PINS, 2015, 48, 1 21, http://dx.doi.org/10.

17159/2309-8708/2015/n48a1

Capitalism
and Suffering

Abstract
The present article is an exploration of the relationship Bert Olivier
between neoliberal capitalism and suffering in a broad Department of Philosophy,
sense, which includes everything from economic and University of the Free State,
physical suffering, psychic suffering in the form of Bloemfontein
anxiety, self-doubt, uncertainty and stress, to more acute [email protected]
suffering, such as identifiable pathologies. Its point of
departure is the patho-analytic principle, that one can Keywords:
gain an understanding of the general psychic condition anxiety, capitalism, choice,
of humanity by focusing on the characteristic traits of a market, neoliberalism,
pathology such as, for example, obsessional neurosis, and resistance, stress, suffering
examining the possibility that some of these characteristics
are encountered in the population at large. Focusing first
on evidence of severe economic suffering under the impact
of what Klein calls disaster capitalism, the argument
proceeds to Parkers claim, that the typical subject under
capitalism displays the character of obsessional neurosis,
then to Salecls examination of capitalisms ideology of
choice, Verhaeghes investigation of the effects of a market-
based economy on psychic health, and Federicis claim
that there are signs of increasing resistance to capitalist
labour. It concludes with some prospective thoughts on
Salecls, and Hardt and Negris diagnosis of present social
conditions under capitalism.

Prelude
At the 2013 International Society for Theoretical Psychology
conference in Chile there was a workshop on The effects
of the neoliberal regime on your body in the context of
the global corporatization of universities. The two women
who led the workshop activities asked participants to
identify their respective body-parts (for instance the head,
stomach, or heart) pathologically affected by things like

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work-related stress, and to present themselves in conversation with other participants
as that organ or limb. They skilfully steered the group in the direction of an increasing
awareness of the ever-intensifying colonization of the body by capitalist imperatives that
are incrementally restructuring intellectual work at universities. I was astonished to learn
how much of individuals personal organ-pathology (irritable bowel, anxiety attacks,
or heart palpitations) can be regarded as registering the stress imposed on one by an
excessive lecturing load (the organization has to maximize profit by maintaining a lean
lecturing faculty complement), with its concomitant hectic grading schedule, coupled
with the ever-intensifying pressure to publish or perish, lest you be found wanting in the
scales monitoring and governing research activities at universities. This pathologization
is further exacerbated by a research and teaching regime which rewards publishing in
scientific journals (and adhering to compatible didactic models) which reinforce and
promote the neoliberal status quo, and penalizes those, whose work appears in diverse
alternative journals explicitly or implicitly challenging the conventional research and
teaching paradigm. In sum: not even the field of intellectual work at universities is exempt
from the suffering that accompanies living in a capitalist society.

Rethinking how capital and the state have striven to transform our bodies into
labor-power also serves to measure the crisis that the capitalist work-discipline is
experiencing at present and to read, behind the social and individual pathologies, the
resistances, the refusals, the search for new anthropological paradigms, something
to which a reconstructed psychology cannot be indifferent, if it wishes to break with
its history of complicity and collaboration with Power. (Silvia Federici, 2013)

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

(Henry David Thoreau, 1847)

Introduction
It may seem counter-intuitive to associate capitalism with suffering, considering
the virtually complete triumph of this economic system worldwide. Didnt Francis
Fukuyama (1992) write in triumphalist mode about the end of history when the Soviet
Union collapsed, proclaiming the marriage between liberal democracy and capitalism
to be the teIos which all states had been moving towards all the time? Isnt capitalism
about enjoyment of commodities, ostentatious consumption, celebrity life and wealth
accumulation as iek (1995) implies where he writes about the ironic displacement of
the superegos injunction from prohibition of enjoyment to the exhortation to do just
that, namely, to Enjoy yourself! And what is there about this that could be connected
with suffering? One could elaborate, as Hardt and Negri do in Multitude (2005) and
Declaration (2012), on the suffering that intolerable debt levels impose on people
generally, and particularly on nations of the developing world (which go hand in hand

PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015 | 2

with material suffering), but the suffering that concerns me here is chiefly of a psychic
kind, as inscribed on the body. Such suffering mostly manifests itself as widespread
insecurity, anxiety, stress and depression, but light may be cast on it by the characteristic
attributes of a pathology (which it sometimes becomes), as I shall argue below.

Suffering under disaster capitalism

Before turning to this, however, a brief indication of the undeniable causal relationship
between the current form of capitalism, namely global free-market (or neoliberal)
capitalism, and human suffering worldwide is necessary, lest the implicit claim to
this effect, contained in the title of this article, be rejected without further ado. For
evidence of this I turn to that indefatigable investigative reporter, fervently hated
by capitalists, Canadian Naomi Klein. In The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster
capitalism (2007), Klein exposes the latest incarnation of the capitalist juggernaut as
driven by the ideological imperative, to privatise every aspect of an economy (local or
national) when and while communities or nations are in a state of disoriented shock in
the wake of a collective natural or political trauma. Such collective traumas, followed
by relentless privatisation, scrutinised by her include the effect of Hurricane Katrina on
the inhabitants of New Orleans in 2005, that of the devastating tsunami along the coast
of Sri Lanka in 2004, the effects of the American invasion of Iraq (of 2003) on the local
population, and the economic consequences of the transition to democracy in South
Africa in 1994. In the wake of all these historical events the signs of human suffering
have been clearly apparent in the aftermath of Katrina, the well-functioning public
school system in New Orleans was rapidly replaced by a private, for-profit charter school
system, where many older, experienced teachers lost their jobs and young teachers were
employed at relatively low salaries and without the benefits that teachers enjoyed in
the public school system. On the coast of Sri Lanka, where the tsunami destroyed the
villages of the local fishing communities, the land was sold by the government to private
development companies that built resorts for the rich in their place, with concomitant
deprivation of the fishing communities of their source of survival. In Iraq American
companies made a financial killing in the wake of the military invasion, while the local
people suffered economically and politically. And in South Africa, where the population
won a democracy at the negotiation table, they lost in economic terms because of
conditions imposed on them by international financial institutions, with far-reaching
negative economic consequences for poor people.

