Why do individual’s sacrifice their individuality, in order to conform to a political ideology?
“The individual’s pattern of thought, whatever its content, reflects his/her personality and is not
merely an aggregate of opinions picked up helter skelter from the ideological environment.”
(Adorno, 1950, p.176)
More than a century of psychological and political theory and research on individuality and
political orientation has shown that individuality determines a person’s political ideology.
(Converse, 2000; Abramowitz & Saunders, 2005; Schwartz, Caprara & Vecchione, 2010) Although
evidence suggests that meaningful right – left ideological differences do exist (Bobbio, 1996), a
number of psychoanalysts, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists remain skeptical that
people are ‘ideological’ in any stable, consistent or profound sense. (Žižek, 1991; Zaller, 1992;
Bishop, 2005; Jost, 2007) What is agreed across the right – left political psychology research
spectrum however, is that ideological allegiance is determined by an individual’s instinctual
motives and psychical structure, even if and perhaps especially because they don’t know it is.
(Carney, Jost, Gosling, Potter, 2008; Žižek, 1989, 1991, 2008)
“They do not know it, but they are doing it.” (Žižek, 1989, p.28)
In this essay, I theorize that political ideological values express basic individual values.
I draw on psychoanalytic concepts to explain the way in which individuals come to be in an
ideological group and how to some extent, they sacrifice their own desires and ideals, in order to
conform to the group’s wishes, ideology, attitudes, practices, aesthetics, etc. In fact, language,
ideology, culture and society – the Symbolic Order in Lacanian terminology – come into being
precisely as a defence against the individual’s primitive instinctual urges and anxieties. (Freud,
1908, 1930; Jost, Napier, Thorisdottir, Gosling, Palfai, & Ostafin, 2007) In the positive scenario,
the individual psyche surrenders to the group psyche, willingly sacrificing its own instinctual
desires and ideological fantasies for some greater good that they imagine, perceive, want and wish
for. While from a negative perspective, the individual is required by the laws of society to adapt and
conform to certain shared ideological norms of thinking, feeling and behaving that go against their
own individual wishes and views. This is what Lacanian psychoanalysts refer to as castration, i.e.
innate sexual and aggressive instincts – which determine individual psychic structure – that must be
repressed in the service of society.
Psychical processes of individual surrender, sacrifice, repression, castration, adaptation and
conformity may seem to contradict my hypothesis that individual motives are primary, but using
1
Freudian psychoanalytic concepts such as libido (sexual life energy), the pleasure principle, ego
ideal, superego, identification, narcissism, suggestion, hypnosis and the principle of constancy, I
show how ‘unconscious’ psychical processes limit individual thinking and personality. At the same
time, although castration, repression, suggestion and hypnosis derail individuality, they do not
extinguish it entirely. The individual’s innate psychical constitution returns not only as the real, but
returns to its own equilibrium as their psyche balances and finds itself. I will use Lacan’s concept
of the real and Freud’s principle of constancy to illustrate these points, but first take a look at
theories of the individual.
Socio-Historical Context of the Individual
The most common idea of the individual in Western industrial society was created by the English
philosopher and classical liberal political theorist, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). His ideal of the
autonomous, self-interested, competitive and altruistic individual was born of the Protestant origins
of American political thought, demanding introspection, self-control and a distain for the erotic.
(Spencer, 1884) Such liberal notions of the individual, for example Thomas Jefferson’s, meant that
basic political concepts such as liberty and the public good were understood in an individualistic
sense. (Jefferson, 1905) However, at the same time, Jefferson’s concept of the individual was
subordinated to the cultural and religious values and norms of his day. Thereby the severe asexual
protestant individual remained as autonomous as possible. (Money-Kyrle, 1951, 1965; Marcus,
1966; Shain, 1994)
Despite the respectable reputation Spencer gave to his liberal Protestant philosophy, the English
surgeon James Hinton (1822–1875) began to link it with his belief that sexual pleasure was a social
good. Hinton’s work, much like Freud’s, is anchored in the context of eighteenth century struggles
over individualism and sexuality in a religious culture and society. According to Hinton, the
achievements of advanced industrial society did not enable humankind to break the union of liberty
and repression, productivity and destruction. After Hinton’s death, his philosophy influenced the
British physician and sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), who understood the expression of
desire to be a way of uniting science and spirituality and liberating the true self. Ellis developed
important psychological concepts such as autoerotism and narcissism, both of which were later
developed further by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905) and other writings.
