On Continuing to learn from Robert Jay Lifton

At the Other Place, you may read of some thoughts of mine on how much I have learned from Robert Jay Lifton, whose memoirs I think I must soon re-read. And here you will see some thoughts developed from reading another book Lifton co-edited on trauma in the former Soviet Union for a lecture I was to have given outside Prague this past June, which has been postponed until late summer of next year. 

I first encountered Lifton more than twenty years ago now thanks to a professor of mine whose research assistant I was for some time. He had found Lifton useful in trying to understand a number of phenomena around mind control and the psychology of totalism, for which, of course, Lifton is perhaps most famous.

Lifton published his newest book late last year: Losing Reality: on Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (The New Press, 2019), 240pp. 

I have written to the publisher asking whether Lifton is available for an interview. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, here are the details on the book, described by the publisher as a

"definitive account of the psychology of zealotry, from a National Book Award winner and a leading authority on the nature of cults, political absolutism, and mind control." Further: 

In this unique and timely volume Robert Jay Lifton, the National Book Award–winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual proposes a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. Exploring the most extreme manifestations of human zealotry, Lifton highlights an array of leaders—from Mao to Hitler to the Japanese apocalyptic cult leader Shōkō Asahara to Donald Trump—who have sought the control of human minds and the ownership of reality.

Lifton has spent decades exploring psychological extremism. His pioneering concept of the “Eight Deadly Sins” of ideological totalism—originally devised to identify “brainwashing” (or “thought reform”) in political movements—has been widely quoted in writings about cults, and embraced by members and former members of religious cults seeking to understand their experiences.

In Losing Reality Lifton makes clear that the apocalyptic impulse—that of destroying the world in order to remake it in purified form—is not limited to religious groups but is prominent in extremist political movements such as Nazism and Chinese Communism, and also in groups surrounding Donald Trump. Lifton applies his concept of “malignant normality” to Trump’s efforts to render his destructive falsehoods a routine part of American life. But Lifton sees the human species as capable of “regaining reality” by means of our “protean” psychological capacities and our ethical and political commitments as “witnessing professionals.”

Lifton weaves together some of his finest work with extensive new commentary to provide vital understanding of our struggle with mental predators. Losing Reality is a book not only of stunning scholarship, but also of huge relevance for these troubled times.

Inside Paul Wachtel's Consulting Room

I've only just come across Paul Wachtel, and am slowly trying to work my way through some of his many fascinating books, starting with Inside the Session: What Really Happens in Psychotherapy, about which some thoughts:

Wachtel starts off by noting that it is of course always easier to write about therapy neatly and tidily than describe the actual messy realities on the ground. Like Nina Coltart, whom I have discussed on here in detail, he also notes that a therapist is mostly uncertain most of the time. If you're overly confident you don't know what you're doing he says quite bluntly. 

Wachtel is quite open in this book about his repeated desire to learn from and integrate practices from the diverse traditions of CBT, experiential, systems, and psychodynamics. One concrete way he does this is to look closely at the patient's behavior in daily life: feedback loops and vicious cycles. This unites CBT and psychodynamic approaches: the thought-action cycle. Early experiences, which psychodynamic approaches focus on, are often reinforced by daily behavior today. 

He begins this attempted integration by focusing on what he regards as the central role across all these traditions of anxiety, which Freud after 1926 revised his project to say was the cornerstone, even more than repression. For Freud discovering and unlocking repression seemed to be key as one who saw himself as an archaeologist. 

The typical idea, Wachtel says, that repressed material is not just "forgotten but can be retrieved later," is no longer believed by just about anybody. Rather repressed material can be discovered in disguised forms. 

The therapeutic task is not just unmasking repressed fears and anxiety. It must also grapple with the corrective emotional experience? In so doing, Wachtel says, psychotherapy has undergone a shift from merely unmasking fears to helping the patient bear them.

Wachtel recognizes a considerable body of evidence pointing to the central role of exposure in helping with this task. CBT does this all the time, but Wachtel says it happens in different ways in psychodynamic treatment as well. In the former it is not just a matter of treating immediate thoughts and behavior, and regarding that as sufficient; in the latter it is not just a matter of insight into fears and anxieties, and treating insight as sufficient. Integrated therapy needs and must seek after both. 