Klein (2007) elaborates on all of these examples of the cynical economic exploitation
of opportunities created by natural catastrophes and political upheavals by so-called
disaster capitalism, with deleterious economic and personal consequences for the
communities concerned. While these consequences undoubtedly include personal
and collective hardship such as loss of employment and livelihood, I would like to

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focus briefly on the phenomenon of suicide, which is arguably a symptom of extreme,
unbearable suffering. It is well known that the Great Depression of 1929 witnessed
many suicides on the part of people who presumably could not perceive any hope of
improvement in their economic circumstances. More recently however, suicide has
again become a barometer for the psychological effects of financial and economic
hardship, as Klein indicates in several instances. First there is Russia, where economic
shock therapy (modelled on medical shock therapy, where the ground is cleared for a
new beginning) was introduced in 1992, three years after the fall of the USSR. Russias
suicide rate increased almost immediately, so that by 1994 it almost doubled from what
it had been eight years before. At the same time, violent crime increased more than four
times what it had been. Small wonder that Vladimir Gusev, quoted by Klein (2007: cf
238), noted in 2006 that the last fifteen years of criminal capitalism had decimated
the Russian population by 10 percent. It was even worse in South Korea at the time of
what was cynically labelled the Asian Flu around 1997. In 1998 the incidence of suicide
increased by no less than 50 percent, with the concentration of these being among older
parents who appeared to kill themselves to alleviate the economic pressure of debt on
their children. Lest anyone might believe that economic disasters such as these cannot
be effectively addressed, Klein provides shocking evidence that Wall Street and the IMF
deliberately adopted a policy of doing nothing to help these countries instead, it
regarded these as opportunities for further capitalist expansion.

The reason for listing these cases of suffering under capitalist economic conditions is to
drive the point home that there is a demonstrable connection between the functioning
of this economic system and human hardship, contrary to what most enthusiastic
supporters of it would want one to believe. It could be argued that what I have referred
to above are only the most extreme instances of suffering under capitalism, and that
when things are normal, the opposite of suffering prevails, namely prosperity and
happiness. In what follows, I would like to show that this is not the case.

Capitalism and obsessional neurosis

To be able to trace some kind of connection between capitalism and suffering under
normal conditions, it is useful to turn to Ian Parker, a practising Lacanian psychoanalyst,
who associates suffering under capitalism with obsessional neurosis, as is evident where
he writes (Parker, 2011: 42): Those who suffer in obsessional mode under capitalism are
subjects who buy into the separation of intellectual and manual labour, the separation
of thinking from being, and live out the predicament of a puzzle about the nature of
being as if false consciousness really did operate only at the level of the individual. Lacan
argues that the question that haunts the obsessional neurotic concerns being, existence,
their right to exist and whether they are alive or dead The obsessions are repetitive
ideas manifested in a series of actions from which the subject seems unable to escape.

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Even though this eventually may result in suffering that is too much to bear, enough
to bring someone to ask for help, it is still stubbornly tied to personal administrative
strategies that contain an unbearable surplus of satisfaction jouissance is our name
for this excess within the domain of the pleasure principle

What Parker (2011) perceives in human behaviour under the social and economic
conditions characteristic of capitalism, then, is a pattern that is reminiscent of the
pathological condition known as obsessional neurosis, recognizable in repetitive
actions, excessive conscientiousness, ineradicable guilt, uncertainty, anxiety, self-
reproach and doubt (see also Freud, 2011a). What is observable in a concentrated form in
someone who is an obsessional neurotic, clinically speaking, returns in capitalist society
as an overall pattern of behaviour, in accordance with Freuds (2011b: cf 4667-4668)
remark, that individuals who suffer from some kind of pathological condition are like the
fragments of a shattered crystal, in whom the attributes of the whole are concentrated.
Philippe Van Haute (2013) refers to this as a patho-analytic insight on Freuds part.
By this he means an analysis and comprehension of normal kinds of behaviour and
mental states in accordance with the characteristics of pathological conditions, where
the latter are conceived of, in terms of Freuds metaphor, as fragments split off from the
crystal of psychical normality. What this implies is that there is no hermetically secure
distinction between so-called normality and pathology, as most people would like to
believe humans are all insane; some just more so than others). In the present context
this implies that the attributes of obsessional neurosis in the clinical sense cast light
on the manner in which people live in contemporary capitalist society. Renata Salecl
(2010: cf 84-88) offers confirmation of this in the context of what she calls love anxiety
in contemporary society, observing that the protective mechanisms typical of certain
clinical conditions seem to occur in the population at large.

