The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it.

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Clinical psychiatry no longer uses the term neurosis, but it remains a vivid word. As Freud summarized the condition: “The ego has come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and of reality.” The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it. Satisfaction having been foreclosed long ago, he becomes a kind of hesitant, recessive, bemused personality. You might think of Woody Allen but it would do just as well to picture Al Gore, John Kerry, or Barack Obama. We liberal or left-wing citizen–clinicians feel that these men are decent, intelligent, and somewhat principled—that their desires are basically the right ones, their intentions more or less good—but that in the service of reality they must ignore the desires latent in their (and our) political unconscious. In deference to a punitive public superego, they sweep under the rug their real urges—which we’d like to think are for truth and justice—and thus come across, in classic neurotic fashion, as more or less castrated. In a way, the citizen–clinicians of the GOP agree with us: they too suspect that Obama is a radical at heart. The difference is that we doubt whether Obama is in communication with his heart anymore.



[From the article Politico-psychopathology: Neurocrats vs. the Grand Old Psychosis by Bejamin Kunkel which can be found here.]



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