From Virtue to Voice: Reflections on Ideological Capture, Guilt, and Group Conformity in Clinical Psychology

Everything Can Be a Defence

One thing you learn quickly in analytic work is that anything and everything can be a defence. The healthy eater, the over-eater, the atheist, the devout believer, the gender abolitionist, the gender essentialist, even the one who insists they have no ideology at all. In the analytic frame, we are not looking to categorise or judge these identities or positions as inherently healthy or pathological. What matters is not the content, but the process: how something is held, what unconscious need it serves, and what psychic debt it may be managing.

Analysis does not offer moral rankings to behaviours, preferences, or political positions. Instead, it listens for their function. Is the daily run an act of pleasure or penance? Is the refusal to comply an act of self-respect or a defence against humiliation? Is intense political fervour a sign of commitment, or a manic attempt to silence unbearable doubt?

This is especially evident in the group analytic space, where defences often migrate (shifting from one person to another), replicate (spreading across members), or constellate (forming shared patterns such as collective silence, scapegoating, or group idealisation). The group becomes a shared projection field, unconsciously assigning roles, distributing burdens, and locating unwanted truths in specific members. Within this matrix, one person may become the over-identified superego, another the grotesque truth-teller, another the dissociated innocent. The group body both reveals and conceals its suffering, its moral economy, and its capacity for cruelty.

Which brings me to an old fairy tale.

The Three Spinners

In the Brothers Grimm tale The Three Spinners, a young woman is punished for refusing to spin. A domestic task laden with symbolic and gendered weight. She is lazy, or overwhelmed, or silently resistant; the tale does not say. When the queen threatens her with punishment, the girl lies, claiming she loves spinning. The queen, impressed, locks her away with a room full of flax, promising she may marry the prince if she can spin it all. Terrified, the girl is saved by three strange women, each deformed in a different way: one with an enormous foot, one with a pendulous lip, and one with a vast thumb. They spin for her in secret. At the wedding, the girl introduces them as her aunties. When the prince asks how they became so disfigured, they reply that it was through a lifetime of spinning. Horrified, he decrees that his new wife must never spin again.

On one reading, the tale is comic. A lazy girl escapes labour, wins a crown, and is rewarded for her trickery. But through an analytic lens, and in dialogue with contemporary concerns about ideology, projection, and moral sadism, the story becomes a parable about who carries the cost of moral purity, and how societies outsource punishment.

At its heart, the tale is about who carries the burden of virtue. The girl, caught in a lie about her love of spinning, is given an impossible task by the queen - a punitive demand presented as an opportunity. She cannot complete it alone, so she is rescued by three grotesque, disfigured women who spin for her in secret. Their bodies bear the visible signs of excessive, selfless labour: a swollen foot, a pendulous lip, a flattened thumb. At the wedding, they are introduced as kin. When the prince asks how they came to look this way, they reply, “From spinning.” He is so repulsed that he promises his wife will never spin again.

It is a tale of deception and reward, but also of outsourced psychic labour. The girl escapes punishment, wins status, and is absolved of work, but only because the spinners, marked and marginal, have absorbed it on her behalf.

In psychoanalytic terms, the tale functions as a story of projection, scapegoating, and moral sadism. The spinners are not merely helpers; they are containers for the disavowed demands of the superego, the bodily expression of what must be hidden in order for the young woman to be seen as virtuous. She does not integrate their suffering; she instrumentalises it. They are symbolic surrogates : figures onto whom the labour, deformity, and punishment can be placed so that she may appear innocent and unmarred.

This is moral sadism in fairy tale form: the pleasure of being seen as good while someone else is punished to uphold the illusion. In group terms, the story mirrors a common institutional pattern, where ritualised virtue (confessions, positionality statements, public admissions of guilt) is performed, but the underlying structures of harm, projection, and avoidance remain untouched.

The Girl and the Group Superego

The girl in the tale does not intend harm. Like many of us in institutional or professional settings, she is trying to survive within a system that demands performance and punishes transparency. Her lie is strategic, but also self-protective. She learns to speak the language of virtue : “I love spinning” even when it is untrue, because the alternative is annihilation.

This is how ideological capture often works. Within rigid moral climates, there is little space for uncertainty or dissent. To belong, one must perform belief. To be seen as good, one must say the expected words. The group superego (intolerant of complexity and ambivalence) demands submission and rewards confession. But the cost is borne by someone. And often that someone is grotesque, hidden, or already marked for marginality.

