normotic personality

In psychodynamics, normotic personality or normopathy is defined the tendency to conform excessively to the social norms of behaviour, without coming to express one's own subjectivity. Christopher Bollas used the term normotic personality to describe "the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity, in favour of a self that is conceived as a material object among other man-made products in the object world" ^[1]. The Normotic Individual is the antithesis of the postmodern world because he is the production-line sequence phenotype reflection of the triad capitalism-individualism-consumerism in opposition to an individual with a subjective narrative and consciousness that guide his inner and external human experience which includes emotions, feelings, and affective states. The normotic individual will choose acceptance and psychosocial fusion (the act of doing and performing whatever society expects and demands in order to fuel the triad of neoliberal societies). As a result the individual loses any contact with inner subjectivity and becomes an object within objects. In other words, individuals become products that resemble other products in regard of behavior, social interaction, and emotional engagement. The normotic individual most likely will socialized with any one who resembles his own racial, social, cultural, economic profile. He is unable to recognize his intense need for acceptance, he rather chooses to fuse and sacrifice his psyche with his proximate social group rather than stand up for his own personality and needs. As a result, the normotic individual has to forget his true identity and becomes a cookie-cutter phenotype that puts aside his own preferences and taste; e.g.: he chooses to dress, talk, joke, and overall, behave like his peer group. His purpose is to fit-in rather than stand out on his own. In addition, he has to obliterate any sign of inner emotion or feeling because those do not fuel late-capitalistic tendencies. Hence, he will be a victim of his own buried emotions; because the system will exploit them through marketing: e.g. Christmas shopping, Easter, San Valentines, etc. -all of those appeal to superficial acts of emotional engagement in which emotions are satisfied with products. The normotic individual does not pursue a life true to himself but rather the comfort of acceptance which is the fuel of neoliberal societies in which the self has been xerox-copied to other individuals' phenotype. Therefore, the individual lacks connectivity with his inner self.

See also: conformism.

References

• ^  Christopher Bollas, The shadow of the object. Psychoanalysis of the unthought known, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 135 sq.

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