reject immortality with the demi-goddess Calypso and return home to his aged wife, dog, and son; this wisdom does not seem like it will prevail into the next decade.

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Humanistic intellectuals, or anyone who ascribes dignity to the human condition, can’t assume they will prevail unless they take seriously how weird things have become, and will continue to become. Writers, artists, philosophers, undergraduates at coffeeshops, whoever is interested in building a new kind of bridge (like modernism) between the future and the past must be audacious relative to the scale of the manifold transformations at hand.

So, where are the new vocabularies, new concepts, new art forms to help humanity process Year Zero, an ontological revolution that may usher in Biblical lifespans, UFO disclosure, cyborgs, Butlerian jihads et al.? Where are the prophets? For the first time, humanism seems to have failed to catch up to changes in the human. The imminent transformation of the foundations of mind and body, and potentially of our understanding of history (if it turns out we are not the only intelligent life form in the galaxy), has not produced great art or thought, only slop and deferral. 

A culture that is preoccupied with dating mores and the manosphere, with the political trends and the lives of pop stars and reality stars and streamers, is derelict both of ambition and duty; rather than acknowledging ontological shock, we are numbing ourselves to it. As a civilization, as a species, and as a global population, we are destitute of secular palliatives, of modes of care and of thought to handle the onslaught of the future. Rather than diluted therapy-speak, we need a new Freud, or new Freuds (or new Marshall McLuhans): new thinker-prophets, to build intellectual bridges to a future that has already commenced.

The comfortable center risks letting the future be defined by technologists with platforms who are invested, literally, in a certain version of the future coming to pass, and by government bureaucrats who may be more interested in controlling unrest than in ameliorating its causes.

And this is a shame. Heightened awareness, new forms of interiority and self-articulation, new means of self-making are traditionally the beneficent byproduct of sudden breaks in the linear unfolding of history. (When we say Shakespeare was early modern, for instance, what we really mean is that the Bard was drawing on intensely new energy that was flowing through London in the wake of intense religious warfare and technological and philosophical change. Ditto Cervantes, ditto Montaigne.)

New ways of life should give rise to new thoughts and new expressions of meaning. Ontological shock can be more than an unpleasant sensation. It can be a provocation, an imperative to reform the ranks and battle a science-fiction future into a dignified truce.

“Would you like to choose your hold music?” inquires the automated voice. The tone is solicitous, therapeutic, and infantilizing. You are not addressed as an adult citizen conducting business, but a vulnerable subject whose emotional state must be stabilized before anything substantive can occur. 

This logic now extends far beyond call centers. Contemporary institutions often present themselves as gentle, conflict-averse, and therapeutic, even as they exert quiet forms of compulsion. I recently received an email from a university learning-support officer, copying in a student who had missed every dissertation meeting to date. The purpose, I was told, was simply to “introduce us,” since the student felt anxious about having fallen behind. The tone was friendly and reassuring — but it carried an unmistakable instruction: the student was not to be penalized, or even questioned, for non-attendance. A relationship between two adults — and one in which there was clearly a teacher–student hierarchy — was subtly recast as one requiring mediation and emotional cushioning.

Call it the West’s collective infantile disorder.

This institutional style did not emerge by accident. It reflects a longer cultural process in which adulthood itself has been steadily hollowed out. The social critic Neil Postman diagnosed a trend toward cultural infantilization in the West as early as the 1960s in The Disappearance of Childhood. His argument was that mass media, particularly television, were eroding childhood as a distinct life stage and, with it, adulthood, which depends upon childhood as a sort of apprenticeship. For Postman, adulthood consisted of hard-won capacities for self-restraint, delayed gratification, conceptual thought, historical awareness, reason and order.

A culture increasingly organized around spectacle, immediacy, and emotionalism undermined these qualities. And thus, Postman contended, childhood and adulthood merged, producing adultified children and infantilized adults. Adulthood is no longer a stable moral category that can tolerate ambiguity and regulate the self.

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The American thinker Benjamin Barber extended this diagnosis by locating its causes in neoliberal capitalism and the transition from a productive to a consumer economy. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Barber described the “radically individuated” consumer as someone free to choose from among endless options, while remaining powerless to change the “menu of the world” itself. Under these conditions, the Protestant ethic of restraint and effort gave way to an infantilizing ethos of immediate gratification. Citizenship was eroded, as shopping displaced civic participation as the defining mark of freedom. Political life, in turn, was reduced to preference, feeling, and grievance. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the heterodox scholar Christopher Lasch similarly diagnosed the emergence of a narcissistic personality type in which “the egomaniacal, experience-devouring, imperial self regresses into a grandiose, infantile, empty self.”

Together, these processes have produced a pervasive therapeutic culture enveloping education and major institutions alike. Management styles, DEI regimes, and pedagogical practices have become increasingly risk-averse and emotion-managing. Universities routinely affirm their commitment to free speech, for example, but only insofar as it does not disrupt “campus relations” or generate complaints. Teaching is increasingly framed as “trauma-informed,” with trigger warnings, flexible deadlines, opt-out provisions, and student-led choices over how — and sometimes whether — difficult material is encountered.

Mass media — whether Postman’s bugbear of television, or today’s social media —  accelerate but do not originate this process; it is more true to say that we evacuated adulthood, and technology filled the vacuum. Before the advent of TV sitcoms, people weren’t all reading Kant — they were reading penny dreadfuls, romances, and Westerns. 

Some blame this institutional malaise on a spreading “feminization” — emotion over logic, sympathy over rationality, softness over necessary rigor. The error in such a diagnosis lies in confusing the presence of women with the feminization of authority — a moral and institutional condition that is neither caused by, nor reducible to, women themselves. 

Feminization is exemption from existential adulthood — an exemption women were long denied the right to refuse, and is now being visited upon us all. It’s a structural position in relation to authority that borrows the language of care while stripping adults, of either sex, of responsibility and choice.

The adult understands that responsibility for her life ultimately rests with her. The child, by contrast, lives in a world organized by others: what time she wakes, what she eats, where she goes, who she may see, what counts as “good for her.” Decisions are presented as facts of the universe, rather than as choices made by someone else. Because she lacks autonomy, the child experiences limits as givens — as natural, immovable constraints — rather than as contingent arrangements that could be questioned or changed. Children submit to this position innocently. Women, however, have historically been required to inhabit it: denied legal and political autonomy across much of the West, and still so in many societies today.

Women, in short, had to be consciously feminized. This was especially the case for women at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That moment saw a transition away from the household as the primary sphere of agrarian production (in which both men and women had to participate) toward the male-dominated factory. Meanwhile, the household, as Lasch argued, became exclusively the site of family reproduction. It was expected to function as a refuge from the competitive brutalities of the industrial world “outside.” Women — especially middle- and upper-class women exempted from factory life — were now to serve as nurturers: to become feminine, as wives and mothers themselves and creators of future wives and mothers.

All this meant, to a great degree, that they had to be infantilized: think of the dreary submission to authority and repression of sexuality demanded of Victorian girls in Jane Eyre. Now, amid the decline of manufacturing and the rise of a services-led consumer economy, both sexes are being similarly infantilized: the authorities are the virtue police, and the repression extends to our language, our professional behavior, and even our thoughts.   

Even where the feminine position is not imposed, it may still be chosen, because it is safer. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it can feel easier to “take shelter in the shadow of men”: to relinquish hard responsibility for life’s decisions, to play happy families, to lose oneself in prescribed feminine roles, whether as wife, mother, or, more recently, trad-wife fantasy. This is not something to which men are immune. Since everyone has been a child, human beings are susceptible to nostalgia for a time when life felt carefree: when responsibility could be disowned. Men, too, may hide behind given masculine roles, treating them as unquestionable, rather than chosen.

Within this framework, it is understandable to connect institutional weakness to the growing presence of women in the professions, particularly as women now outnumber men in college education. The consequences of the growing presence of women are said to include decisions driven by emotion, rather than rationality; an exponential growth of wokeness; and, most seriously, institutions losing the capacity to accomplish their own stated goals.

It is possible to quibble with the empirical details offered in support of this claim. While female medical students now outnumber men, for example, male doctors remain overrepresented in the most prestigious and highly remunerated fields, such as surgery, and are considerably less likely to shift to part-time work, particularly when they become parents. At the same time, the feminization of professions, as sociologist Paula England has shown, tends to be associated with declining pay and prestige, a pattern observable in fields such as biology and computer science. But this “feminization effect” is quite different from the one at issue here: namely, the extension of the way women used to be treated — as child-like creatures — to all of society.

Similarly, proponents of the feminization thesis warn that the legal profession is losing its capacity for impartial judgment as a result of women’s presence on the bar and the bench. Yet it is worth noting that in Britain, the most controversial human-rights asylum rulings, including cases involving migrants with serious criminal histories, are not typically issued by women acting on sentiment, but by male judges applying what they understand to be established jurisprudence within existing human-rights frameworks. 

For example, The Telegraph has recently published several investigations into how immigration judges apply the European Convention on Human Rights to allow migrants and foreign criminals to remain in Britain. These decisions are not “heart-led” so much as procedural, risk-averse, and insulated from democratic accountability — they are not feminine, but represent a feminized form of authority.

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Women’s participation in public life has often strengthened institutions rather than weakened them, particularly in roles requiring long-term stewardship rather than short-term display. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks and financial institutions sought to increase the proportion of women at board and executive level, reflecting evidence that more mixed leadership teams were associated with greater caution and institutional stability. At the highest end of technological and organizational complexity, this pattern is even clearer. At SpaceX, Elon Musk appointed Gwynne Shotwell as president and chief operating officer precisely because of her capacity to translate ambition into execution. While Musk embodies risk, Shotwell has been widely credited with providing the operational discipline that turned SpaceX from a visionary startup into a functioning aerospace institution. Critics of feminization misidentify a moral collapse afflicting both sexes as one caused by only one: women.

Today, infantilization is both forced upon us and is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike — because freedom, once attained, has proved exhausting, bleak, and unromantic. Empowerment arrived without a handbook for existential ethics and choice was steadily reduced to consumption. Institutional infantilization works through compulsion masked as care; individual retreat into infantilized roles works through consent. The two reinforce one another.

This helps explain the growing pattern in which sexual libertinism and conservative domesticity appear not as opposites, but as forms of retreat. Women who move seamlessly from radical sexual politics to idealized visions of wifehood and motherhood do so without contradiction, because both positions offer refuge from the demands of moral authorship.

