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This wide-ranging book aims to offer a way of thinking about our current and historical social trends through the lens of psychoanalytic theory and insights. The author aims to offer a psychoanalytic understanding of some of the current preoccupations of our social world, particularly where polarization and polemics dominate the political landscape. He uses a variety of sources and writers to both explore and evidence his ideas; from Alderdice to Žižek though Arendt, Britton, Freud, Kafka, Lear, Rosenfeld, Sinatra, Volkan and many others. Complex concepts are explored and examined and linked with the author's underlying ‘integrated psychoanalytic perspective’ (p. xv).
The first chapter weaves psychoanalytic theory into structural and sociological understandings about the human condition post the industrial revolution. This is followed by three chapters looking at narcissism, embodied experience and social groups, all moving between psychoanalytic understandings, criticisms of them and other theoretical positions to try to offer a framework into which the reader can put some apparently disparate concepts. For the reader, this can be an exhilarating but at times a slightly confusing journey. However, by the end of Chapter 4 it is becoming clear that the understanding of human behaviour and social trends has to include both internal and external factors, and that what has gone before is often decisive in what happens next. Just as taking a full history in a clinical situation (sadly now the rather old fashioned practice) is central to the understanding of the patient's here-and-now predicament, the next five chapters are concerned with our history and trying to understand our here-and-now social predicament. These chapters unravel various writers’ contributions to the struggle to gain purchase on the slippery areas of destructive narcissism, nationalism and Nazism and knitting them back up into the psychoanalytic overview of how these things may be understood.
By the end