Chapter from a Social Psychology text edited and used by the University of Madrid (Spain) in its Distance Education Program.
Social Psychology is a discipline that emerges with modernity, when the issues of history and social organization come to the forefront of philosophical reflection — as we can see in Hegel — and disciplines like Political Economy with Adam Smith and Marx, or Sociology with Durkheim, emerge. Mass phenomena, revolutionary processes, changes in institutions and organizational forms interrogate the relationship between the individual and society.
From an epistemological reflection and from the analysis proposed by a sociology of knowledge, we understand that there are — in certain historical periods — social conditions that make it possible to raise certain questions or formulate a problem in relevant terms, which will give rise to the development of various responses. In this sense, our century has been particularly fertile in events that shape this field of knowledge concerning Social Psychology. Today, in the period marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and what is called globalization — or even earlier, during the 1970s when the first elaborations of postmodernity were taking form — new questions and theories about society, subjectivity, and their relationships are emerging.
Consequently, the question regarding the destiny and role of Social Psychology is being reframed and updated at the end of the century due to the profound changes that have taken place in the social, political, and economic order, and because of their impact on the configuration of subjectivity.
These changes have triggered — among other issues — intense debates in the field of scientific knowledge, epistemology, the production and validity of knowledge, criteria of truth, the definition of the subject-reality relationship, the conception of causality, and at the same time, they raise new problems concerning ideals, the conception of the subject, and criteria of mental health.
These debates are not external to Social Psychology in its various forms of practice and theoretical elaboration. Rather, they run through the institutions where we work, implicate us, and cannot be avoided but must be navigated.
Throughout its history, our discipline has sought precision in the definition of its field — precision and identity — even while always maintaining the interdisciplinary character of its practice and theoretical processing.
WHAT DOES SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY INVESTIGATE?
We are concerned with an object of great complexity, since it is not “an object,” but rather a multiplicity of processes and relationships that determine and affect each other reciprocally.
What makes Social Psychology specific is its investigation into a foundational and dialectical link: the one between the socio-historical order and subjectivity.
This investigation implies the study of the social relations that give rise to that order; the institutions and practices that express and emerge from those relations; the forms of social knowledge, the systems of representation that traverse that structure and interpret the experience of its subjects, as well as the organizational forms that humans create within that particular order — that is: their modes of grouping, bonding, and communication.
This near-infinite complexity is analyzed from a specific perspective: how do these relationships and processes operate in the genesis and development of the subject? A subject whose identity — understood as integration and continuity of being, as a necessary interplay between permanence and change, between multiplicity and unity — is a fundamental trait. We want to emphasize the importance of the theme of identity, which is today controversial due to a discontinuous and fragmented view of the self that poses a dichotomy between subjectivity and identity without understanding their dialectical relationship.
Thus, we will investigate the various operative and articulating instances and mediations between the socio-historical and psychic processes. But since it is a dialectical relationship, it is also the task of Social Psychology to study the ways in which subjects produce, develop, sustain, or transform these social relationships, institutions, organizational forms, representations, and modes of communication.
We explore this multifaceted dialectic between subject and world, bearing in mind that we are investigating concrete human beings who are producers of a social, material, and symbolic order — an order that, in turn, houses them, produces them, and constitutes them.
Thus, the identity of Social Psychology is affirmed as a critique of everyday life, a scientific analysis of the mechanisms through which social structures materially organize and give meaning to subjects’ experiences.
Without this analysis, which allows us to question social processes from a health-based perspective, we would lose sight of the meaning behind the seemingly most banal events of behavior, of relational vicissitudes, or of group formations. We would be doing technique without science.
SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL PROCESSES. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
I find it necessary to clarify the theoretical framework on which I rely, and at the same time to further develop and deepen some of its core concepts. For Enrique Pichon-Rivière, whose thinking forms the basis of my approach, Social Psychology does not merely refer to an area of processes and phenomena. It entails a conception of the subject as a complex being and upholds the social essence of the psyche.
This conception characterizes the subject as a "being of needs, which are only satisfied socially, within relationships that determine him. The subject is not merely a relational subject, but one produced in praxis. There is nothing in him that is not the result of the interrelation among individuals, groups, and classes." (Contributions to the Didactics of Social Psychology – E. Pichon-Rivière – Ana Quiroga – 1972. Published in El Proceso Grupal, Nueva Visión).
