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Something odd is going on in political theory: the politicization of neuroscience. One result is to render depth psychology irrelevant, or rather simply wrong. Another result, even more puzzling, is the self-destruction of political theory by some of its leading lights. Political theory is about power relationships among people who live in communities, societies, and nations. Once the individual is lifted out of society and community, and seen instead as a neuro-physiological system, there is no need or place for political theory.
Leaders in the neuroscientific interpretation of political theory are William Connolly (2002) and Brian Massumi (1995, 2002). Both use neuroscience to criticize political and social theorists who have made reason central. Immanuel Kant is their bête noir, but any theorist of deliberative democracy, any theorist who emphasizes the centrality of rational argument, from John Rawls to Jürgen Habermas, is subject to their critique. By making reason central, these political and social theorists have sacrificed freedom, or so Connolly and Massumi argue.
While this claim might have merit in general, the way in which Connolly, Massumi, and others use neuroscience reinforces the mind/body split, abandoning Freud's concept of the psychical unconscious. This is bad because it results in a superficial subject. I say this fully recognizing that Connolly et al. (as I shall sometimes call them) seek a superficial subject. The deep subject of Freudian psychoanalysis has alienated us from the freedom and rationality of the body, or so they say. Connolly assumes that individual development takes place almost entirely inside the individual. I will call this neurological individualism.
This assumption rejects a key assumption of British object relations theory, as well as the way humans have understood each other for millennia, as reflected in art and literature. From Bowlby to Bion to Winnicott and beyond, the British School has argued that we develop as we are