Original Article

The psycho-discursive origins of moral

panics: Attempting a new theoretical
synthesis
Galit Ailon
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University,
Ramat Gan 52900, Israel.
E-mail: galit.ailon@biu.ac.il

Abstract This paper attempts a new theoretical synthesis for studying moral
panics. Its proposed model ties together Bions psychoanalytic theory of the
development of collective emotions with Foucaults discourse theory, particularly his
account of the role of the moral code in the cultivation of subjectivity. This psychodiscursive model posits that moral panics are a collective emotional reaction to
subjectively strenuous moral requirements and expectations produced by a particular
type of discursive strain or discontinuity. Its central premise is that the Kleinian
object relations that Bion saw as central to understanding collective emotions
develop in relation to Foucaults notion of a socially sanctioned moral self to self
as an object of moral knowledge.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2013) 18, 3555. doi:10.1057/pcs.2011.15;
published online 4 August 2011
Keywords: moral panics; collective emotions; discourse; Bion; Foucault

Since the 1970s, sociologists and criminologists have sought to understand

moral panics, that is, sudden, often media-driven outbursts of morally
charged collective emotions of anxiety, fear, hate and anger relating to a
variety of folk devils (Cohen, 1972). Attempts to make sense of these moral
panics have foundered on a conceptual stumbling-block. Postulating moral
panics as collective overreactions to perceived societal threats (Cohen, 1972;
Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994), theorists have emphasized the criterion of
unreasonableness: a reaction disproportionate to the true magnitude of the
social problem at hand (Garland, 2008, p. 21; Hier, 2008, p. 180). The
emphasis on disproportion implies that a panic can arise only when
cognition is obscured by an extreme or distorted construction of reality.

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Thus, while it is acknowledged that panic is primarily an emotional, not a

cognitive, phenomenon, the definition places importance on the cognitive. It
directs researchers attention away from the task of explaining the development
of collective emotions to that of identifying who is responsible for constructing
reality in an exaggerated, disproportionate way. Dedicating their efforts to this
task, researchers have offered a number of answers, primarily political and
economic elites (Hall et al, 1978), special movements or pressure groups
(Jenkins, 1992; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994), or the mass media (Cohen,
1972; Thompson, 1998).
Several recent discussions on moral panics theory nevertheless note that the
treatment of moral panics as cognitive misperceptions is problematic. A moral
panic, Young (2009) claims, is, on the surface of things, a mistake in reason,
but it is not, on a more in-depth level, a mistake in emotion (p. 14). In Youngs
(2007) view, the visceral reaction, heavy with emotional energy, is a key feature
of moral panicsy (p. 59). Moreover, he (2009) reminds researchers that the
concept of moral panics as originally developed in the foundational texts of
the 1970s (Young, 1971; Cohen, 1972) arose from an intellectual context that
treated the emotive processes as the main focus of interest. Primary among these
emotive processes, Young maintains, were the moral indignation aroused when
a particular subculture threatens the moral values of a powerful group, and the
resultant ressentiment, whereby the powerful group condemns and rejects the
subgroup for manifesting that which it secretly craves. While this focus on
denied envy cannot explain the fact of a panic, nor can it tie together individual
and collective emotional processes, it does orient attention back to the
emotional processes involved.
The focus on cognitive misperceptions also entails a problematic judgmental
stance. Assured of a supposedly objective, unquestionable truefalse dichotomy
that renders a felt panic an overreaction and a perceived threat a disproportion,
moral panics researchers have not merely analyzed moral panics, they have
argued with them. Problematizing these truefalse moral dichotomies,
the studies of recent writers (see Thompson, 1998; Hier, 2002a, b, 2008)
indicate the need to focus instead on the question of how certain events or
objects come to be constituted as central or heightened moral threats by the
particular knowledge and meaning constellations prevalent at particular times
and places: in other words, by the historically specific ways of defining,
describing and making sense of events, objects, and knowledge about events and
objects (discourse). Treating moral truths as actively constituted (rather
than judging them according to a seemingly objective test of validity determined
by what researchers see as reasonable or appropriate), such a discursive
approach overcomes the tendency to treat the public as passive consumers
of misperceptions. It conceptualizes moral panics as the active appropriation,
negotiation and articulation of the moral common-sense (Hier, 2002a, b,
2008).
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In itself, however, the focus on the discursive constituents of moral panics is

insufficient, for it does not explain the emotive processes and dynamics at work.
Apparently, there is a need to combine a theoretical focus on the emotional
aspect of mass attachment to a moral panic with a focus on the way that moral
panics are actively constituted as such in specific sociohistorical contexts. In
other words, as Hier (2004) argues in a paper on urban surveillance, explaining
collective emotions in the context of moralization demands an integration of
psychoanalytic and discourse theory.1 This paper attempts such a psychodiscursive integration.