In both cases, what is, he says, not often remarked but nonetheless very powerful, is the role of kindness. Wachtel: "the history of psychoanalysis is replete with comments about the importance of kindness, caring, and the offering of the analyst’s more benign vision of what is possible for the patient as a substitute for the patient’s harsh superego" (p.14). This book challenges directly the idea that a clinician should be neutral, aloof, non-gratifying of patient's desires. Instead, "a warmly supportive stance toward the patient is the best facilitator of his capacity to explore previously warded-off thoughts, feelings, and wishes" (19).

This leads Wachtel to recognize that it is insufficient for an analyst or analytic therapist merely to proffer insight, or to insist of facing fears, without providing that kindness out of which the therapist comes to recognize that resistance is not irrational opposition to the therapist, but instead reflects the fact that the patient is terrified. So therapy must give the pt. space and safety to begin reappropriating cut-off parts of his psyche.

The task of the therapist here is to maintain a necessary balance, that is to "root the therapeutic effort in the dialectic between accepting the patient’s experience of the world and helping him to change those features of his assumptive world that are contributing to his pain." One must proceed with a careful hand here, for, as Wachtel continues, "in good part, change is reached by not trying to change the patient, or, more accurately I think, by both trying and not trying at the same time" (p.18). Only after feeling understood can a pt. begin to think about change.

Though written nearly a decade ago before "resiliency" became the buzzword it increasingly is today, Wachtel insists in this book that successful therapeutic change requires looking at positive cycles too. Patient and therapist need to focus on the patient's strengths as key to therapy--not just focusing on pathology.

Wachtel here very much echoes the great Adam Phillips in arguing that "When successful, psychotherapy helps the patient to retell his life story, to provide a different frame and give a different moral to the story. Hence, it enables him to give different meaning to events and experiences." This is a point that Phillips has often made.

Finally, Wachtel notes that a good therapeutic alliance and working relationship can have positive spillover effects in other areas outside the consulting room. 

On Kindness

On my drive to the University of Saint Francis, where I teach, there is, as I round the last corner before pulling up to the campus, a small house with a sign stuck in the front lawn immediately adjacent to the street. In catchy blue and yellow colours, and without any other logo or language on it, it says simply "Be Kind." It went up about 2 weeks ago, and every time I see it I get a little thrill that someone has put this up there for it seems not just powerful but almost forbidden today for people to be kind rather than angry.

That leads me to recommend--as I gladly would and do with all his books--a short book, On Kindness, co-authored by the great Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor. Phillips is, in my view, the most compelling and important, and certainly most prolific, psychoanalyst writing today. After first starting to read Freud thirty years ago now, my return to him over the last 5-7 years has been almost entirely through both the encouragement of, and a hermeneutic greatly indebted to, Phillips. 

This book, like so many of his others, raises key questions about what we forbid ourselves from doing and why. In this case, why is kindness a pleasure we so often deny ourselves even as we can see how greatly it moves others, and matters to us when we receive it? 

Perhaps even more germane to our moment, especially in Anglo-American countries, are further questions he asks in a book that was--nota bene--written more than a decade ago (2009): why are we so adamant about pretending to be independent, and about denying our dependence on others, which is viewed as the province of only the young, the sick, and the elderly? In fact, we are all dependent on each other all the time, but Anglo-Americans live in denial of this thanks in no small part to the "prophets of free-enterprise capitalism" (p. 96). Lest we miss the point, Phillips and Taylor return to this point several times late in the book, noting that "capitalism is no system for the kindhearted" and that such a system is profoundly destructive of all the communities of kindness, including the family. 

These are points made in greater detail and with deeper philosophical development in Alasdair MacIntyre's 1999 book Dependent Rational Animals, which I have used with undergraduates over the years. (MacIntyre and Phillips are aware of each other and occasionally one quotes the other. MacIntyre, e.g., has recommended Phillips' 1989 biography of D.W. Winnicott, which is quite good, though I think Dodi Goldman's In Search of the Real: the Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott is richer.) 

Vamik Volkan Discussing His New Book

As I indicated earlier in the week, Vamik Volkan is a clinician and scholar from whom I have learned much. He has a new book out, Large Group Psychology, just published by Phoenix Books, whose website everyone interested in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and much else should keep a close eye on. Rare is the week that does not see Phoenix publishing something, or advertising books soon to be published, all of which look fascinating. 