Parker further reminds one that there are two sides to capitalism, both of which are
inseparable from it, and connects these explicitly with the structure of obsessional
neurosis, arguably in a manner which resonates with what Van Haute (2013) describes as
Freuds patho-analytic approach. However, Parker (2011: 88) writes: Within the very
texture of capitalism as an ostensibly rational system of production and consumption
and as terrain on which each individual is free to enter into different kinds of commercial
and interpersonal contract with others, there are moments of unbearably excessive
irrationality when relations between subjects break apart. This aspect of alienation
which haunts everyday reality breaks the trust which glues market trading and the civil
community together, and this alienation is real as that impossible point at which the
subject is torn, divided between commodity exchange and the labour process. Here
the subject as such is vaunted in ideology as the psychological individual perceiving,
cognising and electing between alternative courses of action but, in its pathological

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condition of obsessional neurosis, it is the subject as product of capitalism. Uncertainty,
procrastination, powerlessness, resentment and secretive victories over a world that
renders it guilty at its heart for its failure and complicity with exploitation: this is the
condition of the subject which may be crystallised in a symptom taken to analysis, and
then this structure of the subject can be laid bare as obsessional clinical structure and
the subject can speak something of the truth of the alienation that forms it.

In this excerpt Parker identifies what is most relevant for present purposes by
distinguishing the two major areas where one might expect encountering signs
of suffering, namely capitalist production and consumption, neither of which is
dispensable for capitalism to function successfully. Significantly, he also refers to the
suffering that occurs at the interface between these two areas of economic activity (the
subject torn), and insists that the obsessional neurotic is a product of capitalism,
alluding to some of its constitutive conditions (guilt, uncertainty, procrastination, etc.)
that are reminiscent of the connections that Freud (2011) posited between obsessive
and anxiety neuroses.

Capitalism, anxiety and the ideology of choice

Lest the impression be created that everyone living in capitalist society is an obsessional
neurotic, clinically speaking, it is necessary to elaborate on some of the traits of social
behaviour that justify the claim that this society displays a pattern which resonates
with the attributes of the clinical entity, such as anxiety and uncertainty. Somewhat
surprisingly, perhaps, these are encountered in precisely those areas of neoliberal
society most commonly associated with the freedom of the individual, such as the
liberty to choose where and how to live, what to buy and with whom one should hook
up. In her incisive book,Choice(2010), Renata Salecl probes what she calls the tyranny
of choice in the present era. Everywhere we turn in our capitalist society, which thrives
on variety, we are confronted by a bewildering array of things, items, products, services,
even short-term sex partners or companions to choose from. On the one hand it is a
manifestation of what one may think of as economic and social freedom, but as she
shows, it comes at a price. The cost of living in these times of endless options is pervasive
anxiety and depression in the face of the necessity to choose from everything that is on
offer, lest one chooses incorrectly, and has to suffer the scorn of fellow consumers, or
worse, the possibility that your decision may turn out calamitously.

This situation has reached the point where one may legitimately talk about a culture
of anxiety. Salecl sums it up as follows (2010: 3): How is it that in the developed world
this increase in choice, through which we can supposedly customise our lives and make
them perfect leads not to more satisfaction but rather to greater anxiety, and greater
feelings of inadequacy and guilt? Further on, she continues (2010: 8-9): In todays

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society, which glorifies choice and the idea that choice is always in peoples interests,
the problem is not just the scale of choice available but the manner in which choice
is represented. Life choices are described in the same terms as consumer choices: we
set out to find the right life as we would to find the right kind of wallpaper or hair
conditioner. Todays advice culture presents the search for a spouse as not all that
different from the search for a car The issue of choice has been a concern primarily
of the middle classes in the developed world. Yet even in poor countries many have
been deeply troubled by the contradictions inherent in the ideology of choice.
Supposedly now free to make whatever they want out of their lives, in reality they
suffer from numerous constraints They are encouraged to act as though they live in
an ideal world and as though the choices they make are reversible, while the reality is
that their economic circumstances prevent them from having much freedom of choice
at all and that one wrong decision can have disastrous consequences.

Salecl (2010: 5) further makes it clear that the notion of unlimited choice is in fact
a powerful ideological tool of consumer society. She alludes to Louis Althussers
observation, that this ideology of choice is not something accidental, but instead
something that ensures capitalisms hegemony. This is not difficult to understand.
Capitalism as economic system is driven by the imperative to diversify commodities
continuously to stimulate demand, and the discourse of choice that Salecl characterises
so well, functions virtually imperceptibly (as ideology always does) to inculcate a
collective mindset oriented according to its precepts. At the same time, the more
pervasive this culture of choice gets supposedly aimed at providing all the ingredients
for optimal individual fulfilment the more it becomes a psychological burden, and
the source of uncertainty and anxiety. This explains why one of its consequences has
been the emergence of advice culture predicated on relieving individuals from the
onerous task of choosing for themselves. It is a matter of passing the buck, except that
it tends to boomerang. Turning to the variety of advice services available, she points
out, one is confronted, once again, with the inescapable necessity to choose one. As
one might expect, this becomes a kind of psychological (quasi-Hegelian) dialectic that
moves from the initial necessity to choose, to the negation of ones own choice through
seeking advice, to a sublation of the choice one tried to avoid, and so on, in the process
exacerbating the pressure on oneself to make choices. Hence the mounting anxiety and
insecurity that often leads to depression.

There are other factors to consider, too. In answering the question, why choice makes us
anxious, Salecl examines the psychological mechanisms accompanying the experience
of being overwhelmed by a plethora of options, for example when buying cheese. These
typically progress from confusion in the face of a vertigo-inducing variety of possibilities,
through anger at oneself for ones indecisiveness, to suspicion and resentment of

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supposed help offered by authorities available for consultation. Such an experience
illustrates, according to Salecl (2010: 15), some of the reasons why overwhelming
choice can increase our anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. Invariably the person in
such a situation falls back on either a random choice, because of volitional paralysis
when confronted by a dizzying scale of alternatives, or on the banal option triggered by
an automatic awareness of the most advertised product.

