But these schoolyard identifications have been hardened by the discovery that they are already so strong that they present the perfect marketing opportunity to mass-cultural producers. Just to add, as I will come to it in more detail, this doesn’t mean this should be responded to by a hatred of homoeroticism - which this regression will turn into nor does it mean kids straightforwardly enjoy being bullied - and raped, symbolically or otherwise - at school and nor is it to condemn as barbaric either childhood eroticism in general or sadomasochism. Indeed, the present regressions in male mass culture (especially of the American variety) are founded on an almost constant return to schoolyard identifications, and the paired homoerotic sado-masochistic figures of jock and nerd. That is, this story asks the crucial questions: “what are the burgeoning modes of the hatred of women amongst the male precariat? And how do they find their violent expressions?” In one particular way, the story’s diagnosis is extremely precise: in the moments in which it dwells on Robert’s fantasy of Margot’s return to a high school romance. And although this story might speak in more lulling tones than, say, Jelinek did in the 1970s, the violent backdrop is even more extreme: one of Elliott Rodger-style massacres and the mushrooming of nasty 4chan-based chatter about a “beta uprising”, of “pick-up artistry” and the belief that being a “good guy” is the world’s best justification for being a pig in bed. The great victory of stories like “Cat Person” - and perhaps the reason for its popularity - is that they inaugurate this question in the time of our own economic crisis - and in particular amongst a generation of men who, over the last decade, have graduated university into a collapsing economy. But from a psychoanalytic view, they are also stories about how these “new communal modes” are founded, in truth, on regression. In short, this whole analytic nexus is bound up with women at work (“taking the jobs of men”), and how in periods of economic crisis masculinity can triumph through new extra-liberal communal modes of (anti-)social organisation founded on the hatred of women and violence against them, and from which women and their work is excluded. And needless to say too that these developments have prospered in particular in circumstances of male mass-unemployment or the mass fear amongst men of unemployment. And more significantly they have come about as those economic crises have instantiated dominant social modes of the hatred of women, not so much by some abstract patriarchy but by new developments of homosociality, bound up in warriorship, male cliques and confraternities. Needless to say, these are turns that have been made necessary - albeit through the darkest and most labyrinthine paths - by social and economic crisis. Indeed, you can see a longer history of this sort of quantitative ego-analysis as significant to attempts understand the Nazi phenomenon reaching through to the late 1940s. It happened again in the writings of Reich, Fenichel, and Freud in the 1930s. It happened in 1921 in ‘Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, the sister book of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ now not amid war but instead subsequent social and economic ruin. There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and ego weakness) at key moments. My ill-advised tuppenceworth on ’ Cat Person’: