The Perils of the New Intimacy

My talk at the Greene Clinic on "Paternalism, Class and the Changing Function of the Therapeutic"

In his book on the family in the twentieth century, the sociologist Göran Therborn says the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s in the west changed the norms of marriage and family towards an entirely new conception of romantic love and marriage. The main indication of this change is found in the fact that romance is now centered around maximizing pleasure and partners are sought to satisfy our deeper emotional needs first and foremost. Gone is what I will call the bond of distinterest that used to shape and determine romantic couples and thus the possibility of matrimony. The Sexual Revolution gave way to a new bond of intimacy that the sociologist Eva Illouz defines as bond of intimacy in which we seek out partners to alleviate our anxiety and increase our emotional performance. We are encouraged to find relationships that can allow us to better make investments in uncertain futures in our careers.

Thus, as Mao once said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, ‘it is too early to tell,’ the same goes for the Sexual Revolution. The fulfillment of its promises are too unevenly distributed and it is indeed too early to tell. The Sexual Revolution has been seized by market forces which took over the underlying demands of the politics of the time, which sought freer self-expression, a break from patriarchal gender norms, and for divorce and abortion rights for women. These demands have largely been realized; but they have been realized on terms dictated by the market, not by the libertines and radicals who pushed for communal living, abolition of the family and anti-normative conceptions of sexuality.

The erosion of the bond of disinterest is brought about by the rise of seemingly egalitarian access to the pursuit of maximal career optimization, a turn in contemporary social life that pits the demands of ‘self-actualization’, or the individual demands of self-realization through career advancement, at the very center of social life. This affects the bonds of marriage, and even of intimacy as such, molding romantic life to instrumental ends. Romantic partners are inducted into this situation and they prove their worth by playing the role of enhancing the emotional stability required for self-actualization. Marriage is no longer an act which is formed around impersonal commitments and sacrifices.

The intimate bond and the very structure of what is materially possible for marriage and family has become the site of a new conflict over ideals and contestation over the loss of the bond of disinterest. It is crucial in this regard to note that marriage remains very popular. In a 2013 survey, over 80% of gay people reported that they sought the formal bonds of marriage out of love, not out of any social or familial sense of obligation or pressure.¹

The most common reasons cited for divorce now tends to be over ‘emotional’ reasons, and this is a sign that the new bond of intimacy requires that partners subordinate their relationship to propping one another up in individual pursuits of career success do that they can put one another in a position for self-actualization on the market. In a study of a large statistically representative sample of young adults, single and married, 80 percent of the women in the sample stated that they value more a husband or potential partner’s capacity to express deeply his feelings as the most valuable trait of a would-be partner.²

The intimate sphere of modern marriage is governed by a contractual logic centered on protecting one’s self-worth, self-esteem, and dignity. Now when I say that this is a new bond of intimacy centered on self-actualization, what I mean is that the bond of intimacy based on what I will call ‘disinterest’ has largely disappeared.

In Lilian Rubin's study of the working-class family from the 1970s Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family, she discovered a different logic of the bond of intimacy; the working-class respondents that she interviewed did not cite emotional reasons for getting married. When asked why they got married they had difficulty in explaining why, and this was just forty years ago. Marriage was understood as a taken-for-granted and unexamined component of adult identity; as one man put it, “What do you mean, how did we decide to get married?” There was a non-instrumentalized form of intimacy and hence a disinterest at the heart of the intimate bond, and this provided a deeper sense of comfort, security, and connection in family life.

This essay is based on a lecture I offered with the Greene Clinic’s Community Public Speaker Series.

The new bond of intimacy now requires that individuals negotiate the demand for career self-actualization, and this means that partners have to justify every decision in choosing a romantic partner. The impersonal dimension to the working class bond of intimacy has given way to a highly individualist and overly personal bond of intimacy. But what exactly is the self-actualization ideal and where does it emerge? The sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has developed the notion of society of singularities, which he says is rooted in a “post-materialistic’ work ethic in which people do not seek work for material gain but for meaning.³

Our culture is not based on achievement but based on success, and the rubric of success is limited to achievements developed on the site of the market, “it means an audience has appreciated one’s performance as singular.”⁴ Workplaces have ousted the bureaucratic structure of what he calls ‘matrix organizations’, and creative labor has now formed around a new idea of culture wherein one “earns admiration through extraordinary performance.”⁵ This is a society in which the “Matthew effect” is in full display: the Matthew Effect refers to a society in which so-called winners only accrue more success and losers seep lower and lower on the rung.

