“The Neoliberal Personality”

Today, Habermas’s action-theoretic reformulation of Critical Theory seems neither capable of understanding the objective crisis of Europe, in particular, nor the rise of authoritarianism, more generally, from Ukraine, Hungary and Poland to Turkey and India and Egypt.

The account of the “colonization of the life-world” by the social subsystems of money and power engendering defensive responses by social movements—in defense of contexts of symbolically meaningful interaction possesses—in my opinion, has little explanatory power in explaining the depth of the crisis that has gripped the Eurozone or the ripple effects of the 2007–08 financial crisis in the United States. Moreover, the abandonment of psychoanalysis, since Knowledge and Human Interests, renders this drastically refashioned version of Critical theory impotent when it comes to understanding the subjective or considerable socio-psychological appeal of the right populism of AfD, Pediga or UKIP. It also seems unable to provide a convincing understanding of the manner in which a significant proportion of the US population identifies at a profoundly affective level with the figure of Donald J. Trump.

The normative political theory of recognition as developed by Axel Honneth seems even less capable of coming to terms with our contemporary situation for reasons that my friend John Abromeit indicates, namely: like so much contemporary normative liberal political theory, it simply does not have a concept of crisis within socio-economic or political institutions. I will come back to this below. Unlike Habermas who has been a public intellectual, nonpareil, in the European public sphere since at least his 1953 critique of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, figures like Honneth do not seem to want to make interventions beyond the seminar room, although Honneth’s confrontation with Peter Sloterdijk over the latter’s advocacy of neoliberal tax policy for example, was certainly important and laudable. And, of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but the question does then arise as to what makes such a critical theory critical, as Nancy Fraser once phrased it. According to his progammatic essay of 1937, Max Horkheimer argues that, unlike traditional theory, Critical Theory emerges and self-consciously intervenes in a given social and historical constellation. Critical Theory continues the radical Enlightenment tradition insofar as it evinces an explicit interest in human emancipation from structural forms of heteronomy.

Honneth’s inability to address crisis might have to do with the fact that his conception of the social is more indebted to Durkheim than to Marx, hence there is a displacement of the conception of crisis by “social pathology.” One could say that for Durkheim social pathology is the exception while for Marx, in class societies, it is the rule; for the former its presence requires explanation, for the latter its absence. Accordingly, Honneth refuses to understand capitalist society as inherently antagonistic but rather sees “modernity as beset by “paradoxes.” The idea here is that moral and legal norms take time to catch up with underlying transformation in social relations. Such an unwillingness to address the social in terms of constitutive crises is endemic amongst liberal intellectuals and academics and this confirms the right populist suspicion about their basic detachment from the public life of the citizen as such. Such a lacuna is exemplified by his lectures on the crucial conception of “reification” in 2005.[1] Honneth correctly situates his reading of the concept in relation to the dominant understandings of it in the critical Marxism of Georg Lukács and the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger. According to Lucien Goldmann, the latter constituted a reply to the former. So far so good. However, unlike both of his predecessors, who understand the problem of reification in terms of specific sorts of crises––the socio-economic crisis of capitalism and the on-going “ontological” crisis of the metaphysical tradition, respectively––for Honneth, following Stanley Cavell, reification seems to amount to basically a category mistake or a failure to ground “knowledge” in “acknowledgment” (“Kennen” in “Annerkennen”) Such an error can simply be rectified on an individual level but has no real connection to larger social, economic and political forces and structures. This is entirely consistent with a claim he once made in a conference paper that when Starbucks began calling its workers “associates,” this amounted to a substantive gain in “recognition.” In other words, for Honneth there seems to be little or no awareness of the structural features of the social persist in the reification of human beings, not least the way in which, according to Moishe Postone, “abstract labour” is the fundamental form of social mediation in contemporary capitalist societies.[2] Such a form of social mediation would therefore contribute, structurally, to the subsumption of persons under category of “thing.”[3] Therefore only transforming social arrangements rather than subjective dispositions can address the problem of reification. To adapt a formulation from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the problem of reification isn’t a problem to be solved by way of a subjective act of situating “knowledge” within “acknowledgment” of the other, but rather dissolved by way of a transformation of institutionally mediated patterns of social action.

