New Ideas in Psychology

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[ Social Abreaction ] [ Examples ]

The two common abreactions affect society just as much as they affect the individual.

Therefore they lead to two forms of social abreaction, which I call laws of social change. The morality of an age determines what is good and evil, and these ideas form the content of social abreaction. The intensity of these abreactions depend on the rate of social change : the faster the change the greater are the effects of abreaction.

First Law of Social Change

The social abreaction of guilt starts from the excitement of catharsis and ends in resentment. The intensity of the former helps to determine the intensity of the latter. Politically the resentment generates Conservative, even Fascist, attitudes. Social change may start from left-wing views but always ends in a right-wing backlash. The euphoria of revolutions leads to political dictatorship.

Politically, resentment is used to establish control over people who have no self-control or who are weak, that is, those who are immoral, or who have no standards, or who are perceived to be degenerate (usually these criticisms are seen to be relevant only to the poor). Governmental social care programmes are cut back as the poor are blamed and penalised. In addition, asylum seekers to Britain are re-classified as economic migrants who are seeking to sponge off state welfare ; this label allows the state to reject them as undesirables.

Second Law of Social Change

The social abreaction of pride starts from sorrow and ends in bitterness. This abreaction usually ends in forms of Nazism, such as police death squads, the Stalinist political show-trials of the 1930s, and political or sectarian genocide. Bitterness is always worse than resentment. So Nazism is always worse than Fascism.

Bitterness is used to reject claims of equality from other sectors of society. Such sectors are perceived to be inferior. Hence racialism, ethnic conflicts, and disputes between religions come to the foreground during social change.

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Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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