The Emotional Attributes of Moral Panics

Moral panics are not tied to a specific content. In fact, moral panics have been
aroused by and centered on topics as diverse as mugging (Hall et al, 1978);
pedophilia and child murder (Jenkins, 1992); youth drug use (Goode and
Ben-Yehuda, 1994); flag burning (Welch, 2000); and Satanism (Jenkins, 1992).
Despite the thematic heterogeneity, existing descriptions of moral panics
indicate commonalities relating to their emotional stimulation, makeup and
manifestations.
Concerning emotional stimulation, accounts indicate two crucial characteristics of the forces inciting moral panics. First, panics seem primarily connected
to control issues, or, more precisely, to loss of control over a variety of valued
objects, such as the physical body (panics over diseases or sexual offenses),
childrens well-being (parental panics over crimes against children or youth drug
use), material possessions (mugging panic), national cohesion (flag-burning
panics), or religious and mystical beliefs (the Satanism panic). Second, there
appears to be some macrothematic ordering pattern of moral panics. There is, as
Jenkins (1992, p. 13) observes, a tendency toward synchronicity of content in
particular periods of time, with a sequence of moral panics related to a series of
loosely linked menaces that appear as a form of wave for example, the
sequence of parental moral panics related to crimes committed against children
in the 1980s and 1990s. These waves indicate thematic interdependence and
thus possible links to historically specific discursive formations (Thompson,
1998, p. 20): to the specific meaning and value systems prevalent at particular
places and times.
Existing descriptions of moral panics also indicate that they are made up of a
distinctive emotional mixture, which consists of three primary emotions: first,
collective fear marking widespread consensus that a threat is real and serious
(Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994, p. 34); second, collective anger that is directed
toward group members who are designated as the cause of a threat to society or
to segments of it, and thus as an enemy or folk devil. These may be suspected
criminals or a social category or subgroup whose members might consequently
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incorporate the deviant label into their self-identity and actions (Cohen, 1972,
pp. 1415). And, finally, panics entail an upsurge in moral sentiment expressed
as hatred toward the designated devil, repulsion by his wrongdoing and,
simultaneously, strong feelings of righteousness (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994,
p. 31).
The distinctive emotional fusion characteristic of moral panics manifests in
two distinct reactions: collective attack against the folk devils or a panicstricken flight from them (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994; Best, 2000, p. 388).
Both may be expressed through informal, spontaneous reactions (street violence
against designated devils, informal exclusion and evasion, and the like), or
through public calls for strict rule enforcement or social regulation that would
authorize formal punishment or institutionalized exclusion.
Those reactions appear to be orchestrated by moral panic leaders. The moral
panic phenomenon includes collective adherence to those who sanction its
reactions: who orchestrate the attack, legitimate the flight, and often call for
social regulations or strict rule enforcement as solutions. These leaders are
the media and various types of moral entrepreneurs, interest groups, and
social movements that many researchers (for example, Cohen, 1972; Jenkins,
1992; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994) understand as those who incite the
panicky overreaction by constructing an exaggerated portrayal of a problem as
a heightened threat. In the theoretical scheme that is developed here, these
leaders are understood not as the source of moral panic but as a symptomatic
outcome of its discursively evoked emotional dynamics.

A Psycho-Discursive Model of Moral Panics

This papers model integrates Bions (1961) psychoanalytic account of group
emotions and Foucaults (for example, 1972, 1985, 1997) discursive accounts of
the development of subjectivity. The attempt to connect Bions and Foucaults
works may seem like a breach of both of their distinct epistemological spirits.
After all, in his book Bion speaks from within the disciplinary bounds of
psychoanalysis and uses essentialist concepts of self and its inner workings.
Foucault, in contrast, attempts to analyze the psyche through a distinctly
nonpsychoanalytic perspective (Hutton, 1988, p. 122), focusing on the way it
has been fashioned, constructed and disciplined by historically conditioned
knowledge and techniques that were devised both to unravel its mysteries and to
discipline its behavioral manifestations.
And yet the works of those two scholars do have a meeting point. On one
hand, Bions focus on the development of group mentalities re-articulates the
problem of the psyche in terms of the social forces in which it is embedded. On
the other hand, Foucaults late work on morality and ethics his turn toward
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subjectivity (Cook, 1993) establishes a theoretical foothold in the sort of

emotional phenomena that are of interest to Bion.
I should stress that Bions essentialism could never be fully integrated with
Foucaults constructivism and sociohistorical approach. But, if we bracket off
the question of the ultimate origin of the human psyche (nature/history) and
focus on explaining a specific phenomenon (moral panics) in which this psyche
is, to a great extent, already there, we will see that Bion allows it to socially
construct and Foucault allows it to formulate around a structured essence.
Bions interest in group mentality and Foucaults turn toward subjectivity make
a theoretical synthesis possible at the specific intersection of group and self that
is of interest to us here: moral panics.