As I point out in the forthcoming book that I have edited with Johan Hartle, Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle,[4] the concepts of reification and spectacle are important elaborations of Marx’s famous analysis of the commodity form in Volume I of Capital, published exactly 150 years ago. Indeed, as Anselm Jappe has argued, Debord’s reception of Marx anticipates in important ways the “new readings” [neue Lektüre] of Marx emphasizing the problem of value form.[5] The Situationist International’s conception of spectacle or the idea, as defined by Guy Debord, of “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image,” in particular, helps us understand, for example, the strategy of organizations such as ISIS in the way they exploit the mainstream media to spread images of mass violence and therefore terror. Moreover, it is simply not possible to understand the success of figures like Trump, and before him, Ronald Reagan and Silvio Berlusconi, without understanding the tremendous objective power of the culture industry. There is also precious little insight into the subjective tendency of individuals to “escape from freedom” to use Erich Fromm’s description of the burgeoning support for National Socialism in the 1930s. Surely it would be incorrect to say that the social and historical conditions that we see today are the same as in the 1930s and that these conditions will necessarily give rise to movements identical to those of European fascism. However, there are some deeply troubling parallels.

Honneth’s reification book was published in 2008, right in the midst of the most serious financial crisis since the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Without exaggerating, one could say that the crash and the way it was handled by the Obama administration—bailouts for those firms that were apparently “too big to fail” and bonuses for the very executives responsible for the near total collapse of the global financial system, combined with foreclosures on the houses of hundreds of thousands of Americans—has contributed to the ressentiment upon which Trump has capitalized so effectively. One would have expected the heir to the tradition of Critical Theory to have had something incisive to say about this historical moment even if—to be fair– the lectures were delivered a couple of years earlier. Nonetheless, the publication of the book just shows it to be rather out of step with the historical moment that we’re in today. In contrast, Honneth insists that the logic of the capitalist market per se has little to do with the phenomenon of reification, which he understands on the analogy of a tennis match. Here one tends to agree with Nancy Fraser that Honneth distorts Critical Theory “beyond all recognition.” [6]

Returning to the problem of “culture industry,” as both Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt suggest in different ways[7] one of its effects is to severely undermine genuine experience and the power of (reflective) judgment that lies at the very heart of the capacity to think. Both the capacity for experience and reflective judgment play a key role in dealing with the otherness of the realm of politics in a constructive way. Without this capacity, far from orienting themselves towards “mutual understanding” with the other, citizens look for confirmations of their own biases, inclination, values, etc. While, recently, social media, Face Book in particular, has come under attack for creating so-called “echo-chambers” within which individuals become increasingly surrounded by like-minded opinion, where their world-views are simply reflected back at them, this phenomenon is co-extensive with the culture industry itself. The reason that Adorno emphasizes the encounter with the autonomous work of art to such a high degree is because such an encounter actually destabilizes our subjectivity and causes us to experience the world in a dramatically altered way. Similarly, for Arendt, reflective aesthetic judgment is the most politically potent of Kant’s concepts because in such a form of judgment we do not subsume particulars under given universals but must generate universals out of particulars that we are encountering for the first time. The political space is the space of possible new beginnings.[8]

So, contemporary Critical Theory falls well short of the extremely important early contributions of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Pollock, Fromm and Lowenthal. What was so valuable about the first generation of Critical Theory was its dynamic synthesis of social theory and psychoanalysis which enabled it to produce convincing and one can confidently say enduring accounts of why the Left failed and why the Right was so successful in mobilizing a mass social base in the 1930’s. Despite the best efforts of Habermas and Honneth to marginalize the contributions of the First Generation for its supposedly “metaphysical” assumptions, that it remains trapped in the “paradigm of consciousness philosophy”, the work produced by this generation can be of enormous help in coming to terms with the growing rise of authoritarianism globally today, which, in my view, is profoundly connected to the dislocations and upheavals that neo-liberal globalization has produced. Neoliberal globalization has also, as figures like David Harvey[9] and Thomas Piketty[10] have shown produced has obscene levels of socio-economic inequality. Combined with the neo-conservative agenda of redefining the post-Cold War enemy in terms of what Samuel P. Huntington calls the “clash of civilizations,” neoliberalism creates the perfect storm within which authoritarianism can stage an uncanny return. In other words, the collision of a neoliberalism supposedly oriented towards liberating markets from “externalities” and neoconservatism supposedly oriented towards liberating polities from “tyrannies” creates the conditions in which something like the Trump phenomenon becomes possible.