To this one could add the well-known Lacanian insight, that ones desire is really the Others
desire (Lacan, 2007: cf 525) which, in the present context, manifests itself in the worry
that ones choice of product might be judged by others (ones guests, for example) as being
somehow wrong or in bad taste. This sometimes reaches the point where people may even
experience the need to choose as traumatic, and Salecl (2010: 17) lists some of the grounds
for this: the desire to make an ideal choice, the question of others comparative opinion
about ones choice, the feeling that there is no ultimate social authority (who could obviate
ones own need to make certain decisions) and the fear that your choice is not really free,
but always already predetermined by others. The last of these is related to her earlier
discussion of ideology, and is germane to the issue at hand, given the usual persistence
of an overall pattern of behaviour. One unwittingly contributes, albeit negatively, to
the reinforcement of an ideology, Salecl (2010) observes, by not openly declaring ones
disbelief in its precepts. Paradoxically, therefore, because most people tend to believe
that they are exceptions to the rule of subscribing to an ideology not realizing that most
other people feel the same way it is allowed to persist, together with its concomitant
deleterious effects on individuals. Sometimes these effects are physically visible, such as
when we hang our heads and cast down our eyes in shame a frequent occurrence in the
society in thrall to the ideology of choice, as Salecls discussion of such instances, where
people are ashamed of their choices for a variety of reasons, clearly shows.

With fine nuancing and a manifest sensitivity to the often paradoxical consequences
of being incessantly confronted by the need to make decisions regarding the glut of
available options, Salecl (2010) explores the manifold instances of self-doubt, uncertainty
and anxiety that are inseparably intertwined with the culture of choice. One of the
ironies of this culture, for example, is the valorisation of self-mastery and restraint
that accompanies its promotion, which turns out to be a source of self-doubt because of
nagging feelings of failure. The irony deepens when one compares the objective of such
putative (psychological) self-mastery, which is primarily economically motivated, with
that which Foucault (1988) found among those individuals, during the Hellenistic era,
who dedicated themselves to the care of the self. For the latter this entailed rigorous
discipline of a physical as well as discursive nature, guided by the objective, to gain self-
mastery to be able to withstand and overcome the vicissitudes of life which exceed ones
personal control.

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The central paradox of the culture of choice, as formulated by Salecl (2010: 149), is perhaps
this: Choice about the organisation of society is offered and denied at the same time. Liberal
democratic capitalism glorifies the idea of choice, but with the proviso that what is on offer is
primarily a consumerist model of choosing. The choice of a new form of social organisation,
of different ways in which society might develop in the future and especially the possibility of
rejecting capitalist society as we know it all appear not to be available as choices.

Not even personal relationships are exempt from the negative psychological effects of the
tyranny of choice. What Salecl discusses under the rubric of love choices, which really
amounts to hooking up, epitomises what is most conspicuous about dating today, in
so far as it observes the principle of steering clear of real intimacy which is always
accompanied by the risk of getting hurt in favour of what she terms the mechanics of
contact. Hook-up culture is all about choice, she says, and continues, We have so
many options in every aspect of life that the choice of emotional attachment is not only
an added burden but also an impediment to the total freedom we are meant to value.
Someone who gets attached too quickly has supposedly not fully profited from that
freedom. (Salecl, 2010: 76) The link between hook-up culture and the social gains,
on the part of women, during the 1960s, is made clear when Salecl points out that it is
often justified as a practice which prevents especially women from attaching themselves
to a male partner too soon, in this way allowing them to make a better, more informed
choice later.

From this perspective, the practice of hooking up is supposed to enable women to

behave in the same way that men used to behave, namely, to spend a night randomly
with someone, avoiding the investment of feelings, and ignoring any possible emotional
consequences. Paradoxically, however, although all of this is done for the sake of choice
and control, Salecl insists, hook-up culture is inseparable from uncertainty. In spite
of supposedly liberating young people from the burden of attachment, it encumbers
individuals with something else insecurity, anxiety and guilt. Moreover, regardless
of the connotation of casual contact, without emotional attachment, that clings to
hooking up, one sometimes gets emotionally involved despite ones best intentions.
And given the norms governing relationships conceived of as casual encounters, such
a person is not supposed to admit it to herself or himself, let alone to the person they
have developed feelings for. Small wonder that, in such cases, it leads to feelings
of guilt, anxiety and inadequacy. Clearly, although the culture of choice is glorified in
contemporary societies, there is another side to it which suggests that it is overvalued.

The price of adaptation to neoliberal society

It is well known that Lacan opposed adaptation to society as an objective of
psychotherapy, and particularly in the case of psychoanalysis. In Lacans (1997: 82)

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own words: There are always things that dont hang together. This is an obvious fact,
if we do not begin with the idea that inspires all classical, academic psychology, which
is that human beings are, as they say, adapted beings, because they are living, and
therefore it must all hang together. You are not a psychoanalyst if you accept this. To be a
psychoanalyst is simply to open your eyes to the evident fact that nothing malfunctions
more than human reality.

This, in inimitable Lacanian seminar-style, is as much as saying that it is constitutive

of human subjects to be maladapted beings, even or perhaps especially when
one believes that you have adjusted supremely well to social, political and economic
circumstances. Why? Because such adjustment, or adaptation, is always predicated on
a more or less imaginary or hallucinatory relationship with extant social reality, which
assumes the form of a will to illusion, to being deceived. The subject, in other words,
is fundamentally alienated from itself, from the subject of the unconscious, and
misrecognizes itself in the ego-adaptations to a social reality that amount to attempts
at rational mastery. To adapt to a social reality that is essentially the product of fantasy
is therefore to exacerbate the subjects self-alienation.

