PA Reading list

Psychoanalytic thinking on polarisation around specific issues of social/political process

1  Psychoanalysis and Palestine–Israel: a personal angle – M. Fakhry Davids (2019) Excerpt From: David Morgan. “The Unconscious in Social and Political Life”

2. Racism and Similarity: Paranoid-Schizoid Structures – Richard Tan (1993) A clinical study of working with embodied levels of racism in the consulting room

3. The Struggle of Integration: James Baldwin and Melanie Klein in the Context of Black Lives Matter – David W. McIvor (2016) – “I will argue that we cannot fully appreciate the depths of what Baldwin called the “savage paradox” of race without the insights provided by Klein and object relations psychoanalysis.”

4. The National Elections: As seen through the Paranoid Schizoid and Depressive Positions – Jamie L. Loveland Psychoanalytic take on the politics of the Presidential election (Obama and Romney) in 2012

5. Destructive populism as “perverted containing”: A psychoanalytical look at the attraction of Donald Trump – Karin Johanna Zienert-Eilts (2020) “The author examines the appearances and formation processes of destructive populist developments in the Western world from a psychoanalytical perspective, using the example of Donald Trump and his voters. She draws on the concepts of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Otto Kernberg, which build on each other, and drafts the basic features of a psychoanalytic explanatory model of destructive populist social processes.”

6 Social Media and Coronavirus: Paranoid-Schizoid Technology and Pandemic? – Jacob Johanssen (2020) “I want to argue that the world in its current state seems split, divided along harsh, brutal and clear lines, boundaries, and borders: the healthy and unhealthy, the young and the old, the vulnerable and non-vulnerable, the recovered and those still at risk, and the dead and the living. Such splits are mirrored and amplified by social media which, as I show, depend on splitting mechanisms themselves.”