This is part of the reason why emotional support becomes so necessary for realizing one’s highest singular self, for emotional support not only prepares one for individual success, it prepares you for the possibility of not reaching success. The society of singularities must therefore be understood in large part as a sado-masochistic structure; no longer do we think of those who fail to achieve success as defined by market recognition as bound up in a class relation, or as subject to market or class disadvantage. Today, we are governed by the grim liberal view that says those who fail to singularize themselves are losers who brought it upon themselves. And often, what we find is that working-class people struggle to shrug off this cultural mythology that defines our era, and they develop feelings of individual failure and inadequacy. 

In this context, intimacy and marriage are governed by rational calculation (not disinterest) and the drive to maximize one’s possibility of self-singularization on the market. Thus, while the Sexual Revolution has increased the egalitarian possibility of marriage and family norms in the sphere of self-expression and granted rights to gender expression that deviates from the norm, its promises are not realizable by large segments of the working class today. Marriage now follows a pattern known as “assortative”, which means that people are now tending to marry partners from a similar class background at increasingly high rates.⁶

Concurrent to the rise of assortative marriage, national data points to a “divorce divide” in the United States which shows that since the 1970s divorce has increased amongst the working-class and significantly decreased among highly educated men and women but remained steady among those with lower education.⁷ In the United States, just under half of adult working age people do not have a college degree and since the COVID pandemic over 30% of parents report having insecure employment, 17% of children in America live in homes of poverty and half of these young people say that they deal with hunger on a regular basis.

Now there is a wicked irony in the historical trajectory of the demands of the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s and the way they have been absorbed by this new society of singularities. As Reckwitz notes,

“the very thing that youth cultures of the 60s and 70s used to fight against, namely the conformist establishment, has itself become the hegemon: freedom to self-actualize.”

How the Therapeutic Now Functions

But how are the demands for self-actualization and the new bonds of intimacy experienced by the working class today? For working class Millennials ages 27 – 42, coming of age in a post-2008 recession social context, scholar Will Davies characterizes the social and economic system in the following way:

“the ‘enemies’ of today’s society are largely disempowered and internal to the neoliberal system itself. Those who are crippled by poverty, debt and collapsing social-safety nets, they have already been largely destroyed as an autonomous political force. Yet somehow this increases the urge to punish them further.”⁸

The working class is now treated as an ‘underclass’ from the perspective of the hegemonic ideology, they are forced to see themselves as those who have failed to self-actualize and they are forced to take this sense of failure onto themselves. We thus see again the sado-masochistic outcome of this situation because the basis of success has become culturalized: those who self-actualize share values of creativity, openness, empathy, cosmopolitanism, entrepreneurialism, and style—and those who do not adhere to these ideals are perceived not only as losers, but people who do not adopt our values.⁹ We thus see that the society of singularities can only see class through a lens of pathologization. It is precisely this liberal blind spot and embrace of the implicit sado-masochist fantasy of political life that makes socialist politics grounded in a rationalist footing to the problems of the capitalist system.

It is important to understand these dynamics by looking at macro level social policies over the last forty years. Although the term ‘neoliberalism’ is often invoked as a boogeyman in political discussions, connoting anything one does not like in politics, the term can help us understand these new class divides and conflicts. Neoliberalism is a political movement that gained traction in the late 1970s, and it can be defined as the elevation of the market as the primary vector of self-making and self-discipline. Neoliberalism is the return of an older form of class rule that penalizes citizens—especially the working-class—by enforcing personal responsibility, typically backed up by the interests of private finance, across all areas of social life.

As Thomas Piketty, the French economist writes, the inequality of this system is driven more by wealth than it is by income, in other words, the precondition for being put in a position of possible self-actualization is now reliant on access to wealth more so than it is measured by one’s income. This means that a family’s accrued wealth is a greater determinant of how class distinctions are seen to operate than is gauging inequality by income.

College in the U.S. offers an example of how this inequality by wealth shapes access to higher education and often determines the college experience for young people. Today, just under half of American adults hold some sort of college degree, but those who pursue college do so with profound risk over the prospect of having to shoulder long-term debt. For those who enter college with financial support from parents, it comes not from the parents’ incomes but more by family inheritance.