2
Freud challenged the ideal of an autonomous self, believing that the individual had to sacrifice
their instinctual desire, passion and pleasure, for the sake of civilized society. (Freud, 1908, 1930)
Uncontrollable desire was seen as something characteristic of the lower animal self that needed to
be tamed by the conscious will. Examining his collected psychological writings, it is possible to
trace his shift from an early celebration of pleasure and sexuality, for the sake of health, towards its
repudiation, acknowledging that destructive forces are equally strong in the individual and in
society. In Victorian society, desire was seen as essential to the individual’s growth and
development, impelling people to strive for love, comfort and success, yet it also posed a real threat
to individuality, as competition for merger with an ideal other meant conflict and loss of self. It was
thought that the individual could not govern him or herself prudently, if he/she were merely driven
by instinctual desires. The move from the Protestant idea of the autonomous individual based on the
sacrifice of pleasure, to a broader idea of the individual, depended on changing societies
understanding of desire. Rather than thinking of desire as an expression of the animal instincts that
threatened the individual ego, psychoanalysts began to see desire as an expression of a larger
creative ‘life force’. This shift was part of the move away from austere protestant individualism
toward a redemption of material pleasures.
Group Psychology
The Freudian understanding of group psychology takes into account the effects of society on the
individual by considering the unconscious motives that determine individual personality, ideology,
behaviour, aesthetics, politics, etc. (Le Bon, 1895; Freud, 1921) The aim of the application of
group psychology to politics is to discover the unconscious processes that influence an individual’s
political desires, feelings, thinking, ideology and activities. (Money-Kyrle, 1951; Hinshelwood,
1987)
For Freud, individual psychology and group psychology are virtually the same thing, because
individual Ego Psychology is concerned with the individual’s Object Relations with others.
“In the individual’s mental life, someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a
helper and as an opponent.” (Freud, 1921, p.69) The interactive processes between the individual
and its group, gives rise to an internal psychical structure he called the ‘ego-ideal’. This was his
concept for the individual’s ideal image of their self in society.
3
In The Ego and the Id (1923), this separated off, abstract, aspect of the ego, the ego ideal,
became a concept of considerable interest to Freud. It represented the internalized remnants of
actual relations with significant people in early life. The ego ideal is, “a precipitate of abandoned
object-cathexes”. (Freud, 1923, p 29). The language, behaviours, political, ethical and moral ideals
and practices of these loved ones, remain significant within an individual's mind. They then identify
their self with these internal images/objects, as the basis for forming their subjectivity and role
within society. (Britton, 2003) Often in ideal form, they imply standards against which an
individual measures their self in whatever relationship or group they may be in. Freud described
falling in love as a similar psychical process, in which the individual sets up someone or something
as the ego-ideal object of devotion - such as an ideology - then becomes depleted as the ideal
person, ideology, or good cause absorbs all their energy. He compared this kind of one-way,
extreme, obsessive interest in a person, object, idea or practice to the state of hypnosis.
Freud sees the condition of being in a group as hypnotic, where the individual is changed by
suggestion and contagion. People’s emotions are stirred up and intensified so that they are carried
away by a shared impulse that causes them to yield their individuality and become merged with the
group psyche in an omnipotent and narcissistic state of oneness. The intensification of emotion, the
turning of instincts in an identical direction by means of suggestion and contagion, the loss of
thinking and individuality, predominance of auto-hypnotic semi-conscious states or consciousness,
and the compulsion to act out the group’s suggestion, are the principle psychical factors involved in
an individual joining and forming part of a group and changing their thinking, behaviour,
personality, ideology and subjectivity.