Trump and the European authoritarian populists have been very successful in laying the blame for the growing alienation and inequality produced by the neoliberal order at the feet of migrants and refugees. The existential threat people experience in their everyday lives, a sense of what I have elsewhere called “ontological insecurity,”[11] and attendant anxiety leaves them susceptible to the call to strengthen political borders—to erect Fortress Europa or to Trump’s plan to build a wall on the US’s southern border with Mexico, engage in the “extreme vetting” of immigrants and to perhaps ban Muslim immigration altogether. Psychologically speaking, the analogue of political border of the state is, of course, a narcissistic identification with the community emphatically not defined in terms of what Habermas likes to call a “post-national constellation” but in increasingly particularistic terms, as the “national” or ethnic, religious or linguistic identity. This is precisely how neoliberalism and neoconservatism converge to produce authoritarian populism which has been exceedingly successful in translating an atmopsheric anxiety into the concrete fear of a determinate enemy—the enemy being defined, to quote Carl Schmitt, as that entity who “threatens our entire way of life.”

Here, much more valuable than contemporary “Critical” Theory are the Studies in Prejudice Series, produced in the 1940s, especially works such as Löwenthal and Guterman’s Prophet’s of Deceit[12] where the authors show the manner in which the “agitator,” unlike the figures of the “reformist” and “revolutionary”—who, each in their own way, identify structural causes of social contradictions and thus adequate forms of amelioration—seeks to magnify them and lay the responsibility for them at the feet of specific groups via a strategy of “personalization.” Another important text, which formed the basis for the important research conducted at Berkeley in the forties and published under the title of The Authoritarian Personality is, of course, Erich Fromm’s vitally important work, Escape from Freedom, alluded to above, in which Fromm combines psychoanalytical, sociological, and political theoretical insights. A central line of argumentation in this book, published in 1941, is that the negative freedom—freedom from existing forms of political and ecclesiastical authority–resulting from massive social and economic upheavals that is not ultimately grounded in a positive, democratic conception of freedom geared to autonomy leads to ambivalence towards the idea of freedom as such. It leads to as a tendency to renounce it by subordination to a supreme power (God) or a powerful leader.

But while in many respects the individual has grown, has developed mentally and

Emotionally, and participates in cultural achievements in a degree unheard of before, the lag between “freedom from” and “freedom to” has grown too. The result of this disproportion between freedom from any tie and the lack of possibilities for the positive realization of freedom and individuality has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference.[13]

In a sense, what Fromm, and the Frankfurt School as a whole, provide is a social-psychological analysis of the potential power of the political theology of a figure like Carl Schmitt.

In my work I try to understand the phenomenon of support for Trump (think of, for example, the 53% of white women voters who voted for him) in terms of what Adorno, following post-Freudian psychoanalysis, calls “identification with the aggressor.”[14] The problem is as follows: Trump clearly projects power, identifies with and defers to the powerful, and hates “losers.” This is made clear by his fawning over Putin and his reality-TV persona on the Apprentice. There is something here, however, that does not quite add up. The figure who becomes famous for repeating, ad nauseam, the line “You’re Fired” (which he reiterated in his Press Conference the morning after Obama’s farewell address) is going to actually create good, middle-class jobs for US citizens? The man who has admitted to sexually abusing and disrespecting (white) women wins a plurality of their support. How do we explain this?

