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Those most vulnerable to the dissimulation of incongruity would likely be individuals who have an impared capacity to distinguish their own needs from the demands of a coercive environment. Forced to falsify, to themselves and others, their beliefs, perceptions, and desires, they become insensitive to conflict and contradiction and thereby uncritically introject what would otherwise "stick in their throats." Their relationship to the world is one of compliance instead of elective compromise or resistance. Furthermore, to recognize conflict, especially in the rhetoric of an idealized social authority, is to threaten the unconscious fantasy such persons have of fusing with that authority. The psychological aim of this fantasied merger, it must be remembered, is to share in the idealized figure's perceived omnipotence.
Reification is the process or consequence of transforming the actions, properties, and relationships of people into those which resemble things. It is the obverse of the personification of commodities, which are imagined to act autonomously and with a will of their own. The root of both of these processes is located in the actual estrangement of the products of labor from their producers.
Psycholanalytic practice is, after all, nothing if not the highlighting of conflict, the deconstruction of the symptom that serves to mask opposing wishes. This may be one reason why early psychoanalysis was considered a subversive activity by totalitarian regimes of every persuasion, and why authorities in bourgeois-democratic societies sought so desperately to confine it to a medical specialty.
Psychic disturbances have a basis in unconscious conflicting forces to viewing social disturbances as the expression of conflicting class interests.
"The fetishism of commodities produces a fetishism of consciousness." - Lichtman
The conditions of economic life lead to an idealized representation of those conditions in the form of ideology that reproduces the same inversion of subject and object. Thus, ideology, in its reifying function, portrays the changeable, volitional activity of human beings, and the world constructed by this activity, as the immutable and fated unfolding of natural laws, no more subject to change than the speed of light and which stand equally outside of history. Reified inversions create the appearance of naturalness and atemporality which legitimates existing social conditions and the asymmetrical relations of power that generate them. In short, the world of reification is that magical real where prices "fall," inflation "goes up," and America "stands tall."
Marx: "It is an enchanted, perverted topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madam la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters, and at the same time directly as things."
Reification is the process or consequence of transforming the actions, properties, and relationships of people into those which resemble things. It is the obverse of the personification of commodities, which are imagined to act autonomously and with a will of their own. The root of both of these processes is located in the actual estrangement of the products of labor from their producers.
Psycholanalytic practice is, after all, nothing if not the highlighting of conflict, the deconstruction of the symptom that serves to mask opposing wishes. This may be one reason why early psychoanalysis was considered a subversive activity by totalitarian regimes of every persuasion, and why authorities in bourgeois-democratic societies sought so desperately to confine it to a medical specialty.
Psychic disturbances have a basis in unconscious conflicting forces to viewing social disturbances as the expression of conflicting class interests.
"The fetishism of commodities produces a fetishism of consciousness." - Lichtman
The conditions of economic life lead to an idealized representation of those conditions in the form of ideology that reproduces the same inversion of subject and object. Thus, ideology, in its reifying function, portrays the changeable, volitional activity of human beings, and the world constructed by this activity, as the immutable and fated unfolding of natural laws, no more subject to change than the speed of light and which stand equally outside of history. Reified inversions create the appearance of naturalness and atemporality which legitimates existing social conditions and the asymmetrical relations of power that generate them. In short, the world of reification is that magical real where prices "fall," inflation "goes up," and America "stands tall."
Marx: "It is an enchanted, perverted topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madam la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters, and at the same time directly as things."