Bions Analysis of the Emotional Lives of Groups

The fight/flight group mentality
Bions (1961) typology of group mentalities concerns particular states in which
a group is suddenly taken over by joint and powerful emotions. These joint
emotions make it seem as if the group is expressing a unanimous, collective will
premised on one of three underlying basic assumptions: that the group must
function to secure reproduction or pairing-off (the pairing group); to obtain
security from an individual on whom its members depend (the dependence
group); or to ensure self-preservation (the flight/fight group). Human groups,
Bion argues, tend spontaneously to structure themselves in a manner suitable for
acting on one of these basic assumptions; and when they do so they make use of
only those parts of their experience that they can weld into a firm portrait of or
beliefs about the objects on which the basic assumption depends. While some
individuals will maintain a distanced outlook (usually accompanied by a sense
of internal persecution by the group), on the whole the group will exhibit a form
of instantaneous emotional cohesion. This process is characterized by such
vitality that one of the features of group membership is that it gives rise to a
feeling in the individual that he can never catch up with a course of events to
which he is always, at any given moment, already committed (p. 91).
The basic assumption mentalities, Bion claims, appear suddenly, interrupting
other, task-oriented group activities. They also displace each other as if in
response to some obscure emotional impulse. Moreover, the basic-assumption
functions seem subject neither to development nor to decay (p. 172): they rise to
the surface, wane, and then resurface again as if some form of a protomental
system (p. 102) were activated/de-activated without ever changing its basic
shape.
According to Bion (1961), all basic-assumptions include the existence of a
leader. This leader need not be a person but may be identified with an idea or an
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inanimate object. Whatever or whoever the leader is, he (or it) is as much the
product of the basic-assumptions as any other member of the group. Thus,
the leader does not create the group but incarnates the role appropriate for the
basic-assumption. In the case of the flight/fight group, the group will follow a
leader who mobilizes it to attack somebody a recognized enemy who often is
a member of the group itself abandoning or sacrificing this member in the face
of the paramount collective urge of the group. Alternatively, the group will
follow a leader who leads it to flight. There will be a feeling that any strategy
other than the fight/flight option is either nonexistent or directly opposed to the
good of the group (pp. 6465). The flight/fight group thus tends to favor a
leader with an inclination to keep hostility alive. Moreover, if the enemy
is not obvious, the group will choose a leader with marked paranoid trends
(p. 67) who will find an enemy.
The emotional field of the fight/flight group is characterized by the primacy of
feelings of fear, anger and hate. In fact, Bion argues, It is my contention that
panic, flight and uncontrolled attack are really the same (p. 179). Panic, he
explains, does not arise in any situation unless it is one that might as easily have
given rise to rage (p. 179), and both of these interchangeable emotions give rise
to an urge for instantaneous satisfaction, which, as claimed, takes the form of
flight or fight. Individuals in this group will thus have no difficulty turning from
headlong flight to attack or vice versa.
While Bions (1961) typology is based on his experience in small therapeutic
groups, he argues that it has potential applications to large groups as well,
including entire national societies (pp. 112113). Indeed, the emotional
attributes of the flight/fight group directly parallel those characteristic of
moral panic episodes: the sudden surge of panic; the accompanying anger or
hatred towards a recognized enemy; the vitality of the emotions involved; the
sense of a unanimous, collective will to attack this enemy or overcome it;
the equally forceful urge to evade this enemy or flee at the sight of it; and the
tendency to adhere to leaders who will order the attack/flight or legitimate
them (the media, social movements, moral crusaders, and the like). Marking the
instantaneous combination of members in distinctive patterns of behavior, the
attributes of moral panic episodes and their characteristic emotional field
panic, fear, hate, rage directly correspond to the characteristics of Bions flight/
fight mentality.
The causal account
In seeking to explain the emergence of the basic-assumption mentalities in group
life, Bion (1961) proposes a causal account focusing on the psychological
defense mechanisms described by Melanie Klein y as typical of the earliest
phases of mental life (p. 141). These concern phantastic anxieties and defensive
mechanisms for dealing with them, primarily the splitting and projective
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identification of the paranoid-schizoid position, as well as basic processes of