We are witnessing the wide scale deprivation of the chance to self-singularize amongst working-class people and this is leading to an ever-possible feeling of crisis, and a material breakdown in social reproduction and the possibility of marriage and family. As a brief digression, when I published this article and argued this exact point, it was fascinating to see so many liberals come out of the woodwork to dispute this claim, which means that it is a claim over social reality that becomes the site of a political dispute over class antagonism as a built-in feature of social life today. My discussion with C. Derick Varn regarding my research on this topic is something I would recommend for later listening:

Mood Economy, Class Conflict, Recognition

In her study of working-class Millennials, the scholar of inequality Jennifer Silva found that marriage no longer represents a stable and clear marker of adulthood for the working-class. Marriage and family have become completely unstable, and it is generally perceived as too risky to even venture. The new norms and values of intimacy and marriage are perceived as foreign to the working-class young people that Silva interviews in her book Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in a Time of Uncertainty. Working-class people who express a longing for more traditional gender roles and family obligations face what Silva calls a “permanent disadvantage” to realizing those aspirations.¹⁰

A new class conflict has spilled over into the terrain of the ideals of marriage and family and that the middle-class ideals of intimacy are adopted, but only because they are enshrined as mandatory to realizing any successful relationship over the long-term. This is one way of understanding the culture conflicts that tend to shape popular political discourse under the rubric of the “culture wars.” What we find here is that there is a total culturalization of success and this leads to a rejection of the very terms of this framework by working-class people, while at the same time it leads to the sense that there is no alternative to it.

The Peasant Wedding

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1566

The burden of having to depend on another person seems too perilous for the working-class people that Silva interviews. The interviewees in Silva’s study were a large group of men and women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, in the UK and the US, and they thus paint a solid sample of the working class in all its heterogeneity. What we find is that the working-class Millennials either rejected marriage due to economic precarity or they embarked on marriages that tended to dissolve or end in divorce. This has had the effect of leading working-class people to seek out relationships that they describe as pure and that might nurture their deepest selves and meet their personal needs given that the ideals and promises of the family have become unreachable for them.

“in constructing their adult selves, married people find themselves trapped in a liminal space between the rigidity of the past and the flexibility of the present: they are haunted by the myths, rituals, and images of the traditional, gendered family even while this model confronts them as both untenable (economically) and undesirable (socially). Because marriage is considered to be ultimately terminable, it represents less of a stable and clear marker of adulthood and more of a temporary, contingent one.”¹¹

Now as I mentioned, with marriage and family life now increasingly off the table as economically viable for the working-class, the respondents speak of a desire to form therapeutic or “pure” relationships that nurture their deepest selves, that meet their personal needs, and, most importantly they seek out relationships that do not weigh them down with emotional or financial obligations.

Silva found that in the face of the collapse of the promise of marriage and family, the demand to self-actualize was approached through therapeutic culture as a replacement for realizing the new ideals of career success, marriage, and family. In facing a future that is precarious and uncertain, where the prospect of starting a family is likely not possible, relationships now shift to become centered on self-worth, and intimacy becomes tied to strengthening a sense of personal dignity. For the working-class women who Silva interviews, who have grown up shouldering immense social and economic burdens on their own, depending on another person feels too perilous. Thus, they view therapeutic ideals of romance as liberating—even if it means being alone.¹²

One of the consequences of the fact that the family is no longer guaranteed is that social recognition that working class people seek out tends to differ from the standards of the society of singularities that aims for market-based success and recognition. No longer does the working class seek recognition through institutions and accomplishments such as career, starting a family or buying a home. They rather seek recognition amongst their immediate peers and family in the narrative of their own struggle to overcome conditions of suffering and trauma that they inherited from their family and early childhood.

This process gives way to what Silva calls a “mood economy” where the promise of self-actualization becomes about building a narrative of self-resilience, i.e., it is essential that one construct a narrative built around overcoming one’s own past as a means to fortify a possibility of a singularized individual life. This personal aim now functions as a replacement of social recognition. In other words, if one can triumph in overcoming their own familial past traumas and not repeat the cycles of addiction or poverty that beset their parents, this is converted into a higher goal. In this way, the very meaning of the family becomes “hyper symbolized”, as Silva says. Working class people, even though it is materially experienced as out of reach, are tethered to the family.

Is the Therapeutic Still an Anti-Politics?

The mood economy is a liminal space in which the therapeutic, and here we mean the therapeutic as Philip Rieff meant it: the combination of individual indulgence in self-help, forms of professional therapy, or other self-healing methodologies which are more and more adopted as necessary prerequisites to the achievement of a happy and successful life. My argument is this: for the working-class, these modalities are sought out to remediate the social loss of middle-class self-actualization as much as they are required for any one to enter into middle-class existence. Importantly, this embrace of the therapeutic constitutes a different trajectory of the therapeutic turn in our culture that emerged out of the zeitgeist of protest during the 60s and 70s that thinkers such as Christopher Lasch and Philip Rieff analyzed. The historian Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self and Philip Rieff, who was one of the first to really diagnose the therapeutic in his work Triumph of the Therapeutic, written in 1966, both wrote in a critical vein regarding the rise of the therapeutic.

