It was posited that the institutions and practices of modernity came to appear natural to those socialized within them.
The critical categories of alienation and reification are efforts to describe the subjective experience and rootedness of modern social formation. And looking back on those categories we might now think that, although they were originally developed independently, they nevertheless are strikingly resonant with some of the core insights of object relations psychoanalysis.
They each describe damaged kinds of human relating. Alienation, among other things, involves a form of response in which others are perceived to be opposed or hostile. Human beings cannot experience each other as opportunities for shared mutual self-realization; indeed, they cannot experience their own laboring activity as a form of self-realization. Thus the very idea of self-realization gives way to self-preservation. The sense of “species being” is lost where separation is normal and the human capacity for creative self-determination is extinguished. With reification, for its part, the world—including the world of objects, other subjects, and even our own selves—is reduced to things. The qualities that we ideally associate with human interactions, where unexpected and enriching new features of the world can be revealed, are replaced by measurable, calculable, predictable quantitative evaluations.