According to Lacan the adjustment at stake here implicates orthodox psychoanalytic

practice (let alone mainstream psychology), which has promoted a reinforcement of
the ego at every level, to equip it with the strength to manage conflicts and adapt
itself to reality. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer to the question concerning the specific
reality that the subject must adapt itself to is none other than the given social reality
in which the analysand exists (Van Haute, 2002).

If adaptation to societal norms is the rule rather than the exception, one should not
lose sight of the fact that these norms change over time Victorian society, with its rigid
structures of authority, is a far cry from contemporary, so-called permissive society.
Hence, adaptation to contemporary society entails conforming to the demands of a
neoliberal, market-oriented capitalist society; witness the culture of choice, discussed
earlier. Instead of overt obedience to the patriarchal representatives of putative
absolute religious authority, for example, obedience today assumes the guise
of subjects acting conscientiously in accordance with a host of expectations dictated
by the market: optimising ones choice across a wide range of products and services,
submitting to regular audits of their work-performance, performing intermittent
self-assessments in the workplace, dutifully (if ruthlessly) competing with colleagues
for promotion (even if the personal cost is pervasive anxiety or depression), routinely
having to meet production deadlines, displaying the outward signs of success (in your
choice of clothes, smartphone, motor car, house or apartment) and of enjoyment, which
supposedly represents successful competition and consumption (Salecl, 2010).

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It appears that the neoliberal transformations in working conditions have had a far-
reaching impact on peoples health. While I have so far mainly focused on evidence of
suffering, such as anxiety, self-doubt and uncertainty, in a largely non-pathological sense,
psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe draws attention to pathologies and personality disorders
that have been proliferating under social conditions engendered by the neoliberal,
market-based economy. The price one has to pay for such successful adaptation to
neoliberal society is graphically depicted in Verhaeghes What about me? The struggle
for identity in a market-based society (2014). At the outset he states: The neo-liberal
organisation of our society is determining how we relate to our bodies, our partners, our
colleagues, and our children in short, to our identities. And you cant get much more
disordered than that. I take my lead here from Sigmund Freud in his Civilisation and its
discontents (2014: location 59).

After a thorough reconstruction of the provenance and character of neoliberalism,

Verhaeghe (2014) turns his attention to the question of the link between living in a society
dominated by this narrative or ideology and the psychological well-being of people.
He sets the scene by outlining the differences between the biopsychosocial psychiatric
model, which focuses on the individual situation of a patient within a broader context,
and the illness or medical model. Verhaeghe argues that, despite the dominance of
the illness model in psychiatry and psychology, which assumes that pathological
symptoms invariably manifest underlying physical processes that remain the same over
time (hence this diagnostic model lets everyone, from psychologists and psychiatrists
to parents and teachers, off the hook), there are growing signs of people realising that
psychic pathologies reflect social censure on the basis of accepted social norms at any
given time (which Foucault [1980] also pointed out in the first volume of his History of
sexuality). So, for example, Verhaeghe points out, both the British Psychological Society
and the World Health Organisation recently openly criticised the illness paradigm by
pointing out that diagnoses of mental disorders under its regime (as articulated in
the canonical DSM) ignore the conspicuous fact, that they are based on prevailing social
norms. That is, far from representing judgments rooted in scientifically objective
knowledge, they are themselves symptoms of social and economic factors from which
individuals cannot always escape, such as crime, violence, poor housing and debt, to
which one could add neoliberal pressure to outperform ones colleague-competitors.

In sum, Verhaeghe argues persuasively for the view that problems such as mental
disorders are fundamentally tied to prevailing social and economic conditions. At
present, according to him (Verhaeghe, 2014: location 2339): we see an avalanche of
depression and anxiety disorders among adults, and ADHD and autism among children.
This is most marked in the rise in medication. According to official figures, in 2009 one
in every ten Belgians was taking antidepressants, and between 2005 and 2007 the

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number of Ritalin prescriptions doubled. In 2011, the use of antidepressants in the
Netherlands had gone up by 230 per cent over a period of 15 years; prescriptions for
ADHD medication increased annually by more than 10 per cent, with the result that in
2011 the number of prescriptions exceeded one million. Social phobia among adults
is currently such a serious problem in the West despite it being one of the securest
regions in the world that in 2000 the Harvard review of psychiatry referred to it as
the third most frequent psychiatric disorder after depression and alcoholism. Is it too
far-fetched to assume that this general fear of others is connected to the exponential
increase in evaluations, audits, performance interviews, and CCTV cameras, combined
with the disappearance of authority and trust?

It is not surprising to find that social phobia and performance anxiety commonly
occur among working people today (and even executives are not exempted from this).
In a society where those around you in the workplace either fall into the category of
competitors (including your best friends at work) or those who have the task of evaluating
your own performance (sometimes they are both), it is difficult not to experience anxiety
intermittently, which could easily develop into something chronic. Social phobia
has the same origin involuntarily, you start fearing peoples motives when they talk
to you about your work, and again this could burgeon into a general condition. The
proliferation of problems relating to mental health today have to be seen in this light.
The neoliberal practice of salary differentiation, linked to performance, and the resulting
income inequality (characteristic of neoliberal societies) are crucial in this regard.

