Psychotherapy and Politics International (E-Journal)
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The psychoanalytic critique of capitalism: Elements for an overview
Full text linkThis article provides a preliminary overview of the psychoanalytic critique of capitalism. It aims to fortify the recent psychoanalytic turn in—or return to—the study of capitalism and its alternatives. After identifying the main approaches to the psychoanalytic study of the economy, I present some of the key critical contributions along four broad thematic streams: libidinal repression (‘Eros’), repetition compulsion (‘Thanatos’), hedonistic will to power (‘Ahriman’), and narcissistic rationalising (‘Lucifer’). The Ahriman/Lucifer pair is proposed here as a new coupling able to capture wide-ranging trends in this literature. Over time, debates have changed in emphases and concepts, but a large part of the core questions has remained the same and as relevant as ever. While there have been complementarities as well as disagreements between the different contributions, the psychoanalytic study of the economy has regrettably never formed a self-conscious field of inquiry, something that this article seeks to remedy
Self as a teaching tool: Exploring power and anti-oppressive practice with counselling/psychotherapy students
Full text linkCounselling and psychotherapy training often incorporates experiential learning to help students understand and explore different aspects of self. Lecturers and tutors, facilitating such courses, can also share aspects of their lived experience, as a form of experiential learning. This article describes a workshop on power and anti-oppressive practice that was delivered to counselling students in a Master of Arts (MA) in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice. Two lecturers (Beverley and Peter) used their lived experiences of racism and homophobia to stimulate student discussion and debate—effectively, they were using self as a teaching tool. This article details their experiences and reflections whilst in discussion with two students (Ann-Marie and Ben), who attended the workshop
Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Book review): By Lara Sheehi & Stephen Sheehi (Routledge, 2022)
No full textBeyond Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’: The ‘pandemic’ as final reduction of humanity to ‘bare life’
Full text linkThe current ‘pandemic’ is approached through the lens of (mainly) the concept of Homo sacer, elaborated on by Giorgio Agamben (1998). Taking the work of Michel Foucault on the ‘disciplinary society’ and ‘bio-politics’ further, and drawing on the role played by the principle of homo sacer in antiquity, Agamben uncovers the disconcerting extent to which this principle has become generalised in contemporary societies. In antiquity, the principle of ‘sacred man/human’ was invoked in cases where someone was exempted from ritual sacrifice, but simultaneously seen as ‘bare life’, and therefore as being fit for execution. Agamben argues that the sphere of ‘sacred life’ has grown immensely since ancient times in so far as the modern state arrogates to itself the right to wield biopolitical power over ‘bare life’ in a manner analogous to ancient practices, and finds in the concentration camp the contemporary paradigm of this phenomenon. Arguing that today we witness a further downward step in the treatment of humans as ‘bare life’, these concepts are employed as a heuristic for bringing into focus current practices under the aegis of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’. In particular, here the spotlight falls on those areas where burgeoning ‘bare life’ practices can be detected, namely ‘origin of the virus’ and ‘lethal vaccines’. In an upcoming second article, other aspects are addressed, as well as the question of commensurate psychotherapy
Crisis, Ψ-trauma, refugees : Psycho-political questions at the edge of fortress Europe
Full text linkSince 2014 the situation in the Mediterranean Sea has been named and tackled as a ‘refugee crisis’, and in the name of this ‘crisis’ migrants have been accommodated in ‘hotspots’ and camps. Within these spaces, their experiences have often been articulated by the humanitarian sector and the discipline of psychology as traumatic, with refugees being described as traumatised. In this article, I critically discuss the politics of psychology and trauma within the European territory of aid, with a specific focus on Greece, amid the current, so-called ‘refugee crisis’. I start by situating crisis and trauma as concepts and their role within humanitarian and state governance. I continue by discussing how the terms ‘hotspot’ and ‘camp’ emerged in state and humanitarian discourse and practice, to explore then the politics of psychology and trauma there. Both space and time are important elements for understanding the role of psychology, as they comprise the material landscape of migration amid ‘refugee crisis’. At the same time, the discourses of psychology and trauma are implicated in the very production of these spaces. Approaching critically their interconnection through the lens of critical psychology and the work of Frantz Fanon, the article concludes that the gaze of humanitarian aid and psychology, besides medicalising refugees, psychologises the inherently political issues of migration and life lived in hotspots and camps. In so doing, it substitutes the latter with a managerial discourse
Meditation, critical psychology, and emancipation: The social construction and deconstruction of the self
Full text linkIn this article, it is argued that the original Buddhist notion of meditation can be regarded as an emancipatory practice, as opposed to a legitimation of oppressive social relations. The article first discusses the Buddhist notion of meditation as a practice of the deconstruction of the illusion of a substantial (separate, solid, autonomous) self. Then, it explains theories of the social construction of the self and argues that the notion of the autonomous, separated self is an ideology closely tied to social relations of power. Finally, it concludes that meditation, as a practice of the deconstruction of the self, is an emancipatory practice
A critique of leftist gaming
Full text linkThis article presents a discussion between Jan De Vos and Alfie Bown on leftist gaming. Bown wrote a well-read and well-referenced book entitled The Playstation Dreamworld (2018a) in which he also advanced the idea of the necessity to develop gaming for the left. In his book The Digitalisation of (Inter)Subjectivity (2020), De Vos challenged and critiqued the concept of leftist gaming in a chapter entitled ‘Digital Mass Effects’. In this article, Alfie Bown introduces the discussion after which Jan De Vos rehearses the main arguments of his book, adding a few extra elements to his critique. De Vos’s main question is whether the fact that digital technologies, historically underpinned by mainstream psychological theories, undermine Bown’s psychoanalytic project for leftist gaming. In his response, Bown then pleads to scrutinise not only the pre-digital history of coding but also the future of it, so as to rewrite the history of the digital infrastructure as inherently tied to the history of capitalism. De Vos closes this article with a brief afterthought