How can psychoanalytic interpretations of political situations have effects as actions?

ABSTRACT

This article examines the difficulties of making use of psychoanalytic insights to understand and influence political events. In clinical practice, it has often been possible to bring about understanding and change in patients, and in that context, immense developments in psychoanalytic theories and techniques have taken place. But there is no parallel tradition giving rise to the interpretation of unconscious political phenomena although there have been outstanding contributions of this kind by individuals, beginning with Freud's work on group psychology. There have been valuable psychoanalytic understandings of broad social changes, but effective interventions in “here and now” political situations have been few. Some examples of these include Keynes's understanding of the economic consequences of the peace of 1918 which were seen to be relevant mainly after the later peace of 1945 and Mitscherlichs' analysis in the1970s of the German people's “inability to mourn” the catastrophes of the Nazi period. The article concludes with reflections on the conditions which might facilitate effective interpretations of political situations by psychoanalysts today.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpreting political phenomena
• John Maynard Keynes
• The Inability to Mourn

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Patient anonymization

Potentially personally identifying information presented in this article that relates directly or indirectly to an individual, or individuals, has been changed to disguise and safeguard the confidentiality, privacy and data protection rights of those concerned, in accordance with the journal’s anonymization policy.

Notes

1 Psychoanalytic work in conflict mediation has been another relevant kind of intervention in the socio-political sphere, for example in the work of Vamik Volkan (2014) and John Alderdice (2022), who is referred to later in this article.

2 The USA and UK insisted that this occupation be brought to an end, after which the Weimar Republic under the liberal Chancellor and then Foreign Minister Gustav Streseman achieved some recovery.

3 The New York Times reported at the time that 66% of senior officials in Adenauer’s post-war Foreign Ministry had formerly been members of the National Socialist party (https://www.nytimes.com/1952/10/23/archives/adenauer-backs-use-of-nazi-diplomats.html).

4 The psychoanalytic theories of Klein and Bion hold that the capacity for thinking and reflection is closely connected with the integration of feelings of love and hate which makes possible a transition from paranoid-schizoid to depressive states of mind.