I sent Dr Volkan some questions about his book. Here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

VV: I was born in 1932 to Turkish Cypriot parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus when it was a British Colony. The first humans on the island arrived about ten thousand years before the birth of Christ. As the centuries went by, invaders and traders multiplied. In my childhood I was exposed to people with different large-group identities: Cypriot Greeks, Cypriot Turks and, in much smaller numbers, Armenians, Maronites, people who considered themselves as descendants of Phoenicians and, of course, the British – all living side by side. Only much later I begin to wonder what history means for people with different large-group identities.

In early 1957 I came to the United States armed with my medical degree from the Ankara University’s Medical School in Turkey and only 15 dollars in my pocket, but I had a job at a hospital in Chicago. I became an American citizen a few years later. My departure to the United States was part of the phenomenon known as the ‘brain drain.’ The United States lacked medical doctors at this time and therefore attracted doctors from around the world. I had my psychiatric and psychoanalytic training in the USA.

In 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited the Knesset and famously referred to a psychological “wall” between the Israelis and the Arabs—a wall that, he stated, accounted for 70 percent of the problems between them. In response, the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, of which I was a member, brought influential Arabs and Israelis together for unofficial dialogues for six years to find out if this “wall” could be made permeable. This is how I started my decades-long work in unofficial diplomacy.

I met and had opportunity to spend time with many political and community leaders (For example, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, the Emir family in Kuwait, North Cyprus President Raif Denktaş, Turkish President Abdullah Gül, Estonia President Arnold Rüütel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu). This also helped me to study leaders-followers interactions and national, ethnic, religious and political large-groups’ psychology. As an academician, generally speaking, I stayed away from the news media. However, I believe that deeper knowledge about what lies behind what we see, hear and learn daily is useful for the public

AD: What led to the writing of Large Group Psychology: Racism, Societal Division, Narcissistic Leaders, and Who We are Now?

VV: I have been living in Charlottesville, Virginia since 1964. Following the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in my city numerous fatal attacks on churches, synagogue and mosques occurred worldwide. In many countries, people are asking the metaphorical question “Who are we now?” and coming up with seemingly opposite answers. I could no longer ignore the urge to write a new book about large-group problems.

During my decades-long activities in the international arena I have learned that behind observable factors like politics, economics and law, the central psychological factor in starting and keeping alive large-group conflicts is the protection and maintenance of large-group identity. During my work I heard the subjective experiences of such large-group identities being expressed in terms such as “We are Palestinians,” “We are Lithuanian Jews,” “We are Russians living in Estonia,” “We are Polish,” “We are Communists,” “We are Sunni Muslims.”

AD: I visited Cyprus in October 1993 for an international ecumenical conference in Limassol devoted, in part, to overcoming division and conflict between Christians. As a young, naive kid from Canada I was almost entirely ignorant of the conflict until we were given a guided tour of Nicosia, getting as close to the DMZ/Buffer Zone as we were allowed. I've never forgotten the shock of seeing that, like a huge open scar right across the city streets. That division and its conflict are very personal for you, as you tell us in your moving first chapter. Is that conflict part of your own working through of the "rescue fantasy" (p.1) you speak of as motivating some therapists and clinicians?

VV: My arrival in America in 1957 coincided with the Cypriot Greeks’ struggle against British rule in order to unite Cyprus with Greece. The Greek Cypriots began to oppress Turkish Cypriots and an ethnic conflict was inflamed. I experienced a terrible stabbing pain six months after taking up residence in America. My father sent me a newspaper clipping with very grave tidings. My roommate, Erol, from the days when we lived in clapped-out lodgings in Turkey while attending the same medical school had returned to Cyprus to tend to his ailing mother. He was the nearest thing to a brother that I have had. A Greek terrorist shot him seven times, killing him, in a pharmacy where he was buying medication for his mother.

He was murdered in order to terrorize the ethnic group to which he belonged. After receiving the news of his death, I felt numb. I did not cry. I was in Chicago, in a foreign environment in which I was close to no one, so I did not share the news of my former roommate’s murder with any other person. Much later I would become aware how the murder of my roommate played a role in my involvement for finding ways for a more peaceful world.

Relationship between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks changed greatly since your visit to the island in 1993.  Border crossing points are now available. Due to COVID-19 there are the necessary cautions for border crossings.

AD: Your discussion of group psychology is, as of course you note at the outset, indebted to Freud and his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
One of the key points you repeat in your book is that group psychology exists "in its own right." Tell us a bit more what you mean by that and why it's important to be clear about this.

