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That irrational choices, conflicting desires, and inexplicable judgments bedevil the political realm has never been in doubt. It follows that psychoanalysis as the science of parapraxis might be a good source of insight into why people have so much trouble getting it right. More than ever, politics seem to be a stage where the players represent the range of human folly and failure. Ideals are proclaimed and immediately betrayed. Do we psychoanalysts have anything to offer the world for the mitigation of what looks like an inexorable march toward destruction resulting from our collective political failures?
If errors in political judgment are not simply the inevitable expressions of the flawed human character, but instead symptoms shaped by the social experience of the human subject, symptoms that can be the portal to insight and new possibilities, might the recognition and treatment of these symptoms have a salutary effect not only on the individual subject but the body politic itself? That this quaintly utopian dream survives the dystopian history we are witnessing may either be admirable resilience or naïve optimism. Time will tell.
In February 2017, there was a shooting in a bar in Olathe, Kansas. Srinivas