introjection and projection.
Bion does not fully explicate his interpretation of Kleins model in the book
but merely adapts it to adult group life. I would, however, like to present this
model briefly in light of his work. In this model, an infant feeling a dread of
destruction from within manages the disruptions, deprivations and anxieties of
early life by splitting experience into good and bad parts and projecting them
into external objects or part-objects (for example, the prototypical good/bad
breasts). The good object can be trusted, loved and taken in (introjected) as a
base for the sense of self; the bad object is then feared and can be hated and
attacked. Thus, annihilation anxiety is allayed through the projection of the
painful, rageful, unmanageable, or unwanted parts of the self into an external
object. The object of projection might take in these feelings or experiences and
incorporate them as a part of his own self-experiences through projective
identification. The price of this process is fear of a pure, malevolent evil lurking
on the outside (the persecutory anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position).
In the grip of persecutory anxiety, everything bad is seen as someone elses
fault (Gomez, 1997, p. 40), and a sense of control is achieved by turning
the destructive impulse against this hated other (Klein, 1952; Segal, 1988;
Gomez, 1997).
Adapting his version of Kleins model to adult group life, Bion (1961) claims
that the task of establishing contact with the emotional life of the group would
appear as formidable to the adult as the relationship with the breast appears to
be to the infant (pp. 141142). Since in this sense the group is to its members a
complex external reality on which each of them depends, failure to meet the
emotional demands of group life creates a regression in its members. This
regression entails a loss of individual distinctiveness and expresses itself both in
the belief that a group exists, as distinct from an aggregate of individuals, as
well as in the belief in the characteristics with which the supposed group is
endowed by the individual (p. 142).
In this mental state, awareness of individual distinctiveness gives rise to group
panic that does not entail a loss of group cohesiveness (p. 142). Rather, in Bions
scheme it implicates a regressional resort to the defense mechanisms described
earlier. In the case of the fight/flight group, psychotic anxiety is aroused with
such force that defense must be found in the form of the release of hate, which in
turn finds its outlet either in a destructive attack on a supposed enemy or flight
from the hated object (p. 163).
As I understand it, this attempt to adapt Kleins model to adults in groups is
incomplete. It lacks an answer to a critical question: why are the relations with
the group as formidable to adults as the relations with the breast are to infants?
As Sutherland (1992) maintains, To state that the individuals groupishness is
an inherent property in his makeup as a social animal has not really carried
forward our understanding of its nature and origin. y Much as Bion has
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contributed, we are left with what seem to be the crucial questions about groups
unanswered. What does the individuals groupishness rest on? (pp. 62, 68).
We might phrase the question this way: what is the milk that the group feeds
individuals and on which they so critically depend?
A number of researchers who have relied on or developed Bions framework
argue that the group offers its members collective reinforcement and containment of their internal defense mechanisms. For example, Jaques (1955) argued
that in institutional and community contexts individuals are linked with the
collective because the groups unconscious cooperation in splitting and
projection reinforces individual internal defenses against anxiety and guilt. In
her work on nurses, Menzies (1960) maintained a similar point, arguing that,
through structural institutionalization, groups have the collective power to
externalize and give substance in objective reality to characteristic psychic
defense mechanisms against anxiety, reinforcing these mechanisms by making
them appear as an aspect of external reality. And, building on Jaquess and
Menziess work, Hinshelwood (1987) has noted the power of large groups to
enable members unconsciously to externalize intolerable feelings through
collective dramatization, thus defending them from awareness of their stressful
experiences and containing those aspects of their emotional experiences they
feel least able to contain themselves.
The notion that groups offer members collective reinforcement against and
containment of intolerable anxiety or guilt can be only a partial answer to our
question. It leaves our biggest mystery unsolved: how is it that so many people
experience the same sort of intolerable emotions, the same need for defensive
mechanisms, at the same time? To date, group theorists following Bions
tradition have offered structural or event-evoked answers to this question. Thus,
for Menzies (1960) it was the institutional nature of the nurses work role that
stood at the root of their collective emotions. Turquet (1975), to cite another
structural example, argued that large groups incite anxiety and defensiveness in
members who join them because moving to a group role entails threats to
identity and individuality. And, describing event-evoked joint emotions, Hopper
(2003b) speaks of traumatized groups and grouplike social systems creating a
joint fear of annihilation. These explanations do not seem relevant to moral
panics, which are linked neither to any specific role nor to a characteristic
trauma.
I suggest a different explanation to the question of how it is that many people
experience the same sort of intolerable emotions, the same need for defensive
mechanisms in relation to different issues that come to focus at particular
places and times, one that is discursive rather than structural. I argue that the
milk, the nourishment that large groups feed their members, is meaning, and
particularly self-constituting meaning: the collectively constituted knowledge
and beliefs by which a self can be thought of as self and can thus become an
object of knowledge.
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Although Bion did not do any more empirical work on groups beyond what
he reported in Experiences in Groups (Trist, 1992, pp. 12), his (1970) later
interest in the dynamics of thinking and interpretation and the disruptive effects
of new ideas points us to the realm of discourse. Although Bions later work
remained focused on therapeutic processes with individuals, he did acknowledge the importance of tending not only to ideas coming from inner space,
but also to those coming from outer space. Mentioning the combined wisdom
of a group he asked, Is it possible that we can organize ourselves into
communities, institutions in order to defend ourselves against the invasion of
ideas which come from outer space, and also from inner space? (1980, cited in
Grinberg, 1992, p. 186).
Exploring the invasion of ideas that come from outer space requires us to
transcend the disciplinary bounds of Bionian psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalysis, the Foulkesian tradition of group analysis and its debated notion of the
existence of a social unconscious in groups has been one effort in that direction
(for example, Dalal, 2001; Hopper, 2003a).2 My focus, however, is not on the
social unconscious but on the social constitution of consciousness as an
object of thought and action; on the social nourishment through which we are
able to know and enact our-selves. This implies a discursive focus. We must
search for Bions missing link in theoretical work focusing on the development
of meaning systems, of ideas and knowledge, about the self. Thus we turn to
Foucault.

