Abstract
In this paper I explore one psychoanalytically inspired reason why we might worry about policies that aim to maximise market competition and user choice in some areas of social life. Using the case of health and social care, I suggest that the spread of neoliberalised practices would amplify splitting tendencies in subjects that subscribe to particular fantasies, for example, independence fantasies of ‘Individual Self-Sufficiency’ or dependence fantasies of the ‘Caring Other’. One of psychoanalysis’s strongest critical contributions resides in its effort to show what such fantasies have in common: the potential to secure allegiance through the promise of a subjective suture that results in fantasmatic over-investment. Such a perspective points to the rather urgent need to identify and promote those wider cultural and structural conditions that militate against fantasmatic over-investment and toward forms of interdependence that acknowledge contingency and ambivalence.
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Notes
As with recent higher education reforms, health and social care reforms in the UK have been breathtakingly dramatic and regressive in their scale and direction (toward marketisation and likely privatisation); but both sets of reforms have also been scandalously undemocratic because these massive changes, with their rather draconian and long-term implications, are being prosecuted without proper mandate or extended public debate.
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Glynos, J. Neoliberalism, markets, fantasy: The case of health and social care. Psychoanal Cult Soc 19, 5–12 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2013.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2013.23