Man, due to his fundamental condition as a “being of needs,” is constituted in his subjectivity, in his psychic and social dimension, through and by a transformative activity of himself and of reality. Being shaped and determined in and through a relational network, he is a "produced subject," the emergent product of social, institutional, and interpersonal processes. At the same time, as a being of needs, he is also a subject of praxis, of knowledge. His essence lies in being the producer of his material life, which defines him as a subject of History, creator of the social order and the symbolic universe that forms his stage. Consequently, if social relations form the essence of subjectivity and its internal causality, we can say that both in its form and in its existence, these relations are not secondary, random, or external to psychic processes—but rather internal and, as stated, of complex determination.
In analyzing the interrelation between internal causes and external conditions, it becomes inappropriate to speak of a social "outside" as the context of a psychic "inside," even if this may correspond to subjective experiences of "boundaries" (which takes us to another issue—the problem of the self/non-self distinction, of limits and identity). From the perspective presented here, in the interplay between subject and world, the external becomes internal, and vice versa, as the internal is externalized.
We emphasize the complex nature of the subject. A dialectical understanding of their unity and multiplicity allows us to distinguish the specificity of various aspects or instances of subjectivity, to recognize their mutual interpenetration, and not to fragment this complex unity into supposed ontologically and epistemologically autonomous "entities," such as a “social subject” separate from the “subject of the unconscious” or the “group subject.”
This conception of the subject, which underpins Pichon-Rivière's Social Psychology, has implications for the development of a health criterion that guides our work.
CONCEPTION OF THE SUBJECT. CONCEPTION OF HEALTH.
By affirming that man is essentially a “being-in-the-world,” in dialectical relationship with it, and by characterizing the psyche as a system open to the world, formed in and through being in a material, social, and relational world, we are implicitly putting forward hypotheses about the contradiction between health and illness. We attempt to define the terms in which we understand this issue.
Our reflection concerns, as stated, the subject of praxis—one involved in a relationship of reciprocal determination and transformation with a reality that transcends him, yet which he also modifies and produces. Developing a criterion for health requires analyzing the concrete forms that the subject-world relationship takes. Therefore, we will explore both poles of that relationship.
This involves studying the subject’s capacity to perform transformative action, to actively adapt to reality in a way that considers needs, concrete conditions, and potentialities. We will investigate the degree of flexibility or stereotyping in the relationship between internal and external worlds. We will ask about their ability to achieve self-knowledge "in situation," within the universe of experience and meaning that forms their concrete conditions of existence. This requires, in analyzing their behavior, relationships, actions, and worldviews, an inquiry into the plasticity of those psychic operations that Enrique Pichon-Rivière called "ego techniques"—which enable that dialectical and instrumental encounter between subject and world, and which serve learning as a process of grasping reality.
Such grasping allows for a progressively integrative vision of facts and relationships, making it possible to establish connections, discover new articulations, overcome blind spots, as well as recognize fractures, breaks, gaps and absences—or new, previously unknown forms of presence. In this broad inquiry, we ask about the subject's cognitive and emotional capacity for insight and conflict resolution. About their creativity, as the potential to explore and create alternative paths involving innovation, openness to change, mourning what is lost, and generating new projects.
Yet it is not only the subject who is to be interrogated. As mentioned, focusing on this relationship also involves analyzing from this perspective what constitutes their experiential setting: the world of meanings, relationships, and processes in which the subject must position themselves. This refers to the social, institutional, and relational order in which the vicissitudes of their formation and development unfold.
Our study must then examine the fate of the subject’s needs in those settings—whether they are recognized or ignored, valued or disqualified. What kind of support or containment is offered in those interactional spaces.
Thus, still within the framework of developing a mental health criterion and promoting it, we will reflect on the material and social organization of personal and collective experience within a specific sociohistorical order. We will investigate whether the interpretation of experience and self—specific to subjects of that social order—relates to or emerges from everyday life, and through what processes it operates in shaping subjectivity. We will attempt to delve into the meanings, the universe of significance condensed in the system of representations that legitimizes that everyday life as a "valid," "natural," "human" order.