Foucaults Discursive Subjectivity

According to Foucault, the subject is constituted within discourse, within
historically sanctioned modes of producing knowledge about self as an object
of thought (see McNay, 1994, pp. 4884). Discourse feeds people with
particular ways of knowing themselves, of making their embodied existence and
social experiences meaningful, as well as of monitoring themselves as part of
broader processes of policing and domination (Foucault, 1976, 1980, 1988). In
his late work, Foucault, focusing specifically on the moral and ethical dimension
of discourse, saw it as the guiding thread for the constitution of subjectivity.3
Exploring the techniques people use and the trials they perform in an attempt to
make themselves moral agents, Foucault (1985) emphasized the prescriptive
aspects of discourse the values and rules of action that are recommended to
individuals through the intermediary of various prescriptive agencies (p. 25)
and the ways these condition how individuals are supposed to constitute
themselves as moral subjects of their own actions (Foucault, 1997; see in this
regard Cook, 1993, pp. 123124). The subject, Foucault (1988) argued, actively
constitutes himself by practices of self that are not of his own making: They
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are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and
imposed on him by his culture, his society, and his social group (p. 11).
For some of Foucaults interpreters, this idea of subjectivity as historically
and discursively constituted marks an unbridgeable gap with the psychoanalytic
concept of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic thinkers, assuming an inherent layering
and interpenetration of conflicting elements of an inner world, tend to have
a relatively thick view of human material, whereas Foucaults notion of
subjectivity presupposes only a thin conception of human material on which
history operates (Cousins and Hussain, 1984, pp. 254256, cited and discussed
in du Gay et al, 2000, p. 4; see also Evans, 2000, p. 122).
It should nevertheless be noted that Foucaults conception does not contradict
the possibility that an eventual thickness of an inner world might develop.
According to another interpreter of Foucaults work Deleuze (1988)
Foucaults concept of subjectivity is constituted through a process of introjection in which the external forces and techniques that make up a historically
conditioned knowledge of the subject are folded in, becoming, in effect, the
inside of thought (p. 94). It is a process of interiorization, or doubling, of the
outside, which allows a relation to oneself to emerge (pp. 98100). This
interpretation thus seems to imply that while thin to begin with, an inside is
eventually constituted through interiorization or folding. Moreover, since the
inside is constituted by the folding of the outside, between them there is a
topological relation: the relation to oneself is homologous to the relation with
the outside and the two are in contact (p. 119).
The metaphor of a fold signifies that for Foucault the ontological starting
point for the study of subjectivity begins on the outside (introjection), a point
that many (although not all) psychoanalysts would oppose. I would nevertheless
like to stress the following point with regard to Kleinian object relations:
whereas Foucault would reject the notion that object relations originate from
an innate essence or constitute a necessary self, the idea of contact between relations to oneself and relations to the outside suggests that Foucault
entertained the possibility and importance of object relations with self as a
knowledge-object.
That possibility is not exactly foreign to psychoanalytic thinking. For
example, to an extent it resonates with Bollass (1987) psychoanalytic notion of
a persons relation to his self as an object. And yet in psychoanalytic thinking
this form of object relation is primarily configured in the realm of personal
history and therapeutic engagement. The Foucaultian knowledge-object is
configured in a much broader realm. It refers to truth as we know it and
consists of socially sanctioned beliefs, theories and moralities objectified as
factual or real in the wide sociohistorical arena.
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, we might postulate this argument as
follows: if we acknowledge that the concept self is an object of social and
moral thought that it is socially discussed, made sense of, interpreted,
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objectified then we would recognize the possibility that object relations can
exist with it as such. Society in this sense feeds its members ways of thinking
their selves: it configures the relation to self as an object by sanctioning moral
truths of self through which people can make sense of who they are. It offers
people the social milk of subjective awareness, of making themselves live in
their own thoughts.
And yet, Foucaults work further indicates, historically conditioned concepts
of self are heterogeneous and unsettled and are likely to change even within a
single life span. Discourse, Foucault (1972) argues, is neither complete nor
coherent and thus is always open to change, producing discontinuous
knowledge about objects of thought. As discursive formulations change, the
internalized fold becomes a condensed past. According to Roses (1998)
extension of Deleuzes interpretation of the fold, the infoldings are partially
stabilized to the extent that human beings have come to imagine themselves as
the subjects of a biography, to utilize certain arts of memory in order to render
this biography stable, to employ certain vocabularies and explanations to make
this intelligible to themselves (pp. 3738). Stated differently, the folds are
stabilized through assemblages of storytelling rituals and other cultural
techniques that intersect at particular times. Apparently, in the context of such
assemblages, people continue to be morally weighed down with old, multiple,
and, at times, inconsistent beliefs and modes of producing themselves as
subjects. Thus, in Deleuzes (1988) terms, [t]he folding or doubling is itself a
Memory: the absolute memory or memory of the outside, beyond the brief
memory inscribed in strata and archives, beyond the relics remaining in the
diagrams. y Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect on
self by self (p. 107).
Here, then, potentially complex and conflictual inner thickness emerges.
Since social and moral thought may change, since ways of thinking or talking
or understanding self may fluctuate, object relations with it might undergo
disruptions, with previously internalized knowledge-objects weighing down on
each other, causing ambivalence, anxiety and inner tension.4
Now if, as Foucault (1985) demonstrates, contemporary knowledge of
self includes the moralization of particular practices, requiring individuals
to compose themselves as subjects of their own conduct (du Gay, 2000,
p. 282), then the practices that are, at one particular point in time or in one
particular sense, cast as a moral responsibility of self may also be experienced as beyond ones control, as the origin of a frustrating sense of ethical
incompetence, helplessness or vulnerability. In this situation, an untenable
ambivalence would arise between the urge to unite by interiorizing the new
outside, its knowledge-objects and moral expectations, and the absolute
memory that refuses to dissolve fully but haunts this moral interiorization
with a sense of an internal other (the other of the new, socially sanctioned
morality) rooted inside.
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Moreover, if the individual can constitute and recognize himself as a

