Over 40 years ago, the historian Christopher Lasch reflected on the psychological consequences of social change in the post-war West. As government bureaucracies got ever larger and intervened in more areas of public and private life, they challenged traditional centers of authority, like church and family. Their interventions were often guided by the ideology of “welfare liberalism,” which favored a therapeutic response to social problems, neglecting (or even rejecting) traditional forms of self-reliance. Lasch echoed conservative critics when he argued that this “absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance.” But he was most interested in the psychological changes wrought by these developments, which he believed had implications for the superego—the part of the personality which internalizes society’s moral standards and taboos.
