Psychopolitics

Politics is an activity that regularly draws upon, and seeks to shape, subjective motivations and emotional dispositions. Psychoanalysis encourages us to understand these in terms of unconscious fantasies, repressed memories, and as unresolved psychic tensions that give rise to perverse, violent or inexplicable behaviours and obsessions. States, political elites, and movements address such tensions in numerous ways, to stir public feelings and to incite support. This module examines how psychoanalytic theory can contribute to the analysis of politics, particularly the way public language and memory express desires for power, subjugation, or even reparation. It focuses primarily on the texts of Freud, Klein and Lacan to develop analytical insights to understand contemporary events.