Verhaeghe no doubt anticipating accusations of not being sufficiently scientific

in his writing therefore turns to the work of two eminent, widely respected social
epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (who have conducted studies on the
link between peoples health, broadly speaking, and the society they live in) to validate
his argument. Their findings are unambiguous (Verhaeghe, 2014: location 2365): an
increase of this kind [income inequality] has far-reaching consequences for nearly all
health criteria. Its impact on mental health (and consequently also mental disorders) is
by no means an isolated phenomenon. The key factor in their study proved to be stress,
which has been shown to have an impact on human cardiovascular systems as well as
immune systems. And stress (indirectly it seems to me that one can add anxiety and
social phobia) is directly linked to income inequality. A salient conclusion of Wilkinsons
first book (The impact of inequality: How to make sick societies better) was already
that in a city or a country where there is high income inequality the quality of social
relationships is noticeably diminished: there is more aggression, less trust, more fear,
and less participation in the life of the community. One should keep in mind that
income inequality is directly linked to differences in social status. And not surprisingly,
Verhaeghe points out that low social status has a determining effect on health. He

PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015 | 12

therefore arrives at the startling conclusion, that even in prosperous Western Europe, it
isnt the quality of health carethat determines the health of the population, but the
nature of social and economic life. The better social relationships are, the better the
level of health (Verhaeghe, 2014: location 2375). And health has been deteriorating
steadily under the neoliberal regime.

It may seem as if the disorders Verhaeghe refers to contradicts Parkers (2011) claim,
that the behaviour of the subject under capitalism displays the structure of obsessional
neurosis. This is not the case, however. As Parker (2011) also indicates, a host of
pathological conditions accompanies the behaviour of the subject of capitalism, which
displays the structural features of obsessional neurosis, such as ineradicable anxiety and
doubt-based, repeated performance of certain work-procedures. As might be expected,
there is a strong connection between obsessional behaviour and anxiety, which Lacan
(1962/63: 68) formulates causally as follows: Anxiety is not doubt; anxiety is the cause of
doubt. In my own judgment, therefore, these findings on Verhaeghes part are compatible
with the present argument, insofar as, for reasons outlined above, it demands of workers
(executives included) a painfully repetitive and stressful, conscientious commitment to
productive work, as if on the tacit assumption or belief that something terrible would
happen to them if they should fail to obey this categorical imperative (Freud, 1919).
And anxiety or fear and depression are always waiting in the wings, lest one should feel,
as one invariably does, sooner or later, that one is not meeting expectations (which have
by then been internalized).

Signs of growing resistance to capitalist work

In the light of the above it is interesting to note that, according to Silvia Federici (2013),
there are signs that the state of affairs under neoliberal capitalism has evoked a growing
resistance. This has to be seen against the backdrop of her claim, that throughout
its history, capitalism has transformed our bodies into work-machines (Federici,
2013: 3), and that both the state and disciplines like philosophy and psychology have
been actively involved in this process. Her contention is that rethinking how this has
occurred enables one to understand the crisis faced by capitalism today, as manifested
in the social and individual pathologies, the resistances, the refusals, the search for
new anthropological paradigms Moreover, she adds that this is something to which a
reconstructed psychology cannot be indifferent, if it wishes to break with its history of
complicity and collaboration with Power (Federici, 2013: 3).

What was argued earlier concerning adaptation is confirmed by Federicis

elaboration on the contribution of so-called industrial/organizational psychology
to the systematic development of a psychology of conformity to promote optimal
discipline and productivity on the part of labouring subjects in the context of

13 | PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015

capitalist production something that resonates with Foucaults (1995) sustained
argument that, in modern society, various mechanisms of discipline have reduced
subjects to docile bodies which are politically impotent but economically
productive (Olivier, 2010).

Federici (2013) discerns three lessons that may be learnt from the complex history
of capitalisms relentless transformation of bodies into labour power: that the
mechanization of the body is demanded by work-discipline under capitalism,
concomitantly annihilating the bodys creativity and autonomy; that the complicity of
psychologists with this process (ignoring workers abhorrence of the regimentation of
their minds and bodies by industrial labour, for example) amounts to their betrayal of
the assumptions on which their claim to be doing science rests; and that the crisis of
contemporary capitalism is uncovered by this history. This includes the attempts, since
the turning-point of the 1960s, to contain the crisis through a global reorganization of
the work process, the indications that disciplinary mechanisms to ensure production
no longer function, and the multiple manifestations of the refusal to reduce ones
activity to abstract labor, to renounce the satisfaction of ones desires, to relate to ones
body as a machine, and a determination to define our body in ways independent of our
capacity to function as labor-power (Federici, 2013: 6-7).

Given this crisis it makes perfect sense that, since the inception of the neoliberal phase
of capitalism around the 1970s, the preponderant approach aimed at defusing the
refusal alluded to by Federici has been the creation of an illusory freedom freedom
to compete, freedom to advance in ones career, freedom to develop levels of excellence
(which has been one of the chief lures for unsuspecting workers who are keen to
progress to higher income levels in their jobs), and freedom of movement from one
position to another. In fact, the more highly skilled you are, the greater your upward
mobility under neoliberal capitalism; hence the term Yuppie (young, upwardly mobile
worker). In the light of what was pointed out earlier regarding the price of adaptation,
it should be apparent that such upward mobility does not come without the suffering
peculiar to the marketplace of sought-after worker skills. A pertinent example of this
in South Africa and elsewhere are the attempts, on the part of employers such as
universities, to retain what is labelled gold-collar workers because of their financial
value to the institution. Although such well-qualified and, in the case of universities,
research-productive employees are generally well-remunerated, the catch is that they
are under constant pressure to produce the expected number of research outputs, or
to attract large funding from corporations, with the result that their work is invariably
accompanied by high stress levels. This is clearly demonstrated by a recent case in
Britain, where a professor of medicine committed suicide when he was told that he
would be dismissed (sacked) because he had failed to generate the required 200 000

PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015 | 14

per annum (Colquhoun, 2014). Clearly, under the neoliberal regime many universities
are run more like businesses than as institutions of higher learning by a ruthless cohort
of managers, with dire results for the health of academic staff.