Masculinity has developed its own evasions. On the Right, many propose a return to masculine “thumos” — the warrior virtues of hero, king, or strongman —  as an antidote to supposed feminization. Mary Harrington has framed this in terms of masculine archetypes; N. S. Lyons and R. R. Reno see it embodied in figures such as Donald Trump, representing “strong gods” against a civilization weakened from within. 

The internal abdication of authority leads to Nietzschean ressentiment, as Douglas Murray rightly insists. Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create. We see this truth all around us in the spread of ugly, untalented graffiti in urban centers; not street art, but defacement: the scrawling over of buildings and of genuine murals alike by those incapable of producing art of their own.

Ressentiment thrives where agency has collapsed and adulthood has been hollowed out. It is the product of a culture that no longer expects individuals to act, choose, or bear the consequences of freedom. It is immaturity embodied: a sneering hostility towards achievements that required long years of labor, discipline and self-control.

Murray rightly extols humility and gratitude, which are supremely adult virtues, once cultivated during childhood when that stage was understood as an apprenticeship to adulthood. Properly understood, gratitude is not passivity or deference, but what Hannah Arendt described as augmentation: the capacity to receive an inherited world, to build upon it, to criticize it where necessary and to extend it without obliterating it. 

Authority, in this sense, does not demand obedience but presupposes responsibility — a willingness to take up what has been handed down and make it one’s own. But this prescription only works if the goal is properly understood. The task is not to overcome feminization or to revive masculine aesthetics, but for men and women alike to relearn how to live as adults, with courage and without refuge.

There is something dystopian about people competing for the attention of a famous podcast host to solve their most intimate problems. Hundreds of couples apply for a handful of opportunities to share their stories with Perel, along with her legion of listeners. Her 2006 bestselling guide to marital relations, Mating in Captivity, established her as TED-talking international authority on relationships. By the time Where Should We Begin? launched in 2017, Perel was listed in Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 list of “spiritual luminaries”. Her podcast has been downloaded 50 million times since its launch.

It’s not hard to see why. As radical new ways of ordering relationships have proliferated, we no longer hold a set of principles for living in common. Liberalism’s marketplace of ideas has given rise to a marketplace of moralities: as free unbounded agents, we get to decide what is right for us. But when our bespoke moral stories clash with those adopted by other people in our lives, things get tricky: how do you resolve a conflict when you cannot agree on the rules that mediate it? Who do you turn to, to help you decide?

Enter Perel. She is fair, philosophical in encouraging a big-picture view of how to live well, and gently tough at making sure that the dynamic never falls into that of victim and aggressor. Nothing is sensationalised, and no one is demonised. She is something of a radical in the Anglosphere, where our one-strike-and-you’re-out attitude to cheating has remained intransigent even as non-traditional, non-monogamous relationships have become increasingly common. With divorce rates estimated at 42% in the UK and 45% in the US, and 27% of US adults estranged from a close family member, Perel’s more charitable approach to conflict might have merit.

She is also part of a trend. Therapists are increasingly becoming a kind of free-market priesthood, jockeying for the territory that actual priests once oversaw. With the decline of religion, we have lost any sense of a unifying story about how to live, without which we’re more likely to be miserable — as the mental health gains from being religious can attest. The claim of therapy is that it helps you shape the overarching narrative with which you make sense of the world, and how to live well in it. At best, going to one’s therapist is a substitute for confession, a time for honest reckoning; too often, though, clients see it as an indulgence, a means to divest one’s conscience of interpersonal responsibility. Once, we could have taken solace in doing the right thing by others; now, the feeling of solace comes first.

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Perel is too tough, and too professional, to let her clients avoid hard truths. But other therapy-as-content offers people that easy way out, dwelling purely on the solace. If Instagram laid the groundwork for the therapy influencer phenomenon, all pastel-coloured quotes and exhortations to set boundaries, TikTok took it to the next level. Therapists on the video-sharing site seem to see everything as a sign of trauma: transient negative emotions, feeling under-motivated, feeling over-motivated, feeling uncertain. Things that cause trauma include having to do homework, dead celebrities, and understocked supermarkets. If anyone suggests that these things might not actually cause trauma, TikTokers argue that they are “invalidating” that trauma — which, they insist, causes further trauma. The therapists who say things like this make their followers feel understood, offering sweet relief from the harsher offline world — and building their influence as they do.

An obvious concern of the influencer model of therapy is that anyone can set themselves up as a mental health expert, without any training or expertise. But most successful influencers on TikTok and Instagram are verifiably qualified therapists or psychologists. They’re careful with disclaimers too, reminding their audience that their content isn’t therapy.

But if it isn’t therapy, what is it? And who does it serve?

In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche describes the emergence of a priesthood class that gains its influence by stirring up resentment. Until the priests come along, you may not even have understood that you were suffering. It is only when they point out injustices that the extent of your distress becomes apparent. They present you with a new, inverted moral code in which suffering is honourable and weakness is good, while the previous virtues of strength are abandoned.

The therapy influencers peddling trauma are straight out of the priesthood playbook. If the Nietzschean priesthood is all about radicalising the underclass against its oppressors, TikTok therapists have identified a vast new audience for this. Whipping up new flavours of trauma with every new social justice movement, they target a demographic who genuinely lack full autonomy, who have resented this since forever, and who spend a lot of time online: teens.

The #teentherapists’s USP is that they get it — your parents don’t listen, they don’t validate your experiences, they’re actively undermining you. The demands of school are too much right now. Setting consequences for your behaviour is abusive parenting, and it doesn’t work anyway. They’ll even shout at your mum for you. They argue that “reparenting” is required to fix all this trauma, setting themselves as the adults you really can trust.

Much of what these #teentherapists identify as abusive behaviour looks alarmingly like differences in opinion in how to navigate the world, or jarring communication styles. The information they’re sharing is bitesize, in videos that aren’t usually longer than a couple of minutes. It’s also general: whereas Perel offers insight into a specific relationship dynamic or individual psyche, TiKTok therapists are presenting universal “life lessons”. The brevity of the messaging and its attempt at catch-all appeal does little to help its audience discern abuse from ordinary conflict. There’s also something uncomfortable about adults cultivating mass parasocial relationships with kids, especially when the implication is that these distant adults are better authorities than those who are present in a teenager’s life lives.

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The TikTok therapists have an appealing moral sales pitch — they can reach out to a massive audience who would otherwise have been ignored. The app is more accessible than therapy. But in order to get their voices heard, therapists have to actively seek followers. If a TikTok influencer takes a strong line, viewers feel heard and vindicated, they get to blame someone else, and they want more of the same kind of validation. TikTok therapists get validation, too, from follower counts, and the book deal that might accompany them. They might even get to be the new Esther Perel.

But Perel isn’t speaking to you; she’s speaking to the couples in her session. Where most therapy-as-content cares little for the public good — it tells stories about our inner lives that can only atomise us further — Perel focuses on building, rather than destroying, social relations. Her branch of therapy is closer to genuine spirituality than the TikToker’s: the sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion as a force for ordering interpersonal relationships, creating meaning and bringing people together to communicate and affirm shared values. It’s a version of spirituality that only works when it works in common, and you can’t achieve that in a me-centric universe.

Then again, the marketplace of meaning isn’t a uniquely postmodern phenomenon. The decline of the traditions of the Roman republic brought in weird new religions, which were mixed and matched to suit people’s temperament and station, just as elements of spirituality are today. Individualist spiritualism is nothing new, either: William James wrote about the cheesy affirmations of wellness-adjacent New Thought at the turn of the 20th century.

What is new is the impact of technology. The internet gives would-be priests access to souls worldwide, and allows them to repackage their advice into compelling, publicly-available content. The reality TV show Couples Therapy has had 50 million viewers, for instance. While Perel’s episodes conceal the identity of their subjects, Couples Therapy has not only real names but faces. A misanthrope might wonder whether that accounts in part for its wild success — there’s nothing like watching a real relationship melt down in real time. We watch Love Island for the drama of hot 20-somethings cycling through new relationships. How different is it to watch a 30-something couple conclude on TV that this is probably the end, skilfully assisted by a therapist?

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Perhaps it’s about how the therapy-as-content is presented. If it exists only as emotional pornography to feed our outrage, resentment, or lust for drama, there’s nothing very therapeutic going on. When it gives us the opportunity to think expansively about what sacrifice, loyalty or trade-offs mean in our interactions with one another, then it carries both personal and social benefits.

The way those stories are packaged and sold inevitably shapes the way we use them in the wild. Create shorts for kids that introduce a layer of conflict to ordinary hardships, and they’ll probably end up more lost and distressed. Edit a day of footage showing couples bickering by the poolside into a half-hour show of shallow emotions, and you’re arguably complicit in manipulating them for malign ends. Carefully stitch together real-life therapy sessions to represent a couple’s deepest challenges, with their informed consent, as Couples Therapy does, and you’ll have a largely thoughtful audience who, though titillated, are also inclined to care about the interpersonal conflict presented, and its broader social implications.

Likewise, Where Shall We Begin? avoids the hyperinflated trauma, lurid revelations and psychobabble that get the attention on TikTok or television, instead teasing out nuance and deep understanding from its subjects. Like a good priest, Perel offers her flock pastoral care, even when she is saying things it’s hard to hear. Perel’s clients are parables for her congregation. Every session, focused on one interpersonal relationship, poses big-question questions: about what it means to be a man, or married, or loyal. Each encourages us, therefore, to think a little harder about the principles for which we no longer have a blueprint.

REBT is characterised by a kind of rugged psychic individualism. In this view, if you hope to be psychologically fixed by relying on others, if you seek healing from interpersonal woo-woo like transference, you’ve already made a key philosophical error. You’ve outsourced your agency. And that’s before getting into the most eccentric elements of psychoanalytic theory — penis envy, the Oedipus complex, Melanie Klein’s baffling idea of the bad breast as persecutory object. To read Freud is to grit one’s teeth at the relentless dogmatism of his prose, the certainty with which assumptions that look absurd in the context of observable reality somehow grew legs and ran for decades. If you are looking for relief from mental distress, is it wise to procure it from people who believe in resentment-drenched theories that could only ever make sense to the pathologically horny and disturbed?