VV: Sigmund Freud and his followers (in the clinical setting) described what belonging to a large ethnic, national or religious group means for an individual and how an individual unconsciously perceives his or her large group as a symbol of a mother or father figure.

My work is very different. As a psychoanalyst I have studied the shared psychological processes within a large group and relationships between opposing large groups. Large-group psychology in its own right means making formulations about the conscious and unconscious shared past and present historical/psychological experiences that exist within a large group. Making such formulations enlarges our understanding of the emergence of present-day societal-political-religious events, and leader-follower relationships. 

Doing this allows us to look at the interactions between opposing large groups in depth. This is similar to a psychoanalyst making formulations about his or her analysands’ developmental histories associated with various conscious and unconscious fantasies in order to understand what motivates certain behavior patterns, symptoms and habitual interpersonal relationships.

AD: Two other key phrases recur in your book, reflecting some of your earlier work: "Complicated mourning" and "survivor guilt." From everything I'm hearing in this pandemic, there seems to be a lot of both being experienced by people today. Tell us a bit about those and how you understand them.

VV: I wrote about my roommate Erol’s murder above. Since I did not have family members or friends in Chicago at that time, I had no one to share my feelings and thoughts about my loss. My mourning process was complicated. 

Also, I was not aware of my “survivor guilt.” While I was safe in the US my family members in Cyprus were living under very difficult conditions and my former roommate was dead. Decades later I realized how I handled my “complicated mourning” and “survival guilt.” My first academic research was on these topics. I wrote papers and books on these subjects. My book (with Elizabeth Zinti), Life After Loss has been translated into several languages.

In the present book, the reactions to loss are seen in the  Addendum, which describes 16 analysands’ initial responses to the pandemic. These patients returned, consciously and unconsciously, to their childhood losses and re-experienced anxieties and old defense mechanisms and fantasies linked to such losses. Moreover, when I gave a seminar for 8,000 Chinese mental health workers on trauma due to COVID-19 pandemic on April 3, 2020 I encouraged them to study the psychology of mourning.

AD: You note (p.29) that an individual who has difficulty in mourning can often pass that on to succeeding generations, resulting in the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Is that also a dynamic we see at work in groups, indeed whole countries? Could it be said that some of the rage and grief today over police brutality and racism are at least partly due to America's never really having grieved the legacy of slavery and attempted to heal from it?

There are variations of transgenerational transmissions and all of them depend on the permeability of the psychological boundary between children and their mothers or other important caretakers. It is not only anxiety that travels from the mother or other primary caretaker to a developing child through the permeable boundary. Other psychological “messages” are also  given to the child.

Important adult persons may push their specific self- and object-images into the developing self-representation of the child. In other words, the “other” uses the child, mostly unconsciously, as a reservoir for certain self- and object-images that belong to that adult.

The experiences that created these mental images in the adult are not “accessible” to the child, but instead are deposited or pushed into the child, but without the experiential/contextual framework that created them.
In the psychoanalytic literature there are many papers and books that examine the psychology of the transgenerational consequences of the Holocaust for the children of the survivors as well as the perpetrators.

The rage and grief today over police brutality and racism are mostly due to America's never really having mourned the legacy of slavery. Mourning is a slow process related to remembering and relating to lost persons and things and, if everything goes Ok, saying “good bye” to such lost objects. What we see in the streets can be considered as an expression of shared mourning. I hope that it will take a positive course.

AD: In that vein, can we see your notion of a "linking object" as helpful in trying to understand some of the battles over statues, including over the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville in 2017, which you say in your introduction was part of the motive for writing this book?

I described linking objects and linking phenomena in 1972. A linking object is an item chosen by an adult mourner that unconsciously represents a meeting ground for the mental image of the lost person or thing and the corresponding image of the mourner.   

Not every keepsake is a linking object; the item is a linking object if the mourner makes it “magical” and uses it as a “tool” for postponing the work of mourning. For example: after his father’s death, a young man picks up his father’s broken watch and hides it in a desk drawer.  For the young man, this broken watch becomes “magical.”  He becomes preoccupied with repairing the watch, but he never gets it repaired.

Some statues and monuments are shared linking objects. They connect many people to their ancestors’ losses or glories often without hurting or humiliating other large groups. But in the US some such shared linking objects humiliate another group (African Americans).