An answer can be located in the work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst and one-time member of Freud’s inner-circle, Sandor Ferenczi, who articulated the idea of the “identification with the aggressor.” This idea was later taken up by Anna Freud, and she is often referred to as its originator in her 1936 book, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense.[15] Ferenczi is an interesting figure, not least because he is credited for challenging Freud’s controversial abandonment of the seduction theory, which, of course, paved the way for his equally contested placement of the Oedipal conflict at the very heart of psychoanalysis, almost as a kind of Procrustean bed into which every explanation must be made to fit. He is also credited with the being one of the originators of relational psychoanalysis or the shift from a view of the individual as essentially monadological––as developing its relations to others as an extension of an originally auto-erotic posture––to dialogical, which is to say, emphasizing the centrality of the early pre-Oedipal relation of infant and mother, stretching all the way back to the infant’s uterine existence.

I suggest that Adorno for whom the idea of the ‘identification with the aggressor” was a key idea running through all of his thinking and was solidified in his experience as an émigré intellectual in the United States during the war years. I argue that reading Adorno and Ferenczi together might enable us to rescue Adorno’s invaluable insights into the nature of the ‘authoritarian personality” by loosening its reliance on questionable orthodox Freudian categories and also up-date it such that we can speak of a “neo-liberal personality” that responds not to Keyensian welfare state capitalism—which was Adorno’s historical horizon—but rather the present form of neoliberal capitalism. It can help us, in other words, answer the question as to why people are often such willing participants in their own domination. Indeed, Adorno So, I suggest Adorno can be read in terms of Ferenzci’s, not Anna Freud’s conception of the “identification of the aggressor.”

The idea goes like this. In contrast to Anna Freud’s understanding of the term, which suggests a momentary impersonation of the aggressor––in a sense reflecting back to him his own aggression as a way of feeling for that time more secure in the moment––Ferenczi’s use of the term entails, according to psychoanalyst, Jay Frankel, a “pervasive change in someone’s perceptual world…[and] about actually protecting oneself than about simply feeling more secure.”[16] Drawing on his clinical experience with adults who had experienced a deeply traumatic encounter with an abusive adult in early childhood, Ferenzci reasoned that “identification with the aggressor” is a typical response to conditions of pervasive social and emotional insecurity. Ferenczi’s particular understanding of the concept is especially attractive for our purposes, insofar as a central feature of neoliberal capitalism entails the direct destruction of an entire social security network through privatization and commodification, financialization, crisis management, and upward redistribution of wealth. Such processes have created the conditions of the casualization and increasing precariousness of labour. The combined effect of these four processes of neo-liberalization is profoundly traumatic, insofar as they deepen and accelerate the struggle for existence that has always constituted the insecurity that characterizes capitalism at its core. This is when our world seems on the verge of breaking down, when the basic meaningful structures of the life-world seem fragile and brittle.

It is a response to a situation in which, to quote Frankel again,

we have lost our sense that the world will protect us, when we are in danger with no chance of escape. What we do is make ourselves disappear. This response goes beyond dissociation from present experience: like chameleons, we blend into the world around us, into the very thing that threatens us, in order to protect ourselves. We stop being ourselves and transform ourselves into someone else’s image of us.[17]

There are three dimensions of the identification with the aggressor that distinguishes it from Anna Freud’s, rather than a displaced aggression, what we find is compliance, accommodation, and submission. And this works in the following way, as explained by Frankel:

First, we mentally subordinate ourselves to the attacker. Second, this subordination lets us divine the aggressor’s desires—get into the attacker’s mind to know just what he is thinking or feeling, so that we can anticipate exactly what he is about to do and know how to maximize our own survival. And, third, we do the thing that we feel will save us: usually we make ourselves vanish through submission and a precisely attuned compliance with the attacker.[18]