self only through the moralities that structure the relationship of self with
self (Foucault, 1985, p. 6) moralities that turn the self into something
that can be thought then this moralitys other lurking inside threatens self
itself and thus must not be thought. Nevertheless, there seems to be another
resort: in the homology between the relations of self with self and the relations
of self with others, moralitys other can be, so to speak, redoubled; it
can be found in the image of another other a folk devil, for example who
is othered as the absolute outside of a persecuted group. The folk devil,
I suggest, might, in turn, fold in this force of the groups evolving rule of
knowledge (its evolving moral othering), enclosing it within his own inside of
thought.
That is not a projection and projective identification in the strict psychoanalytic sense, and, yet, to some extent it is. There is no absolute or essential
inside in this account, only a sociohistorical knowledge of an inside, which,
given that it is social and historical, is always, in fact, an outside (thus the notion
of a folding whereby the outside becomes the insides of thought). But there is a
movement here wherein a conflictual and ambivalent relation to oneself is
reconstituted as a relation to external objects the good group and the evil
groups other and then forces itself through a collectivitys evolving
rules of knowledge onto or into the folds of those who are othered (in Bions,
1961, terms we might refer to this knowledge as the truths defined by a groups
collective force of action). Self, group, other: these are all, in Foucaultian
terms, objects of knowledge; but, through the moral knowledge that allows
a sense of inside to be constituted and regulated, they are caught in a movement of force, from outside code to fold, from group to subjectivities, and
inversely.
Cast in those terms, the dread of group destruction that Bion observed
emanates from within the archeological depths of the fold. It stems from the
experience of a subjectivity made distinctive to an entire social strata by fissures
between previously internalized discursive formations echoing from within the
fold and a new moral code from outside. In Bions terms: fissures between
the invasion of ideas that come from inner space and those that come from
outer space. These fissures contain threats of moral self-doubt and of rising
awareness of the contingency of the truth of self as an object of knowledge.
Nevertheless, given the homology between the relation to oneself and the
relation to the outside, group members can find their own internal bad objects
actively present on the outside, where those bad objects can be decisively
attacked or fled from. As the group becomes identified with the good and
constructs its enemy as both an absolute evil and an absolute outside, it
allows each of its members both to regain a sense of moral stature and control
by turning a destructive impulse against this evil and to reassert emotional
attachment to the collectivity and its new moral requirements.
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The Psycho-Discursive Model: An Illustration

In the proposed psycho-discursive model, the so-called leaders of moral panics
are not a cause as much as a symptom. Following Bions (1961) observation, I
contend that the panicked group will cast as its leaders only those who reflect its
emotional state: who keep the hostility and persecutory anxiety alive, reinforce
the collective resort to defense mechanisms, and thus license the impulse to
flight or legitimate the urge to attack. On the basis of Foucaults work, I further
suggest that a surge of moral panic is the consequence of a particular form of
discursive strain. In this strain a discursive formulation casts a moral expectation of being able to control a core or highly valued object that other formulations render largely unyielding to individuals control. It is a discursive strain
that gives rise to a particular form of moral self-ambiguity and tension and
entails in individuals a sense of deep-seated doubt about their ability to perform
a central expectation on which some core aspect of their self and moral stature
has become, in the context of collective discursive transformations, increasingly
dependent.
Lets take as an example the British and American parental moral panics
relating to crimes against children. According to Jenkins (1992, p. xiii), in the
1980s and early 1990s the British and American media carried repeated
headlines of violence, sexual abuse and assaults against children. While sexual
and other crimes against children were hardly a new phenomenon, the sheer
scale of media coverage about different types of child predators and
abusers, and the extent to which the offenses were believed to represent a
very widespread threat, were, at that time, exceptional (Jenkins, 1992). Also
exceptional was the attention they attracted from legislators and law enforcement agencies, which advocated draconian solutions (p. 9). According to
Jenkins, these moral panics were used as a part of a politics of substitutions
whereby claim-makers who worried about normative and structural changes in
the traditional family incited children-related morality campaigns to raise the
general moral decency stakes. Jenkinss explanation thus focuses on the
political and moral interests of those whom the moral panics appear to have
served.
The psycho-discursive model would posit that the leadership of those claimmakers was itself a consequence of the emotional dynamics at work. Moreover,
it would posit that those emotional dynamics were a collective reaction of a
generation of parents facing a set of heightened moral expectations that
rendered them ethically responsible for controlling what was internally sensed
as beyond their control.
There is ample evidence to support this explanation. The 1980s and 1990s
seemed to have constituted a historical crossroads of moral discourses relating
primarily to motherhood but also, to a lesser but nonetheless significant extent,
to fatherhood. In the earlier decades of the twentieth century the ethic of
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motherhood underwent significant transformations. These were primarily the