The restructuring and reorganisation of labour at all levels can further be understood,
according to Federici (2013: 7), in terms of the precarization and flexibilization of work,
as well as the systematic disinvestment by the state in social reproduction. On the
one hand, although they are not exempt from the stress accompanying pressure
to perform, those with the rare skills required by the restructured economy (the
so-called gold-collar workers) are in a position to exploit the demand for their abilities
(as knowledge workers), but on the other hand it has resulted in the emergence of a
worker that is depersonalized, adaptable, ready at any moment to change occupation
(Federici, 2013: 7), something noted by Verhaeghe (2014) too.1

Taking into consideration that this stress-inducing situation is further exacerbated

by the ongoing automation and computerization of work, requiring what Federici
(2013) describes as dehumanizing, militaristic types of behavior, her summary of the
concomitant suffering serves as a mirror for the contemporary subject, and resonates
with Verhaeghes findings, discussed earlier. For instance, Federici (2013: 7) notes:
Indeed, the abstraction and regimentation of labor has reached today its completion
and so has our sense of alienation and de-socialization. What levels of stress this
situation is producing in our lives can be measured by the massification of mental
diseases panic, anxiety, fear, attention deficit, the escalating consumption of drugs
from Prozac to Viagra Fear and anxiety are only one aspect of the terror that today
is employed to suffocate the growing revolt against the global work machine. Equally
important has been the militarization of everyday life, now an international trend,
preceding September 11.

It appears, therefore, that there is ample reason today for the multiple emerging signs of
resistance to the relentless, encompassing strategy of global capital to ensure that the
economic wheels keep turning. What Federici has brought to light is highly significant: that
increasing numbers of people are actively pursuing alternative ways of living, unregulated
by work that is subject to the identity-destructive market, that workers are turning to ways
of protesting that differ from the customary strike, and that discursive practices linked to
the commons are engendering practices like time-banking and new community-oriented
initiatives (including the burgeoning of communes). One is witnessing nothing less than the
gestation of a new imaginary, as the globally spreading popularity of tattoos (arguably a

1
In South Africa this is perceptible in the fact that the entire school education system is geared to the production of such flexible
workers a shocking example of collusion between the state and neoliberal capital. See in this regard Du Plessis (2012).

15 | PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015

kind of throwback to pre-modern markers of tribal belonging, resurfacing in the context of
resistance to the culturally homogenising tendency of capitalist globalisation), the preference
for androgynous gender models and the impact of a movie like James Camerons Avatar
with its indictment of capitalist, eco-destructive exploitation, combined with a valorization
of the unity of human(oid) and nature, further show (Olivier, 2010a; 2011).

Federici (2013: 9) concludes her far-reaching paper with important questions: What
would a psychology be like that measured the mental and physical damages caused by
capitalism? That recognized that stress, anxiety, dread, insecurity, alienation from others
and from oneself, are inevitable results of a system that normalizes the destruction
of our livelihood, our social relations, our creativity? That would refuse to accept the
transformation of living labor into dead labor as a norm, and therefore refused the use of
torture, not only in its literal form, but in its daily appearance in the form of the capitalist
organization of work? Answering these questions is the task ahead of us.

Conclusion
To conclude, one should take seriously Renata Salecls (2010) repeated observation,
that the ideology of choice, so prevalent in contemporary society, persisting even
(perhaps surprisingly) in the wake of the recent global financial crisis, functions to
distract ones attention from the need for fundamental economic and social change.
In other words, it is an ideological mechanism that ensures neoliberal capitalisms
perpetuation, for as long as people are preoccupied with all its attendant psychological
difficulties, such as self-doubt and anxiety, which focus attention on ostensible failings
of the individual subject, instead of on the necessity to change the extant economic
system. The difference between the Hellenistic Roman era, referred to earlier regarding
Foucaults (1988) examination of the care of the self as model of self-mastery, and
today, is instructive here. The present and the Hellenistic era display some similarities,
chief among which is perhaps that in both cases individuals could easily feel lost and
overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the world they inhabit(ed). After all, when
the demise of the Greek city-states made way, first, for Alexanders Macedonian
conquests and later for the Roman Empire, people had to accept that, unlike the
situation in the Greek polis, where citizens could exercise a measure of influence
over their own economic and political circumstances, the far-flung Empire precluded
such participation for all but the privileged few. In todays globalized world feelings
of being insignificantly small may be similar to those of centuries ago, but there is
an important difference, namely, that the possibility of contributing to economic and
social/political change today far outweigh that of Roman times.

