V — Social Ecology and Psychotherapy — Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop

Series — Social Ecology Today: Roots

How is domination embedded in subjectivities?

“Domination does not merely produce institutions; it shapes characters, desires, and imaginaries.”

Introduction — From Social Critique to the Ecology of Subjectivities

After examining the theoretical foundations of social ecology, its relationships to anarchism, critical Marxism, and libertarian anthropology, one question remains open and decisive: how do structures of domination take root in subjectivities themselves?

Hierarchical societies do not maintain themselves solely through economic or police coercion. They produce human types suited to their reproduction: they shape sensibilities, affects, fears, and even forms of personality. Murray Bookchin himself emphasized this all-too-often neglected dimension: while the domination of nature historically stems from the domination of humans by humans, this domination also has an internalized aspect. It generates a specific social psychology, shaped by centuries of authority, guilt-induction, and separation.

This is why social ecology cannot be limited to a critique of institutions. It must also become a critique of everyday life, of forms of socialization, and of the psychological mechanisms that reproduce hierarchy—understanding why human beings sometimes consent to their own domination, why servitude can become desirable, why authority constantly reestablishes itself, even within emancipatory movements.

Many thinkers—often situated at the intersection of psychoanalysis, institutional psychiatry, and social critique—have sought to map these connections. From Erich Fromm to Wilhelm Reich, from François Tosquelles to Jean Oury, from Ivan Illich to Fernand Deligny, a shared intuition runs through their work: there can be no collective emancipation without a transformation of subjectivities.

One clarification is necessary, however. This is not about psychologizing social relations or reducing forms of domination to individual problems. Contemporary psychological suffering—burnout, isolation, resentment, generalized anxiety, feelings of powerlessness—also reflects the state of the world. Conversely, emancipation cannot be limited to individualized personal development that is compatible with the maintenance of structures of domination. Social transformation and self-transformation are inseparable.

From this perspective, social ecology opens up a unique field of reflection: that of an ecology of subjectivities. Not a therapy for adapting to the existing world, but a reconstruction of human capacities to live together, to cooperate, to desire differently.

Social Domination and Authoritarian Personality

Hierarchical societies shape character

One of Erich Fromm’s great insights was to show that every society tends to produce a “social character” compatible with its own functioning. Institutions alone are not enough to ensure the stability of an order; individuals must also internalize the behaviors and emotions necessary for its reproduction.

In modern capitalist societies, the individual is encouraged to think of themselves as human capital that must constantly increase its value. This logic is not limited to the economy—it permeates families, schools, work, and emotional relationships. Authority no longer functions solely through external coercion: it becomes internalized.

In The Fear of Freedom, Fromm analyzes how individuals confronted with the anxiety of autonomy may be tempted to flee freedom by submitting to authoritarian figures or reassuring ideologies. This analysis remains disturbingly relevant today. In societies marked by precariousness and social atomization, authoritarian tendencies resurface in various forms: identity-based nationalism, the cult of the leader, political machismo, and adherence to simplistic narratives.

Social ecology allows us here to link psychology and social structures without falling into reductionism. Authoritarian personalities do not arise spontaneously: they develop in contexts marked by insecurity, hierarchy, and the fragmentation of community ties.

Wilhelm Reich and the psychological construction of obedience

Wilhelm Reich was one of the first to articulate psychoanalysis and radical social critique. In contrast to purely economic approaches to fascism, he sought to understand why the masses might desire their own subjugation.

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich puts forward a decisive hypothesis: political authoritarianism is based in part on a character structure produced by the patriarchal family, the repression of emotions, and hierarchical institutions. A child raised in an authoritarian environment learns very early on to repress their desires, to fear autonomy, and to associate obedience with security. Even if some of Reich’s theses may seem dated today, his central contribution remains intact: systems of domination are rooted in bodies, emotions, and emotional habits.

Contemporary capitalism has not eliminated this dimension; it has transformed it. Where disciplinary societies imposed repression, neoliberal societies favor self-restraint. The individual is required to be autonomous, high-performing, desirable, and happy—while simultaneously being exploited and managing their own exploitation. This shift produces new forms of suffering: chronic fatigue, constant guilt, feelings of inadequacy, and emotional exhaustion. As Christopher Lasch and Byung-Chul Han have shown, neoliberalism tends to produce narcissistic and fragile subjectivities, oscillating between hyper-adaptation and collapse.

Resentment as a Political Affect

Hierarchical societies also produce specific political affects. When individuals feel powerless to transform their living conditions, frustration can be redirected toward scapegoats rather than toward the social structures themselves. Resentment then becomes a reactionary force.