result of the popularization of the ideas of Freud and his followers through
the emergence of pseudoscientific child-rearing gurus preaching the importance of full-time, full-responsibility motherhood to the psychological wellbeing of children (Marshall, 1991). The popularization of these ideas was
accompanied by an increasing idealization and consequent moral disciplining of
mothers, whereby mothers became morally accountable for every aspect of the
way their children were to turn out (Dally, 1982; Chodorow and Contratto,
1989). In contrast to earlier times (Dally, 1982), this ethic of motherhood was
defined by an all-encompassing set of expectations holding mothers responsible
for ensuring what popularized psychology and psychoanalysis defined and
sanctified as the psychological, emotional and relational childs best interest
(Phoenix and Woollett, 1991). As part of this ethic, after World War II a
powerful opposition to maternal employment outside the home developed.
While earlier opposition to maternal employment tended to dwell on the
dangers of physical and moral neglect, this new opposition focused on the
threat of supposed long-lasting psychological damage to children (Tizard, 1991,
p. 178).
Beginning in the 1970s but reaching a peak in the 1980s, the increasingly
popular neoliberalism and feminism jointly placed that ethic of motherhood
under a practically impossible strain. The neoliberal withdrawal of the state
from many areas of social provision, including welfare, public education, and
health care, marked the penetration of a new socio-economic commonsense
defined by the determination to transfer all responsibility for well-being back to
individuals (Harvey, 2005). This theme of responsibilization of the discursive
reconstitution of subjects as autonomous actors, morally responsible for
more and more aspects of their identity, economic destiny and social fate
(for example, Binkley, 2009; Hamann, 2009) accompanied the increasing
isolation of households. Thus responsibilized and entrepreneurialized
(Rose, 1999, p. 482), mothers, and it seems plausible to add fathers as well,
faced both increasing pressures for public-sphere involvement and dedication
and, simultaneously, a heightened sense of isolation in their child-rearing
responsibilities.
The upsurge of feminism also created pressures both for mothers and for
fathers. As far as mothers were concerned, various streams of feminist thought
idealized public-sphere womanhood and surfaced a sense of discontent with
domesticity. To a great extent, womens liberation became broadly identified
with increasing involvement in the public sphere. Like any discourse, however,
feminism, too, was neither fully coherent nor unitary: the emphasis on the
public sphere did not loosen the grip of the old motherhood ethic, with its
intermingled idealizing blaming dynamic, but paradoxically strengthened it.
Writing in 1989, Chodorow and Contratto thus noted that feminists writings
about their own mothers and motherhood assumes an all-powerful mother
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who is totally responsible for how her children turn out y (p. 80) Feminists
writing thus merely added a new quality of rage to the blame-themother discourse, heightening the belief in total infantile need and maternal
responsibility (pp. 90, 92). The generation that grew up in a discursive
environment that idealized motherhood and opposed outside employment on
account of its threats to the psychological well-being of children became
mothers in a context of heightened feminist pressures toward public-sphere
careers, heightened neoliberal responsibilization, and an ever-more pressing and
uncompromising ethic of maternal love, control, and perfection (see also Parker,
1997).
Feminism also promoted an increasing sense of paternal moral responsibility
for rearing children. Although the large pattern of paternal public-sphere
emphasis has not changed dramatically, certainly not in the 1980s, the notion
that fathers can and should fulfill primary parenting and associated domestic
roles has been increasingly popularized (Hollway, 2006, p. 84). As a mark of
this notions strengthening hold, the 1980s and 1990s were characterized
by an increasing cultural preoccupation with the question of the changing
role of fathers (Russell, 1983). In other words, the 1980s and 1990s were
characterized by a new sense of paternal moral responsibility accompanied by
contradictory cultural pressures for fathers to remain to a large extent out of the
household and sustain maximum involvement in the public sphere.
While there is little empirical evidence concerning the emotional consequences of fathers changing moral codes with regard to children, there is
substantial evidence with regard to mothers. According to Hollway (2006), in a
framework combining phantasies of the omnipotent mother with a reality of
employment and other commitments, there is conflict and tension involved in
womens experience of maternal subjectivity (pp. 7576). Indeed, beneath the
ethic of full-responsibility and control that reached a paradoxical peak in the
1980s atmosphere of neoliberal responsibilization and feminist public-sphere
emphasis lay another belief that derived from the same discursive roots but
contradicted them at the same time. The same psychological discourse that
sanctified grandiose expectations of mothers also popularized the notion of the
unconscious, a notion emphasising how limited is our real control over
children, even when we seem to be in control (Parker, 1997, p. 34). Wanting to
control what was also sensed as beyond her control, a mother [felt] painfully
culpable when things [went] wrong. y Women mother within cultures that
maintain impossible, contradictory maternal ideals (pp. 3435).
The consequences included heightened anxiety, tension and ambivalence.
Feeling responsible for what was sensed as beyond her control, a late-twentiethcentury mother found her life becoming dominated by fears of strangers,
traffic and drugs, and suffused with an unmanageable ambivalence in the
face of feelings of hate and aggression for the child who could, with any trace
of defiance, become an accusation of her inadequacy (Parker, 1997, pp. 32, 33).
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Motherhood thus gave rise to powerful aggressive feelings and behaviors or