More generously understood, psychoanalysis is based on the idea that mental distress tends to arise from unconscious inner conflicts, and that past experiences — especially those of early childhood — exert a long-term effect on our thoughts, feelings and actions. The analyst assists the patient in exploring the depths of their mind, unearthing hidden meanings. Change happens by means of the therapeutic relationship, with the patient unconsciously acting out past conflicts. The process can take years.

Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, was a psychoanalysis refusenik, as was Aaron Beck, the father of CBT as we know it today. Their early careers were largely an accident of history: both happened to train in clinical practice in the post-war era, when psychoanalysis was dominant. Both soon observed inconsistencies between the theoretical claims of how analysis worked and their own observations of patients. Beck noticed that negative views of the self, the world and the future characterised depressive episodes in patients, rather than the repressed feelings that Freud held to be their cause. The psychoanalytic process was only supposed to work if you saw the patients daily, maintaining the relational magic, but Ellis noted that his patients who only came in once a week did just as well, and that they did even better when he ditched the psychoanalytic theory and talked to them about philosophy instead.

What emerged from this was cognitive behavioural therapy. Rather than getting stuck into the past, it operated in the here and now, looking for the habits of thought and behaviour that maintain our distress, and finding ways of thinking and behaving that might work better. The therapist’s role was not as ersatz parent or interpreter, but as Socratic teacher, helping guide the patient’s reasoning to more pragmatic ends. This seems to have worked well: in the English-speaking world, the dominance of CBT makes Freud look more like a kooky curiosity in the history of ideas than the father of psychology.

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The ideological descendants of Freud have strong feelings about this. They’re not all psychoanalysts: there’s a genealogy of therapeutic styles that see human distress as the product of relational problems, from maternal attachment to structural oppression. They tend to see the solution as lying in the deepest layers of the self. Another thing they often have in common is really, really hating CBT.

The arguments vary. Psychodynamic psychologist Jonathan Shedler has suggested that its evidence base for CBT is skewed by selective reporting. Its heavy reliance on manuals, which therapist Nancy McWilliams criticises as rigid and simplistic, leads it to be mistakenly thought of as scientific. By focusing on the individual locus of control, CBT is a tool of neoliberalism, ignoring the systemic inequalities that shape people, telling us to grit our teeth and smile rather than try to change the world. For Jungian psychotherapist Paul Atkinson, CBT mostly serves industry, rather than the people it’s supposed to treat; it’s designed to make you a better cog in the machine. Since 2008, it has been provided for free by the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, conceived by New Labour’s “happiness czar” Richard Layard, to improve economic productivity by way of public wellbeing. As a public investment, CBT was a good one: it is short-term, taking as few as six sessions to complete in straightforward cases, and therefore cheap. It is also highly structured, gathering its own data via regular symptom inventories, meaning it could be accountable to the public purse. Choosing CBT was following the science.

This infuriated CBT’s detractors, provoking a backlash against IAPT and CBT in general. Doubts have been raised over whether IAPT data supports the impressive results it claims; studies of CBT’s efficacy elsewhere have found it to fall over time, with one finding it no more effective than its nemesis. Given that it’s being offered for free to anyone who wants it, if CBT worked, you’d expect things to be going pretty well by now. Instead, we are less happy than we have ever been, with the ONS finding the UK prevalence of moderate or severe depressive symptoms at 21%. If, as the accusers declare, CBT isn’t really therapy but a coercive lever to make people economically productive, it’s not working: record numbers are out of work due to mental ill-health.

Each era brings its own problems. In Beck and Ellis’s time, sexuality was repressed in favour of propriety, which fed depression. In the 21st century, our wellbeing has been eviscerated by technology; the impact of the internet and smartphones is well-documented. Relationships, as we used to understand them, have collapsed. The world of work has changed: there are fewer casual, pleasurable digressions between colleagues; work is increasingly seen as something that happens in isolation, rather than in concert with people you care about. If the online world turns out to have rewired our attention, this may undermine our ability to maintain the cognitive control that allows the mechanics of CBT to happen.

Economics plays its part, too. Even before inflation and housing shortages piled on extra pressures, it was hard for a family to keep a roof over its head without two adults working full-time, which impacts time spent with loved ones. You can blame this on the capitalist pursuit of profit, or the creep of technological slavery, but the outcome is the same either way. We’re swimming in material goods, and relationally impoverished. This is where the psychoanalysts might have a point. Even if cognitive-behavioural therapists can train our thoughts, downplaying the influence of the external world on our wellbeing is unwise. Psychological studies are in agreement: the quality and quantity of our relationships strongly predict our wellbeing.

But there’s something perverse about the very idea of therapy when we think about it, as the psychoanalysts do, in the terms of a relationship. We have always spent money on the services of soothsayers, acupuncturists or hairdressers, but those transactions weren’t intentionally about paying for human contact. We have also always exchanged money for sex, though it has usually been social taboo. Now we pay similar prices for the more basic intercourse of being listened to. We don’t trust people who sell sexual affection, because that affection lasts only while they’re paid, but we place uncritical confidence in those who sell us empathy.

CBT may not be the panacea it was hoped to be, but psychoanalysts accusing it of neoliberalism are being hypocritical. Selling committed, long-term relationships looks a lot like commodifying humanity. And if state-funded therapy threatens your livelihood, you’re more likely to get cross about it.

Beck described the therapeutic relationship as necessary but not sufficient for change, which comes, first and foremost, from the patient methodically practising new habits of action and mind. By contrast, the labyrinthine doctrines and relational focus of psychoanalysis make it easier to abandon agency: you can hand over your wellbeing to someone with a parental-style command of what is really going on in your head, who can give your world meaning and keep you feeling safe. It’s more comfortable, at least in the short term, to be told that our problems came from others, but it carries interpersonal risks. Being told we’re victims of fate tends to make us resentful. If you’re feeling low and you’re told that the reason is probably a failure on your mother’s part, your attitude to relationships probably won’t improve. The same is true if you’re feeling bruised from a tricky break-up and are told that you’ve been traumatised.

CBT is, in some sense, classically liberal, in that it sees the individual as having autonomy over one’s own mind. It’s harder to pin down a single position for its detractors. A relational view of the world — especially one where attachment to the mother dictates later wellbeing — is fundamentally conservative. Current discourse around attachment and trauma, rooted in socio-economic forces, is mostly Leftist in character. The philosophies underlying therapeutic approaches should, in theory, have a profound impact on patient outcomes. But this doesn’t happen.

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Psychological studies find that there’s remarkably little difference in outcome between wildly different therapeutic styles. This is known as the Dodo-bird effect, from the famous scene in Alice in Wonderland where all must have prizes. The stories we tell about our minds may have social consequences, depending on what or whom we find accountable when things go wrong, but they don’t make much difference to therapy itself. Individual studies of this or that approach will continue to make grand claims of their power. Other studies will erode them. But therapy’s value seems to stem from sitting in a room being listened to by someone we like. In which case, can’t we replicate this experience with friends or relatives in our lives?

What we can say with certainty is that in the decades since we normalised paying to be listened to, we haven’t become any happier. We know, too, that we do best when our lives are rich with relationships and meaning. Maybe it was always a stretch to think that these things could be bought, or provided by the state. Internecine squabbles between opposing forms of therapy might disguise a conclusion that looks bad for all of them. We don’t need shrinks or ever-growing datasets to work out if we’re okay: we’ll know things are looking up when we stop employing people to listen to us talk.

The main thrust of that moralisation has been to protect women from male sexuality; here is an instance of men seeking to protect themselves. They do so on the supposition that their vital energy has been dissipated and colonised by a culture, and an industry, of pornography that is predatory and dehumanising.

One might suppose, then, that this movement would find sympathetic allies among feminists who notice a symmetry of concerns. And surely there are such feminists. But we also hear alarm, in a register typical of today’s politics: these young men are displaying disturbing fascist tendencies.

Say what?

There may indeed be an overlap between the no-nutters and the online Right. That is certainly how it is characterised by those who find it threatening. If there is such an overlap, the common thread is surely the reappearance of “vitalism” as a point of orientation for young men who feel smothered and demoralised in a society that has little use for male energies. European vitalist thinkers include Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. In the American context, the vitalist tradition is represented by figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, William James and, arguably, Mohammed Ali. Its most vivid recent articulation may be found in the movie Fight Club, which depicted a masculinist revolt against the androgynising and enervating effects of a consumerist, white-collar existence that offers little place for male solidarity. Its current avatar is the notorious, beloved Bronze Age Pervert (BAP to his fans). As the historian TJ Jackson Lears points out in his forthcoming book Animal Spirits, the vitalist orientation does not appeal solely to men. It may be found also in “sex-positive” feminists going back to Margaret Sanger and Mabel Dodge in the 19th century.

Whatever meaning and political valence the no-fap movement has for its adepts, the journalistic Left’s ready identification of sexual self-regulation with “fascism” has a definite genealogy. Retracing this gives us a glimpse into a fascinating chapter of 20th-century social engineering, a programme of sexual “liberation” that is still with us and can feel, if not obligatory, certainly on the agenda for all who would be well-adjusted. Acquaintance with this history should disabuse us of the idea that the sexual revolution was an entirely organic eruption of cultural change, and that it happened in the Sixties. Sexual liberation was the goal of a therapeutic para-state whose organs sprang into existence almost overnight at the conclusion of the Second World War. Its political purpose was to forestall the possibility of fascism in the United States. It would be too simple to say the sexual revolution was a government psy-op, but neither has the role of government been adequately appreciated. With the spectre of fascism once again haunting the American political imagination, and attendant worries in some quarters about inadequate masturbation, this is an episode worth revisiting.

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In the early Thirties, one wing of the psychoanalytic movement splintered off and became politicised under the leadership of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was convinced that fighting fascism would require a psychological transformation of the entire German population. Their susceptibility to authoritarian politics and attraction to the Fuhrer were due to the unhealthy festering of irrational forces in individual psyches, rooted ultimately in sexual “repression”. Through the efforts of Archibald MacLeish, arch-WASP literary man of the Ivy League and liberal activist, these ideas gained influence in the American security services during the war, and particular the OSS, which was planning for the reeducation of the Germans upon their defeat and subsequent military occupation. And, in fact, the US-led Allied High Commission took up this project of Freudian political therapy in its rule over the defeated Germans, which lasted until 1955.

