Nietzsche Redux

It has been a bit challenging to find things to write about lately.  The reasons for this are likely multifaceted, some of which are personal (seasonal illnesses running rampant in my household) and some of which are professional (year-end evaluation of my practice and preparing documentation for tax season).  However, I think there has been another lingering issue, which is the utterly distracting nature of the current political and social order in the US, something my clients, my peers, and I have been discussing extensively.  My politics have always been rather left-leaning/progressive, which I am generally open with my clients about when appropriate (having an office in Cambridge means a certain amount—though not necessarily total—uniformity amongst the political views that get selected for in my practice).  However, recent developments in the political infrastructure in the US have been far more worrying than simple differences of opinion on conservative versus progressive approaches to politics.  Many of my clients, and I would count myself among this number to a certain degree as well, are struggling to make sense of these changes and are rightly doing their best to resist the kind of disheartened passivity that is meant to be elicited by this kind of “Flood the Zone” approach to political maneuvering that we are seeing play out by the current political forces.

With all of the above in consideration, I have found myself presented with a strange instance of writer’s block.  It’s certainly not that I am not reading (at present I am working through Horacio Etchegoyen’s remarkable The Fundamentals on Psychoanalytic Technique), but somehow that is not clicking with the mark of inspiration it usually does.  I do wonder if that is in large part because of what the present moment demands philosophically and whether or not it’s going to be possible to continue writing without bringing in some element of thought related to the lived-in present and how to contend with it, rather than what I typically do here in the form of musings about the overlap of philosophy within the trimmer scope of therapeutic practice.  (It may very well also be that Etchegoyen’s book, for all its brilliance and expansiveness, is narrowly about transference and it’s analysis and that this topic simply isn’t structured in itself to spark creative output in the same mode as some of the broader connections I try to make here…though at present, I am much more taken with the former point that the latter.)

While in search of inspiration, I was perusing some of my old posts, when I came across one I did related to Raymond Geuss’ work on Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals.  Written in the late spring/summer of 2024, I don’t think at the time I was reflecting too deeply on what that piece could mean if we found ourselves existing in an increasingly dystopian political future, but here we are.  And so, I think it is important to revisit, as Nietzsche’s work, despite accusations of its being influential in the development of authoritarian and fascist modes of governance, is actually much more instructive in making sense of the ways we fall victim to those kinds of social forces.

I want to highlight two sections from that earlier piece that I want to bring back into focus.  The first is:

“The grossly oversimplified version goes something like this: due to the structural imbalances implicit in the relationship between the master and slave, the slave must find some creative way to deal with the burden of his structurally assigned inferiority with respects to the master.  This need leads to a number of features, two of which are 1.) a tendency towards complicitly with the social order in order to atone for a perceived guilt related to one’s own failings within that structural hierarchy and 2.) the need to develop some kind of meaning system which makes sense of the suffering we are experiencing.”

And the second:

“Nietzsche then goes on to trace the degenerative effects of [the kind of meaning that gets made of this structural problem] which are, again briefly: slave responds to the narrative of ‘I am a slave because I am a sinner’ —> to resolve this conflict, they turn their aggression against themselves and limit their own vitality —> they in turn actually end up making themselves weaker —> which means they suffer even more and must begin the whole cycle all over again in an ever deteriorating spiral.”

I struggle to think of a more effective way to describe the outcome of the recent election than as one representative of the reversal outlined in these two excerpts.  Much of what you hear coming from the folks who voted for the current administration will cite things like the corruption of prior political forces and the sense that the government is somehow working against them as the primary reasons for the rationale for electing these officials.  It feels like in a kind of existential defeat, there came a massive political shift amongst the populace to simply elect someone who in many ways was obviously corrupt and made it transparently clear that he was primarily interested in governing in his own best interests.  These capitulations to a broken political order could then be denied and reversed into the delusion that somehow this process was an attempt to establish mechanisms of political authority that would work in the direction of individual self interest for a subset of the population who felt disenfranchised without necessarily seeing themselves as being marginalized.

Of course, as Nietzsche saw it, this kind of system was already playing out on a spiritual level within the German society in which he was raised and likely bears some resemblance to how we have always lived in this country, which has over generations only amplified the kind of cultural decadence and nihilism Nietzsche was often so concerned with.  But there is real reason to be concerned in a whole new way when a country which is among the most influential economic and political forces on the planet is deciding to make a turn towards authoritarianism to absolve itself of the decades long sin of disavowing the kind of political involvement that a truly democratic system actually demands.

My hope is, of course, that all is not lost.  But I think fixing this can only come as the result of a long and arduous process that might look something like a cultural therapeutic transformation, one that would have a deep existential position as part of its framing.  The number one complaint I hear from those who ultimately voted in favor of the current political climate is that somehow politics failed them.  I am not denying this position, but I think this only acknowledges half of the dialectic, the other half of which is that they failed their political system.  It is often the case that these folks who I talk to are thinly informed about various political goings on, understand little about civic processes, and have minimal sense of the need for an effective democratic political process to require a considerable amount of effort and community involvement on the part of those participating in it (by the way I think this is a problem for those involved on all sides and spaces between whatever political spectrum one wants to draw up, not merely amongst the passive authoritarians we are encountering at present). 

This may seem a bit tangential, but as I am writing this, it all makes me think about the Lacanian notion of the Subject-Supposed-to-Know (and I was worried Etchegoyen wouldn’t make it into this piece…).  I’m not a rigorous Lacan scholar, but my understanding of this principle is that one aspect of Lacan’s rendering of the transference amounted to the idea that the psychoanalyst was seen by the analysand as being the possessor of a kind of knowledge/power that the analysand was seeking through the analytic process.  The ultimate idea of the therapy being that the analyst should frustrate these transferential phenomena in a way that awakens the analysand from the stupor of their belief that the analyst is somehow the possessor of some absolute knowledge about the subject, deconstructing this illusion and bringing the subject into a more direct, though not necessarily comfortable, relationship with the unknowing nature of what it means to be a subject.  I will leave it to you to connect the parallels with what is already here.

There are obviously myriad systemic elements at play with regards to all of this.  I am certainly not meaning to offer a broad solution, but rather some attempt at assessing the psychological and philosophical forces involved.  But I am not yet completely despondent.  The possibility of using these devices to frame some of our understanding of this reminds us to the fact that none of this is new.  History moves and repeats, and we move alongside of it, determining along the way how we will choose to respond.  Hopefully those seeking to make a change for the better will recognize the need not to selectively empower, but to speak to all of those who have felt cast aside in recent years.  To remind them of the promise (one that likely was never truly fulfilled) of what it could mean to be a self-governing body.  To call them into a new relationship with the responsibility of what it means to be an active agent in the context of a complex and, at times, dispiriting social order.