For Rieff, the therapeutic represents a new stage of western civilization in which what triumphs is a new way of life that accepts mere comfort and wellness instead of sacrifice for a higher cause. A culture of therapy has the function, according to Rieff, of containing aggression or containing what Freud diagnosed as the general unbehagen in civilization. The therapeutic was thought as a pacifying process which meant that it had an implicit political function of enhancing necessary levels of attention to activity in work and labor discipline. The more therapeutic methods are introduced to the population, the more self-realized workers will become accepting of work conditions, and more adjusted to the status quo.

But the therapeutic also reduced political struggles to individual psychological fulfillments of psychological needs instead of a conception of politics based on broad solidarity and collective liberation. For Rieff, even the left began to become consumed by the therapeutic and they began to construe the meaning of revolution as the abolition of all forms of repression in society. This is what led collective struggles, solidarity in large-scale social movements, and even the left’s idea of power as borne from any class-based understanding to be replaced with what Rieff calls an “anti-politics.”

Anti-politics is a situation in which political conflicts occur in a domain where unchanging strife between the generations are permanent and what matters is the fulfillment of the psychological needs of every individual. Politics under a therapeutic paradigm becomes terminally individualized, and narcissistic.

Therapeutic modalities are invoked in two ways: as a means to prepare a more stable worker and to prepare one for the market demands of self-actualization and they helpt to address the aggressiveness and anxieties that the loss of the bonds of intimacy (and even friendship) as bound up with a logic of disinterest. This leads to a hollowness and a tenuous reaction; if one even long for bonds of disinterest, or for the desire for a family, they are perceived as politically suspect by the norms of reigning middle-class ideology. Reigning middle-class ideology has itself regressed to a class conflict footing in which it denies the very processes that now erode the family; and that erosion happens across both classes, but it is felt and lived with maximal torsion among the working-class.

For Lasch, just as for Lillian Rubin the feminist author, the bond of intimacy based in disinterest was present in the Fordist period from the 1940s – 1970s, and this meant in psychoanalytic terms, that the ego ideals of the family, of one’s local network of teachers, and of immediate personal relations formed “ego ideals” out of which an institutional field then linked up “ideal ego” identifications.” Freud thought ego ideal and ideal ego in a dialectical fashion in which there is a social mediation between the processes of inner self-worth (ego ideal identifications), and outer identifications with models or ego ideals (ideal ego identifications). The social order was thus capable of dispensing a superegoic mechanism that was grounded on these institutions of local relations, including the family.

What this indicates is that the rise of the society of singularities signals a new crisis in social recognition such that everyone is now forced to adhere to a form of recognition based on market success as opposed to a less-pressure-filled form of recognition that was grounded in more local relations. And under these conditions of hyper-marketization, I argue that subjects experience the rise of a different form of the superego that is more acephalic or detached from one’s immediate relations.

The sado-masochistic logic of the society of singularities and the mandatory drive for success has given way to a crueler and more aggressive form of superego because it lacks the same relay system to ideal egos that were formed and grounded in institutions and more local vectors of family and community life. As Bernard Stiegler says of the superego in late capitalism, it is like Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone, the figure that dictates the laws of the state, but it now imposes no limits on its subjects. The superego enforces, but it has become lawless. Its demands are internalized by subjects as the demand to succeed and it is this demand that tends to weigh on subjects and produce more intense feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression. Paradoxically, we can say that the market erodes the superego, and this has given rise to an unhinged drive-based culture that has lost a clear conception of limits, and which foments a profound permanent crisis that forecloses solidarity and even collective reason.

In my book, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family I build off of Lasch’s view that refer to this as the socialization of the superego, a process that has given way to a different form of self-making, wherein secondary narcissism—or pathological narcissism—is released as a normalized form of social personality. In other words, narcissism breaks down and undergoes a crisis wherein more pathological forms of “secondary narcissism” become more common: and these include aggressive identifications that tend to overwhelm the capacity for subjects to form positive bonds of self-love.

