the psychical rigidity of the right

Freud speaks about how sometimes une femme de trente ans can disturb him and his ilk because of her peculiar "psychical rigidity".

[The term, "psychical", by the way, I snatched from Freud. I haven't seen it elsewhere. It was far better than what I was trying before: "psychic" (which has other connotations for us today or "spiritual" (which sounds vague and wafty).]

Thinking about what "psychical rigidity" means these days, I am inclined to see it as much less likely to be attached to women who have grown prematurely old internally, but to a particular class of men of the current time and era, to whom the generic term, "right wingers", could be loosely attached.

The ability to intellectually and emotionally nurture oneself may have once been attached to the concept of masculinity -- as it was, in fact by Nietzsche, and as Freud seems to do it implicitly in refence to the gender comparisons he makes (above).

However, these days, if they are indeed different from those of the past, psychical rigidity seems to be the attitude and condition of a determination to be parasitical upon the generative energies of others (intellectual and emotional) without doing any of the groundwork oneself.

The parasite on other people's intellectual or creative work is rigid because he knows only one trick - both figuratively and literally, he knows how to suck.

What he best knows how to do is to provoke some emotional reaction in the other, and then by setting himself and his emotional or intellectual position off in contradistinction to whatsoever happens to be expressed by the other, he sucks the life out of them, leaving them an emotionally empty husk, whilst inflating himself.

Ego inflation, these days, is the mark of the man of ressentiment. Whilst he may sometimes succeed in hiding this uncool aspect of himself in terms of the contents of the ideas he espouses (eg. by presenting himself as "the strong" and the vitalistic element of society), in terms of his methodology in engaging with others, he almost always gives himself away, in terms of what he really is. The means by which the right winger debates, in order to reveal to the watching public who is right and who is wrong is almost always according to the following formula:

...[P]icture “the enemy” as the man of ressentiment conceives him – and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “the Evil One,” and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a “good one” – himself!

Isn't it true that for the right winger in politics and debate, these days, the nature of being "good" is rhetorically defined by the failure to present an intellectual or substantive political opinion most of the time (thus reveling in a passive conceptualisation of "good".) More precisely, aren't most of the standards of goodness and righteousness on the part of the political right derivative and borne out of reacting to a projected notion of "evil" that is said to be emanating from out of the minds and hearts of the liberals, viewed as the moral enemy?

The inability to come alive, to invent policies, perspectives and moral values of one's own lies at the heart of the psychological destitution of the right winger, in character and constitution, today. He has to suck the blood-life out of another, but he is running out of means and methods to perform the one trick he knows how.

Psychical rigidity has often been mistaken for strength in the past, and it is possibly a typical error to mistake what is merely rigid, and unbendable in the breeze, for that which has perspective and endurance. A rigid character structure is ultimately duller, more brittle, less easily able to fend for itself, than is one that still has young sap in it, and is capable of fluidity.

L'homme de trente ans

, these days, often frightens me and mine with his psychical rigidity.