Understanding today’s political trends has become a challenging undertaking. Invoking Freudian psychology will strike some as not the most promising method. But Howard Schwartz has written a book of considerable importance and depth, where he endeavors—convincingly and without psychobabble—to explain the roots of “political correctness” in terms of how we connect at a young age with our respective parents and what happens when this development is altered, arrested, distorted, and manipulated in various ways.
It must be acknowledged at the start that psychoanalyzing one’s political opponents and attributing their beliefs to psychological disorders can become a nasty little game with some unwholesome consequences that certainly should not be encouraged. The psychiatric prisons of the Soviet Union are the most notorious example, though in recent years Western family courts have experimented with similar methods to control and punish citizens whose refusal to cooperate with government action they consider immoral requires coerced remedial therapy and officially mandated “education.”
But this is not at all where Schwartz is going. Politicizing psychology to serve the needs of official ideology and rationalize institutional power is different from examining the phenomenon of ideology itself through the prism of psychoanalysis. To understand ideological rebellion through childhood and adolescent rebellion, and through the surrounding context of family and sexuality, might have required extensive argumentation a few years ago. Now that these matters have themselves become the central subject matter and substance of political ideology and political contention, their connection with the theories of psychoanalysis acquires a new plausibility. As issues like the family, fatherhood, parental authority, and relations between the sexes become politicized, the psychoanalytic approach that seeks explanations for rebellion in early childhood opens myriad possibilities.
At his own most plausible, after all, Freud wrote less as an analyst than as a political theorist, which is why even his critics consider his most enduring essay to be Totem and Taboo, a work Schwartz compares to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and quotes extensively.
In fact, Schwartz has done something quite remarkable. Though he himself does not describe his own purposes in this way, he has turned the tables on those who would politicize psychotherapy. What he offers, in effect, is a psychoanalytic explanation for political ideology itself. He himself adopts the more colloquial term “political correctness,” perhaps in an effort to popularize his argument, but the point is the same.
Schwartz argues that in the healthy “Oedipal model,” the child gains unconditional love from the mother during the early years, but acquires an ambivalent relationship with the father, whom he both fears and wants to eliminate as a rival for the mother’s love. The mother’s love for the father allows the child to overcome his fear and hatred for the father and instead imitate the father by breaking out of the maternal cocoon and gaining the love of a woman by striving for accomplishment.
