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Eszter Salgó is an important voice in the field of psychoanalysis and politics. A faculty member in international relations at the American University of Rome, yet conversant with a wide range of psychoanalytic thinking, she has written a compelling, thoughtful, surprising book—erudite, yet accessible and engaging—that brings a psychoanalytic critique to utopian political pathologies of both right and left.
Drawing on a wealth of psychoanalytic and political thinkers and anthropologists, the author's psychoanalytic starting point is that we perceive reality through a lens of fantasy, and that political communities are based on shared conscious and unconscious fantasies. Each political community coalesces around a particular symbolic drama in which these fantasies are played out on a public stage. The role of unconscious fantasy, especially, is overlooked in much of political analysis.
Explicating her thesis, Salgó observes that transitional periods marked by chaos and crisis, such as we are in today, stir up feelings of loss, disorientation, and fear. They create a lack of trust in political leadership and in people's sense of their own power as political and social agents. Many individuals retreat from this frightening present into their society's particular shared fantasy of its mythical past—a paradise myth involving an idyllic Golden Age—or a vision of an idealized future that promises a return to it, in a new version. In a time of anxiety, leaders may mold these mythical fantasies into a political vision they can exploit—a vision that galvanizes people's emotions and stifles their thinking, in which the leaders portray themselves as new founding fathers.
In democracies, in contrast, Salgó points to the centrality of the capacity to bring a personal, playful perspective, broadly speaking, to one's political existence—to feel like an active and influential participant in the drama unfolding on the public stage. What is necessary, if this is to become possible in wha