This is not merely a matter of individual moral weakness: contemporary resentment is fueled by societies that destroy solidarity, isolate individuals, and foster widespread competition. Digital platforms further amplify this phenomenon by transforming negative emotions into attention-grabbing commodities—where anger and humiliation become economic drivers. A social ecology of subjectivities must therefore also be a critique of the mechanisms that perpetuate permanent frustration and collective powerlessness.

Captured Desire: Alienation and Commercial Imaginaries

The concept of alienation, which we have already encountered in previous sections from the perspective of labor and false consciousness, must be understood here in its most intimate dimension: that of desire itself. One of the great strengths of contemporary capitalism lies precisely in its ability to colonize desire.

Advertising, the cultural industries, and digital platforms do not merely sell goods—they manufacture imaginaries, needs, and identities. Human desire, which is potentially creative and relational, is constantly redirected toward accumulation, possession, and the staging of the self.

Herbert Marcuse had already spoken of “repressive desublimation” to describe this integration of desires into the market system. Whereas ancient societies directly repressed certain impulses, capitalism, on the contrary, tends to organize their controlled circulation to stimulate consumption. The result is not liberation, but a permanent dependence on market mechanisms of immediate gratification. Many people today struggle to distinguish their own desires from socially manufactured ones.

Ivan Illich had foreseen this growing dispossession from another angle. According to him, industrial societies are gradually destroying the autonomous capacities of individuals and communities to care for themselves. Institutions become counterproductive when they monopolize skills that were once shared: healing, learning, living, and passing on knowledge. Human beings thus lose their power to act in favor of increasingly opaque technobureaucratic systems.

Institutional Psychiatry: Healing Environments, Not Normalizing Individuals

Faced with this pathogenic society, certain psychiatrists and practitioners have developed approaches radically different from classical psychiatry. François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, and Félix Guattari demonstrated that madness cannot be understood independently of the social environments in which it emerges.

Institutional psychiatry refused to reduce patients to medical objects to be normalized. Instead, it sought to transform the institutions themselves to make more humane ways of life possible. At the La Borde clinic, Jean Oury emphasized the importance of relationships, the free flow of speech, and the collective organization of daily life. Healing meant, above all, rebuilding the possibilities for connection.

This perspective is deeply aligned with social ecology: a hierarchical, competitive, and bureaucratic society necessarily produces massive forms of psychological suffering. The issue is therefore not merely treating individual symptoms, but transforming living environments.

Fernand Deligny developed an even more radical approach with autistic or marginalized children. Rejecting the normative categories of traditional psychiatry, he sought to create spaces of presence and attention that escaped, as much as possible, the logic of normalization. His work recalls an essential idea: there always exist in human beings forms of life that cannot be reduced to the mechanisms of social control.

Reconstruction of Subjectivities and Autonomy

Moving Beyond the Logic of Adaptation

In contemporary societies, psychotherapy is often reduced to an adaptive function: helping individuals better endure a profoundly pathogenic world. The implicit goal becomes restoring the ability to function within the existing system rather than questioning it.

An emancipatory perspective, on the contrary, involves politicizing suffering without denying its singular dimension. This does not mean that all psychological distress is directly political, nor that individuals are merely passive products of social structures. But it is impossible to understand the contemporary explosion of mental health issues without analyzing the social conditions that fuel them: material precariousness, relational isolation, the disappearance of concrete forms of solidarity, information overload, and contradictory demands for success.

Autonomy as a Collective Process

Social ecology differs radically here from individualistic conceptions of autonomy. Autonomy is not the absolute independence of a self-sufficient individual. It refers to the collective capacity to regain control over the conditions of existence. Cornelius Castoriadis defined it as the possibility for a society to recognize itself as the author of its own institutions.

This autonomy requires work on oneself—learning to think for oneself, to deliberate, to cooperate, and to handle conflict without domination. Bookchin also emphasized the necessity of an ethical and cultural transformation accompanying any political transformation. An ecological and libertarian society could not emerge without individuals capable of breaking free from the authoritarian and consumerist reflexes produced by capitalism.

But this transformation cannot be purely individual. Subjectivities are also transformed through collective practices. Experiences of mutual aid, self-management, direct democracy, concrete cooperation, and collective creation profoundly alter human relationships. They allow us to relearn capacities often stunted by market society.

