Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Digging around in the lower depths of my inbox, those bits and pieces that came and lay unloved for many months, I found this essay announcement, with abstract:

Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?
By Jaime L. Napier and John T. Jost

In this study, researchers drew on system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. Specifically, in three studies using nationally representative data from the United States and nine additional countries, researchers found that right-wing (vs. left-wing) orientation is indeed associated with greater subjective well-being and that the relation between political orientation and subjective well-being is mediated by the rationalization of inequality. In a third study, they found that increasing economic inequality (as measured by the Gini index) from 1974 to 2004 has exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality.

(To read the article, go here, though you will need to subscribe or purchase the article.)

Just to summarise, conservative are apparently happier than liberals because they have in-built defences so that they don't feel bad about others' suffering. In Kleinian or more general object-relations terms, we might say that they are more successfully splitting; in particular, splitting feeling (and the capacity to empathise) from thought (i.e. the ideological justification for continuing to support a system that perpetrates inequality).

This is then evidence -- now apparently backed up by appropriately 'scientific' studies -- for a long-held belief amongst a number of psycho-social thinkers that capitalism is psychopathological; schizoid, as a Kleinian might say. (Others, of different psychoanalytic persuasions, of course had different diagnostic categories, but they most often arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Such assessments are regarded unfashionable by some nowadays, but surely this gives us license to carry on with our speculations?

(NB: these studies were obviously conducted pre-crash -- I wonder if the results would be different were they to revisit these subjects?)

Merry Christmas, Mrs. Klein

In a festive holiday treat, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play just this week broadcast Nicholas Wright's play, Mrs. Klein. The information from the BBC website is here:

Saturday 20 December Mrs Klein

By Nicholas Wright

The troubled relationship between influential child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her own children.

Faced with coming to terms with the news of the death of her son, Mrs Klein decides against going to his funeral. Frustrated with her mother's behaviour, Klein's daughter Melitta confronts her with some home truths.

Mrs Klein ...... Janet Suzman
Melitta ...... Eve Best
Paula ...... Clare Corbett

Director Alison Hindell.

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A very BIG Thank you to Sarah for bringing this to my attention, because I missed it on the day. BUT, thanks to modern technology, we needn't go without. You can listen again (until December 27) via the BBC iPlayer (though I don't know if this will work outside of the UK), and the 'listen again' link on the website (when it's updated).

Happy listening!

On the lighter side

The students in my undergraduate psychoanalytic theory seminar have discovered some terrific illustrations for some Kleinian ideas that are too perfect not to share.

These clips (sorry about the ads) are from The Family Guy. No, I haven't seen it (come on! there's only so many hours in the day!), but I will try to catch it when I can now.

First up, a terrific illustration of the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position. Note the demands, note how the baby deals with the Oedipal threat, note the fear of retaliation from the object... Klein in a one-minute cartoon:





And this one... well. It just made me laugh. Because my sons do this:





More analyses welcome. Another must-watch for fans of Freud, it seems. Many, many thanks to everyone: Katie, Izzy, Tori, Sally, Liz, Emma, Rachel, Fay!

Klein at the British Museum

Not really, no. But her work lives on, and nowhere it is more apparent than in the British Museum. You can see why Freud -- and Klein, and Jung... the lot, really -- kept finding inspiration, or rather, 'evidence', in the art of the ancients.

I've been especially haunted by a figure that I found in Asian section. ('Room 33' in your guidebooks.)

I think you'll see why.



Wild analysis on why this has been haunting me is, of course, as welcome as it is inevitable. (I know my audience.) But I've finally had a moment to do some basic research, and though anthropology isn't exactly my forte, I thought I'd share some of my findings.

(Hey, let's be honest: anthropology was never really Freud's forte either. But who would want to live in a world without Totem and Taboo?)

SO, back to my nightmare. The British Museum website on this figure tells us that this is a sandstone figure of Chamunda. Here's a snippet from their description:

The Great Hindu goddess Devi takes many forms: benign, sensuous and maternal at one level, horrifying and powerful at another. Chamunda, with her skeletal frame and staring socket eyes, is one of her fiercest manifestations, associated with corpses and even sacrificial rituals.

And here we've got all the classic imagery of death and destruction, of Klein's mother intent on revenge, in the infant's phantasy, for all of the attacks that she has suffered at the hands (and poos) of her baby. She's already obviously endured these anal attacks, her inner contents (father's penis, other children, shit -- all threatening objects to her children) having been ripped from her. And how she's coming back, armed with a thunderbolt, trident, snake and sword. With the skull-cap and severed head she's carrying her first trophies.

Notice in the British Museum description what her weapons are for: to fight ignorance, which we can see linked to the epistemophillic impulse, the force that initiates anal aggression in the first place (see 'Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict'), and to fight 'ego' -- though I don't think they mean 'ego' in the way Klein would intend it, obviously, there still there suggestions of an attack on the self, which is what the paranoid imagined retaliation of the mother actually is, after all.

In a longer, and much more detailed explanation (which is interesting beyond its description of Chamunda), Chandra Alexandre explains how Chamunda was linked to death and was demonised by patriarchal traditions in India, which is very interesting in the context of men's envy and fear of the 'bad' (read: all-powerful and frustrating) mother, manifested so often in patriarchal strictures, institutions and misogyny more generally.

Please post your comments if you can offer any further enlightenment!