Summary:
The postmodern consumer society is being undoubtedly represented by a social imaginary institution, a newly established anthropological type of radical and total individualism, which crushes the modern Self. It is the place where the excessive need of consumerism is born and triggered, in order to overlay-overspread the suffocating loss of meaning, the individual escapism’s attempt and, eventually, loneliness per se. “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it”, Freud concluded in his famous formulation. Following Jean Laplanche, we should conceive “The Object” as a substitute -within and by way of displacement- of that first lost object, through a new, sexual object. Borrowing its’ register and its’ language of the feeding function (that is, psychoanalytically, the equal term for incorporation), transforms the feeding function into a scenario of fantasy. This is the place where we will observe the outbreak of incorporation through the gaze (images, icons, photographs - eventually and in general, figures), through the body and the skin but, even more so, through the process of exchanging sexual partners, senses and facts that depict the sociological attributes of consumer society. From this point of view, the consumptive sphere, Jean Baudrillard -among others- outlined, is nothing else than a psychical conception and creation of the modern societies, in order to give an answer to the impasse of loneliness. Relied on these reflections, this paper attempts to analyze the composing and principal aspects of the issue - the consumption as a psychical process of object(s) incorporation.
Keywords:
Psychoanalysis, self, consumption, culture of narcissism.
