ABSTRACT
Analogies from the clinical to the social and cultural realms are common in Sigmund Freud’s work. Freud likened religion to a collective obsessional neurosis; he allowed that Hamlet suffered unduly from an Oedipus complex; he diagnosed Lady Macbeth a fate neurotic. To describe a particular political state of affairs as a state of insanity is a manner of speaking but it is not an analysis. In a comprehensive statement on the non-clinical value of psychoanalysis—‘The claims of psychoanalysis to scientific interest’—Freud notes: “It is true that psycho-analysis has taken the individual mind as its subject, but in investigating the individual it could not avoid dealing with the emotional basis of the relationship of the individual to society”. A psychopathology of conformity would then consist of the emotional costs and conflicts—the intra-psychic means—with which one maintained the fact of belonging to one or another social order.