To put the matter crudely, the Germans were going to have to start masturbating more. More seriously, the working-class family, with its sharply distinguished sex roles and ideal of a strong father, was found to be at the root of the political problem.

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Reich called himself a Freudo-Marxist. The term announced a political program that would require nothing less than a moral revolution, working at the deepest level of the individual. For society is not only unjust, it is sick. His project might reasonably be compared with that of Rousseau, whose popular works of sentimental reeducation supplied (however wittingly) the emotional idiom of the French Revolution, and the character ideal its enthusiasts sought to realise through that cataclysm.

Psychoanalysis was to be used for revolutionary purposes. Conventional Marxists made economic conditions the focus of their science; the Freudo-Marxist focused on moral conditions. Where the consummation of the Marxist project brings the withering away of the state, Reich’s political therapy required nothing less than the dissolution of the superego, that “sham social surface” and impediment to the instincts, which are taken to be pure and good. Here, too, we see an echo of the French Revolutionists’ Rousseau-inspired cult of sincerity or self-exposure. Let it all out.

The public tyranny of capitalist domination and the private tyranny of conscience form a circle of mutual support, on Reich’s view. Revolution cannot succeed unless it works ruthlessly on the psychological level. Indeed, revolution carried out on the level of economy and politics alone leads to bourgeois “defense reactions”, the most disastrous of which is fascism.

It is in the family that repressive authority is incubated and reproduced. Someone less invested in moral revolution may object that it is in the family that our faculties of moral perception develop, a gradual training of the affections whereby the child begins to apprehend an objective order of good. If all goes well, he comes to prefer virtue over vice through the mediating guidance and concern — the authority — of his parents. Reich would entirely agree, but with an opposite thrust. That is, he agrees that the moral sense is a product of authority, but insists that authority can only be repressive, never generative. It is always exercised self-interestedly, never generously for the good of another. Morality is the very thing that needs to be liquidated in the revolution.

As Philip Rieff puts Reich’s point, “A revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old political gangs and their leaders…. The destruction, then, of the ancient mystique of fatherhood defines the revolutionary task.”

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All this may be interesting as a nugget in the history ideas, but does it have any relevance to today’s politico-sexual landscape? Reich wasn’t just one more radical crank, fascinating to intellectuals but of little consequence. In fact, he was part of a larger intellectual movement that gained a substantial institutional footing in the United States in the decade immediately after Second World War.

One such institutional perch for Freudian ideas was the Army. The scale and intensity of violence in the Second World War are difficult for us to comprehend today. It was a war in which the civilian populations of entire cities were incinerated in a matter of hours. For B-17 bomber crews in the European theatre, the odds of surviving a complete tour of 25 missions was about 50% in 1943. We should not be surprised that of those American soldiers removed from service before completing their tours, approximately half were deemed unfit for psychiatric reasons. Sustained, abject terror will do that to a man. Of those who completed their tours of duty, many were deeply troubled.

Immediately after the war, the War Department undertook a study to determine the causes of psychiatric breakdown in American soldiers, using interviews to probe their minds. According to Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Century of the Self, the study was conducted under the guidance of refugee psychoanalysts from central Europe. The focus of these interviews, however, was not the soldiers’ wartime experiences but their childhoods. The stress of combat had merely triggered buried memories.

And what were the findings of the study? The problems of these broken soldiers were due, not to violence, but to the repression of violence, and of sexuality, typical of family life. Small town life in middle America, it turned out, was a breeding ground of precisely those unhealthy character traits that, under the right conditions, give rise to fascist movements.

In The Century of the Self, one Martin Bergmann, a US Army psychoanalyst from 1943 to 1945, speaks into the camera in a thick Mitteleuropa accent, recounting the train trip he took from the East Coast to the West Coast of his newly adopted country and his fascination with “what goes on in all those little towns”. His work gave him “a privileged tour into the inner soul of America”. What he found is that “the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America is very much in favor of the irrational”. It is “a much more problematic country” then you would think, given its cheerful self – image.

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The problem with Americans was that they were latent Nazis. Presumably this came as a surprise to those soldiers who had lately placed their young bodies in the service of a national effort to defeat the Nazi regime.

In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in America, a watershed moment in the emergence of the therapeutic state. As Curtis put it, “the Second World War would utterly transform the way governments saw democracy, and the people they governed”. The American government, in particular, would turn to the Freud family for guidance on how to control the enemy within, convinced that “hidden under the surface of their own population were the same dangerous forces” that had led to the death camps. The inner lives of Americans were now something that needed to be managed. Anti-fascism in the United States would be a science of social adjustment working at a deep level of the psyche, modeled on the occupation government’s parallel effort in Germany.

“What is needed is a human being that can internalise democratic values,” said Bergmann, the US Army psychiatrist. “Psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done. It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structure of the human being can be changed so that he becomes a more vital, free supporter and maintainer of democracy.”

One must pause whenever the word “democracy” is used in such utterances. In fact, a central premise of midcentury social management was precisely that the free contest of responsible citizens in democratic politics does not reliably produce a properly “democratic” personality. “Changing the inner structure of the human being” so he becomes a reliable supporter of a political program — creating a New Man — was supposed to be the hallmark of totalitarianism, but evidently appeared necessary to some significant part of the American political establishment. Liberalism would have to become, not anti-totalitarian, but rather a countervailing project of man-making, no less total in its reach.

Following passage of the National Mental Health Act of 1946, its principal architects Karl and Will Menninger trained an army of hundreds of psychiatrists to fan out across America. In the late Forties, “psychological guidance centers” were set up in hundreds of towns, staffed by psychiatrists who “thought it was their job to control the hidden forces inside millions of Americans”, according to Adam Curtis. Thousands of counselors offered marriage guidance; social workers visited homes. As Robert Wallerstein of the Menninger Foundation put it in The Century of the Self, the operating assumption in these times was that “you could really change people. And you could change them almost in limitless ways.”

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Freud’s daughter Anna was the guiding figure for the new para-state organs of psychological adjustment. Heir to her father’s movement, “her whole life rotated around the spreading of psychoanalysis”, according to her nephew Anton Freud. Curtis points out that this evangelising spirit marked a shift from Sigmund Freud’s efforts to understand the psyche to Anna Freud’s mission to modify the psyche. While Sigmund had a tragic view of the human being, emphasising the irreducible conflict between self and society, Anna had a reformer’s faith in the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a technology of personal and social improvement.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider the political soil in which these imported Freudian seeds would germinate. In his 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch notes that “around the turn of the century, social reformers began to refer to themselves as progressives rather than liberals”. He quotes a work titled Liberalism in America (1919) in which Harold Stearns offered a portrait of the ideal political personality as “scientific, curious, experimental…urbane, good-natured, non-partisan, detached”. I don’t know if they had yard signs back then, but these were the traits of what H.L. Mencken called “the civilized minority”. They were tied to specific political positions, opposition to which could be taken as signs of ignorance, superstition, and intolerance.

Lasch writes that in the early decades of the 20^th century, liberals convinced that the mass of their fellow citizens were impervious to reason believed they “would either have to master the new techniques of advertising and propaganda, … or seek to minimise the influence of public opinion on policy, … and see to it that policy – making was conducted exclusively by experts.”

In fact, both strategies became important. On the policy front, Woodrow Wilson addressed the growing gulf between popular preferences and progressive policy goals (recently exacerbated by an expansion of voting rights to less enlightened elements in society) by transferring political initiative and discretion from the democratically elected legislature to the bureaucracies of the nascent administrative state, where matters could safely be decided by experts. But it is the propaganda front that concerns us here, as it intersects intimately with the premises of Freudian political therapy.

The art of propaganda had taken great strides forward during the First World War, when popular fervour against “the Hun” was whipped up in the United States to support an unprecedentedly destructive war, the point of which nobody could say. Edward Bernays, one of the architects of the wartime propaganda effort, turned to advertising after the war as the logical venue for his craft (he would later put his talents in the service of the CIA). A nephew of Sigmund Freud, with whom he was intellectually close, Bernays developed his art on the premise that human beings are irrational, subject to subconscious drives that swamp any capacity for reflective deliberation.

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Between the wars, liberals in the United States were watching developments in Europe with unease as fascist movements began to get traction. In the United States, there was significant sympathy with European fascist movements, not only on the anti-semitic Right but also on the New Deal Left. The putative irrationality of ordinary people was beginning to look like an ominous political fact. The premise of irrationality offered a lever of social control through the manipulation of subconscious drives, while the gathering political threat provided a reason for the principled use of this lever to steer the masses away from dangerous territory.

In this period, Walter Lippmann and H.L. Mencken were influential among liberals in their embittered view of the public as unreliable partners in the democratic project. What was wanted was democracy without a demos. This becomes less paradoxical once you understand that the term “democracy” was serving then, as it does now, as a term of approbation naming something in no way dependent upon the procedures of representative government, and a character ideal defined in explicit opposition to the deplorable masses. The mantle of “democracy” was the homespun worn by liberalism when it went about in public, seeking a wider political legitimacy than would otherwise be extended to the preoccupations of a civilised minority pursuing “experiments in living”, to use J.S. Mill’s formula.

Immediately after the Second World War, this distrust of the people among America’s Northeastern Protestant liberals got joined to an imported version brought by European émigré intellectuals who had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a Nazi murder state that enjoyed a kind of terrifying democratic mandate, in the narrow procedural sense of winning the support of a majority in its rise to power. These émigrés were therefore understandably ill-disposed to the masses, and toward democracy in its primary sense of rule by the people.

The concerns of this politicised psychoanalytic movement got grafted onto the regime of technocratic administration that liberals had been advancing in the US for half a century. The fateful consequence, clearly visible in retrospect, is that the administrative state became the therapeutic state, with the “helping professions” serving as expert handmaidens to the new regime. Flush with victory in its first ideological war, confident in the surfeit of legitimacy that comes with victory, the government took up anti-fascism as a wider mandate of moral and social transformation.

At the same time, the academic discipline of sociology took an activist turn. The American-led occupation government in Germany favoured sociology departments in universities as a vehicle of German re-education. The effort was led by scholars returning from forced exile in the United States, some of them connected to the Frankfurt School. In the US, five collaborative works, together titled Studies in Prejudice, were sponsored by the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Scientific Research. Of these, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was the most influential. “No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today,” wrote Nathan Glazer in Commentary in 1954. The research was conducted by a group at Berkeley headed by Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School.

