"Leftists" doesn't point to just one way of thinking, feeling and acting does it? I suspect it's possible to find varying degrees of psychopathology among those self-described as leftists. The combination of a feeling of grandiosity with perception of the self as fragmented and completely controlled by external forces, for instance, is explained in Kleinian psychoanalysis as the product of mechanisms of defence against psychotic anxiety.
Psychotic anxiety? That's a new one on me, and I've read my Deleuze-Guattari.
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society."
Is this Melanie Klein or Dr. Irwin Corey?
Klein, by the way, also provides an account of the strong integrated ego relatively free from psychopathology. She identifies it with an idea of "wealth" very like Marx's.
"If in our earliest development we have been able to transfer our interest and love from our mother to other people and other sources of gratification, then, and only then, are we able in later life to derive enjoyment from other sources.
Remind me to take this up when I deal with the Brenner thesis applied to American slavery.
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