We are now more openly becoming aware that the beginning of American greatness was accompanied with the history of slavery. This reality now is hitting us openly. We need good leadership and open discussions to come up with ideas about what to do with some statues and monuments.

AD: Over the years, since discovering your work, I've found your concepts of "chosen trauma/glory" and "time collapse" enormously valuable. In this new book you introduce a concept I've not come across before in your work: "Entitlement ideology." Would you give us a sense of that and perhaps a current example?

Entitlement ideologies refer to a shared sense of entitlement to recover what was lost in reality and fantasy during the ancestors’ collective trauma. They deny difficulties and losses that had occurred during it, and imagine their large group as if it is composed of persons belonging to a superior species. Holding on to an entitlement ideology primarily reflects a complication in large group mourning, an attempt both to deny losses as well as a wish to recover them, a narcissistic reorganization accompanied by “bad” prejudice for the other.

The white supremacists openly verbalize their (fantasied and delusional) entitlement ideology, to have an America populated only by  white people from selected locations.

Some entitlement ideologies are known by specific names in the literature. What Italians call “irredentism” (related to Italia Irredenta), what Greeks call  “Megali Idea” (Great Idea) (an irredentist concept that expressed the goal of reviving the Byzantine Empire), what Turks call “Pan-Turanism” (bringing all the Turkic people together from Anatolia and Central Asia), what Serbs call “Christoslavism,” and what extreme religious Islamists of today call “the return of an Islamic Empire” are examples of entitlement ideologies.

We should remember the horrible consequences of the inflammation of the Serbian entitlement ideology (to have a greater Serbia) under Slobodan Milošević and be aware and careful about the inflammation of American white supremacists’ entitlement ideology.

AD: On pp.54-55 you speak of the "formal and informal systems of 'checks and balances' in a well-functioning democracy [that] prevent a leader's personality...from exerting undue influence over government and the governed." It seems ever more widely accepted by clinicians and observers today that such a system in this country is under the greatest and most severe strain ever. Is that an assessment you would share?

Yes.


AD: You refer to some of those clinicians (p.98) before, in ch.9, talking about "persons with exaggerated narcissism." Here you draw on the works of Kohut, Kernberg, and Jacobson. Tell us a bit more about this phenomenon of extreme or exaggerated narcissism. Is this a helpful way of understanding Donald Trump?

In my book I describe Charlottesville Psychoanalytic Study Group’s years-long study of persons with exaggerated narcissism.  An in-depth description of such individuals’ behavior patterns, need to be number one, language peculiarities, inability to have empathy and other characteristics help us to see observable personality characteristics of Donald Trump.


AD: Sum up your hopes for Large Group Psychology, and who especially would benefit from reading it:

VV: First, today we see a preoccupation with Donald Trump’s tweets, verbalizations, and behavior patterns. In the book the reader will learn about narcissistic personality organization, why it evolves and how it can lead to destructive or reparative societal processes. Such knowledge will help the reader to have a better understanding of Donald Trump and his influence on his followers.

Second, there are severe societal/political divisions in the USA. The reader will read why there is a need to have allies and enemies in human nature.

Third, racism, ethnic prejudice, removing or not removing some statues are discussed. In the book I describe the experience and views of an immigrant to the USA in late 1950s on these issues.

Fourth this book illustrates the need to have an in depth psychological/historical understanding of large groups and the meaning and the power of large group identity in order to find new solutions for political/societal problems.

Fifth, I wrote this book before the COVID-19 pandemic started to illustrate shared psychological processes of the Trump-era America and the world. The corona virus pandemic made me to realize that deeper knowledge of such psychological processes is sought by the reader. At the present time the personality of political leaders, racism, societal/political divisions and political propaganda preoccupy public interest. 

Sixth and finally, this book is written without my hiding behind technical psychoanalytic terms. It is easily readable.

AD: Having finished this book, do you have other projects on the go at the moment--other books in the works?

VV: I just finished writing another book. Soon I will send my manuscript to my publisher.  This one is on non-chemical addictions. I describe how some individuals remember their childhood traumas and their own “solutions” with compulsive actions. I hope that this book will also help the reader to have a deeper understanding of some political leaders’ repeating actions.

Vamik Volkan on Racism and Group Psychology

I'm delighted to be able to report that on the weekend I received two books, one of which I have read: Vamik Volkan, Large-Group Psychology: Racism, Societal Divisions, Narcissistic Leaders and Who We Are We Now (Phoenix, 2020), 144pp.

