The Analytic Attitude At first glance, the concepts of psychological man or expressive individualism would not seem in themselves to offer an answer to the question of why public acknowledgment of the validity of particular identities is important or of why certain identities become respectable and others do not. For example, one could easily argue that expressive individualism really only requires freedom for me to be who I think I am, as long as that does not interfere with the lives of others.
If I declare myself to be gay, it would seem that as long as that does not prevent me from holding a job, voting, receiving an education, or availing myself of the necessities of life, there is little reason for me to want anything more. Why would I need my neighbors to affirm my homosexuality as a good thing? To use the matter of cake baking: Mr.
Bun, the Christian cake baker, may not be willing to make a cake for my gay wedding, but he will sell me his baked goods in general and will even recommend to me a baker who will fulfill my wedding requirements. His policy on wedding cakes is not going to cause me to starve or even require that I travel great distances to avail myself of baked goods. Why should such amicable tolerance of my homosexuality not suffice?
Surely a situation whereby my identity is tolerated by others in a manner that allows me to go about my daily business would seem to be a reasonable state of affairs? Yet the history of the sexual—or perhaps better, identity—revolution has clearly not played out in quite such a fashion.
In fact, precisely such a scenario as that outlined above led to one of the most contentious and divisive Supreme Court cases of recent years.18 It is clearly indisputable that mere tolerance of sexual identities that break with the heterosexual norm has not proved an acceptable option to the sexual revolutionaries.
Nothing short of full equality under the law and full recognition of the legitimacy of certain nontraditional sexual identities by wider society has emerged as the ambition of the LGBTQ+ movement. It is not enough that I can buy a wedding cake somewhere in town. I must be able to buy a wedding cake from each and every baker in town who ever caters for weddings.
Why is this the case?19 One could build an answer to this question on one aspect of Philip Rieff’s definition of traditional culture—that it normally directs the self outward to communal purposes in which it can find satisfaction but that this direction has clearly been reversed in the era of psychological man. Satisfaction and meaning—authenticity—are now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end. Indeed, it must now serve the purpose of meeting my psychological needs;
I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic. The refusal to bake me a wedding cake, therefore, is not an act consistent with the therapeutic ideal; in fact, it is the opposite—an act causing me psychological harm. There is therefore an outward, social dimension to my psychological well-being that demands others acknowledge my inward, psychological identity.
We all as individuals still inhabit the same social spaces, still interact with other individuals, and so these other individuals must be coerced to be part of our therapeutic world. The era of psychological man therefore requires changes in the culture and its institutions, practices, and beliefs that affect everyone. They all need to adapt to reflect a therapeutic mentality that focuses on the psychological well-being of the individual.
Rieff calls this societal characteristic the analytic attitude.