"The seduction that is being provided is you have a way out if you don't feel like it, you don't have to go for it."
In this thought-provoking episode, psychoanalytic psychotherapist Jaco van Zyl examines the cultural shifts in Western society that have profoundly impacted psychological development. He explores how our modern world has moved from valuing duty and resilience to prioritizing comfort and gratification, creating a generation unprepared for life's inevitable challenges and frustrations.
About Jaco van Zyl
Jaco van Zyl is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist originally from South Africa, now practicing in Ireland. He serves as Co-Director at Critical Therapy Antidote, working to counter the ideological capture of mental health fields. His professional interests span the psychology of large groups, the role of ideology in radical movements, and applying psychoanalytic thinking to contemporary social issues.
The Developmental Importance of Frustration
The interview begins with Jaco exploring how the psychological requirements for dealing with reality involve confronting frustration. When young children experience frustration, a primary caregiver helps attune to their experiences and guides them through these feelings. This process becomes the foundation for dealing with adversity throughout life.
This early frustration processing mechanism helps us manage the inevitable frustrations we face, especially during major developmental phases like adolescence.
Further reading:
From Duty to Gratification Culture
Jaco identifies a fundamental shift in Western society: "Our culture has changed from a duty-bound culture, a culture where duty is the ultimate aim, to a culture where gratification is the ultimate aim."
This shift has revolutionized parenting, creating trends like "gentle parenting" where children are shielded from all frustration. While attunement to children's needs is important, constant intervention teaches children they cannot survive normal challenges—fostering dependency rather than resilience.
Further reading:
The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
The Collapse of Parenting by Leonard Sax
The Seduction of Avoidance
In our current culture, young people are offered an escape route from necessary developmental challenges: "The seduction that is being provided is you have a way out. If you don't feel like it, you don't have to go for it. Whatever you say is true, and that is standpoint epistemology taken to its perverse extreme."
This cultural message creates a situation where children never develop the psychological tools needed to handle life's inevitable frustrations. Instead, they direct their confusion and aggression toward their bodies, which become "the source and the target of anguish."
Further reading:
The Dangers of Avoidance by Stella O’Malley
The Maternal Universe vs. Paternal Principle
Through psychoanalytic concepts, Jaco explains how our society has become "anti-Oedipal" - rejecting the paternal principle in favor of the maternal: "Our Western culture has moved to a maternal universe. And how do they then respond to restraint and restriction? They attack it. They despise it. That's why young people have such a difficulty with motivation."
The maternal principle provides love and affirmation, making the child feel like the center of the universe. The paternal function introduces necessary limitations. Both are needed for healthy development, but our culture now treats any limitation as oppression.
Further reading:
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
The Myth of "My Truth"
Jaco challenges the popular notion of subjective truth: "There's no such thing as your truth and my truth. There's your perception of truth, and this is my perception of truth. So there is this external ideal, this external reality that we approximate."
Our language has been corrupted by expressions like "my truth," conflating subjective feelings with objective reality and making it harder to engage constructively with the world as it actually is.
Further reading:
Death Anxiety and Cultural Buffers
From an evolutionary perspective, Jaco explains how human societies developed buffers against death anxiety through tribal affiliation, religion, and cultural participation.
Modern Western society has abandoned these protective structures: "The only thing that protects us against death anxiety is gratification. More food, more porn, more fashion, more gratification. But we know that cannot be the only counterforce against death anxiety. There also needs to be something like work, a legacy that I leave behind, something that I build that will survive my demise."
This explains the explosion of anxiety in today's youth—they lack the buffers that would have been provided by collective identity and meaningful cultural participation.
Further reading:
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
The Chernobyl Effect in Parenting
Jaco describes how parents engage in what he calls "the Chernobyl effect"—seeing warning signs but turning off the alarms: "Social media for someone younger than 18 years old is horrifying. It's horrible. A smartphone for a pre-adolescent is horrible... And then you see intelligent parents giving their kiddies a smartphone, an iPhone. Chernobyl effect."
Parents ignore obvious dangers because confronting them feels uncomfortable. They prioritize being "popular parents" over good parents, going along with dominant narratives rather than risking social ostracism.
Further reading:
Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society by Ronald J. Deibert
iGen by Jean M. Twenge
The Transgender Phenomenon
Jaco identifies what he calls "this frenzy of transgenderism among young people" as evidence of our culture's failure to help children navigate developmental challenges. He observes that when children feel anguish during development, they often "take out their aggression, their control onto the body as the source and the target of anguish."
Rather than affirming these feelings, Jaco suggests these young people need adults who will "listen to the manifest content," help them "conceptualize their anguish," and guide them through necessary developmental phases "to develop into the person they were meant to be as biology dictated."
Jaco explored these concepts in depth at Genspect’s Bigger Picture Lisbon conference on the psychological drive to transition, applying psychoanalytic frameworks to understand the current phenomenon.
Building New Institutions
Rather than trying to reform failing institutions, Jaco advocates for creation: "Sun Tzu said: Do not try and obliterate your enemy. Give them a golden bridge... Let them run those universities. Those universities won't survive for very long. In the meantime, you re-channel your resources and build civilizationist, civilization-loving structures again."
Advice for Parents
For parents navigating this cultural chaos, Jaco offers practical advice:
Connect with organizations like Critical Therapy Antidote and Genspect
Form networks with like-minded parents rather than trying to face these challenges alone
Keep speaking truth even when it's unpopular
Get involved in your community, as people need sane voices again
About Critical Therapy Antidote
The Critical Therapy Antidote (CTA) is an organization concerned with the ideological takeover of mental health fields. CTA works to identify where psychology and mental health have been politicized and become anti-therapeutic rather than therapeutic.
CTA publishes articles and news reports, hosts monthly talks, runs online supervision groups for professionals at different qualification levels, and collaborates with other organizations like Genspect and the Open Therapy Institute.
CTA’s book Cynical Therapies (2023) features Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman among its contributors examining the harmful impact of Critical Social Justice ideology on therapy.
Follow Jaco van Zyl
X: @Jaco_v_Z
Website:
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