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In 2015, colleagues from the British Psychoanalytic Society began meeting to discuss contemporary politics for a series called The Political Mind Seminars. The group presented papers interpreting various subjects, including democracy, Brexit, neoliberalism, climate change, and the Trump presidency. In his introduction to The Unconscious in Social and Political Life, a 2019 essay collection that presents the first ten of these seminars, editor David Morgan states, “I am aware that many analysts do not consider the political world a suitable place for psychoanalysis to venture” (p. xxxiv). But these gatherings continued to cover prevailing issues and only became more and more popular. The series is ongoing.
Morgan says that it was the magnitude of the 9/11 attack on America that spurred him to look at unconscious process in political thought, inspiring the seminars and this book (p. xiii). In Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional, Kuchuck (2014) writes that “September 11th, 2001, was the first time that my patients and I were experiencing trauma and retraumatization at the same time” (p. xxii). As analysts, we live through history with our patients—consciously and unconsciously—and as crucial as it is to set apart analytic space, it can be destructive to deny the wider world within a treatment. In the time after Morgan compiled
this book of essays, the world changed thoroughly with the spread of COVID, and the physical practice of psychoanalysis moved from the couch to the telephone or the computer screen. We have been processing the initial consequences of the pandemic with our patients for months, and we have yet to see their long-term unconscious effects. (The 2021 lineup for The Political Mind Seminars included a lecture about the meaning of the Coronavirus by Michael Rustin, which we can hope will appear in a follow-up book.) Poverty, prejudice, terrorism, and even pandemic, are not hypothetical iss