What New Psychic Economy?
摘要
According to several psychoanalysts, Externatus’s society replaces coercion with seduction, and psychic repression with a rhetoric of freedom. They describe this buccal society—where the mouth is used more for consuming than for speaking—as “a society of ‘like’” (pleasure and/or imitation). In their view, contemporary technologies are driving a shift toward precarious subjectivities. Some speak of a new psychic economy, particularly in Western societies, whose archetype aligns more closely with a perverse structure (denial of limits) than with a neurotic one (no access to full jouissance). Others point to a pre-Oedipal archetype, one that keeps all developmental potentials open without inscription into a clearly defined life vector. This aborted individuation leaves the subject suspended in indeterminacy, potentially resembling autism or some new psychic structure. The most concerned psychoanalysts refer to structures bordering on psychosis: borderline personalities, absence of markers, diminished desire, false selves, and fragmented identities. If the symbolic law deteriorates to such a degree, might we be approaching psychosis, particularly what psychiatrists call cold psychosis, in which the subject does not appear overtly mad but lives without meaningful relationships? Beyond neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, this period is marked by a diversification of psychic economies.