Therapeutic Man
Around the time that I was reading Christopher Lasch's books, in 2005, I saw a few interviews with Philip Rieff at AL Daily. There is a long, penetrating essay about Dr. Rieff's work by George Scialabba, "The Curse of Modernity, Philip Rieff's problem with freedom" in the Boston Review. Much of Rieff's work involved the continuing reevaluation of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud into religion as a social force. In Rieff's 1959 book on Freud, he suggested, in Sciallaba's words:
Until the twentieth century ... three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament.There is some force to this idea, although I don't think that psychological man is a separate character type from economic man. Psychology has become an industry based on the management of feelings and the validation of status. It has become a tool to manipulate employees, customers and citizens to produce, consume and comply. It has become a theory of morality which defines the good as what appeals to the feelings.
