Forever children: Narcissism and the resiliency of modern capitalism

Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses of modern capitalist society that approach the study of human behavior and thinking from a psychoanalytic perspective dominantly identify ideological manipulation and mystification as the variables most responsible for the resiliency of modern capitalism. On the basis of an oedipally centered paradigm of psychic development, many of these writings conclude that oedipal repression introduces within human character structures an ideological weakness that is self-servingly manipulated by capitalist authorities.;Yet, oedipally centered paradigms rest on a faulty picture of the prior developmental phase of primary narcissism. Hence, using a revised theory of human development we will find that the behavioral and thinking patterns that most Marxists associate in their totality with the phenomenon of false consciousness are indicative instead of the continued influence, on adult behavior and thinking, of an archaic and narcissistic mental framework.;Furthermore, in light of these premises we will identify the capitalist market of commodities and common consumerist experiences as the fundamental sources of a particularly resilient and positive disposition towards modern capitalist life. By specularly reflecting the dominant structure and content of narcissistic fantasies, capitalist consumer culture enables many individuals to engage in a intensively pleasurable type of fantasy play through which narcissistic yearnings are symbolically satisfied and the sexual anxieties produced by the oedipalization of human desire easily appeased.;Therefore, from a narcissistic perspective of human psychic development capitalist consumption effectively reproduces contemporary capitalist conditions by: (1) sustaining the required consumption rates through market fantasy games, (2) offering an arena of emotional refueling which compensates for most workers' generally unsatisfactory experience within capitalist production and (3) reproducing a predominantly positive ideological disposition towards capitalism in children from which workers prejudicially approach capitalist production.;It is concluded that people's inherent psychic predisposition towards self-mystification, the enduring ideological and behavioral effects of archaic narcissistic yearnings and their interaction with the arena of capitalist consumption hold greater theoretical relevance for explaining the resiliency of modern capitalism than the possible presence of ideological mystification or manipulation in contemporary capitalist society.