When I saw the book was forthcoming earlier this year, I wrote to Dr. Volkan about an interview, and he has kindly consented. I'm putting questions together for that now and will post his thoughts as soon as I have them.

The other book the publisher kindly sent to me is a biography of Volkan: Ferhat Atik, A Psychoanalyst on His Own Couch: A Biography of Vamık Volkan and His Psychoanalytic and Psychopolitical Concepts, published not quite a year ago. I'm eagerly looking forward to reading it not least because even the bits and pieces of Volkan's life that I have read (some of which he shares in the moving introduction to the group psychology book noted above) are moving and fascinating indeed. 

In the meantime, let me also point you to at least a couple of other books. I first came across Volkan's work when I was doing research on ISIS about five years ago. For those who read their online propaganda magazine Dabiq, as I did in detail, you quickly saw that there were manifold and many uses and abuses of Crusades history. Trying to puzzle through what was going on led me first to Charles Strozier (a Harvard historian, Lincoln scholar, and psychoanalyst in New York City, and author, inter alia, of the invaluable biography of Heinz Kohut, the well-known Chicago psychoanalyst). 

Strozier had edited the collection The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History. That book, valuable in itself, also introduced me to Volkan, whose work on religious-political conflict in the Balkans and elsewhere has been very helpful in trying to understand the ISIS mindset, as well as Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox religious conflicts in the twentieth century, about which I have a book coming out late this year.

For those new to Volkan, he has been very prolific, so knowing where to begin might be daunting. Might I suggest you begin with the book I first found so valuable? That was his 1998 book Bloodlines. In it I first encountered Volkan's key ideas of "chosen glory," "chosen trauma," and "time collapse," all of which have been very revealing when applied to some of the religious and historiographical conflicts I have studied and written about. More recently, and in a similar vein, there is his 2013 book Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace.

Stay tuned for the interview, and further discussions of Volkan's new book on group psychology. 

The Sociopolitical Role of the Unconscious

Christopher Bollas, most of whose books I have read and benefited from, including those discussed elsewhere, speaks of "normotic illness," one of whose features is a denial of the existence of the unconscious mind. But in the world we are living in today, especially in these United States, can anyone for a moment deny the power of unconscious forces and traumas all around us, not least emanating from the current occupant of the White House?

Bollas has an essay in a recent collection along with other scholars and clinicians: David Morgan, ed., The Unconscious in Social and Political Life (Phoenix Press, 2019), 318pp. 

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

Traumatic events happen in every age, yet there is a particularly cataclysmic feeling to our own epoch that is so attractive to some and so terrifying to others. The terrible events of September 11th 2001 still resonate and the repercussions continue to this day: the desperation of immigrants fleeing terror, the uncertainty of Brexit, Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the alt-right and hard left, increasing fundamentalism, and terror groups intent on causing destruction to the Western way of life. If that were not enough, we also have to grapple with the enormity of climate change and the charge that if we do not act now, it will be too late. Is it any wonder many are left overwhelmed by the events they see on the news?

Galvanised by the events outside of his consulting room, in 2015, David Morgan began The Political Mind seminars at the British Psychoanalytical Society and their successful run continues today. A series of superlative seminars, mostly presented by colleagues from the British Society plus a few select external experts, that examine a dazzling array of relevant topics to provide a psychoanalytic understanding of just what is going on in our world. This book is the first in The Political Mind series to bring these seminars to a wider audience.

The Unconscious in Political and Social Life contains compelling contributions from Christopher Bollas, Michael Rustin, Jonathan Sklar, David Bell, Philip Stokoe, Roger Kennedy, David Morgan, M. Fakhry Davids, Ruth McCall, R. D. Hinshelwood, Renée Danziger, Josh Cohen, Sally Weintrobe, and Margot Waddell. They investigate so many vital issues affecting us today: the evolution of democracy, right-wing populism, prejudice, the rise of the far right, attitudes to refugees and migrants, neoliberalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, the Palestine-Israel situation, political change, feminism, austerity in the UK, financial globalisation, and climate change.

This book needs to be read by all who are concerned by the state of the world today. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts with their awareness of what motivates human beings bring clarity and fresh insight to these matters. A deeper understanding of humanity awaits the reader of The Unconscious in Political and Social Life.