In response, far from repudiating or violently repulsing the malevolent adult, the child acquiesces and reflects back to the adult what the latter requires of her. As in the Stockholm Syndrome, the child identifies with the abusive adult. In addition to the process of identifying with the adult as a threatening external object, as an additional mechanism of defense, the child also introjects or transfers from external to internal reality the adult’s guilt as a form of mastery of a force that, if it is not controlled, could actually threaten to destroy the integrity of the child’s ego. In particular, what the child introjects is the adult’s guilt, by, herself, taking the blame for the event. Here, significantly, the logic is deepened and exacerbated by the tendency of a neoliberal capitalism to rely increasingly on debt to finance consumption and higher education, not to mention state expenditures. For the individual, increasing debt means, psychologically, guilt for, as Nietzsche showed so incisively in the On Genealogy of Morals, debt (Schulden) and guilt (Schuld) are intrinsically linked. (Maurizio Lazzarto in his books The Making of Indebted Man and Governing by Debt has written extensively about this in the context of the European imbroglio.) Moreover, the child undergoes a process, particularly at the moment of assault, of splitting and dissociation—a distancing of that part of the child that experienced the violence.

We can understand these three moments in terms of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment’s presentation of the formation of subjectivity, an account that draws heavily upon Nietzsche in its crucial account of the “introversion of sacrifice.” First, faced with a social world marked by a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” a state of nature that is in actual fact, the historical reality of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the individual–understood as homo economicu–must strengthen or harden himself up in order to survive. He must subordinate himself to and, therefore, identify precisely with the external imperatives of the prevailing performance principle of this order by making himself competitive in relation to others. At the same time, for the individuals to do this successfully, such an adaptation to the outside must be introjected or internalized. The individual must, therefore, renounce or at least indefinitely defer the claim to a libidinally fulfilled life. The psychic cost of this dialectic of identification with and introjection of the external forces in the interest of self-preservation is a diminishment in the capacity of the self for experience and, ultimately, action. The life that is to be preserved at all costs becomes, paradoxically, turned into “going through the motions.” This is the basic paradox identified by Horkheimer and Adorno at the very heart of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” the logic of self-preservation destroys the very ‘self” it is meant to preserve. In other words, life, as Adorno puts it, “does not live;” neoliberal subjects become, like the popular television show, “the walking dead.”.

It seems to me that an account that draws on Ferenczi’s notion of the “identification with the aggressor” can help us avoid some of the problems that attend Adorno’s account of the transition from liberal to state capitalism, the ensuing decentering of the sources of paternal authority and the emergence of the authoritarian or sado-masochistic personality type, characterized by obsequious obedience to authorities and unrestrained violence towards those with comparatively less socio-economic power . Moreover, in contrast to a state capitalism that was premised upon the idea that capitalism embodied a contradiction inherent in a social form geared to the domination of exchange over use value, a contradiction between over-production and under-consumption, the doctrine at the heart of neo-liberalism, namely monetarism, asserted an identity of interests between the power of money and society as a whole. That creating a “favourable environment for capital by regulating the money supply would benefit society as a whole. This is, of course, exacerbated by the culture industry and the cult of celebrity that it produces through which citizens increasingly live vicariously through the lives of the rich and famous, often through reality television programs such as The Apprentice. In my view, the tripartite structure of identification, introjection, and dissociation can help us, at least in part, to understand the paradox that, with deepening inequality and social insecurity, we see the emergence not of a strong, radical democratic opposition but, rather, authoritarian parties and movements. More specifically, it helps us address the paradox that I mentioned above: that the very person who disparages “losers” is the one who will save them; the very person who has become famous on television for declaring “You’re fired” is the one who will put Americans back to work in a revived manufacturing sector; the very person who admits to sexually assaulting and disrespecting (white) women receives a plurality of their votes.

