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compelling, even definitive sway over all within its
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grasp. In essence, Orwell gave us an Ego strangely
placid, imperturbable, no longer pressed by Freud s Id,
no longer troubled within by Pascal s moral misgivings,
no longer swollen by Meredith s version of unembar-
rassed conceit or Eliot s of heedless self-regard (theoreti-
cal elaboration as a variant of self-promotion), but now
the property of something else: the state s (moral, polit-
ical) power become for the individual a commanding
and pervasive presence the Ego as something with-
out, enforcing its institutional will on the within of all
those subjugated mass-men (Czeslaw Milosz s cap-
tive mind ).
We breathe easier these days, surely. Orwell s appre-
hension has not quite come true that more and more
totalitarian states would control not only the civic life
of their subjects, or their economic fate, or the cultural
values given expression, but their minds in a more di-
rect and intimate way: what they think, the language
they use, how they speak to one another. Of course,
many of us in the social sciences and in psychoanalytic
psychiatry have, perhaps, underestimated all along the
impact on individuals of all that happens in the name of
race, class, politics, culture as it affirms itself on the
radio, on television, on the Internet, in journalism, in
advertising, in the theater. It took me some time, in the
course of working with children caught in political and
social and racial crises, to realize that their mental life
had to do not only with the relationships they had with
their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, but
with the larger world they inhabited. All the time chil-
dren s thoughts and impressions and opinions and con-
cerns and misgivings and fears are being shaped outside
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WHERE WE ARE HEADED
their homes as well as within them: in neighborhoods,
and in the realm that reaches them through the televi-
sion set or on-line, or as they sit watching a movie in
the living room or a theater. Yet with Stalinism gone,
with the terrible likes of Hitler a constantly receding
nightmare, with democracies increasingly prevalent in
our own hemisphere, we can assure ourselves that the
brainwashing so often described in earlier decades of
this century, and so vividly evoked, satirized by Orwell,
is no longer a threat to us.
Yet Orwell may have been more pervasively and
broadly prophetic than we want him to be; he may well
have meant to examine across the board the nature of
political and of cultural authority, their influence on a
nation s citizens, and to do so as a satirist does, through
the exaggerations of caricature. After all, during the Sec-
ond World War he worked for the BBC; he was no
stranger, then, to politics become public information,
if not outright propaganda. (The latter, of course, is al-
ways what one s enemies describe; the former what
one s own side is trying to get across.) In any event, Or-
well was at pains, apart from 1984, to remind us that
the language we use, the reading we favor, and what we
are taught to make of that reading, has to do with a lot
more than the emergence of Fascism or Communism,
with their statist encroachment on private life. In
Boys Weeklies, in Politics vs. Literature, in Poetry
and the Microphone, in Notes on Nationalism, in
The Prevention of Literature, he kept taking on cul-
ture and political power as they bear down on our
ways of thinking, our minds. For him the huge bu-
reaucratic machines that he mentions in Poetry and
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the Microphone (it was published in 1945, well before
1984 appeared) exert enormous psychological impact
on our personal lives and become, in fact, overseers,
even as they control so many of us, economically, politi-
cally. For him, too, Freud s Superego was not merely a
consequence of family life, a construct that we theo-
rists invoke as a means of referring to countless admoni-
tions by mothers and fathers become, eventually, a
child s notion of ought and naught, probably yes and
definitely no. Rather, parents and children alike learn to
shape their sense of the possible, the desirable, the for-
bidden in response to a host of institutional imperatives
quite evidently and concretely transmitted to them, to
all of us. A novelist rather than a theorist, Orwell never-
theless extended the psychoanalytic paradigm for wide-
spread public consideration. In truth, he intuitively
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