Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on February 5, 2025. It was translated into English from French by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
The contemporary period, which has been described as hypermodern, produces identity ideologies that are part of a Manichean and victim-based vision of social life. They reduce human relationships to dynamics of domination—systemic, hidden, and anonymous; unconscious yet lacking a clear subject—which, in turn, demand constant scrutiny and deconstruction. This activism is embodied in particular in a hypermoralization of social life, which tends to infiltrate all areas, from the public sphere to intimate relationships.
But what seems to distinguish it from other forms of total morality, and which is specific to the hypermodern era, is its autonomous, and no longer heteronomous, character. Because here, moral condemnation is no longer stated in the name of a transcendent collective principle—God, the Fatherland, the Revolution, etc.—but under the pressure of individual issues. Unlike traditional Puritanism, neo-Puritanism is not driven by the anxiety of guilt determined by an extrinsic morality but by shame— a more archaic affect rooted in a narcissistic essence, fraught with depressive and (self-)destructive potential. This mutation must be placed in the general context of a weakening of the narcissistic-identity foundations of individuals in contemporary societies. Clinical practices in mental health, in psychotherapy practices as well as in psychiatric institutions, are obviously not impervious to this. I propose to identify some of the effects of contemporary identity ideologies on practices psy.
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Hatred of difference
The hypermoralization of social life determines a hatred of difference, which is demonstrated in particular by a shift in the use of the word discrimination: any difference tends to be perceived as oppression. The search for ideological purity, fueled by the narcissistic issues that underlie these new moralities, imposes a distrust of any difference experienced as violence or an offense. This translates into a search for specularity, for sameness, which obviously influences the modalities of the meeting between a patient and a therapist. This is how we have seen in recent years an increase in the number of therapists claiming to have this or that community affiliation in order to claim to be more safe, inclusive, and friendly than others. They pretend to believe that resemblance to a patient would be a guarantee of empathy and therapeutic effectiveness; it most often only promotes seduction and confusion. We have even seen the birth of associations bringing together practitioners, no longer around a theoretical orientation or a therapeutic method, but on the basis of ideologized identity criteria. These hypermodern shrinks respond, with this new offer, to the growing demand of patients to turn to therapists who resemble them.
Access to differentiation is a crucial issue in psychic development. It conditions the emergence of the symbolic function, which allows the subjective appropriation of lived experience. To feel that he exists, the baby must learn to represent the maternal object, which implies losing it as an extension of oneself in order to encounter it as a differentiated object: loss, symbolization, differentiation, and subjectivation, are inextricably linked in psychic life, and are brought back into play within the clinical framework. We measure how much the sameness and the hatred of difference from which it proceeds risk harming the patient’s relaunch of a subjective appropriation of his history, which is the basis of the therapeutic process. By choosing his shrink based on an identity criterion, the patient deprives himself of a clinical framework based on neutrality, a condition for analyzing the transference: it is only by ignoring—as much as possible—the identity and opinions of his therapist that the patient can make him play in fantasy the role of the various characters who populate his psychic life, and free himself from them if necessary. By going to see a shrink who resembles him, the patient exposes himself to identifying with their common attribute, to the detriment of the gap, the difference, the singularity. The risk is to promote or reinforce the false self, that is to say an identity facade dictated by the anxiety of abandonment and cut off from its impulsive roots. Psychotherapy is then reduced to an operation of mutual seduction and identity assignment, where, on the contrary, we would like it to contribute to supporting psychic autonomy and the moving play of identifications, to promote creativity, the feeling of authenticity, and the capacity for a living encounter with others.
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Hatred of the unconscious
The clinical setting is an encounter with otherness in two ways: that of the clinician, but also theforeign in itself. However, contemporary hypermoralization implies a distrust of psychic life in its unconscious dimension insofar as it escapes any effort of self-control and moral re-education. Because the unconscious, postulated by psychoanalysts, maintains a relationship of dynamic opposition with morality, insofar as it is largely the superego demands, the internalized moral prohibitions, which determine repression: the unconscious is, therefore, immoral by nature. Hypermorality promotes, on the contrary, a two-dimensional anthropology, that is to say, an individual without depth, transparent to himself and especially to others, free from lies, doubt, and ambivalence, that is to say, everything that could hide an immoral thought or desire, but also everything that makes his humanity. The ideal individual of hypermodern society does what he says, says what he thinks, and thinks as he is.
The technical process invented by psychoanalysis to promote the emergence of unconscious material consists of submitting the patient to the rule of free association. This is an invitation to say everything, in particular, what he would prefer to keep quiet, which does not meet social desirability or the supposed expectations of the analyst: his guilty desires, his shameful thoughts. What happens to this freedom of speech when the therapeutic relationship is conditioned by a sameness between patient and therapist and, therefore, to a requirement for moral and ideological purity? We are witnessing a shift towards militant and re-educative practices on the part of practitioners who seem to take advantage of the influence their status gives them to assert their ideology. Thus, they allow themselves to take a position on the opinions and life choices of their patients, encouraging them, for example, to turn away from a spouse or a parent—judged toxic or narcissistic pervert—continue or stop cheating on their spouse, have an abortion or give it up, accept or refuse a particular sexual practice, claim a particular part of themselves, hide another part, identify with a particular gender, claim to be a victim—or assume responsibility—of a particular violence, of a particular oppression, deconstructing such stereotype, etc. It is no longer a question here of unconditionally welcoming the subjectivity of the patient, as the principle of neutrality at the foundation of the clinical posture requires, but on the contrary of influencing it in the direction of an ideal, which is that of the therapist.
This is what Freud already denounced in 1918, in one of his very rare ethical positions, when he wrote that psychoanalysis must not “put itself at the service of a particular philosophical conception of the universe which would force the patient to elevate himself morally,” which would be “only a kind of tyranny veiled by the nobility of the goal to be achieved.“ On the contrary, “we seek neither to edify his fate, nor to instill in him our ideals, nor to mold him in our image with the pride of a Creator—which would be very pleasing to us.” This temptation is, therefore, not new, but it seems to be fueled by the contemporary ideological climate, quick to impose its moral vision in all spheres of human life.
Image: ChatGPT. A Dark, Black-and-White Silhouette-Style Image Depicting Hypermoralization and Identity Ideologies. Generated February 19, 2025.