In The Three Spinners, the deformity is literal. In government and public sector institutions, it is symbolic. Those who come to represent the unwanted roles (such as the “unconscious racist”, the “privilege denier”, or the “un-woke”) are often cast as moral scapegoats. They become containers for the organisation’s disavowed guilt and anxiety. Rather than working through its own contradictions and historical complicities, the institution preserves a sense of moral legitimacy by projecting blame onto selected individuals. The burden of guilt is not metabolised collectively, but outsourced, and it frequently falls along familiar, politicised lines.

Yet now, we are also witnessing a swing in the opposite direction. A growing refusal to acknowledge the importance of these dynamics at all. The language of unconscious bias, structural harm, or moral accountability is increasingly dismissed as ideological overreach or “woke theatre”. This counter-move can itself become a defence, protecting against the discomfort of complexity by mocking or flattening all attempts at reckoning. Where once guilt was inflated and ritualised, now it is denied or ridiculed. Both stances, though seemingly opposed, reflect a shared resistance to metabolising moral ambiguity. In place of dialogue, we get disavowal. The cost is borne not by the institution, but by those who live at the fault lines: often marginalised twice, first by moral performance, then by moral backlash.

The Spinners’ Hidden Motives

But what of the three deformed women themselves? Traditional retellings leave their motives unexamined, but a psychoanalytic reading invites deeper reflection:

• Identification with the superego: Perhaps they believe enduring pain is righteous, that suffering grants moral worth or protects others.

• Masochistic gratification: They may find unconscious satisfaction in their toil, repeating cycles of self-sacrifice to feel useful, needed, or good.

• Desire for belonging: Their “help” could be a strategy to gain proximity to the girl’s fate, hoping service will buy them inclusion or protection.

• Compulsion to repeat: They might be acting out old relational patterns, unconsciously compelled to rescue others while neglecting themselves.

Like over-functioning members in a group, the spinners carry what others refuse. They embody the group’s disavowed demands. They pay the price in their bodies so that the young woman, and the surrounding social order, may remain seemingly pure.

Their silence invites a broader question about the unconscious bargains that shape institutional life. Especially in professions such as clinical psychology, where ethics, care, and virtue are central to professional identity. Who is allowed to appear good? Who carries the unseen labour of holding institutional shame, contradiction, or confusion? And when the moral climate shifts, who becomes the new target for blame?

The profession is caught in a bind. On one side, there is a climate of moral absolutism, where clinicians are expected to perform their righteousness and align themselves with rapidly changing ideological norms. This is exhausting, especially for those with personal histories of trauma, marginalisation, or dissent. On the other side, a backlash is growing, often cynical and dismissive. It casts any engagement with power or identity as manipulative, naïve, or misguided. In both positions, genuine reflection is replaced by performance. The analytic value of curiosity is eroded in favour of certainty, ridicule, or fear.

Group analysis offers an alternative. It does not require confession or ideological alignment. It attends instead to what is disavowed, to what migrates between members, to what is replicated or defended against. These dynamics are not merely personal, but systemic. The group unconsciously assigns roles to maintain cohesion, often projecting denied material onto a few. One member may carry the anxiety, another the guilt, another the aggression. This is not about individual pathology, but about how psychic burdens are distributed in group life.

From Moral Sadism to Metabolising Guilt

Reflecting on my own earlier attempts to perform virtue, I recognise how I, too, tried to spin a narrative of suffering and moral clarity in order to be seen as good. I also outsourced parts of my psyche: projecting dissociation onto the group, and enacting unprocessed trauma through certainty. The fairy tale does not condemn the girl, just as I do not condemn my former self. But it does ask: what happens to the spinners? What becomes of those who do the unseen labour of carrying collective pain — in silence, grotesque, disfigured, and invisible?

Group analysis offers another way. It invites us not to perform our virtue, but to enter into dialogue. Not to split off guilt, but to metabolise it. Not to rescue the girl or pity the spinners, but to bring them into relation. To name what has been disavowed, and to hold the unbearable truth that our innocence always has a cost.

To metabolise guilt is not to perform remorse or seek absolution. It is to recognise that we are all, at different times, the girl, the queen, the prince, and the spinners. We lie to survive. We reward performance. We recoil from the grotesque. We seek goodness without bearing its cost. But we can choose to stay present, within the group and within ourselves, long enough for the story to change.