Radioactive Identifications in the Present: Introduction to a Roundtable Discussion of the Intersect of Politics, Social Formations, and the Clinical

Abstract

This is an introduction to a roundtable comprising three papers and a discussion considering the interweave of psychoanalysis and social and political life. Prepared for a 2017 conference in Prague, the three papers (and one discussion) address political and social changes in Central Europe and globally as they effect internal conscious and unconscious experience. The roundtable centers on how changes in political order, and in the environment, past and present, produce ongoing new and renewed trauma in citizens, both locally and globally. The introduction sets this work in the context of the 2017 conference and the subsequent election of Donald Trump to president of the United States, speaking to the unsettled “radioactive” effects of social and political change on the subject.

Keywords:

• environment
• collective history
• identification
• political culture
• psychoanalytic history
• trauma
• unconscious.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, PhD, is faculty and supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In 2009, She, Lewis Aron, and the late Jeremy Safran established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. Harris co-edits the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with more than 90 published volumes.

Eyal Rozmarin

Eyal Rozmarin, PhD, is co-editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis and associate editor of the journals Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He has published numerous articles in psychoanalytic journals, as well as book chapters, and has presented his work around the world. His research takes place in the intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory and explores the relations between subjectivity, collectivity, and history. He is in private practice in New York.