WHITE NEUROSIS OR THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF ALIENATION 

Liviu Poenaru, July 20, 2025

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In the tradition of psychoanalytic thought, particularly following André Green and Jean‑Luc Donnet’s conceptualization of psychose blanche—a psychosis without delusions or hallucinations, marked instead by a radical voiding of psychic life—it becomes vital to explore its neurotic counterpart under contemporary socio‑cultural conditions (Green, 2005; Donnet, 1973). One might thus propose the notion of a white neurosis, not as a mere semantic invention, but as a necessary theoretical tool to articulate a form of psychic suffering deeply embedded in the invisible matrices of Western alienation.

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White neurosis designates a type of neurotic suffering that resists symbolization and eludes clinical visibility, precisely because it is shaped by the very codes and norms that structure what is considered “normal” or even “desirable” in late‑capitalist societies. In this regard, it aligns with analyses of neoliberal affective governance, where emotional expression is regulated by norms of positivity, performance, and individual responsibility (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). The subject marked by white neurosis does not exhibit traditional neurotic conflicts rendered in metaphorical language; instead, they suffer silently from a de‑symbolization of their interior world. Their affects, though present, are anesthetized, muted, or diverted; their inner conflicts, though intense, are rendered inexpressible by the absence of symbolic scaffolding. This is not the silence of repression in the classical Freudian sense, but a deeper blanching of signification itself—an inability to give colour to psychic life.

 

At the heart of this condition lies a collective foreclosure of alienation as a lived experience. The psychic cost of life in performative societies is increasingly understood through the prism of “white suffering,” where pain is privatized and social malaise internalized (Han, 2015; Rosa, 2019). In a society governed by imperatives of productivity and constant optimization, there is little room for the expression of existential discomfort or unnameable anxiety. The subject internalizes the command to appear well—functioning, positive, smiling—while their psychic apparatus is saturated with unprocessed contradictions, ethical dissonance, and disaffiliated affects (Han, 2017). The suffering induced by alienation is not simply repressed, but naturalized, normalized, and rendered illegible to both the subject and their social environment. The symptom does not scream; it whispers, or worse, it disappears into a desert of anesthetized affect.

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This leads to a striking diagnostic paradox: the absence of symptoms is not necessarily a sign of mental health, but may indicate a more insidious psychic desiccation. Just as psychose blanche is characterized by a collapse of thought without psychotic markers (Green, 2005), névrose blanche would reflect a collapse of symbolization without hysteric or obsessive manifestations. It is a neurosis stripped of its own language, deprived of its capacity to transform suffering into narrative or metaphor. What emerges is a silent form of suffering—quiet, efficient, socially compliant—perfectly adapted to the demands of a society that devalues introspection and marginalizes vulnerability.

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This form of neurosis must therefore be understood not merely as a clinical entity, but as a political and cultural symptom. It is produced at the intersection of neoliberal rationality and affective impoverishment, where the psychic cost of conforming to dominant narratives of success and wellbeing is the progressive erasure of the subject’s interiority (Berardi, 2015; Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). To speak of white neurosis is thus to denounce the whitening of the symbolic, the bleaching of desire, and the colonization of psychic life by imperatives of control and self‑regulation.

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The diagnostic opacity confronts not only the subject but also the psychotherapist with a peculiar form of clinical impotence. Constrained by an insufficient theoretical framework, most practitioners find themselves disarmed when faced with this white neurosis, which lacks the usual signposts of conflict, transference, and symptom formation. The difficulty lies in the absence of stable, mentalizable elements that can serve as anchors for therapeutic elaboration. As long as the unconscious economic codes—those internalized norms of productivity, success, social performance, and visibility—are perceived as natural or morally justified, they remain invisible both to the patient and the clinician. These codes, intimately tied to the fear of exclusion and the fantasy of failure, operate beneath the threshold of symbolization, reinforcing compliance while resisting interpretation. The prevailing psychological and psychiatric paradigms are themselves shaped—often unconsciously—by the dominant economic ideology. They promote adjustment, emotional regulation, and resilience rather than radical critique, thereby neutralizing the conditions for genuine psychic transformation. As such, white neurosis constitutes not only a blind spot of the psyche but a systemic limit of contemporary clinical praxis itself.

 

The concept of white neurosis invites us to rethink the frontiers of suffering in contemporary societies. It challenges clinicians, researchers, and theorists to detect the invisible forms of psychic violence exerted by cultural norms and to develop new tools for naming, symbolizing, and deconstructing these silent pathologies. This is not simply a theoretical gesture; it is an ethical imperative in a world where the absence of symptoms might hide the most profound forms of alienation.

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Bibliography 

Berardi, F. (2015). Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Verso Books.

Cabanas, E., & Illouz, E. (2019). Happycracy: How the Science of Happiness Controls Our Lives. Polity Press.

Donnet, J.-L. (1973). L’inconscient et ses lettres: Introduction à la topique lacanienne. Gallimard.

Green, A. (2005). La folie privée : Psychanalyse des cas limites. Gallimard.

Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso Books.

Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press.

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