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How could it be otherwise in a system whose basic principle is that production is directed by the interest in maximal profit and not by the interest in maximal usefulness for human beings?
The clientele of psychoanalysts are, largely, liberal members of the middle and upper-middle classes, for whom religion has ceased to play an effective role, and who have no passionately held political convictions. For them no god, emperor, pope, rabbi, or charismatic political leader fills the void. The psychoanalyst becomes a mixture of guru, scientist, father, priest, or rabbi; he does not demand hard tasks, he is friendly, he dissolves all the real problems of life—social, economic, political, religious, moral, philosophical—into psychological ones. Thus he reduces them to the status of
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becomes simple, ac-countable, manageable, and comfortable when it is reduced to this bourgeois mini-cosmos.
On whom am I dependent? What are my main fears? Who was I meant to be at birth? What were my goals and how did they change? What were the forks of the road where I took the wrong direction and went the wrong way? What efforts did I make
to correct the error and return to the right way? Who am I now, and who would I be if I had always made the right decisions and avoided crucial errors? Whom did I want to be long ago, now, and in the future? What is my image of myself? What is the image I wish others to have of me? Where are the discrepancies between the two images, both between themselves and with what I sense is my real self? Who will I be if I continue to live as I am living now? What are the conditions responsible for the development as it happened? What are the alternatives for further development open to me now? What
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but often what they say is glorified gossip about themselves and others, using psychological terms and concepts instead of the less sophisticated old-fashioned gossip.
Man today, wearing the mask of a giant, has become a weak, helpless being dependent on the machines he made, and hence on the leaders who guarantee the proper functioning of the society that produces the machines, dependent on a well-functioning business, frightened to death of losing all the props, of being “a man without rank and without title,” of just being, of being challenged by the question “Who am I?”
