In the slow accretion of self-images that is the mortar between periods in the history of our civilization, a third character ideal emerged, in part … - Philip Rieff

In the time of public philosophies and social religions, the great communities were positive. A positive community is characterized by the fact that it guarantees some kind of salvation to the individual by virtue of his membership and participation in that community. That sort of community seemed corrupt to the economic man, with his particular version of an ascetic ideal tested mainly by self-reliance and personal achievement. The positive community was displaced, in social theory, by the neutral market. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the market mechanism appears not so much corrupt as a fiction to psychological man, with his awareness of how decisions are made in the social system. In order to participate self-protectively in the manipulative and acquisitive game, psychological man builds his tight family island, living for the remainder of his time in negative communities. But these collections of little islands surrounded by therapeutic activities, without any pretense at a doctrine of salvation, are themselves infected by the negativity of the larger community and become manipulative arenas themselves, rather than oases of escape from the larger arena. The indefinite prolongation of psychoanalytic therapy is itself a form of membership in the negative community. Positive communities were, according to Freud, held together by guilt, they appear attractive only now, in distant retrospect, but the modern individual, faced with the necessity of merging his own life into communal effort, would have found them suffocating. Instead, the modern individual can only use the community as the necessary stage for his effort to enhance himself—if not always, or necessarily, to enrich himself.

Only cultureless societies can exist without presiding presences. No presence can preside when all are subject to abandonments quick as their adoptions. Our passionate truths are so provisional, they move so quickly with the electrified times, that none can prepare us to receive them deeply into ourselves, as character.

Depth psychology has demolished the optimistic faith of democrats in the rationality of a free citizenry, by discovering that the average citizen (in or out of a crowd) is not rational. But this is no reason to despair. There remains what is for Freud perhaps the highest rationality: knowledge of the irrational, a knowledge which may be used […] to arrive at rational decisions essential to democracy.