We ask whether this social order promotes learning, the subject's movement through the world, and the relationship of reciprocal transformation—or, on the contrary, obstructs it, tending to impose stereotypes or various forms of passivity, deepening rifts between subject and reality. These are the questions that give Social Psychology its critical character—as a systematic inquiry into people living at a particular historical moment in a particular society. This analysis includes them in the complexity of their praxis, experience, internal dynamics, within a world of objective relations that make up their concrete conditions of existence.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
This perspective defines a field of knowledge that encompasses a multitude of phenomena, from social events and technological developments to crises and changes, as well as inter- and intra-subjective processes. We consider part of these social events the discourses that interpret them by expressing systems of social representation, and which influence their perception. Today, addressing this diversity involves confronting events that significantly marked the end of the 20th century and define the beginning of the third millennium, shaping certain development trends.
Despite their substantive differences, these events converge in generating new forms of everyday life and experience organization, with a profound impact on subjectivity. We will focus on some of them—perhaps the most significant.
One such event is the current reunification of the global market under the capitalist system, led by U.S. hegemony. This reunification was made possible through a process that began with the defeat of socialist revolutions in Russia in the 1950s and culminated with China's shift toward capitalism after Mao Tse Tung's death. These events accelerated the USSR's collapse and the dissolution of the socialist bloc. The totality of these events marks the end of a historical era and forms the real basis of so-called globalization.
Another significant development—this time technological—is the emergence and development of an information and media revolution, highlighted by the creation of a new dimension: cyberspace. This innovation, along with other profound changes in science and technology, calls for investigation, as today’s technological transformations affect not only macro-social processes but also seemingly trivial aspects of our daily lives.
Subjectivity is deeply impacted as media transform our experience of time and space—core components of how we structure our everyday lives, perceive ourselves, and interpret our context. In short, they affect our identity and our notion of the “neighbor,” who is both similar and other. This transformation influences communication and identification processes in contradictory ways.
The invention of cyberspace represents a qualitative shift in a pre-existing process: the universalization of communicative domains. This media revolution profoundly changes our experience of temporality, enabling simultaneity between an event and its complex perception anywhere in the world. At the same time, cyberspace allows for personal information processing and cyber-navigation through virtual realities, along with the decomposition and recreation of images, forms, and figures. While virtual reality is a simulation, it makes possible a previously unknown mode of subject–reality relationship.
This simultaneity—which some authors like McLuhan view as an abolition of time and space—affects identification processes that define others as "neighbors." This contradiction relates to processes of “news construction” and how events are portrayed: which can either promote emotional connection and recognition of the other as similar, or, conversely, establish emotional distancing, turning both subject and event into abstract, dehumanized entities.
As for cyberspace, it is essential to note its vast, still immeasurable potential for understanding our universe of experience and knowledge.
However, the expansion of perception, navigation of digital domains, and appropriation of this unthinkable complexity, as well as the implementation of new styles in knowledge presentation made possible by multimedia, are still in the early stages of research and development.
Phenomena such as the isomorphism between the multimodal nature of life and learning and its multimedia expression, the reciprocal causality between evolving communication modes and perception structures, and the dynamic ways that networks, hypertexts, and virtual realities may alter subjectivity and social networks—remain largely hypothetical and experimental.
We also consider part of this universe of inquiry the discourses that permeate the socio-historical order, forming and interpenetrating it. These discourses name, explain, interpret. They configure perceptions, shape experiences, construct a worldview (Weltanschauung). They express and contribute to systems of social representation. They may reveal knowledge—or mystify it. Thus, for a subject defined as a knower, the issue of their relationship with reality, the possibility of objective knowledge, and the question of truth is not “irrelevant.” Whether words and language merely refer to themselves, or to an objective world, matters deeply.
This projection of technological development and its effects—which some authors consider already theoretical—may have experimental bases, but these are not widespread; they are still highly restricted and sophisticated.
Even the current widespread use of the Internet—with 66 million users—does not change the fact that, on a global scale, experiences in cyberspace remain highly selective. In a world where roughly half the population has never used a telephone, the phenomena enabling this new communicational dimension—and those expected to emerge in the future—demand investigation. Especially concerning the issues of subjectivity and identity experience. Such inquiry must be systematic, large-scale, and sustained over time to distinguish science from fiction.
