Abstract

ROCHA, Tiago Humberto Rodrigues  and  SANTOS, Luciano Henrique Moreira. Neoliberalism and super-Me: A reading on the management of contemporary malaise. Rev. Subj. [online]. 2024, vol.24, n.1, e13427.  Epub Mar 20, 2026. ISSN 2359-0769.  https://doi.org/10.5020/23590777.rs.v24i1.e13427.

Understanding the tangled relationships between neoliberalism and human subjectivity constitutes the main scope of this study. Furthermore, based on this, we also seek to systematically grasp the associative textures of the Super-Me's status with the logic of neoliberal functioning to establish links with the psychic phenomenon of authority and authoritarianism. This research was, fundamentally, based on a psychoanalytic research method perspective, whose parameter is based on the premise of the interpretative analysis of subjective and social phenomena. Thus, it is possible to think that in contemporary times, there are modes of subjectivation that are emptied by what, in the past, was regulated by the paternal function, by the Name-of-the-Father. This fact corroborates the implementation of a social functioning outlined by the so-called imperative of enjoyment, which translates into the assiduous demand for happiness, which has been called, by some authors, exacerbated hedonism. There is, however, a reminder that is a product of this community manifestation: helplessness. Similarly, there is a paradigmatic proposition that establishes a structural defence mode that reflects the specificity of the contemporary period, called the denial of deprivation. This concept erects the conception of the non-introjected image of the paternal function, which encompasses its statutory fall; this results in a psychic constitution based on the rigorous radicality of the Super-Me through its imperious deliberation: it enjoys! Finally, contemporaneity is engendered, from a point of view, as a hiatus marked by the denial of the founding Law. And about this, from the fall of the status of otherness, neoliberalism constitutes itself as a manager of the policies of subjective suffering in the contemporary world of human malaise. Thus, the articulation between the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary can be thought of differently than what had been expressed in previous periods.

Keywords : contemporary subject; politics; superego; authoritarianism; helplessness.

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