10/23/2026
A quotation from a paper of mine entitled "Colonizing the American Psyche."
Let me summarize in an extremely schematic way some of the conclusions that might be drawn from The Authoritarian Personality and some of the related documents by the Frankfurt School. According to their analysis, the dominant American personality type is particularly susceptible to subconscious suggestion. This implies that when something is communicated to Americans of this dominant type, the communication tends to be taken as innocent until proven guilty, providing it conforms with currently held and largely bourgeois values and views. This is so, in part, because Americans are neither taught nor do they typically use much by way of critical thinking – critical thinking not only about what someone else says but also about one’s own reactions and impulses, for example, about what we nowadays call “implicit biases.” This lack of critical thinking produces, we might say, a tendency to assume that all knowledge claims are equal, and so, in the end, I can simply follow my own preferences, my own prejudices. Consistent with this, Americans of this personality type tend to tell stories – both to themselves and to others – attempting to make these often irrational and contradictory ideas appear coherent and reasonable rather than questioning the preferred narrative. Thus, people of this dominant type are often resistant to new information or new interpretations that might challenge their chosen narrative about the meaning of things. Furthermore, of particular importance for our purposes, this dominant American personality type displays what the Frankfurt scholars call a “weak ego,” meaning that it is highly susceptible to subliminal messaging and is therefore easily manipulated via imaginative and emotional life. Consequently, there is a specific and intense impressionability in many Americans, one that is largely unconscious and therefore difficult to combat.
Discusses some of the challenges for psychotherapists due to the fact that we and our patients live in a society dominated by consumer capitalism.
