On the Economy of the Psyche in Times of Crisis

The financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing economic crisis have not only affected individual people, but also countries and nations, and have changed them profoundly to the present day. The consequences of the crisis were collapsed economies, unemployment, indebtedness of household and state budgets, mental illnesses, but also broken visions of the future and political destabilization. The aim of this work is to show that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic social psychology can contribute significantly to the understanding of the crisis and its processing, because they examine like no other science the conscious and unconscious factors that determine thinking, feeling and acting. This work follows the tradition of psychoanalysis, which links societal changes and individual suffering. What has been lacking so far is not only an analysis of the desires and promises that, in the run-up to the crisis, fascinated those people who had nothing and longed for wealth, but also an analysis of neoliberal economic thinking that made it possible for bankers to become cult figures. In the absence of government controls, they could decide on the prosperity or ruin of investors and turn the world economy into a large casino. There was also no wider analysis of the affects, especially the anxieties and guilt feelings that were mobilized in the course of the crisis and defended in the form of projections on scapegoats. The thesis describes - also based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with businesspeople - how certain model conceptions of crises turn them into recurring events that afflict generations of people in the manner of natural laws and against which one can seemingly do little. It furthermore demonstrates how certain working conditions and organisational structures make it impossible to identify the factors causing the crisis, or how practices of job replacement and restrictive communication strategies in institutions prevent sustainable crisis management from taking place. Since these phenomena do not come to consciousness, the wheel of history continues to turn and crises, like other traumatic events, are perceived as unavoidable. Thus power relations and those of social inequality persist. The work vividly demonstrates how productive an interdisciplinary approach between psychoanalysis and other sciences can be in the analysis of dramatic societal episodes, such as the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. Psychoanalysis thus fulfils an essential socio- critical function by pointing out possibilities for change both with regard to one`s own life history and to social conditions in society.