The text provides a critical reconstruction of the twentieth-century discussion around social character initiated by Wilhelm Reich, continued by Erich Fromm, David Riesman, among others, and reflected in historical diagnoses in the Frankfurt School. It formulates a hypothesis about the paradigmatic breakthrough in the reception of Sigmund Freud’s theory, which is pursued by Christopher Lasch in his research on pathological narcissism. This breakthrough concerns the picture of the etiology of the superego in the process of the formation of the psychic apparatus. The Oedipus complex, instead of founding the psychic formation of the individual, turns out to be only a precarious culmination of the decisive developmental processes associated with the experience of separation and separation anxiety. The conclusions open a new perspective in the discussion of the historical conditions and psychodynamics of fascism.
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