The existence of cyberspace, as we noted, is essentially a technological fact that, like all technology, exists within concrete social relationships—those of what is today called “globalization.” This process of increasing concentration of power and wealth, which utilizes technology, and which manifests in forms such as simultaneous market operation (reshaping capital development and mobility), is made possible by cyberspace—but its origin lies not in technology, not in productive forces per se, but in the production relations that generate and sustain them.
This causal relationship is what various economic and production discourses—especially those predicting “the end of work”—attempt to invert, presenting it abstractly and mystifyingly. These discourses, and the events they frame, impact subjectivity by offering a worldview. We will analyze some of them—perhaps the most significant.
It is therefore important to precisely define the scope of cybernetics in a globalized economy. This definition can curb the tendency to attribute a dominant role in sustaining society to this “intangible environment and its cyber-games.”
On the objective basis of financial markets and capital’s current development, many fall into the absurdity of attributing a central role in economic processes to speculative movements—facilitated by cyberspace—even in their current scale.
This causal inversion, inseparable from a so-called “technological paradigm,” separates labor from production, denying the former its role as a creator of goods, technologies, tools, and wealth. As a result, if labor is a constitutive trait of humanity, then it is the subject who is stripped of their status as a producer and protagonist of socio-historical processes.
This separation is tied to another aspect of the same assumed axiom—so dear to globalization—which states: “The third industrial revolution, essentially digital in nature, is the main and inevitable cause of job destruction due to humans being replaced by machines.” This replacement, in its current forms, is said to announce a historical mutation: a world without work. A mutation that would link to another: that of a subject without abstract thought, trapped in the image.
SOCIAL DISCOURSES AND SUBJECTIVITY
We have paused on some of the features of the discourses generated by this new order in order to reflect on their ideological function and their subjective effects, since the fallacies and distortions they contain lead to new forms in the process of alienation.
As a symbolic production that permeates social life, the universalizing discourse of globalization was born with a triumphant announcement: the culmination of human evolution in the realm of ideologies. This “end of history” contained a message that humanity quickly deciphered: the new objective conditions and the power relations that sustain them — which have involved radical changes in the lives of millions of human beings on a planetary scale — are an inevitable historical corollary. Therefore, an irreversible order and occurrence.
Within this central concept, the statements of the “technological paradigm,” “the end of work,” and “economic horror” converge and reinforce each other — threads in a mystifying and alienating framework.
As an ideological construct, the text of globalization is superficially shifting and ambiguous. It identifies a contradictory and potentially antagonistic diversity within the same socio-cultural process.
Within it, “the rationality of the unified market” implies the abolition of differences and borders, concealing — under the guise of supposed homogenization — the absence of reciprocity and exchange, the asymmetry of power, and the growing manifestations of resistance to the intrusive and hegemonic model of the First World. One form of this resistance is expressed in the intensification of antagonisms between ethnicities, cultures, religious beliefs, and the emergence of new forms of fundamentalism.
By calling for the unification of peoples, it not only attempts to wipe out customs and identities, but also masks the harrowing inequalities, the rigid stratification that — under multiple forms of oppression, exclusion, and threat of nonexistence — this self-defined “only possible world” imposes on individuals and nations. At the same time, it silences the relentless and evident struggle for market control and the deepening contradictions among power centers.
Consistent with its strategy, the discourse of globalization declares obsolete the concepts of nation and sovereignty, and with them the international law that upholds them.
Drug trafficking, terrorism, and corruption — in which these centers of power are deeply involved — provide justification for increasingly overt forms of supranational interventionism and control, under the guise of a supposed “duty of interference.” The ideological work around these issues — so sensitive for individuals — now aims to achieve consensus for the legal legitimization of these forms of invasion and control. These are the features of the discourse of globalization. We now turn to another aspect.
In the realm of discourses — interpretations of the world, of human beings, and social life — the cultural movement known as postmodernism, despite its heterogeneity, converges in a break with the conceptions that prevailed in collective representations until the 1970s.
