​Psycho-Politics: Authoritarianism and the Return of the Repressed​

To what extent can psychoanalysis and critical social psychology help us understand the current political conjuncture, where rising fascisms around the world increasingly appear as a kind of “return of the repressed”? This event brings together two leading theorists in psycho-political theory to reflect on psychic explanations of current authoritarian mobilisations.

How can psychoanalytic and critical psychological perspectives illuminate the contemporary resurgence of authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies?

Alenka Zupančič: Adapting to a New Reality?

We often hear today that, as the old world order is collapsing, we must adapt to a new reality. But what exactly does this mean—and, more importantly, what does it entail? Jacques Lacan once wrote that we easily ‘adapt to reality. The truth we repress.’ What is the cost of this repression, and what does it imply for the so-called new reality, or new world order? These and other questions will be discussed from the perspective of what many perceive today as a new rise of fascism.

Hannah Proctor: Authoritarian Personalities Then and Now

Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism (2023) opens with a section on the ‘spectre of analogy’: ‘Those who find themselves living in times of crisis and disorientation often seek shelter and guidance in analogies’. But the present, he argues, should not be mistaken for the past. Following Trump’s first election victory in 2016 there was a flurry of interest in historical attempts to understand the psychological appeal of fascism from Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism to Adorno et al’s The Authoritarian Personality. In this lecture Proctor will return to debates about right and left authoritarianism from the early years of the Cold War that raged following the publication of The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, arguing that while the ideological discussions and methodological approach taken by social scientists at that time are not analogous to the present, that some of the questions they were asking about the relationship between politics and the psyche are nonetheless worth revisiting in the context of our current conjuncture.

Speakers

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist, one of the prominent members of the ‘Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis’. She works as Research Councilor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and is guest lecturer to numerous universities worldwide. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two; The Odd One In: On Comedy; What is Sex?; Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax; and Disavowal.

Hannah Proctor holds a Wellcome University Award at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her second book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat was published by Verso in 2024. She is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and is a contributing editor at Parapraxis. She is currently working on two new book projects: Communist Cases, an academic monograph on Cold War era social science in the US for OUP, and a history of the long 1990s for Verso. She is also interested in revenge.

Jana Cattien is Assistant Professor in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, in the capacity group Philosophy and Public Affairs. Her research and teaching is situated in continental philosophy (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism), feminist theory, critical race theory and postcolonial theory. Her work has been published in journals like Feminist Theory, New German Critique, Hypatia, Signs, and Radical Philosophy.

Veerle van Wijngaarden is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the intersection of sexual ethics, feminist philosophy, and critical theory, and focuses on the problem of sexual subjectivity. In her PhD dissertation, Change What You Want? Sexual Subjectivity and the Politics of Desire, she examines how sexual subjects are constituted through relations of recognition, vulnerability, and objecthood, and how these dynamics complicate dominant frameworks of consent and autonomy.