In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud theorised that humans have violent impulses that are threatening to humanity or to civilisation, to use his parlance. These violent instincts are tempered by the internalisation of society’s demands for sublimation, and through the mastery of the pleasure principle, whereby an adaptive ego must come to terms with “reality”. But what if the super-ego is not a corrective to violent impulses as Freud suggests, but rather is destructive onto itself, as Sándor Ferenczi suggests, where the superego is the internalisation of society’s denial of ego experience? This project explores how contemporary capitalism may create social norms of violence that are ego syntonic, whereby the superego is formed in the denial of human suffering, formed in the submission of authority, and formed in the denial of one’s own subjectivity, a denial of ego-reality testing. The project explores how such conditions could be worked through in a process of collective reflection, akin to cultural mourning. The project looks to also explore the ways in which psychoanalysis can offer modes of understanding as a way of retrieving emotional experience in the contemporary environment of emotional commodification. The very reification of emotions as objects to be consumed is the hallmark of affective capitalism, creating surpluses through the extraction of emotional life beyond the traditionally recognised modes of extraction of physical labour. Experience itself as a commodity is yet another denial of subjectivity, is the rupture of a continuous, reflexive, personal encounter, to one of reproducible objects, similar to other such objects, and commensurate along a medium of exchange. In this way, psychoanalysis can be seen as a praxis of inter-subjective recognition, which repairs such fragmentation and reification that contemporary capitalism does to ourselves, and that we are encouraged to do to others.