The Persistence of Paternal Forms of Social Power

Socially determined ego-ideal and ideal-ego identifications break down in this situation of pervasive “pathological narcissism,” and the subject perceives the rules of the market in terms of the superego, not the ideal ego identifications that were grounded in more concrete social relations that were less hampered by capitalist marketization. There was thus a distance from marketizing logics prior to the rise of this process of hyper-marketization, and this distance from the market meant that subjects could distance themselves from the demands of the market and its pressures. It is this distance from the market that made the bond of marriage and of family one of disinterest. This also affects authority relations because we see the withering of the family structure in which subjects are capable of thoroughly working-through paternalistic identifications.

Today, we experience paternal forms of social control because the market governs so many areas of social life, and the market cannot impose limits on subjects that distinerested familial structures were capable of enacting. In order to transcend limits, there must first be clear limits imposed at a subjective level. The pre-Oedipal subject faces a social situation in which there is a crisis over the imposition—and transcendence—of limits.

Lasch saw that the turn to the therapeutic as a means for accelerating the hollowing out of interior life and not permitting subjects from working-through this crisis. He thought that the therapeutic was incapable of resolving the aggressiveness and anxieties of contemporary capitalist life. However, what we find from the ethnographic work of Silva as well as the wider field of working-class studies reports and studies¹³ is that the turn to the embrace of the therapeutic is not functioning to foment an interior hollowness of the self; the therapeutic has rather become a source for resolving the absence of the ideals of the middle-class life and unmet market success. This is a different sort of adjustment to labor regimentation or attunement to the status quo than the social trends that Lasch foresaw.

Conclusion:

Therapeutic Considerations: Narrative Constructions and the Limits to Resilience

What does this mean for mental health counselors, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social workers? I think we can extract the lesson from this insight that patients are seeking to construct narratives of resilience that might function as an alternative to the pressures and anxieties of the demands for constant success and career advancement. This type of embrace of the therapeutic is of course occurring in a society such as the US that significantly underfunds access to mental health services, especially for people without disposable income. Attention to this disparity and therapeutic analysis can be a means by which mental health practitioners advocate for the expansion of mental health services.

To what extent can therapy begin to build narratives that can allow patients to address the pressures that come from capitalist market forces, from feelings of inadequacy, to shame, to the sado-masochist demands placed on self-actualization. We would have to think of a subject beyond the “resilient” narrative that is the backbone to the mood economy. In his Keywords for the Age of Austerity, John Leary writes of the predominant meaning of resilience:

To be resilient is what we might call a disciplinary affect; to be resilient is required to adjust to the social order as it is, and it is disciplinary precisely in the way it encourages us to celebrate our resilience, but as a means of adaptation.

Resilience is thus the source of the construction of a narrative of perseverance, strength and courage in the face of life conditions that have led to disappointment and the internalization of feelings of failure. Resilience must therefore be handled with a certain care; we must try to avoid reinforcing narratives that accept social realties that overlook material conditions at work in the patient’s life.

The more we can challenge the myth of the winner-loser dynamics implicit in capitalist logics, by continuously pointing attention to underlying social conditions that shape the outcome of people’s lives, the more we can cultivate patients with greater means for understanding that resilience is both a disciplinary device and the fundamental affect available to overturning oppressive conditions.

If working class people have internalized a conception of the social conditions facing their life prospects as essentially sado-masochist, how can therapeutic approaches shatter this illusion? There is undoubtedly a certain rage and madness at the border between truth and fiction. This is the place where we must address class, in the liminal zone of experience that exists between disciplinary resilience and the resistance to the truth of this very disciplinary experience, a resistance that makes up today’s bourgeois ideology.

1. Brien, M., Lillard, L. and Waite, L. (1999) ‘Inter-Related Family-Building Behaviors: Cohabitation, Marriage, and Nonmarital Conception’, Demography 36: 535–51.

2. Illouz, E. (2019) The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations Oxford University Press. p. 184

3. Reckwitz, Andreas, The Society of Singularities p. 156

4. Ibid, p. 152

5. Ibid, p. 132

6. I discuss this trend and its meaning for politics in the last two chapters of my book Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family.

7. Cherlin, A “Marriage Has Become a Trophy,” The Atlantic, March 20, 2018

8. Davies, W. (2016) “The New Neoliberalism” New Left Review Issue 121 / September October. p. 132

9. Reckwitz, p. 205

10. Silva, J. (2013) Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in a Time of Uncertainty Oxford University Press. p. 71

11. Ibid, p. 75

12. Ibid, p. 65

13. I consult numerous studies in both my book and in the article published with Aeon Magazine.