The on-going crisis conditions of the neo-liberal order constitute it as radically more insecure than the one it replaces insofar as it comes into being through a roll back of formal and informal networks of solidarity and social security. It can, therefore, be understood to be experienced as profoundly traumatic—since Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark about the “short, sharp, shock,” it is often referred to as a kind of “shock therapy” and, of course, six years prior to Thatcher’s victory, there was the US coup in Chile that set up the first brutal laboratory for such shock therapy in Chile, overseen by Milton Friedman and the “Chicago boys.” As a way of surviving such shock-like conditions, subjects could be said to evince a tendency to identify overwhelmingly––not with those social forces that would constitute a fundamental challenge to that order––but rather, paradoxically, with the very forces that maintain, and benefit from, those structures. We are going to see in the coming months the misery that results from the fact that millions of US citizens are going to lose their health care coverage with the scrapping of the Affordable Care Act as there does seem to be anything to replace it, contrary to Trump’s pronouncements. Citizens could be said to introject the aggressor’s blame for the very conditions of the crisis, itself. At the very outset, from Chile, in which the coup against Allende, constituted the first neo-liberal laboratory, to Ronald Regan’s attack on the Air Traffic Controllers to Thatcher’s attack on the Miners, working class organizations—“Big Labour—are blamed for the social and economic crisis of the Keynesian order and, of course, would have to soften if not entire renounce their demands henceforth. And, this entails, the third aspect of “identification with the aggressor,” which is to say, a dissociation from its own interests. Can there be any doubt that a Trump presidency would entail, in contrast to that of a Bernie Sanders, an exponential deepening of misery for the majority whom globalization has simply left behind. Yet, mimetic identification of the weak with strength appears to be the strategy for survival. In turn, such an identification generates increasing hostility and violence towards those groups and individuals who are identified with weakness, those who are particularly marginalized: the homeless, migrants workers, immigrants and refugees. The socially excluded can take vicarious pleasure in the bullying posture of a United States that expels Muslims and builds a wall on its southern border with Mexico to keep out the “rapists, murderers and drug dealers”; the proverbial “garbage” of Mexican society. But the key question that arises is whether in “identifying with the aggressor,” Trump’s supporters are identifying with a figure who directly threatens them or with an ally who protects the ethno-national tribe from the danger posed by its external enemies such as “political Islam.” In a way, this is a false opposition insofar as—and Trump in his reality televsion role in The Apprentice embodies this—the ultimate form of aggression isn’t the individual himself but rather the exploitative and oppressive social order as a whole that Trump seems to personify. Under the guise of confronting the inequities of the neoliberal order, both Trump and the pro-Brexit Tories in the UK will actually deepen the hold of this order on its citizens via an acceleration of further tax cuts, labour market deregulation and redoubled austerity and privatization.

Notes

[1] Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at An Old Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

[2] Time, Labour and Social Domination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[3] See Rüdiger Danneman, “Georg Lukacs’ Theory of Reification and the Idea of Socialism”, trans. Andreas Kahre and Samir Gandesha, Contours, Spring, 2017,

[4] Samir Gandesha and Johan Hartle (eds.) (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press: forthcoming).

[5] Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1999).

[6] See Nancy Fraser “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).

[7] Adorno in a variety of writings, most significantly the Culture Industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1988): 120-167 and Arendt in “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance”, in Between Past and Future, (London: Penguin, 2006): 194-222.

[8] See Samir Gandesha, “Homeless Philosophy,” Arendt and Adorno: Political and philosophical Investigation, Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (eds.) (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012): 248-79.

[9] In his book A Brief History of Neo-liberalism (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2007), Harvey shows the way in which neoliberalism entails a constellation of processes: privatization, de-regulation, “accumulation by dispossession” and an upward re-distribution of wealth.

[10] Capital in the Twenty-First Century , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014)

[11] See Samir Gandesha, “The Political Semiosis of Populism” Semiotic Review of Books Vol. 13, 3, (2003): 1-7

[12]Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study in the Techniques of the American Agitator (Pacific Book Club, 1970).

[13] Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom.

[14] “From the Authoritarian to the Neo-Liberal Personality,” paper presented at “Der aufrechte Gang im windscheifen Kapitalismus” conference at the Nietzsche Kollege in Weimar and at the Freud Museum in London in January, 2016. It will be appearing in the journal Constellations later this year. An early attempt to get to grips with this was “The Political Semiosis of Populism” in the Semiotic Review of Books Vol. 13, 3, (2003): 1-7

[15] (London: Karnac Books, 1992).

[16] Jay Frankel, “Exploring Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life and the Therapeutic Relationship,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, (12): 102.

[17] Jay Frankel, “Exploring Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life and the Therapeutic Relationship,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, (12): 103.

[18] Ibid.