Drawing on certain interpretations of discoveries in quantum and sub-quantum physics, it embraces philosophical and scientific relativism and agnosticism, declaring the impossibility of knowing reality, the non-existence of an objective order, and the irrelevance of the truth-question in knowledge. Man is a being trapped within the limits of his sensations and conceptual categories, enclosed in a web of languages that lead only to other languages. The subject and the world explode into a multiplicity without unity. Chaos without law, disorder without order, chance without necessity — all impose themselves in an explicitly anti-dialectical way of thinking.
Born out of a legitimate critique of the dogmatism prevalent in politically progressive organizations where revolutionary ideas had already been defeated, postmodernism adopts skepticism in the political and social arena. It declares the “grand narratives” obsolete, proclaims the end of utopias, while paradoxically creating a new utopia: the postmodern society — in an “age of emptiness” with no mobilizing projects. A society in which, through an increasing process of “personalization” free from the authoritarian socialization forms of modern societies, institutions are shaped according to individuals’ motivations. An open and plural society that respects personal desires, increases freedom of choice, and multiplies opportunities and offerings. Personal fulfillment and autonomy are exalted as supreme values, along with the right to uniqueness and difference, and the enjoyment of life in a world of pleasure and achievement.
The postmodern utopia contributed its narrative to the free-market society, which incorporated it into its strategy of creating homogeneous consumer segments and differentiated, sophisticated minorities. Thus, it becomes part of the most seductive and concealing myths that make up the discourse of globalization.
It is not hard to find links between postmodern individualism and neoliberal ideals, between its agnostic skepticism and the strong adaptive content embedded in the messages about the irreversibility of the new world order. In this convergence, it perhaps failed to recognize or denounce the end of history “as a new grand narrative.”
However, in the “new world order,” not everything is discourse and representation.
At the heart of the greatest historical expansion of capitalism, the increasing monopolistic concentration, the competition for markets, the dizzying technological development — high-cost and quickly obsolete — which leads to a falling rate of profit, and the rise of speculative capital relative to productive investment, are all factors contributing to a severe systemic crisis. This crisis arises because its essential contradiction has intensified: the one between social production and private appropriation.
This crisis is dramatically evident today in the collapse of the “emerging paradises,” the volatility of the “Asian tigers,” the looming threats to Japan's economy, and the risks implicit in the current economic trajectory of the United States. Paradoxically, at a time of greatest potential wealth, the risk of a global recession persists. This is another fact, closely linked to this form of globalization and the qualitative leap in some areas of science and technology.
The growing, objective crisis of capitalism has led to a new organization of production. This new organization leverages technological development and intensifies asymmetry in power relations. It designs for the maximum exploitation of the workforce while simultaneously facilitating its increasing exclusion from productive processes. Labor participation becomes increasingly precarious, legitimized by laws and agreements.
The economic system of globalization accepts as structural an unemployment rate that affects 30% of the global labor force.
In the growing population concentrations of major cities, pockets of poverty and marginality multiply, while misery and lack of prospects in rural areas condemn the majority of rural workers to exodus. Small and medium producers are devoured by banking usury and monopolies, destroying the peasant family both as a productive unit and as a group of belonging and support for individuals.
These facts form the material basis for a process that is emerging with great intensity in social life. We refer to the contradiction of inclusion/exclusion that creates a “horizon of threat,” a sense of being at the mercy of events, at risk of nonexistence due to social disconnection. This affects not only the unemployed. It destabilizes social life as a whole.
Through a complex causality, which includes other factors, these objective conditions contribute to the emergence of social dispersion movements and processes of subjective and relational fragmentation and weakening.
Simultaneously, the mobility of investments — aiding the reorganization and flexibilization of production — promotes labor precariousness. The “versatility and multi-skilling” of the worker, so highly praised today, is not merely a positive requirement of new production methods. Taken to the extreme, it also expresses traits of a subject who can uncritically adapt to precariousness and social integration through work. This is possible to the extent that they internalize in their self and world representation one of the axioms of globalization: stable employment is now a myth. This internalization is one of the features of a pathogenic process — overadaptation.
As we have previously stated, we consider it relevant to analyze some of the features of the “new world order,” particularly regarding its economic foundation and expression in power relations. Since we define the field and object of Social Psychology as a “complex dialectic between social relations and subjectivity,” we adopt a conception of the subject and a consequent criterion of health.
