![]() ![]() Rickels reminds us that Freud’s take on the group differed from that of his contemporaries in two crucial ways: 1) he didn’t merely denigrate the masses and mass psychology, 2) he emphasized the crucial role that the leader plays in capturing and arranging the libidinal energies of many, disparate human beings. He does so by theorizing California and its symptoms (perpetual adolescence, self-esteem problems, death cults, body building, group therapy, gadget love, etc.). What Rickels reads for us through California is not only psychoanalysis but, precisely, group psychology. Oedipus is the popular image of Freudian psychoanalysis and the site of the most intense academic turf wars waged against the psychoanalytic model the psychoanalytic take on the group, however, is almost ignored. Assuming identities as an adventure in gadgets and accessories that offer temporary relief from all doubt, the teen leads the way to conversion experience via consumer experience. Teen being reflects the unconscious desire of all beings and their parts: the teen always wants to fit in and know where s/he belongs. ![]() Taking on the Teen Age (the teen is the one who is always into technology and uncannily aware of all that falls “in” and “out” of group appreciation), Rickels offers us, at the same time, a rigorous set of arguments countering the essentialist undertow of much contemporary theorizing around the question of identity. With California as the site of this encounter, Rickels takes Freud to the beach and California to the couch, picking up, in many ways, where the Frankfurt School left off-cut short (in Walter Benjamin’s case) and stranded in America (in Theodor Adorno’s) with the rise to power in Germany of National Socialism. Rickels is one of the few theorists today who is able to think technology through psychoanalysis and vice versa this assignment is crucial, because both technology and psychoanalysis are everywhere. If postmodernity is postmarked (like the repressed according to Freud) “made in Germany” (SE 19:236), then California is its address, and techno-future." ![]()
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