maternal identification that is y full of rage and fear (Chodorow and
Contratto, 1989, p. 92).
An analysis (Evans, 2003) of a sudden eruption of violent protests against
suspected paedophiles the protests of Residents Against Paedophiles on the
Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth, UK, in 2000 offers evidence linking parents
experiences of inner ambivalence and tension to collective paranoia/attack
against designated folk devils. Following a case of child murder, the Paulsgrove
protesters torched cars and firebombed flats and houses where suspected sex
offenders and paedophiles were thought to live. Evans argues that the hate,
aggression and violence of the group of protesters may be a consequence of
unconscious projections and excitations depending on the prevailing anxieties
and defenses at the time (p. 172). The protesters, she further claims, were
working-class women, many of them single mothers and many themselves
childhood victims of sexual abuse with consequent difficulties in managing their
feelings towards their children. She concludes:
It is reasonably certain that these women y were disowning the aggressive
and destructive anxieties about their own incapacities and bad inner
objects from their pasts and projecting them onto the figure of the
paedophile. y Strengthened by the group, individuals achieved a position
of moral rectitude. (p. 177)
Thus, that group of protesters came to be identified with and act as a persecuted
and absolute moral good (p. 180). The collective action became a means of
disowning aggressive and destructive anxieties originating from a joint sense of
parental incapacities and moral self-doubt that, for the women, were so terrible
to acknowledge that [they had to be] cast out as belonging to the paedophile
alone (p. 177).
My argument about the children-related moral panics is that the sense of
parental incompetence can be discursively produced and thus experienced by a
much larger population and, moreover, can be projected onto or into a variety
of folk devils. The collective resort to the defense mechanisms that Evans (2003)
identified in the case of the local panic of the Paulsgrove mothers may be
provoked not merely by personal past experiences such as of childhood abuse,
but rather by strenuous discursive discontinuities pertaining to moral codes that
influence an entire generation. As shown, research on the 1980s and 1990s
indeed indicates the existence of such a discursive strain, one in which the
collective moral requirements pertaining to (parental) self as a knowledgeobject implied that parents should control what was also seen, through the lens
of previously internalized discursive constellations, as beyond their control.
Such conflict leads to complex experiences of unmanageable ambivalence and
tension.
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The same underlying psycho-discursive dynamic holds for other moral

panics. Thus, by way of a preliminary outline, the 1970s British mugging moral
panic that Hall et al (1978) describe a panic that concerned primarily the
experience of loss of control over material and personal possessions may have
resulted from changes in the moral code that rendered individuals ethically
responsible for securing control over those aspects of their material fate and
well-being that they also saw as beyond their control. Halls (1996) later work
on the rise of the New Times ethos and the interrelated neoliberal and
meritocratic buildup that culminated in Thatcherism5 suggests that such a
discursive change did indeed take place during the 1970s in Britain. His account
indicates that during this time a transformation of the material moral code was
gaining momentum, giving rise to an increasing emphasis on individuals ethical
responsibility and accountability for their own material well-being.
Similarly, the American flag-burning panics of the late 1980s (Welch, 2000)
might have resulted from changes in moral expectations relating to the
cultivation of intense national sentiment and patriotic devotion. Since the flagburning panic concerned the disciplining of moral sentiment the control of
national faith its psycho-discursive origins might have been rooted in the
moral interstices between the patriotic decree of the time and previously
internalized codes that endangered the subjective experience of full-hearted
patriotic devotion. According to the model advanced here, the attack of the flag
burners was related to a morally dreaded sense of patriotic doubt or ambiguity
subjectively experienced by people who faced, as a group, a heightened
nationalistic discursive emphasis. Indeed, Welch (2000) himself indicates that
such a heightened nationalistic discursive emphasis took hold in the Reagan era
and became a hallmark of the Bush era.
In each type of moral panic the folk devils are different: criminals haunting
children, muggers stealing possessions, flag burners defying a decree of patriotic
devotion. But I propose that the underlying dynamic is the same: the enemy who
is attacked or fled from, the enemy who is hated, is to a significant extent a
projected sense of a shared evil-split-part-from-any-good; it is an inner evil
experienced by a large population that, by virtue of its collective belonging, was
nourished by joint self-constituting moral discourses. As new, changing,
variable discursive formations render people ethically responsible for making
the uncertain certain, for controlling that which, owing to previously
internalized discursive formations, they also perceive as uncontrollable, they
project the resultant bad internal other whom they do not wish to face and
collectively turn him or her into a folk devil. Old, socially sanctioned truths
of self are split apart from the new that ethically denies them the new that
morally demands of people more control than previously internalized knowledge renders possible and are cast outside the group, only to re-emerge,
through the collective fight/flight response, in the demonized image of a folk
devil lurking everywhere group members turn.
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Acknowledgement
I thank PCS Editor Lynne Layton for her insightful comments and important
corrections. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions
and contributions.

About the Author

Galit Ailon is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Her published works include studies of
identity, culture, and power in organizations, as well as analyses of popular
economic discourse. She is author of Global Ambitions and Local Identities: An
Israeli-American High-Tech Merger (Berghahn Books). In her most recent
research project she is studying contemporary financial scandals and the moral
panics they entail.

Notes
1 Hiers (2004) paper on surveillance integrates aspects of Foucaults discourse theory and postLacanian thought on affective repertoires relating to the maintenance of order. Seeking to explain
moral panics rather than urban surveillance, this paper focuses on the emotive rather than regulatory
functions underpinning the development of collective emotions.
2 Foulkes attempted an integration (primarily) of Freudian and sociological thinking, his work bearing
the influences of Eliass sociology (Dalal, 2001). Foulkess followers critiqued and developed this
theoretical synthesis (for example, Dalal, 2001; Hopper, 2003a).
3 Foucault (1985) distinguished between morality, understood as the discursive vantage point or rule
of knowledge, and ethics, understood as the active experience or practice upon the self as a subject
of action (Rabinow, 1997, p. xix).
4 There is a question of the extent to which the foldings are negotiable. On the issue of negotiation, see
Layton (1998, 2004) integration of psychoanalytic and postmodern gender theory. Future research
on moral panics should address this issue.
5 The focus here is not on value changes related to meritocracy (Young, 2009, p. 12) but on the
changes that meritocracy introduced in the moral code relating to controlling economic fate.

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