From this position, we question and challenge the social order as either enabling or obstructing the existence of an integrated subject — integrated within themselves and with others, aware of their contradictions, of the relationships in which they are immersed and in which they are agents. A subject capable of critical thinking, learning, and creativity. A subject produced by and emerging from concrete conditions, who can assume their essential identity as producer of their material life and symbolic universe — a subject of knowledge and protagonist of History.
The relationship between social processes and subjectivity is neither mechanical, simple, nor unilateral. Its complexity still exceeds our analytical tools, which leads us to work with hypotheses and questions.
In this inquiry, we find that today, if the market law functions as the fundamental institution regulating human exchanges, then exclusionary competitiveness becomes the highest social value. Exalted individualism and the perception of the other as a rival to exclude or destroy are redefined as hegemonic ideals.
A movement of social dispersion, disruption of identification processes, and fracture of solidaristic bonds — which constitute the foundation of the subject's being, the condition of the psyche and of history — emerges from these realities and their ideological legitimation.
However, as W. Reich maintained, “An oppressive social order, one that denies life and the most basic needs, can only be sustained if it is transformed into spontaneous behavior.”
That is to say, it is instituted in subjectivity and, in some aspect, configures it. This order of exclusion may find its psychic anchor in the fact that the terrified, isolated subject, in the face of the risk of devastation and non-existence, finds in identification with this order some form of support that allows them to deny their anguish, and the experience of loneliness and helplessness that becomes intolerable. This would be the basis of the false self that various instances of social life will tend to reinforce.
When objective conditions of scarcity increase in a social order, and the threat of exclusion and the incentive to rivalry are installed, the fabric of relationships deteriorates. If the subject is denied or devalued in their essential function as producer, this tends to have an impact on the subjective realm, expressed through melancholization, the loss of self-esteem, distrust, objectification of self and others. Isolation grows, the person becomes trapped in their own skin, their own thoughts, with inner emptiness, loneliness, and panic taking over. At the same time, violence in interpersonal relationships increases, and rejection of difference intensifies. The objective crisis has become a crisis of the subject.
As experiences of insecurity and uncertainty, of loss and attack intensify, the amount of anxiety and confusion weakens the much-needed sense of ego strength, of basic safety. This may become an obstacle to mature identification and the encounter with the other as different yet similar. Thus, our capacity for “concern” (Winnicott), our “concern for the other,” one of the foundations of our ethical condition and base for constructing bonds of solidarity and social networks that, as we have said, support the being and sustain identity, is undermined.
We have mentioned hypotheses regarding the institution of this new order in subjectivity and the possibility of psychic anchoring.
The new world order, as defined by current power relations as the “only possible world,” presents a univocal and forceful message of obedience. The discourse suppresses the possibility of alternatives. It is, therefore, essentially adaptationist.
This discourse plays out within the contradiction of inclusion/exclusion, what we have called an “order of scarcity,” a “horizon of threat.” In the terror of non-existence that emerges from the possibility of irreversible exclusion, the mandate—sometimes imperative, sometimes seductive—for submission and identification with the ideals of the “new order” finds fertile ground.
We have spoken of subjective fragility, of alienation as loss and ignorance of oneself, and the subject’s identification with the ideals and mandates of a power not only foreign but antagonistic to them.
The social forms of organizing experience, and the dominant social meanings of this new order, tend to produce social and subjective fragmentation as forms of alienated existence. These deeply interconnected processes, which support and refer to each other, present a dual character: they may result from the concrete conditions of existence, which demand increasingly adaptive responses to the proliferation and diversity of stimuli, the vertigo of change, and the sudden loss of reference points. But they may also function as defense mechanisms in the face of the massive assault on subjectivity—the potential ego damage represented by the simultaneous emergence of this constellation of events.
An adaptive path is one that attempts an “adequate” response in the factual realm—of labor and social performance. But this “adequacy” does not come from ego strength that allows for a critical relationship with the world of experience, but from submission. It is a behavior of overadaptation, involving the construction of a false self, a false identity. It is intimately linked to the process of alienation and requires a fragmented subjectivity. The subject splits, becomes unaware of their own needs, feelings, history, and relationships, prioritizing only that which subjugates them, believing it provides meaning and existence. Thus, they adopt as spontaneous behavior—denying or repressing their conflicts—the mandates and discourse of an other, in a relationship of submission.