“Whoever the individual members that compose it, however like or unlike their mode of life, their
occupations, their character or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a
group, puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind, which makes them feel, think and act in
a manner quite different from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were he in a
state of isolation.” (Freud, 1920, p.73)
4
Simply stated, in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud traces
group psychology processes to the charisma and prestige of leaders, to primitive induction of
emotion, suggestion, imitation and contagion and he insists on five facts of group psychology:
1. Intensification of emotion and hence liability to emotion
2. Focusing of thoughts and feelings in a common direction
3. Reduction of consciousness and individuality
4. Predominance of the unconscious, and
5. Immediate acting out of unconscious desires
The captivating, hypnotic psychical processes involved in the disappearance of individuality
include animal magnetism, charisma, prestige, interest, aspiration, fascination, intense emotion,
influence, suggestion, auto-hypnosis, partial loss of the thinking function, partial loss of inhibitions
and defences, surrender to instincts, irresistible impulsion and compulsion, love, obsession,
imitation, contagion and trend. Note, I wrote ‘disappearance of individuality’ and not ‘sacrifice of
individual interest’ as there is always a quantity of individual satisfaction, gratification and benefit
involved in the exchange of self for other. In fact, it is precisely for narcissistic i.e. self-interest
purposes that the individual loses their individuality and acquires new aspects of their thinking,
behaviour and personality. Or they consciously sacrifice their former ideas/beliefs/practices
precisely because they wish i.e. desire to attain something they intuit, perceive, think, feel and
imagine to be a better or greater good. In either case, unconscious surrender or conscious sacrifice,
individual self-interest remains operative, even in the service of cathecting (investing in/supporting)
another individual, ideology or group.
The Economics of Pleasure and Displeasure
The operations of the Pleasure Principle, Reality Principle and Principle of Constancy also called
the Principle of Inertia, were initially described by Freud in his Project for a Scientific Psychology
(1887) part one entitled First Principle Theorem: The Quantitative Conception. Much later in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he borrowed the term ‘nirvana’ from Barbara Low to
reiterate that the psychical apparatus – id, ego, superego – is directed towards keeping itself as free
as possible from extraneous stimuli, in accordance with the Principle of Constancy which he now
called the Nirvana Principle.
5
“It is true, we do meet with a hypothesis, but it is of so fantastic a kind, a myth rather than a
scientific explanation… for it traces the origin of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of
things.” (Freud, 1920, p.57)
The principle of constancy operates in accordance with the individual’s innate biological and
psychical structure. In effect, this means that however stunted, repressed, distorted and perverted
the difficulties, conflicts, mistakes and dictates of a society may make an individual, their essence,
which when in accordance with society is referred to as a true self, remains in intact, no matter how
corrupt or unwell he or she may have become.
It was during their first psychoanalytic treatments that Dr. Freud and Dr. Breuer discovered the
role of pleasure and unpleasure as psychical experiences that determine what is perceived as good,
what is perceive as bad, and the repression required to avoid and repress the bad. Early on in his
Project for a Scientific Psychology (1887) Freud formulated the psychical principle of constancy
inspired by the concept of homeostasis in physiology. He estimated pleasure and unpleasure to be
the only psychical qualities apprehended by consciousness, “it is the releases of pleasure and
unpleasure that automatically regulate the course of cathetic processes.” (Freud, 1900, p. 574)
According to Freud, the psychical apparatus can do nothing but desire. His Pleasure Principle
described the individual psyche that automatically discharges excitations, when they accumulate
above a certain threshold and are experienced as unpleasurable. The pleasure/unpleasure principle
is the basis of Freud’s Economic Psychology. Pleasure has the meaning of pleasure, but also of
desire, or want, as Freud originally used the term ‘lust’ to mean ‘to want’ or ‘to have a desire for’.
