It's interesting that Jonathan Rowe's article of several years ago is again
making the rounds on the internet. It also showed up a couple of days ago on
the PEN-L (progressive economist) list. Rowe uses a pair of analogies with
psycho-analysis and medicine that could bear literal elaboration: "How such
agile and ambitious minds could drift so far out of touch with daily
reality, is a question which merits the attentions of our most astute
psychologists." and "Could it be that in industrial societies, human
distress is increasingly a form of iatrogenic disease - the doctors in this
case being economists?"
1. "How such agile and ambitious minds could drift so far out of touch with
daily reality, is a question which merits the attentions of our most astute
psychologists."
Would Freud be astute enough? As it turns out, the drift of the "agile and
ambitious minds" of economists exactly fits the textbook case of
*repression* as theorized by Freud in several articles, notably his articles
on "Repression"(1915), "The Unconscious"(1915) and "Beyond the Pleasure
Principle"(1920).
The following passage from Beyond the Pleasure Principle gives a compressed
account of Freud's theory about what the organism tries to accomplish by
means of repression:
"*Protection against* stimuli is an almost more important function for the
living organism than *reception of* stimuli . . . The excitations coming
from within are, however, in their intensity and in other, qualitative,
respects -- in their amplitude, perhaps -- more commensurate with the
system's method of working than the stimuli which stream in from the
external world. This state of things produces two definite results. First,
the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure predominate over all external
stimuli. And secondly, a particular way is adopted of dealing with any
internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure:
there is a tendendcy to treat them as though they were acting, not from the
inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield
against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them. This is
the origin of *projection*, which is destined to play such a large part in
the causation of pathological processes."
The mechanism of repression is almost too byzantine to summarize briefly,
but it involves, firstly, the substitution of an external phobia to take the
place of the anxiety-causing internal drive and subsequently an endless
repetition of substituting for the substitute. Although economists concern
themselves with the *elasticity* of substitution, I've yet to come across
much acknowledgement of the possibility that some such substitution may be,
as Freud suggested, PATHOGENIC.
The repression of key economics texts and the substitution of vulgar
apologetics is endemic to the *discipline* of economics. The process of
repression/substitution is so fundamental to economics that it would be more
clinically appropriate to refer to the discourse frankly as an "anxiety
hysteria" rather than "discipline". From this perspective, the GDP is not
simply an "inadequate concept", it is a hysterical projection -- a chimera.
The GDP simply has no theoretical standing in economics (this can be readily
documented from the source texts -- see for example remarks by Simon
Kuznets). It is, rather, symptomatic of a *phobic flight* from political
economy's own theory and evidence.
Of course, this diagnosis of GDP as symptom doesn't say much for Rowe's
project of constructing an alternative indicator of "genuine progress". What
could it possibly mean to educate the patient in the production of
"healthier" symptoms? This sounds like what Freud referred to as a
transference neurosis -- "*repeat*[ing] the repressed material as a
contemporary experience instead of . . . *remembering* it as something
belonging to the past". The psycho-analytical therapy for the neurosis of
economics (of which the GDP is a symptom) would seem to involve uncovering
the repressed impulse and, as Freud suggests, "to force as much as possible
into the channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as
repetition."
This is easier said than done. There is an additional irony here in that
mainstream economics purports to be about the satisfaction of psychological
impulses -- that is to say, the pleasure principle -- but it takes flight
from the implication of an economic "beyond the pleasure principle", a
compulsion to repeat.
2. "Could it be that in industrial societies, human distress is increasingly
a form of iatrogenic disease - the doctors in this case being economists?"
Rowe's second analogy acquires an extra measure of menace from the
suggestion that not only are the "doctors" inducing disease "unknowingly"
but they do so *compulsively* as the symptom of their professional neurotic
disorder. Sure, it would be nice if we could "cure" the economists, but what
does this say about the rest of us -- submitting passively to a
disease-inducing "treatment" administered by certified crackpots?
To be fair to the economists, they are after all only the mouthpieces (and
eventually the scapegoats?) for an enormous collective repression. And not
just simple repression -- but SURPLUS repression. As Herbert Marcuse wrote,
"Civilization has to defend itself against the spector of a world which
could be free."
"[T]he closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the
constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need
for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established
order of domination dissolve."
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