This—observable in various aspects of everyday life—appears, for example, in the institution of work, when from the worker’s position in the new productive organization, responsibility is not limited to labor but extends to business responsibility: satisfying and retaining clients and maintaining market competitiveness. In effect, each worker becomes a monitor of their coworkers and is led to a false representation of their own position in the productive relationships.
In adaptationism, with its denial of contradictions and submission, a significant part of emotions and thought, as well as bodily signals, is suppressed, blocked, and perhaps lost. The processes of symbolization deteriorate, as the subject can no longer think or reflect on themselves. They can no longer autonomously take themselves or reality as an object of knowledge. This process is reinforced by a discourse of power that systematically practices the “denial of perception.”
The psychological impoverishment, the deterioration of symbolization, and the fear of internal destruction that threaten the subject push them to seek substitute satisfactions. Among them, various addictive behaviors stand out.
In this modality of fragmentation, the subject seems to be scattered across the surface of things, in an external relationship with themselves, trivializing their relationships. This may be a trait of what has been called “light subjectivity.” But it may also be the situation of those trapped in a sense of futility and emptiness, characteristic of a silently installed depression.
This absence of thought, this fragmentation, is also evident in those who cannot follow the supposedly appropriate, adapted response. They find themselves unable to symbolize or process their anguish, frustration, and rage, and instead discharge them in violent action, in an endless search to calm their panic by annihilating the source of anxiety. This source is constantly sought and displaced. The other, the others, become the enemy. The senseless violence present in our daily lives has its origin in this process.
Another path, also linked to fragmentation and the difficulty of symbolic processing, is melancholization. In it, the subject breaks social ties, isolates themselves, and internalizes the full weight of powerlessness and loss—blaming themselves—and this can lead to various forms of self-destruction. Pathologies ranging from bulimia and anorexia to suicide may emerge.
We define this situation as a critical point in the field of health.
The psychological damage caused to the majority of the world's population by mass unemployment and labor precarity—establishing a “horizon of threat” as a chronic insecurity—has been compared to the impact of a world war.
In 1997, the WHO characterized the effects of this model as an epidemiological catastrophe. Depression, along with various forms of panic syndrome, has become a dominant pathology. The lack of perspective and future-oriented projects lies at the root of various forms of mental illness.
However, not everything is obedience, not everything is alienated resignation.
A profound critique of this model of injustice and oppression has emerged and is developing both in practice and in representations.
Although subjective fragmentation and social atomization persist as hegemonic phenomena, and overadaptation continues alongside panic—giving rise to intense forms of suffering—alternative responses are taking shape.
As the crisis unfolds and reaches its peaks, new behaviors arise. These are expressed in the movements of tens of thousands of workers and students in Europe, in massive demonstrations in Asia, and in new forms of social struggle seen in Mexico, Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, or in the resistance of Third World countries like Cuba, Iraq, and others to imperialist siege and aggression.
These struggles and innovative forms—like those of Chiapas, the fogoneros and piqueteros of Argentina, the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil and Paraguay—demonstrate both social and personal learning. In them, silence gives way to speech—speech that demands to be heard. Paralysis gives way to organized action. The sense of shame and marginalization, the guilt over unemployment, is now indignation and awareness of disgrace. There is a shift from a self-perception of victimized and powerless unemployed persons to a new self-perception: that of being a group subject of power.
Many of those who were—until recently—devastated in their subjectivity by this model, now identify with the condition of being victimized, but no longer as excluded, rather as robbed and dispossessed. They do not accept the discourse or power of the victimizer. They redefine their self-worth. They do not identify with the aggressor, and they grow in their effort to identify him—to expose his methods and identity.
It is the shared, the articulated, the new identificatory processes that sustain this possibility for action and mobilization, for precise analysis and relevant doing.
This is a complex process, which will require time and multiple stages of practice. However, as a response to globalization, to the “end of history,” to the extinction of labor, millions of human beings are attempting to recover or reappropriate an essential feature of identity: that of being protagonists of identity itself—that of being protagonists of history. This is expressed today in various practices and in the recreation of discourse. A discourse founded on an unrenounceable awareness of dignity.
Ana P. de Quiroga
Buenos Aires, August 1998