Western versions of hungry ghosts:

Lacanian objet petit a phantoms. In Lacanian terms, a child raised without love may form a “ghost” in the psyche — a persistent lack that haunts desire.

It is not a being but a structural absence that behaves like one, shaping the symbolic order.
Winnicott’s false self. When a child receives no attuned care, they may develop a “false self” — a protective apparition that stands in for the real self. It is a spirit of adaptation born from emotional starvation.
Collective egregores of neglect. In occult theory, an egregore can form not only from shared intention but from shared deprivation — a group’s unspoken wounds coalescing into a psychic entity.
A Toynbeean Time of Troubles practically breeds deprivation‑spirits — not necessarily literal ghosts, but the whole spectrum of psychic, cultural, and mythic entities formed from lack, from emotional starvation to institutional collapse.
"Interesting Times" as a generator of “privation spirits”. An Epochal Crisis is defined by:
Institutional failure (especially economic).
Elite obstruction.
Social atomization.
Breakdown of affective ties.
Lack of emotional or psychological security results from institutional failures. When the integrative institutions no longer integrate, the society’s “nutritional” systems — emotional, symbolic, communal — collapse. What emerges is a population raised in privation of meaning, belonging, and care.
In mythic terms, that’s exactly the ecology that produces hungry ghosts, sorrow spirits, and thin wandering beings. Typically our Faustian culture has a blind spot when it comes to perceiving the collective dimension of this Haunted Palace. It is all supposed to be the individual's fault, the individual's responsibility. Neoliberal self-optimization is the 21st-century iteration of social Darwinism or Hobbesianism, symptoms of earlier such crises. The one that began in the 1890s was never completely resolved by New-Deal-Anatomy-of-Britain programs.
Social media is their realm, especially Xitter where they tear at each other to settle old scores with perfect strangers.

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