7. Conclusion

Views as to the socio-political implications of psychodynamic psychology have varied as widely as opinions about the socio-political implications of Christianity. Can they all claim legitimacy? All the analysts and therapists with personal or clinical experience of the authoritarian personality argued that it has its roots in the values and beliefs about gender roles of a patriarchal culture - as Dicks put it, in the model of a harsh, tyrannical father figure with whom young males are expected to identify. This model, they warn us, threatens democratic institutions and societies. Yet this is the model that Lacan and his followers actually commend. In his paper on democracy Winnicott argues that democracies, whether societies or institutions like hospitals, face a threat from two main groups: roughly, those who pro-social, but anti individual, i.e the authoritarian personality, and those who are pro-individual but anti- social, or criminal psychopaths. Though on the face of it, opposites, they have a dangerous tendency to fuse and use each other for their own nefarious ends. Societies are most at risk of this at times of frightening instability such as Germany faced in the 1920s and Russia experienced after the implosion of the former Soviet Union sixty or more years later. Capitalism, it has been observed, is inherently unstable, though some forms of it are more so than others. There is a need to replace a social philosophy based on the competitive pursuit of material gain with one that has at its heart the mental and physical well-being of its members, and the protection of those members against violence from within and without.

How to prevent violence has been the message that James Gilligan has tried to convey in his research and his writings, and the mental and physical well-being of populations has been the life work of the medical epidemiologist Michael Marmot. Marmot’s reports for the U.K. and the WHO are not rooted in psychotherapeutic experience, but they provide very solid statistical support the conclusions of the therapists about the mental and physical harm and the damage done to societies by social and economic inequalities. The implementation of proposals that would rectify that is a moral issue, he insists. As the Book of Proverbs tells us, ‘ without a vision the people perish’.