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The massive study offered a set of criteria to discern personality traits said to indicate authoritarian tendencies. With the impressive machinery of social science, it ranked Americans on an “F Scale” where F stands for pre-fascist. An early version of its questionnaire to detect right-wing personality traits, deployed in California in 1947, was used in police work and in the psychological assessment of public school students.

The survey built on earlier studies conducted in Germany at the Institute for Social Research, but with a different slant. Openly Marxist in its original, Frankfurt iteration, it had placed its subjects on an authoritarian personality/revolutionary personality axis. (To the extent you are not revolutionary, you are authoritarian.) Repackaged for America, this was changed to an authoritarian personality/democratic personality axis. The shift of terms was well-attuned to the political idiom of the study’s American sponsors: in the United States, the vanguard named itself “democratic” rather than revolutionary.

Which is not to say that TAP’s adaptation of Freudo-Marxism to the American context was merely superficial. No less a figure than Peter Berger failed to see that an important shift had occurred between Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (addressed to a German audience in 1933) and The Authoritarian Personality (addressed to an American audience in 1950). Berger saw the latter as continuing the attack on the family coming from the Communist Left, which found the roots of “authoritarianism” in bourgeois-capitalist family structure. Accordingly, Berger saw the 1950 American volume as lending support to the commune movement that was gaining traction in Western Europe and America. Christopher Lasch points out that, in fact, “the general conclusions reached by Adorno and his collaborators fitted comfortably into a liberal consensus that condemned the allegedly repressive family patterns typical of working-class and lower-middle-class milieux and advocated as an alternative not ‘communes’ but the enlightened family patterns already adopted by the professional and managerial classes”. (451) These were the very patterns that would be demanded by capitalism in the coming postindustrial economy, which would accelerate an ongoing erasure of sexually differentiated forms of work.

Items contributing to the working class’s high scores on the F-scale included a belief in distinct sex roles and a “rigid” sexual morality. A woman with a “self-image of conventional femininity,” for example, was sure to develop an “underlying bitterness” which often took “deviously destructive forms”. We can note as well that, from the perspective of late capitalism, someone “clinging to femininity” is someone who has failed to become an all-purpose “human resource,” a labor unit minimally prone to pregnancy and maximally adaptable to the workplace.

Rosie the Riveter, that well-muscled emblem of the munitions economy, was one of the government’s most successful propaganda campaigns. In Norman Rockwell’s magnificently butch, 1943 image of Rosie for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, she has her foot resting on a copy of Mein Kampf. She would become the hero of capitalism’s next stage, in which feminism plays a structural role. The type of social science pioneered by TAP would provide expert grounds for the emerging bourgeoise sexual morality, in which sexual difference itself is viewed as a hangover from a lower stage of human development.

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Another trait that earned one a high rank on the F-scale was a “punitive” and “moralistic” style of child-rearing. As Lasch writes, “The Authoritarian Personality revealed more about the enlightened prejudices of the professional classes than about authoritarian prejudices among the common people” who “may have good reason to… reject a middle-class conception of easy-going parental discipline.”

Rather than consider the pros and cons of sexually conservate attitudes, the authors of TAP treated them as manifestations of a “social disease”. Lasch points out that this influential work “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic — to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate. This procedure had the effect of making it unnecessary to discuss moral and political questions on their merits.”

Around this same time, Alfred Kinsey released the first of the Kinsey Reports on Americans’ sexual practices (1948). It was a publishing phenomenon that had no precedent for sales in the 20^th century and became the focus of intense public discussion. Kinsey understood his work to be serving a “mass psychotherapeutic function”, namely, the eradication of shame. He also assimilated the nascent concept of the “authoritarian personality” to lingering sexual moralists of various stripes. Kinsey relied on his status as an entomologist (who just happened to turn his attention from beetles to humans) to claim for himself the persona of a disinterested man of science, rather than a cultural crusader.

In TAP and its antecedents we see the ground laid for a novel politico-cultural consciousness. It would become apparent only in the next cohort, the Baby Boom, perhaps because this consciousness required a generation of conditioning by government therapy and activist social science to achieve: we are groovy astronauts of the libido (as against our repressed parents). Whatever the reality of their individual mindsets, which are no doubt as various as that of any other generation, this is the official story told about the Boomers by their self-appointed spokespersons. At the same time, a new “professional managerial class” arose that would have a deep identification with expertise as title to rule and source of class solidarity

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This history is important not least for helping us to see that the century-long colonisation of ordinary people’s moral judgment by psychology, dating from the rise of the social worker in the 19th century, and more broadly the idea that common sense should defer to expertise located in a scientific clerisy, got a big boost from the psycho-sexual turn that anti-fascist politics took after the Second World War. Initiatives by the federal government spawned a wider apparatus of psychological adjustment, located in schools (above all, sex education), HR departments and any institution devoted to forming and policing character according to the priorities of a vanguardist minority. Given mid-century America’s institutional investment in fighting fascism, it became invested also in construing the world in such a way as to justify that investment. The world has ever since been saturated with something like fascism, however invisible it may appear to most people — especially after our grandfathers had defeated the real thing on the battlefields of Europe.

The valour of that effort was borrowed by social engineers and attached to their own campaign. The military campaign had required a self-confident and still mostly self-governing people to risk their lives on behalf of human dignity. The domestic campaign required cultivation of a diminished picture of the human subject, now viewed as an irrational tangle of psycho-sexual compulsions. However partial and inadequate the new anthropology, it became “too big to fail”. The politics of anti-fascism have proven highly elastic, adaptable to the needs of an expanding, therapeutic para-state that has not hesitated to substitute morally cognate terms such as racism and sexism for the original. These too are expressions of dark irrationality, and cunningly increase in society precisely by appearing to decrease.

With this pocket history in hand, we can speculate as to why the no-fapping movement could cause alarm. Keeping the appetites at a high pitch of activity, stimulating desire and then satisfying it, can serve as a political soporific. Porn may function as a soma of the masses and in particular of the male— that toxic element in society that has lately attracted special interest from the organs of political therapy. Untoward eruptions of ascetic self-command are inconvenient to the governing anthropology; they would seem to cast doubt on both the need for, and the means of, social management. Reciprocally, for men and women both, the experience of self-command can create a taste for more, and possibly even lead to curiosity about a corresponding political possibility long thought obsolete — that of self-government.

This essay is the first in a series I am calling the Archedelia Project.

 ***

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The obvious answer — that he has never shrunk from a challenge, feels a keen sense of responsibility to the country and wishes to serve its people — is the kind of thing that politicians read off autocues. It is like declaring that there are brighter days ahead, that actions speak louder than words, or that we should stop brooding over the past (including what happened 10 days ago) and look to the future. If Sunak could best serve the nation by working as an anonymous official in a dingy back room in Basildon, would he do so? I’m not convinced.

Our new Prime Minister is in Downing Street chiefly because he is hungry for power, like most of the place’s previous inhabitants. It’s not that Sunak is power-mad, but that power can itself be a form of madness. What sane human being would prefer supervising the decline of an increasingly inconsiderable offshore island to permanently sunbathing in the Cayman Islands? Boris Johnson’s cronies spouted similar guff when they claimed that in withdrawing from the contest he was putting the country before himself. They were talking about our most resplendent example of a Hobbesian man, powered purely by self-interest. Johnson is no more likely to put the nation before himself than he is to glue himself to the M6.

Perhaps Sunak believes that he can unify the country. Almost everyone is in favour of unity, just as almost everyone is in favour of freedom, happiness, nurses, chocolate truffles and Billy Connolly. Nobody casts a vote for the Disunity Party. But one should be wary of what almost everybody approves of. Unity is not a virtue in itself, as the German people learnt to their cost when the Nazis came to power. Plato disapproved of tragedy because it enhanced our sense of the individual’s apartness, thus undermining the cohesion of the state. Unity means trying to weld conflicting interests together — but in whose interests?

There is something fundamentally dishonest about the call to drop your differences and rally around a leader. Either the differences are real, in which case they won’t just disappear; or if they can be dropped as easily as that, they probably weren’t worth much in the first place. It’s not as though one is dealing simply with minor shades of difference. If politics is to be more than a game, it must engage interests which go all the way down, to the point where they form part of one’s identity. And you can’t abandon these just because you’re doing badly in the polls. You can say you do, of course, but that’s different. It’s a matter of biting your tongue, not changing your heart.

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Behind the idea of discarding your interests overnight lies a particular view of human beings. On this theory, interests are really external to the self. You can shop around among them as in a boutique, trying on one after another. There’s the little red Marxist number, the sky-blue Tory one, the saffron Buddhist robe, the scruffy black leather existentialist jacket and so on. You don’t have to commit yourself to any of them for good. Sinéad O’Connor tried on the Catholic priest outfit for a few weeks before throwing it out, while Madonna has been through the entire shop more times than anyone can count. A few weeks ago, there were Tory politicians who were fervent Trussites in the morning, ardent Johnsonians around lunchtime and devout Sunakians in the evening.

There is, however, a problem with all this. If you survey a range of commitments like a rack of shirts, what motivates you to choose one rather than the other? On a classical liberal view, the self is an impartial, disinterested entity; but if this is so, then there is no reason why you should go for the sky-blue Tory outfit than the Buddhist robe. You would simply be paralysed, incapable of choosing, unless you already had interests which inclined you towards certain interests. It is in this sense that interests go all the way down. They are not like a row of hats; they are matters for which people will occasionally fight and die.

Is all we have, then, a Darwinian clash of competing interests? Not quite. Fortunately, we have rationality as well. In fact, we need rationality to discover what our interests are, as well as to promote them. You can’t acquire your beliefs without reasoning about how things stand with the world, and you can’t put them into practice without reasoning either. There’s no point in cutting taxes if everyone has been wiped out by nuclear war and you simply haven’t noticed. Reason, however, can question our interests and desires as well as advance them. It isn’t rational to wish to return to a past society in which life was entirely free of antagonism, since there wasn’t one.

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People sometimes ask why politicians can’t stop squabbling among themselves and get together. A lot of Conservative MPs are asking this right now, less because they find squabbling distasteful than because they fear it might lose them the next election. But conflict is inevitable. Some Tories are going to be centrist or pragmatic, while others will be more doctrinaire. “Doctrinaire” or “ideological” are words one uses of other people’s beliefs, not of one’s own. My views are moderate, while his are extreme.