This is why autonomous collective spaces—people’s assemblies, self-managed spaces, cooperatives, community gardens, shared workshops, and libertarian pedagogies—also possess a therapeutic dimension in the broadest sense. They recreate relational environments where trust, collective power, and the reappropriation of lived experience can emerge.

Rehabilitating Care and Vulnerability

Capitalist societies value performance, speed, and competitiveness. Vulnerability is often seen as a weakness to be corrected. Conversely, a social ecology of subjectivities involves rehabilitating care, attention, and interdependence.

Feminism has contributed significantly to this reflection by demonstrating how caregiving activities, long rendered invisible, nevertheless constitute the conditions of social life. Caring does not mean establishing a sacrificial morality, but recognizing that human beings are fundamentally relational. True autonomy is not built against others, but with them.

Social emancipation and personal transformation

Transforming society without reproducing domination

The history of revolutionary movements shows that domination can re-emerge within emancipatory struggles themselves: informal hierarchies, vanguardist logic, militant authoritarianism, the cult of the leader, and the reproduction of gender power relations. This is why an emancipatory politics must be attentive to the relational forms it produces right now.

Social ecology does not merely offer a critique of existing institutions; it invites us to experiment with ways of life consistent with the goals we seek. The means are already shaping the world to come. This demand aligns with historical libertarian intuitions: there can be no free society built through authoritarian practices.

Desiring Differently

At the heart of any social transformation lies an often-underestimated question: that of desire. Capitalism does not sustain itself solely through coercion—it also produces forms of pleasure, recognition, and identification. Breaking free from this system therefore requires reinventing other ways of living, inhabiting the world, and finding meaning.

An ecological society cannot emerge sustainably without a profound transformation of our conceptions of happiness, success, and progress. This implies, in particular, breaking with the ideology of limitlessness: infinite accumulation, perpetual growth, and the widespread exploitation of living beings. But this break cannot be imposed through moralistic discourse or technocratic constraints. It requires the emergence of desirable ways of life, rich in connections, creativity, and shared autonomy. Emancipation is not merely about abolishing oppressive structures; it is also about expanding human possibilities.

An Ecology of Subjectivities

Through this reflection, social ecology ultimately emerges as much more than a political or ecological theory. It opens up a comprehensive inquiry into human ways of life: how can we build societies that foster autonomy rather than submission? How can we recreate environments that nurture cooperation rather than competition? How can we develop subjectivities capable of freedom without falling back into the authoritarian logics inherited from centuries of domination?

These questions do not fall solely within the realm of politics, nor solely within that of psychology. They lie at their intersection. A coherent social ecology must thus become an ecology of human relations, imaginaries, and sensibilities—not a therapy for adapting to a sick world, but the collective creation of forms of life that are freer, more solidarity-based, and more livable.

Conclusion — Rebuilding the lived world

The contemporary ecological crisis cannot be understood independently of the crisis of subjectivities produced by industrial capitalism and hierarchical society. Widespread psychological exhaustion, social isolation, authoritarian impulses, resentment, and the destruction of collective bonds are not phenomena separate from the ecological catastrophe—they are one of its essential dimensions.

A society founded on constant competition and the complete commodification of life simultaneously destroys ecosystems and human capacities to inhabit the world with sensitivity and solidarity. Social ecology therefore invites us to transcend the false divisions between the psychological and the political, between the individual and the collective, between care and social transformation.

Emancipation requires new institutions, different collective practices, and a profound transformation of subjectivities. It is not about creating a “new man” according to some authoritarian project, but about creating social conditions that allow for the emergence of more autonomous beings, capable of cooperation, non-dominating conflict, and care for the living.

From this perspective, experiments in self-management, mutual aid, direct democracy, institutional psychiatry, or libertarian pedagogy appear as laboratories for another way of inhabiting the world. For the real question may well be this: how to rebuild a shared world within a civilization that methodically destroys the bonds necessary for its existence.

Transition → VI — Social Ecology and Degrowth

Understanding how societies shape subjectivities also allows us to examine one of the most powerful drivers of modernity: the ideology of unlimited growth. For while the quest for perpetual economic expansion seems self-evident today, it rests on deeply internalized representations of progress, desire, and well-being.

Capitalism does not merely produce commodities; it also produces imaginaries based on accumulation and boundlessness. It is this logic that is challenged by a school of thought that has become central to contemporary ecological debates: degrowth. By criticizing the myth of infinite development and the confusion between material abundance and human emancipation, degrowth builds on certain fundamental insights of social ecology.

It, in turn, poses a decisive question: how can we move beyond a civilization organized around growth without also transforming our needs, our desires, and our ways of life?

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