New Forms of Self and Psychic Suffering Today and Their Implications for Psychoanalysis

In this article, I and my co-authors explore how neoliberalism has generated specific types of selfhood and psychological distress that have not been found in earlier epochs. Relying on Frankfurt School critical theory and relational psychoanalysis, we contend that contemporary Western life is characterised by fragmented, exhausted selves who require external support to carry on with the most essential activities.

Historical Progression of the Self

We trace three distinct eras of selfhood. In Freud’s era (19th-early 20th century), industrial capitalism demanded “repressive sublimation” - the violent suppression and redirected transformation of libidinal desires into productive labour. This generated neurotic conflict between unconscious desires and social demands. Welfare-state capitalism in Marcuse's era (mid-20th century) shifted towards “repressive de-sublimation”, compelling people to engage in prescribed consumer pleasures whilst upholding a façade of happiness and forcing the “empty self” to conform.

Today’s neoliberal era (1980s onwards) has created something qualitatively different: a flattened, fractured self characterised by the destruction of interiority itself. Through composite clinical vignettes, we identify the basic elements: deep chasms between outer functionality and inner turmoil, dependence on outside supports (substances, approval, addictions), obsessive attachment to productivity measures, and profound feelings of inescapability.

Systemic Pressures

The neoliberal system with its accelerated pace, hyper-competitive “meritocracy”, and individualisation of risk places untenable demands on us. Success requires the sacrifice of basic human needs, the appearance of invulnerability, and constantly striving for self-optimisation. This creates lives bereft of authentic connection - what we have called "relationshiplessness" - where people misattribute their suffering to personal failure rather than systemic forces. The resulting fatigue and fragmentation represent not just repressed desires but an utter erosion of coherent selfhood and agency.

Implications for Psychoanalysis

This cultural shift presents both challenges and opportunities for psychoanalytic practice. Traditional psychoanalysis, with its focus on intimacy, depth and meaning, is fundamentally at odds with neoliberal values. Patients often seek quick fixes to their problems - diagnoses, techniques, medication - rather than self-reflection. The therapeutic work is less about analysing unconscious conflicts and more about providing respite from repeated crisis and shoring up dissolving selves.

However, we contend that psychoanalysis can retain the possibility for resistance. It needs to move beyond false neutrality and toward a “three-person psychology”, in which the social context is given voice, so that patients learn to also relate their misery to social conditions and systems rather than only to individual failings. Psychoanalysis has the potential to facilitate the kind of critical self-reflexivity, and genuine human connection that challenges neoliberalism, cultivating the daily resistance necessary to develop new capacities for meaningful connection as opposed to the exiting disconnection perpetuated by the market logic.

Conclusion

In this paper, we propose that whereas neoliberalism has distorted personality structures and social ties more than previous eras - where repressions had enabled some individuation - psychoanalysis could elucidate these deformations and help us envision more humanising alternatives. This requires a relational ethics that challenges the socio-political realities that render depth psychological work increasingly difficult, yet simultaneously more necessary.