But it isn’t just that political types are temperamentally given to in-fighting. Nor is it true, as liberals tend to suspect, that conflict should always be seen negatively. How can women vanquish sexism without arguing and taking action against it, and why is it usually men who find their talk a little too strident? Not only are conflicts here to stay, but in a number of cases one party is going to have to win and the other is going to have to lose. This, too, is hardly music to liberal ears. But the fact is that either the racists triumph or their adversaries do. Otherwise, we will have to settle for a moderate, pragmatic, commonsensical brand of racism.

The great organ of unity is supposed to be the state. Yet there are those who have suspected that this togetherness is a little lopsided, suiting the interests of some more than others. There are even thinkers who have claimed that the state exists to protect private property (I have in mind Cicero, who argued just this, as well of course as Karl Marx). There are also forms of solidarity which flourish only because everyone has an enemy in common. In any case, it’s hard to reconcile unity with diversity. One image of this resolution has been, of all things, the work of art. From Aristotle to our own day, one of the most entrenched aesthetic dogmas has been that the work of art forms an integral whole, with no spare parts or loose ends. For centuries, nobody thought of questioning this assumption. Then, in the early 20th century, a revolutionary new form of art broke out with the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists and others, which saw no reason why the art-work shouldn’t be marked by dissonance, asymmetry and contradiction.  Such an art, after all, was truer to the experience of the bloodiest century on record than unity and harmony, terms which were increasingly the stock-in-trade of despots standing on balconies haranguing the masses.

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All the same, we have a horror of fragmentation. We have only to see something in pieces — a vase, a social order, a piece of fiction — to feel an overpowering desire to put it together again. It is an impulse which probably runs deeper than politics. For the Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, it stems from the relationship between mother and infant. The infant, in Klein’s view, has a murderous desire to pound the mother’s breast to pieces, but then, stricken by guilt, tries to reassemble it in imaginary form.

This kind of stuff doesn’t go down well with the English, who prefer common sense to the unconscious. Austrian babies may behave like this, but English ones certainly don’t. It’s also hard to see Rishi Sunak appealing to it any time soon. But psychoanalysis has much to say about how the idea of the unified, autonomous self is a myth, and the same might be said about the unified, autonomous state. In recent times, the name for the latter in Britain has been Brexit. It took the surreal farce of Liz Truss’s brief reign to remind us that there is no such thing as an independent nation-state other than in the fantasises of Farage — that the sovereign power on this planet is not the state but the market, and that in the end it is the market which decides who sits in No. 10, who will grow fat and who will go hungry.

In the 1990 reissue of The Culture of Narcissism, he called on Americans to rediscover the tradition of “populism”. Based on values of “competence”, “discipline” and “work ethic”, the populist tradition in America was associated with aspirations of economic self-sufficiency and social stability. It had often found expression in apparently backward-looking political movements aimed at protecting small farmers and artisans from the encroachments of industrial capitalism.

Lasch’s defence of populism, however, contradicted key aspects of his analysis of postwar American society. He recognised, for instance, that the vanishing worldview of Middle America was primarily an ideology by which elites of the 19th and early 20th centuries manipulated the masses. Instilling in ordinary people a love of work and aspirations to property ownership was not necessarily in their interests, but it did reflect the needs of the American economy at the time. By the mid-20th century, as the US transformed into a consumer society, elite ideology shifted towards an emphasis on “authenticity” and an obsession with self-image. Lasch understood this, but nevertheless insisted that the ideology of the “old order” would be indispensable in escaping the present. This amounted to the sort of “Ghost Dance” mode of resistance Kurt Vonnegut parodied in his early novel Cat’s Cradle — the elevation of nostalgic pieties into a political programme.

Lasch’s sympathy for populism also conflicted with his psychoanalytic perspective. He emphasised in The Culture of Narcissism that our capacity for rational collective action — that is, for decent politics — is being degraded by our increasingly thin and inward-looking sense of selfhood. We have withdrawn from associational life (political parties, unions, clubs, churches) and immersed ourselves in short-lived, increasingly virtual pseudo-relationships. And so we are less and less able to see the public sphere as an area for substantive debate and action toward common ends, rather than as a stage for narcissistic self-expression.

We are, in turn, enthralled by a new kind of elite who rule us through their celebrity. We have replaced the traditional patron-client structure of politics (we follow elites because they advance our material interests) with a kind of cheerleading (or simping) for figures who represent our “values” in a political theatre. Our populist politicians, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their supporters exemplify this narcissistic new politics.

It is, in a sense, both too late and too soon for populism as Lasch envisioned it. Populism was the expression of an economic order that no longer exists. Nor can we revive or replace it until we have escaped our infatuation with the self. What we need, to escape this vicious cycle, is a politics that makes us capable of politics.

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In 1984, Lasch wrote a sequel to The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self, which remains relatively neglected. In it, Lasch explored this paradox. He points beyond the shallow populism with which he is sometimes identified, and towards a politics aimed at the restitution of our psychological integrity. Arguing that the division of the political field along a Left-Right axis was outmoded, he tried to replace it with a new typology organised around different approaches to what he called the “politics of the psyche”.

Lasch saw three camps in this emerging psychopolitical spectrum: the “party of the superego”, “the party of the ego”, and the “party of Narcissus”. The emblematic figure of the first was Philip Rieff, who, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1967), had articulated a powerful critique of our norm-less and atomised society. His 1973 follow-up Fellow Teachers, unjustly overlooked today, was a powerful defence of the Freudian superego — the part of the psyche that enforces personal moral responsibility and respect for the “inhibitions” that make culture possible. In a rather cruel mischaracterisation, Lasch portrayed Rieff as a cultural conservative whose morality was based on conformism and “fear”, rather than a properly individuated awareness of one’s obligation to help others.

The “party of the ego”, by contrast, sought to empower individuals to survive in a competitive, isolating society by bolstering their capacity for self-interested competition. The watchword of its adherents — mainly members of the psychoanalytic tradition of “ego psychology” that dominated the United States in the decades following the Second World War — was “adjustment”. This tradition can be seen as the predecessor of the therapeutic movements of today, aimed at helping patients avoid emotional dependence on others, anxiety over the future, guilt over the past, and other barriers to being dynamic, “well-adjusted” economic agents.

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The trouble with this advice, as Lasch notes, is not so much that it is ineffective as that it reinforces the social dynamics that create our psychological problems in the first place. Whether framed in more feminine and pseudo-progressive terms as “self-care” or in more masculine and Social-Darwinian terms as “grindset”, the “party of the ego” invites us to become more of what we already are: self-absorbed competitors who imagine that we must overcome our last shreds of decency to achieve happiness.

Lasch had the most sympathy for what he called the “party of Narcissus”, which may seem ironic, given his critique of narcissism. This group emerged out of the New Left of the Sixties, and particularly its radical feminist and ecological strands. It saw the basic problem of contemporary psychology not as a deficit of moral authority or the vulnerability of the ego, but as the alienation of the self from others and the world, driven in large part by our reliance on technology.

This rhymed with Lasch’s own critique of the 20th century as an era in which the technological domination of nature was now redounding on humanity itself — which had become, in the hands of doctors, psychiatrists, marketers and bureaucrats, a manipulable object. Through the critique of technology — and what, in the jargon of that period, was sometimes called the “technostructure” of government by unelected experts — the party of Narcissus, like Lasch himself, expressed its hopes for a new, more humane form of society oriented towards harmony rather than progress.

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It is perhaps on the political Right that such ideas are most forcefully expressed today. Lasch emphasised that his new typology superseded the political binary, but fantasies of simple agrarian living, unprocessed food, and escape from modern technology now strike many as “conservative”. But whether its politics are coded as “Left” or “Right”, Lasch warned that the “party of Narcissus” aims at an impossible ideal. Seduced by the image of a self free from the contradictions of post-modernity, it is drawn into a retrograde fantasy politics.

What we need, Lasch insisted in the conclusion to Minimal Self, is not a doubling down on outmoded moral strictures, nor the shoring up of our brittle, anxious egos — nor, for all its desirability, the pursuit of a self wholly integrated in a post-technological society at peace with nature. Rather, we need to develop the psychic strength to bear the tensions of post-modernity: the searing gap between what we desire and what we can accomplish at present. The kind of person capable of political action in this environment is someone who can endure, without illusion, the growing desert — and looks beyond superannuated political identities for friends with whom he might find a way out.

The education of such individuals was in fact Rieff’s own project, as articulated in Fellow Teachers. It remains the task of some critical theorists on the Left, such as Benjamin Fong, who calls in his Death and Mastery (2016) for a pedagogical “politics that makes politics possible”. If we look past the dead-end of populism, we can see the road Lasch did not follow after Minimal Self — the search for a new kind of meta-politics aimed at the restoration of the psychological resources necessary for normal life. That search, one presumes, will bring us into company with strange fellow travellers and teachers.

I kept thinking about this idea last week, as I was trying to make sense of Vladimir Putin’s paranoid new essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples,” which the Russian President published on the Kremlin’s website (so, essentially, self-published). Putin fancies himself as something of a historian, and the gist of the 5000-word ramble — so poorly-composed it’s unlikely to be entirely ghost-written — is that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”, cruelly separated by scheming foreign powers who want to turn Ukraine into the “anti-Russia”. Kiev, known as “the mother of Russian cities”, has been split from Moscow over the centuries by dark forces: the Tatar Mongols, the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, Austro-Hungary, the Nazis, and now “the West”, who turn the “mother” into a weapon against Moscow.

It’s rare for Putin to publish something so long, and historians, Kremlinologists and cultural critics have all been working out what it can tell us about the Russian President’s ideology and geopolitical intent. The BBC Russian service pulled together comments from eminent Russian and Ukrainian scholars, who accused the President of “school boy errors”.  Putin claims, for example, that Russians and Ukrainians are all descendants of a single medieval kingdom from Finland to Kiev that was unified by one language, one Orthodox Christian faith and one royal family. The early Kiev Kings supposedly adopted Christianity and then moved to Moscow. In Putin’s simplistic vision the identity is stable, the lineage unbroken. In fact, Medieval Rus was multilingual, has always been multi-confessional, and the descendants of Kiev kings ruled over areas outside of Moscow.

