Shining a Psychoanalytic Light on Alienation, Otherness, and Xenophobia

Psychoanalytic insights about the human mind, the internal world, and object relations, gleaned through our psychoanalytic work on the couch, have enriched our understanding of individual dynamics and the relationship with the outside world. Psychoanalytic concepts and mode of thinking may also be usefully applied to deriving models of understanding current events, phenomena, and crises in the social, political, and cultural media. Just as psychoanalytic theory has brought light to the dark reaches of the unconscious mind, it might help to enlighten us about the dynamics of alienation, otherness, and xenophobia that we are witnessing in the current crisis of mass emigration, and its xenophobic reaction in the “welcoming” countries.

Psychoanalysts are reaching out to the world community in offering a forum for discourse concerning the dynamic undercurrents of the world crises we are witnessing. Fortunately, there appears to be a trend in psychoanalytic and academic circles with an increasing number of efforts to introduce psychoanalytic ideas to socio-political and cultural debates on current world events. The European Psychoanalytic Federation 2017 Conference titled The Familiar, and the Unfamiliar, is an example of this discourse. Lene Auestad's annual conferences on Psychoanalysis and Politics, Samir Gandesha's Psychoanalytic Lecture Series in the Simon Fraser University Humanities Department, Vamik Volkan's Special Issue of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Volkan, 2015), are all recent evidences of the intersection of psychoanalysis and the social world. These are only a few expressions of the increasing interest by psychoanalysts and academicians, in the application of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in framing the socio-political dynamics of current world crises. In their papers, Franco De Masi (2017), Sverre Varvin (2017) and Ilany Kogan (2017) have