Therefore the pleasure principle could also be considered the Desire Principle. Similarly, with
regard to Freud’s Unpleasure Principle, his concept of ‘unlust’ means aversion, as when individual
consciousness automatically turns away from someone or something unpleasurable. Caught
between pleasurable life (sexual) instincts and unpleasurable death (aggressive) instincts on the one
hand, and the prohibitions and laws of society on the other, the individual ego has to work hard to
manage both the sexual and aggressive instinctual impulses emanating from within the body,
and their interaction with the codes, rules, laws, structures and systems of the external world of
society. This balancing act (constancy or homeostasis) itself requires quantities of libidinal energy
that has to be generated, attained, consumed, discharged, transferred, diverted, repressed, processed,
etc. So that for the individual, adaptation and conformity to the group psyche (ideology) is an easier
and less costly option.
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The Superego, Ego Ideal and Conscience.
The superego is the aspect of individual psyche that holds all of the internalized moral standards
and ideals acquired from parents and society, whether or not their views, beliefs and actions were
good or bad, right or wrong, e.g. drug taking parents practicing and sanctioning recreational drug
use, vegetarian parents not feeding their children meat, communist parents advocating avoidance of
the monetary system, etc. The political ideologies and religious beliefs transmitted to a young
individual from their parents and from the particular culture within which they live, provides the
guidelines for their later adult decision making and judgments. There are two parts of the superego:
1. The Ego Ideal includes ideal standards and conventions for good individual conduct in society,
according to parent’s and other authority figures particular version of ‘good’, e.g. be kind, say
please and thank you, share with your brother and sister, be friendly to neighbours, etc. An
individual conforming to these ideal standards of conduct leads to feelings of pride, value and
accomplishment.
2. The Conscience includes the ethical and moral standards about things viewed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’
by parents and authority figures in a particular group, e.g. playing, studying, working, sharing,
helping, relating and loving are good, and swearing, fighting, drug taking, stealing, sex outside of
marriage or a committed relationship and homosexuality are bad. Good behaviours lead to rewards
while bad behaviors are forbidden and lead to punishments.
The Freudian superego is usually perceived as the controlling ethical agency which bombards the
individual with impossible regulations and laws with which to conform. For French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan however, to experience something as pleasurable and good or unpleasurable and bad,
is not a matter of the individual following their innate psychical tendencies, in accordance with
nature, it is something the individual does as an ethical duty for society.
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Ideology
There are various psychoanalytic ways of understanding what ideology is and its role within the
individual psyche and in a group in society. (Lacan, 1960; Hinshelwood, 1987; Speziale-Bagliacca,
1991; Yong, 1992; Berman, 1993; Kernberg, 1998) Every group has a set of shared ideas,
assumptions, attitudes, practices and its own behavioural, aesthetic, ethical/moral codes and its own
language. Indeed the language, ideologies, fantasies, attitudes, practices and culture (food, music,
dance, dress, rituals, customs, conventions, norms, the entire network of intertwined discourses) of
a group is formative of its membership and boundary. Ego Psychology and Object Relations
psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg takes a broad definition of ideology when he says that it, “refers to a
system of beliefs that a group, a mass, or a society share, concerning the origin and functions of
their common social life and the cultural and ethical demands and expectations they hold for
society.” (Kernberg, 1998, p. 277) For him, all systems of beliefs and ideas count as an ideology
and all involve a fundamental phantasmic endeavour.
“Every individual or collective phantasmatic organisation is the invention of drugs, or of a rhetoric
of drugs, be it aphrodisiac or not.” (Derrida, 1990, p.228)
Žižek on Ideological Fantasy
Lacanian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek draws his definition of ideology from Marx,
“The personal relationship is concealed by the objectified form. So just what a value is does not
stand written on its forehead. In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men
are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but
they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction value.” (Marx, 1867, p.125)
For Žižek the concept of ideology implies the individual’s misrecognition of its own psychical
structure/position/condition and the limitations of its thinking and knowledge. (Žižek, 1989, 1994)
A misrecognition of its false consciousness and identity that it usually mistakes for its ideal self,
and of the distorted social reality that created its unconscious confusion. These misrecognitions fill
the gap between social ideological reality and the biological reality of being a human animal. For
Žižek, individuals do not know what they are really doing because they have a false representation
of social reality, that is, an ideology, to which they belong, an ideology produced by the same
distorted social reality. This is arguably a pessimistic, but perhaps painfully realistic view.