The Russian President also dismisses Ukrainian efforts (and huge sacrifices) for statehood over the centuries. The mother could not possibly be an autonomous subject. Putin claims the first Ukrainian republic of 1917 was just a German “construct.” Stalin’s enforced famine of Ukrainian peasants and slaughter of Ukrainian intelligentsia, he says, had nothing to do with the Generalissimo’s fears about Ukrainian nationalism undermining the Soviet project. Indeed, independent Ukraine, “is entirely the brainchild of the Soviet era, and was to a large extent created at the expense of historical Russian lands.” Putin’s take utterly ignores the Soviet rationale for formalising a Ukrainian Soviet republic completely controlled from Moscow. It was a way to control nationalist energies.

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Sergey Radchenko, Professor of Cold War History and International Relations at Johns Hopkins University dismissed the essay as “deranged” — but frightening all the same. Rather than a serious scholarly account, its aim is to give a rationale for continued aggression. After all, if Ukraine and Russia are “one”, then invasion and other forms of colonial subjugation are just an internal matter. Putin often invokes “history” when he needs propaganda cover to send in the tanks. To justify his annexation of Crimea and invasion of East Ukraine, Putin argued in 2014 that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, there’s been something disturbed about the way Kremlin propaganda has conceptualised Ukraine: either deifying it as “the mother” or castigating it as a whore who has sold itself to the West. There’s the good breast and the bad breast, and nothing in between. This latest essay, too, circles around metaphors of family relations, identity and possession; that’s why it’s so tempting to read it through the framework of psychoanalysis.

Because Ukraine isn’t just another political issue for Putin: it cuts to the quick of how he, and many of his compatriots, make sense of Russia’s sense of self. One of the tragedies of post-Soviet Russia is that its rulers have never surrendered their vision of the nation as an Empire, intrinsically destined to be a Great Power, a force around which the world revolves. And historically this identity has always been formulated via Ukraine. In the 16th century the tsars of Muscovy grandly declared their kingdom to be the “third Rome”: the inheritor of the divine mission of Rome and then Constantinople; the next city destined to unite politics and Christianity and establish God’s Empire on earth. But this claim was always based on Muscovy’s connections to Kyiv: it was the Kings of Kyiv who brought Christianity to the region, and married into the Byzantine royal family. As descendants of the Kyivan kings, Moscow’s rulers now claimed to be the epiphany of that lineage. Russia can’t quite live up to serious Empire billing if it doesn’t control cities like Odessa, Kharkov and Kyiv, the jewels of the old Russian Empire.

Internalising the idea that the “mother of Russian cities” is autonomous would mean Russia having to grow out of its self-perception as an Empire. That’s something that Putin and his clique refuse to do. Part of the protest movement against the President that swelled dramatically in 2011-12, demanded that Russia become a “normal”, modern European nation state. It called for economic and political reforms, and relations with neighbouring countries that recognised their rights as independent actors. Such a mature Russian nation would not need a tsar-like figure to rule it. Putin’s response was to stoke Imperial nostalgia and a grandiose sense of identity by annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine — and to elevate himself to de facto monarch. He just can’t let go.

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“Growing up is realising that not everything, good and bad, revolves around you,” says the literature professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, who introduced me to Klein’s theories. Infants who receive enough care and love should start to recognise the mother as an actual person, and so enter what Klein calls the “depressive position”: “the belated perception of the mother as whole object,” to quote Cohen; “the realisation that the good and the bad breast are actually the same breast.” Ukraine is neither Madonna nor whore. “Ultimately that’s how you get to complexity and nuance and beyond facile splitting between the idealised and demonised object.”

Unable to come to terms with the complexity of the real world — unable to separate from the mother — some infants become increasingly disturbed. Putin is stuck in what Klein would call the “paranoid-schizoid” position, in which the infant becomes resentful, full of suspicion about the world, and can compensate with over-weaning ambition and sadism. The feelings towards the mother, both the obsession with and the hate towards her, can be displaced onto all sorts of things. Many people have some sort of residual resentment of such nature. The skilful propagandist will use it. Conspiratorial propaganda feeds the screaming infant inside all of us, allowing us to retreat back to before we had to grow up.

The irony is, no one has done more to alienate Ukrainians from Russia than Putin. There is a self-destructive, irrational streak in his politics. His invasion re-orientated Ukraine towards the West to a previously unimaginable extent. His need for the mother country could be the death of her. When, in his latest essay, he likens post-Soviet Ukraine to a weapon of mass destruction aimed at subverting Russia, he is laying the groundwork for a violent response. Lashing out, like holding on too tight, can’t ultimate succeed in keeping another close.

First published on 20 July, 2021

The original patient of psychoanalysis was never treated by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; she was treated instead by its John the Baptist, Josef Breuer, who co-wrote Studies on Hysteria. “The discovery of Breuer’s,” wrote Freud of his colleague in 1917, “is still the foundation of psycho-analytical theory”. What Breuer discovered, and Freud later developed, was that neurotic conditions could be treated by a “talking cure”. By talking about her childhood experiences to the analyst, the patient can relieve herself of the disorders that burden her — and subsequently alleviate, with the help of the analyst, the physical manifestations of such disorders.

Psychoanalysis, then, is medical treatment by language. Adam Phillips, one of the leading psychoanalysts in England, writes that “Freud was as much, if not more, of writer than a doctor”. Like the Fin-de-Siècle writers who uncovered the dark undercurrents of bourgeois conventions, or the modernist writers who questioned coherent narratives, Freud was an integral part of the lively intellectual culture that witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and much of continental Europe. And it was very much a literary culture.

To briefly psychoanalyse: as a child Freud was gifted at languages, became familiar with Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French and English. And yet it was medicine he ultimately studied at the University of Vienna: as the firstborn son, he wanted to be dutiful and serve his impoverished family.

All of which begs the question that haunts his legacy: did his treatment work?

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Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, in Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives (out last month), thinks not. “Freud’s cures were largely ineffectual,” he writes, “when they were not downright destructive”. Borch-Jacobsen examines 38 patients Freud treated in his 50-year practice, but his book is concerned less with the efficacy of psychoanalysis and more with portraying, in selective but vivid detail, the individuals Freud treated. “We all know the characters described by Freud in his case studies,” he writes, “but do we know these illustrious pseudonyms?” His book is “an attempt to reconstruct the sometimes comical, most often tragic and always captivating stories of these patients who have long been nameless and faceless”.

Anna Von Lieben, referred to as Cäcilie M by Freud, was his most important patient for a period of six years, beginning in 1887. She was, Borch-Jacobsen writes, part of the “Viennese Jewish upper bourgeoisie”: brought up in a palace, where her family hosted Brahms, Strauss and Liszt. She was treated in Paris by Freud’s hero, Jean-Martin Charcot, otherwise known as the Napoleon of Neuroses. In Vienna, she was also a patient of Breuer.

Von Lieben was obese. She tried to curb this by following a strict diet of caviar and champagne. And she was an accomplished chess player: she liked to play two games simultaneously, and, while she slept, she would have a chess player on standby near her room in case she woke up and fancied a game. Perhaps not unrelatedly, Von Lieben had facial neuralgia and attacks of the nerves. For this, Freud was brought in to treat her.

He was her “nerve doctor”. He used hypnosis to purge her of childhood traumas. Unlike the talking cure Breuer used on Pappenheim, however — in which the patient simply remembers her traumatic experiences — in Freud’s talking cure the patient is invited “to relive and forget their traumas”. But he also gave her morphine — and this was what stopped her neurotic attacks, not hypnosis. “The famous cathartic cure of Cäcilie M”, writes Borsch-Jacobsen, “was in fact a morphine cure”.

Her husband, Leopold von Lieben, “finally decided to end her treatment with Freud, which had spanned almost six years and had produced no lasting improvement”. Anna von Lieben died of a cardiac arrest when she was 53. Her children referred to Freud as der Zauberer — the magician — who performed worthless tricks on their mother.

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Cäcilie M is not the only woman in Borch-Jacobsen’s book who could afford champagne and caviar. Three quarters of Freud’s patients were rich. Fanny Moser, referred to in Studies on Hysteria as Emmy von N, was “said to be the richest woman in Central Europe”. When she was 23, she married a 63-year-old Swiss businessman named Heinrich Moser, who had amassed his wealth by selling watches in Russia and Asia; three years later, Heinrich died and left most of his fortune to his wife.

Freud’s patients were not only rich; they were fashionable. In late nineteenth century German-speaking Europe, psychoanalysis became à la mode. It didn’t work as an effective medical treatment for neurotic ailments. Psychoanalysis was embraced, consistent with Veblen’s contemporaneous model of “conspicuous consumption”, as a way for the bourgeoisie to signal their affinity with cutting-edge theories and practices. They were seduced by the ideas of psychoanalysis rather than by the outcomes of it; it was evidence that they were citizens of a modern civilisation.

And Freud also saw himself as modern: he was a figure of the Enlightenment, who defined himself against the reactionary force of religion. He skipped his mother’s Jewish funeral. He didn’t have his sons circumcised. And his children were forbidden to enter a synagogue while they were living with him. In one of his last books, Moses and Monotheism, he argued that Moses was Egyptian rather than Jewish. In 1937, when Freud was visited by the French psychoanalyst René Laforgue, he was asked whether he feared the Nazis. Freud said: “The Nazis? I’m not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy”. When Laforgue asked who this was, Freud replied: “Religion, the Roman Catholic Church”.

He was, though, operating within a tradition. Religion sustained attacks throughout the nineteenth century in the German-speaking world, by thinkers of the Higher Criticism movement, which sought to demystify documents that were considered sacred ― to look at the unvarnished world behind the text. Freud had a similarly iconoclastic vision: to look beneath the surface of our selves. Like two other successors of the Higher Criticism tradition, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, he recognised that religion satisfied a deep human craving, but denied the sanctity of religious doctrine.

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It is perhaps ironic, then, that Freud is often treated as a messiah. Frederick Crews, in his extensive and pugnacious biography of him, opened with this sentence: “Among historical figures, Sigmund Freud ranks with Shakespeare and Jesus of Nazareth for the amount of attention bestowed upon him by scholars and commentators”. We find him engrossing because he presented his beliefs as universal truths ― but also because these truths tease rather than satisfy us. They draw us in like a great novel or a play in that they don’t offer a definitive sort of closure, but something to dwell on. Freud was closer to a literary messiah like Shakespeare than a religious messiah like Jesus; embracing him will not make us see the light.

