2. Reading Ayn Rand Psychoanalytically: Ethics, Libertarian and Otherwise

This chapter contends that if we are to grasp the forms of subjectivity in Objectivist writing that (whether Rand likes it or not), owe a discursive debt to Freud, then this writing has to be read psychoanalytically. Such a reading must be one that attends to the implication of psychoanalytic discourse in Objectivist texts rather than attempting to ‘apply’ psychoanalysis to them. Objectivism is understood to provide a distinctive account of ethics, yet this is distinctive not so much to Rand and her followers as to the capitalist economics they admired, and can be brought into focus through an analysis of contrasting ethical formulations to be found in psychoanalysis, here in the work of Thomas Szasz and Slavoj Žižek. It is demonstrated not only that Szasz’s American ego-psychological libertarianism chimes with the Objectivist thought it criticises, but that Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian alternative presents a mirror-image of it, ostensibly refusing it but effectively confirming it.