Hence, the following remark by Salecl (2010: 24) may appear to apply to both historical
eras, but in fact only applies to the present: The more isolated we become from a real

PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015 | 16

engagement with the social and political sphere, the more we are propelled toward self-
mastery. Two thousand years ago the opportunity did not exist for the vast majority
of people to engage with the social and political sphere, but today it does, even if it
means confronting the juggernaut of neoliberal capitalism and its paralyzing ideology
of choice, with a view to finding an alternative to it. It is fitting to quote Salecl (2010:
148) at length here: Todays capitalist society, with its insistence on the idea of choice,
masks class difference as well as racial and sexual inequalityThe feeling of shame for
being poor and of guilt for not getting further up the ladder of economic success has
replaced the fight against social injustice. And the anxiety about not being good enough
has pacified people, leading them not only to work longer hours but often to work just
as hard at their appearance. Choice can open up the possibility of change at the level
of society, but only when it is no longer perceived as solely an individual prerogative.
The success of the ideology of choice in todays society has been in blinding people to
the fact that their actual choices are becoming severely limited by the social divisions
in society and that issues such as the organisation of labour, health and safety, and the
environment appear more and more beyond their choice. At the level of society we are
therefore losing the possibility of choice in terms of change in power relations as we
know them. Not surprisingly, the ideology of choice goes hand in hand with the New Age
ideology that promotes living in the moment and accepting things as they are.

One thing that the culture of choice inculcates, and may go unnoticed by many people
who are preoccupied with the task of fashioning themselves according to the precepts of
this pervasive ideology, is the fact that it goes hand in hand with the kind of individualism
on which neoliberalism thrives. As Salecl (2010) demonstrates so well, however, there is
plenty of evidence that suffering, especially in the form of a cluster of interrelated psychic
phenomena such as anxiety, self-doubt, depression and debilitating uncertainty
is inseparable from the culture of choice. Corroborating her insights, in his sustained
investigation of the hidden ties between depression, mourning and melancholia, Darian
Leader (2008: 1-2) highlights the negative side of modern individualism, where each
of us is taken to be an isolated agent, cut off from others and driven by competition for
goods and services in the market-place rather than by community and shared effort. It
is no accident that Leader uncovers the crucial role that communal ties and rituals have
traditionally played in coming to terms with loss through mourning, which is discouraged
in contemporary society (preoccupied as it is with quick fix pharmaceutical treatment
of what are symptoms, rather than underlying conditions).

What the present inquiry has shown, then, can be summarized as follows. As Salecl (2010)
and others have indicated, we live in a severely divided society, where, on the one hand,
capitalism benefits from the divisions, thriving on the individualistic ideology of choice
at every level, from product choice to service choice (like advice services), concomitantly

17 | PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015

generating uncertainty and feelings of failure in consumers, which, in their turn, generate
the need for new choices in the advice and self-help industries. And instead of addressing
the root of the problem the neoliberal organization of societies individuals attention
is conveniently diverted to themselves as being responsible for their failures and feelings
of inadequacy. What Parker (2011) has highlighted, that the typical subject of capitalism
is the obsessional neurotic which has here been understood in Freuds patho-analytic
sense of a pathology that resonates, and hence throws light on widespread patterns of
behaviour in normal society may be perceived as concentrating in itself the modes of
suffering identified by Salecl, Verhaeghe and Federici.

I would like to conclude this reflection on some of the kinds of suffering that seem to be
inseparably bound up with neoliberal capitalism today by drawing attention, briefly, to the
recent work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, alluded to at the outset in this article. In
Declarationthey articulate the global crisis of the present era in terms of four figures, or
subjectivities produced under conditions of what they call Empire (2001), or the new
sovereign economic and political power ruling the world. They summarise these figures as
follows (Hardt & Negri, 2012: 9): The triumph of neoliberalism and its crisis have shifted the
terms of economic and political life, but they have also operated a social, anthropological
transformation, fabricating new figures of subjectivity. The hegemony of finance and the
banks has produced the indebted. Control over information and communication networks
has created the mediatised. The security regime and the generalised state of exception
[a reference to Giorgio Agambens work B O] have constructed a figure prey to fear and
yearning for protection the securitised. And the corruption of democracy has forged a
strange, depoliticised figure, the represented. These subjective figures constitute the
social terrain on which and against which movements of resistance and rebellion must
act these movements have the ability not only to refuse these subjectivities but also to
invert them and create figures that are capable of expressing their independence and their
powers of political action.

Hardt and Negris elaboration on each of these subjectivities produced under current
socio-economic and political conditions, which are all intertwined, highlights just
how hamstrung people in todays world are by the power of capital. The indebted,
for example, is a figure that marks the general condition of being in debt today, and
their enumeration of all the levels and sites of debt (including house mortgages,
student loans, car-instalments and personal loans to pay any number of other debts)
resonates with the experience of most people today. Loans have indeed become the
primary means to be able to live in a social context. But more than that, apart from
welfare having turned into what they call debtfare, debt may be said to control
everything, from consumption to your very survival (a claim that echoes Deleuzes
[1992] observations on societies of control). Without exaggerating, Hardt and Negri

PINS [Psychology in Society] 48 2015 | 18

point out that it determines ones choices, such as those confronting you when you
finish your university study with a repayable loan, and have to find a job to be able to
pay off your debt, or being held captive to work uninterruptedly by a mortgage on an
apartment, lest you lose it. They compare debt to the work ethic, with the difference
that the latter is born within the subject, while debt starts as an external force, only
to invade ones subjectivity later. Under debt, for which you are responsible, guilt
(of a financial kind) becomes a form of life. The indebted is the contemporary,
non-dialectical counterpart of Hegels slave, and it has been spawned by neoliberal,
market-based capitalism.

In the light of the conditions of provenance of all of these modes of suffering and
hardship in contemporary societies, could anyone deny that they are inseparable
from the hegemonic neoliberal economic system? Furthermore, how long will it take
before a significant number of people will realise that, instead of being able to deliver
the fulfilment it routinely promises in advertising images of glamour and happiness
(Olivier, 2013), neoliberal capitalism is a source of unmitigated hardship and suffering?

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