Last night’s ‘shock’ election result which has left the UK with its second hung parliament within the space of seven years has not only upset the usual suspects (the political class, the commentariat, Daily Mail and Telegraph readers, etc) but also all those people who thought there was a direct …
The following is definitely a ‘work in progress’ and a working hypothesis, and its main aim is to try and formulate a relationship between right-wing populism (RWP) and the Real. My basic contention is that RWP is founded on an ‘ideology of the Real’, which although posing a number of …
In my previous post on psychosalvation I argued that psychotherapy, and, to a certain extent, psychoanalysis, were grounded in an ideology of ‘psychosalvation’, by which I meant that therapy offers the possibility of ‘saving’ the human subject from the secular equivalent of Christian hell and damnation. On this reading, ‘hell’ …
Many years ago, when I was in final year of my undergraduate studies, I wrote a dissertation on humanistic psychotherapy, within which I strongly criticised its concept of the ‘self’ or ‘ego’ and, linked to this, the notion of ‘psychosalvation’. By this I mean the idea that therapy can, in …
At one point near the end of the Watchmen graphic novel, and in the film of the same name, Dr Manhattan tells his companion and lover Laurie that he has been blinded by a shower of tachyons that he attributes to a nuclear bomb being detonated by the ‘villain’ of …
First the Brexit vote, then Trump, and now…..the real possibility of two right-wing populist mainstream European governments within a couple of months of each other. I’m referring of course to the upcoming French elections and the ‘surprise’ British general election that Teresa May called yesterday. ‘Surprise’ to whom, one wonders? …
Special guest posting by Sarai Allen The previous post on the subject of right-wing populism discussed and critiqued Jay Frankel’s paper that made the argument for right wing working class Americans identifying with the aggressor. This was based on Frankel’s reading of Ferenczi’s paper on this subject. In this post …
I concluded my previous post on the psychopathology of Brexit by suggesting that right-wing populist ideology is an attempt to articulate a trauma. In this context, trauma can be thought of as a manifestation of the Real, as Lacan makes clear in Seminar XI. Another way to look at this …
Is Brexit the manifestation of a right-wing populism? Certainly, some of the key motivations that appear to stand behind Brexit, which include concerns about immigration, a desire to see Britain ‘great’ again, xenophobia (especially towards ‘Europeans’), a distrust of (liberal) political elites, social conservatism veering towards authoritarianism, and so on, …
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 …