The latest US-led air strike on Syria, purportedly as punishment for Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on the town of Douma last week, reminds me of Baudrillard’s short book of essays on the first Gulf War The Gulf War did not take place.1 The third essay, which bears the …
In a memorable scene in Menno Meyjes’ 2002 film Max, the would-be artist Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) remarks to his would-be Jewish mentor, the (fictional) Munich art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack), that ‘politics is the new art’. Too late Rothman realises the true meaning of Hitler’s words: this failed …
Twenty years ago Howard Schwartz wrote a paper on the Psychodynamics of Political Correctness which might easily have disappeared into the academic graveyard along with all those other countless publications that no-one outside their particular sub-discipline would ever read in the first place. However, times change and today political correctness …
Since the EU referendum in June 2016 there have been a number of attempts, including my own contributions on this site, to look at how psychoanalysis can help us make sense of Brexit. I think at this point it might be helpful to take a closer look at the kinds …
As I pointed out in a previous writing on this subject the term ‘psychopathology’ is not meant in a derogatory sense, i.e. implying that those individuals who voted to leave the EU in June 2016 were somehow ‘deluded’ (and likewise for those who voted to remain). Rather, it is to …
The BBC news channel recently broadcast a fascinating documentary on American film noir and its relationship to small town America. In it, the historian Adam Smith argues that Donald Trump’s election victory has highlighted the division between the cultures of the (corrupt) big city and the (innocent) small town. Although …
And before all the those Brexiteers out there reach for their side arms this is not criticism of those who exercised their democratic right last June to ‘redefine’ our relationship with the EU. Rather, it’s an attempt to try and make some sort of sense of what’s going in the …