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Utopian Ideology
Turning to the positive, literature on utopian ideology is characterized by a tension between the
positive view of utopia as an expression of hope, optimism and a springboard for constructive social
change, and the negative view of utopian ideology as a source of illusory promises, fanaticism and
even bloodshed. (Berman, 1993; Žižek, 1994; García & Aguilar-Sánchez, 2008) Although this
essay tends toward the second emphasis, the dialectics between these two points of view should not
be oversimplified. Just as an ideological fantasy may often be the unconscious motivating force, so
a utopian belief e.g. a rescue fantasy toward humanity, may be the motivating force of an attempt to
improve human society and in its lack, pessimism, conservatism and stagnation may take over.
At the same time, just as a rescue fantasy or ideology may sabotage a person’s sense of identity
through inflation, omnipotence, self-idealization, romanticization, projection of aggression onto a
guilty other group, and splitting between fantasies of the good/rescuer or rescuing group and the
bad/guilty person/group. So an uncritical dedication to a political ideology or utopian vision can
become a boomerang turning revolutionaries into tyrants and culminating in cynicism and despair.
Further, the utopian fantasy of an autonomous individual, still prominent in many religious and
political movements, may legitimize the harassment of others seen as bad, flawed, or failing to
achieve a fully functioning independent existence.
Lacan, Ideology and Politics.
Ideology and politics from a Lacanian perspective involves exploring the ways in which
‘discourse’ is interwoven with the psychodynamics of the Imaginary (Fantasy) and the Real
(Biology). Relevant literature sources include Lacan’s essay A Theoretical Introduction to the
Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology (1950) that discusses the ideology of freedom.
According to Lacan, Žižek and other Post-Structural philosophers, all forms of ideology are forms
of ‘discursive closure’ that may be understood as abstract intellectual attempts to escape
manifestations of the real instinctual sexual and aggressive drives, which traumatize the individual
and society and cause delusion, anxiety, illness, betrayal, crime, accidents and so on. (Lacan, 1960;
Zizek, 1989, 1991, 2008) The real is what destroys social and political 'reality' as an intelligible,
stable, coherent, order, structure, system. In this sense, ideology can be seen as a process which
constantly re-stages the underlying struggle between life and death instincts, between the individual
and society and between biological and ideological reality.
9
The promise of ideology is that it will realize a fully reconciled social order and deliver
individuals from the real human condition. It is a promise contained in all ideologies, from
liberalism to totalitarianism, in which society is conceived in terms of a pre-existing harmonious
‘order’ which conforms to ‘ideal’ principles. And yet my argument in this essay is that there is a
‘blue-print’ within the individual’s genetic code and within the social order, that does exist.
Originally, the notion of the ‘idea’ was articulated in Plato’s theory of Forms in his monograph the
Republic where he wrote about structure, society, dialectical forms of government, democracy,
justice, universals, practicality and the philosopher kings. (Plato, 1892) The Platonic forms are the
non-material abstract, but substantial ideas, master signifiers in Lacanian terminology, that are not
the illusory world of change known through the imaginary realm of perception and sensation, but
processes of the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. The discourse of the master is the
basic discourse from which all other discourses derive. It is the master, S1, who puts the slave, S2,
to work, resulting in the myriad ‘objet a’ illusory ideal forms that the individual appropriates to
achieve their subjectivity and mask the gap of their soul.
The problem with abstract conceptions like ideology is that it focuses exclusively on discourse
and tends to separate off and alienate ideas from fantasy, desire and the enjoyment of the body. The
term ‘ideal-form’ in my view, moves somewhat closer to the imaginary and real and may go some
way to integrating theory and practice without closing the gap. In conclusion, surely ‘ideas’ and
‘concepts’ of ideology and discourse, as well as ideas and concepts of the individual, have to be
more broadly considered in terms of libidinal affects and the imaginary and real dimensions which
exist both before and beyond the individual and discourse.
10
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