Politics and Psychoanalysis

In what ways might we understand politics and various aspects of the political system by studying psychoanalytic theory? In its inverse sense, how might political theory or activity contribute to psychoanalytic reasoning? This course aims to explore intellectual ideas and conversations between primarily these two perspectives, including the disciplinary anxieties and methodologies through which these perspectives are shielded and made relevant. In this course – of thirteen weeks, and twenty sessions – we shall aim to study in depth six broad but critical political phenomenon that have not just shaped contemporary psycho-social dynamics, but have also remained central to the sense of the political at the level of the personal and the public. These themes are: (i) colonialism and racism, (ii) narcissism and political leadership, (iii) sexuality and psychopathology, (iv) violence: individual and communal, (v) hysteria, trauma and guilt, (vi) visuality and psychoanalysis.