The Political Mind: A Deeper Cut | Michael Rustin

The Political Mind: A Deeper Cut - With Michael Rustin

The Political Mind: A Deeper Cut presents - Professor Michael Rustin
6 seminars on Psychoanalytic Social Theory and Criticism: Reflections on some major writings.

The purposes of the Political Mind programme of seminars is to give some attention to the tradition of social theory and criticism which has been influenced by psychoanalysis, even where it is not itself the work of psychoanalysts. Fundamental psychoanalytic ideas, such as those of desire, repression, and sublimation, the Oedipal situation, anxiety, and projection, have been absorbed from different psychoanalytic traditions, and used to frame the analysis and critique of societies.

It would be possible to start from writings of psychoanalysts themselves, including Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, and Meltzer, and to trace from them implications that can be drawn for the understanding of different kinds of social harm and well-being. Each of these psychoanalysts provide either full accounts (Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents,) or substantial hints of how core psychoanalytic ideas can be valuably extended to understanding the social sphere.

However in this series I will follow the different pathway of beginning with works by social critics who were not psychoanalysts. I will explore how they made use of psychoanalytic ideas to develop their critiques of the societies in which they wrote. It would be difficult to claim that there exists a unified tradition of psychoanalytic social theory, and there are reasons why clinically-based psychoanalytic theories have been more connected and cumulative in their development than psychoanalytic writings about societies. However it seems relevant to those interested in the “The Political Mind” to examine the work of major figures in this tradition of thought. Perhaps in doing so we can understand them in a connected way.

The lecturer’s fee for this series will be donated to the Stuart Hall Foundation http://stuarthallfoundation.org/