In fact, his theories made us more mysterious to ourselves. As Phillips puts it, it was “knowledge that he wanted, but not necessarily clarity”. The paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis is that it is an attempt to shed light on something it views as irreducibly opaque: the self. Kant, the father of the German Enlightenment, said know thyself. Freud said sure ― but it won’t be enlightening.

And if we can’t clearly know ourselves, how can we expect to know others? How, for example, can an analyst know his patient and vice versa? Janet Malcolm, in “The Impossible Profession”, her essay on psychoanalysis, posits that “the concept of transference”, which is key to psychoanalysis,

“at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain”.

Psychoanalysis, as Malcolm suggests, constitutes a fundamentally tragic way of seeing life: as an unending struggle to know other people. One of Freud’s most famous theories, after all, was based on a classical Greek tragedy in which a man doesn’t know his own mother when he sees her.

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But if we accept the premise of psychoanalysis — that life is inevitably tragic — then treatment, which psychoanalysis also claims to offer, seems elusive. If life is an unending struggle, the notion of being fixed is futile. This is another way in which psychoanalysis, despite Freud’s self-image, doesn’t fit with the model of enlightenment, in which our bodies and minds can be continuously improved, but rather starts with the same premise as religion or literature or myth: that human suffering is inescapable.

The psychoanalysis of patient zero, Bertha Pappenheim, was disastrous. “The treatment,” writes Borch-Jacobsen, “had never shown any real progress and as early as the autumn of 1881 Breuer was thinking of placing Bertha in another clinic.” She ended up spending four months in the Bellevue Sanitorium in Switzerland, addicted to morphine because of Breuer’s attempt to alleviate her facial neuralgia.

Later in life, she had a successful career: she translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women into German and, in 1904, founded the League of Jewish Women, which became the largest Jewish women’s organisation in Germany. In 1907, she also funded a home for unwed mothers and “illegitimate” children in Neu-Isenberg. A friend named Dora Edinger says Pappenheim “violently opposed any suggestion of psychoanalytic therapy for someone she was in charge of”. She utterly rejected the practice. In 1954, a year after Ernest Jones revealed Anna O was Pappenheim, in the first volume of his biography of Freud, a German postage stamp was issued. The left side read: “Bertha Pappenheim”. The right side read: “Helfer der Menschheit,” helper of mankind.

Freud was not a helper of mankind. He was too transfixed by tragedy. He ultimately did not want to improve us in any direct way; he wanted only to refract our disjointed selves back to us, like the analyst with the patient, or the novelist with the reader.

“Your truth”. That phrase slipped off Oprah’s tongue with such ease during her interview with Meghan and Harry. But on this apparently simple construction hangs a question that has divided us with an explosion of animosity: how many truths can there be?

With the new world once again pitted against the old, I find myself reminded of the words of another Royal confidante, those of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “To thine own self be true,” he advised his son. This sentiment seems to encapsulate so much of what is philosophically at stake in this interview, with the Prince and the Princess expressing “their truth”, a truth that was as much a function of the need to be true to who they are, as it was a reference to objective reality.

Put aside for one moment the on-going debate about their claims concerning Royal racism, for it seems to me that there is a troubling tension between two meanings of truth going on here: being true to yourself, something we have come to call authenticity, and truth as an empirical statement of fact.

The former was largely conceived by Rousseau and is often known as “expressivism” — the idea that, as the philosopher Charles Taylor describes in his magisterial Sources of the Self, “the moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.” And this is where we divide. For some their “personal vision” is a hallmark of truth; for others it is very much a reason to be suspicious of it.

Here, too, it’s worth returning to Hamlet — not least because it is impossible not to be struck by the parallels between its title character and Prince Harry. For Freud, Hamlet represented an archetypal example of the Oedipus complex: a kind of childhood compulsion where a son develops an unconscious sexual desire for his mother and a sense of rivalry with his father.

Joseph Schwartz, in his definitive history of psychoanalysis, Cassandra’s Daughter, sees this “sexualisation of the mother-son relationship” as “part of the dynamic of the Victorian patriarchal family”. He continues:

 “This family romance is dominated by an absent authoritarian father who, arriving home, asserts his own needs over his children’s by making overt or covert sexual demands on his wife. The wife, resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes, lavishes attention on her son. And the son, perceiving rivalry for the mother’s affections expressed in sexual terms, responds in kind.”

It is hard to read these words and not be reminded of the relationship between Charles and Diana, a woman “resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes [who] lavished attention on her son”.

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If Freud has taught us anything, it is that we may not always be the best judges of who we really are, let alone what really drives us. That is the very point of the unconscious; we are run by forces that we do not always properly understand, which are often repressed, working away in the background without us being fully aware of them. And if this is the case, then the problem with “my truth” is not just that it can fail to describe objective reality, but — and this is crucial — that it may fail, just as much, to describe subjective reality too.

That is not to say whether we should or should not believe Meghan or Harry. Instead, Freud’s work simply demonstrates that phrases such as “my truth” are not always helpful, either objectively and subjectively. It presumes too quickly that there is little more to inner truth than simply what you feel. But as the psychoanalytic experience so often demonstrates, “my truth” also requires a kind of discipled critical vigilance — the sort of push-back provided by a skilled analyst.

All of us are complex creatures; we are often a mystery, even to ourselves. And being at the intersection of Royalty and celebrity no doubt makes one’s life confusing in ways that are unimaginable to most of us, especially given that both are objects of considerable projection. It cannot be a coincidence that the stories that Freud most associated with the Oedipus complex — Oedipus Rex and Hamlet — are stories about princes.

None of this would matter so much were it not for the fact that the “truth” expressed to Oprah has the capacity to undermine one of the constitutional foundations of this country. It is one thing to sit on a couch in front of a therapist and work out your issues in private. I have done so myself and recommend it.

It is quite another to sit in front of millions of people, giving a half-interview, half-therapy session conducted by an unchallenging friend and neighbour, and for others to take this on face value. The stakes are far too high to allow “my truth” to go unchallenged. At the end of Hamlet, most of the protagonists lie dead; the court in ruins. “To thine own self be true” may have a nice ring to it. But it remains very poor advice.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

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The creation of Boris Johnson

By Tanya Gold

He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

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By Tanya Gold

As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

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He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.

My father is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, so I grew up with the opposite world view: that we’re all a bit damaged, dysfunctional and deluded. On more than one occasion, when I expressed some teenage angst, he chuckled and — with great affection in his voice — said I was a fascinating bundle of psychopathology. When I accidentally stabbed myself in the hand with a pencil while revising for my A Levels, he described this as a “particularly primitive piece of acting out.” He was probably right.

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Slowly, the world has come round to my father’s point of view. We have new shibboleths proclaimed by mental health advocates: mental health exists on a spectrum, just like physical health, they say. Sometimes we’re up, and sometimes we’re down. One in four of us is experiencing a diagnosable mental health problem at any one time: two thirds of us will experience mental illness in our lifetimes.

All this is technically true. But as a public narrative it’s creating its own disasters. If everyone is a little bit crazy, and everyone should ask for help, it creates a wall of demand that medicalised mental health services will never be able to meet, and that is compromising our ability to help those most in need. We are not in the middle of a mental illness epidemic. We are in the middle of a treatment crisis, where there is not enough help to go around.

Yes: about ‘one in four’ of us has a diagnosable mental health problem. But it was about one in four back in 1993 when we first asked this question in a survey of what’s called “Adult Psychiatric Morbidity”. It was one in four in 2000, in 2007 and in 2014. Of course, it’s absurd that this survey is only done once every seven years: we won’t have the next survey results until 2023 at the earliest, so maybe things have changed. But long term, the pattern is clear. Numbers of people with poor mental health are pretty stable.

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In praise of failed resolutions

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So what’s changed? Why all the noise about a crisis? We’ve done something wonderful by stripping the stigma from mental health problems. We’ve empowered people to come forward and ask for help, instead of suffering in silence. Between 2007 and 2014 the number of people in treatment rose from 25% of those with symptoms of a common mental disorder to 40%. That’s an extra 1.5 million UK adults who felt able to ask for help, and got some.

So why am I not celebrating? Because providing treatment for those “common mental disorders” too often comes at the expense of help for those with less common, but more serious, conditions.

It’s vital to understand that there isn’t one single thing called “mental health problem” just as there was never a single thing called “lunatic”. Depression is not the same as bipolar disorder, which is not the same as anorexia, which is not the same as schizophrenia, which is not the same as post-traumatic stress disorder, which is not the same as post-natal depression, which is not even the same as post-natal psychosis.

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Diagnosis itself is, of course, controversial in mental health circles, and among people with these conditions or symptoms. We are largely swimming in the dark when it comes to understanding what is happening in the brain, or in what you might call the “mind”, if you believe such a thing exists separately from the squishy mass of neurons inside your skull. What we do know is that all of these conditions come with pain: pain so profound that it sucks the purpose from life and can lead people to isolation, rage, self-harm, and suicide.

The first job of our health services has to be to help those at most risk. The NHS often talks about people in crisis: that includes people considering ending their life, hurting themselves or someone else, and people experiencing psychosis — a break in their ability to comprehend reality that may include hallucinations or delusions. People going through a crisis of this sort need expensive care — either in-patient care in a psychiatric hospital, or intensive support in the community.

And you don’t need to be in crisis to need hospital care. People with eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-natal depression and a range of other conditions can also need intensive support for weeks or months at a time, to help them eat enough, care for their baby, or process their trauma. Doing that at home often just isn’t possible, and certainly not possible when you remember how little support is available. But we’ve all read stories of people denied help, or shipped to a hospital the other side of the country, because there just aren’t enough places to go around. We have fewer beds for this kind of treatment than we did in 1998.

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That should be the story that dominates our headlines, not yet more celebrity interviews about challenging stigma that encourage everyone to put their hands up for help. I know celebrity depression is a lot more beautiful than a homeless man with schizophrenia who hasn’t washed since he lost his home because he thought the rent collector was a demon. But we mustn’t let the easy story crowd out the difficult one.

We have thrown extraordinary levels of political capital at stripping away stigma, and telling people it’s good to talk. There’s been an upsurge in the number of people getting treatment but no corresponding dip in the number of people with problems. This deluge of demand isn’t curing anyone, it’s overcrowding our stretched mental health services, and it acts as an epic distraction from providing intensive care for the 5% or so who are quite literally struggling to stay alive.