Reflection or Action: And Never the Twain Shall Meet

Here I address the major problem I see in getting psychoanalysis and politics to communicate together fruitfully. That problem is that the unconscious individual influences and the external social ones are essentially different categories of influences, and can be bridged conceptually only with some difficulty.

Back in the 1990s, I was part of a group that worked out some ideas that we might take to the Labour Party. You may remember that the dying regime of the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher and John Major was hanging on, and with the election in 1997 coming up, the Labour Party was desperate to convince the electorate of its better policies. The idea was whether we could give an account of group dynamics that might be helpful to Labour to understand the way to create a more democratic society. At the time Labour were talking about ‘the third way’; somewhat vague, but it appeared that it might promote more measured attitudes in Society suggestive of depressive position thinking - ambivalence, considerateness towards everyone, and generally a reluctance towards the unrealistic perfectionism of ideologies. It seemed there could be a match between the political rhetoric and the study of unconscious group processes. In the event when we met a couple of people at Millbank, it was clear they were politely indifferent to what we were trying to present. Their interest was whether we had the secret of how to influence the electorate to vote for Labour. They wanted advice on their marketing. There seemed a radical disconnection between our earnest views about a more mature society, and their wish for effective marketing.

I have thought, over the years, about our naïvety. Obviously there is a potential for psychology to be used as an instrument for manipulation of the public, and later, I came across the writing of one of the founders of marketing and public relations, in the US, back in the 1920s. He wrote

If we understand the mechanism and