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Published online: 8 July 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
The centenary of the publication of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego was marked in 2021. In that monumental work, Freud offered one of his most elaborate attempts to take the psychoanalytic concepts out of the clinic and use them to explain the formation and character of groups, one of the most fundamental social processes. The implications of Freud’s analysis for politics are immense. The bond at the core of all social identity, he tells us, is of a libidinal nature; as such, its logic runs counter to the rationality traditionally associated with isolated individuals. Yet, even with a quick look at our most common responses to recent events (Brexit, the election and presidency of Donald Trump, the various forms of populism and polarisation, etc.) we can easily notice how little we have learned from Freud’s lessons. We tend to treat such political developments as exceptions, disturbing anomalies, deviations from a ‘normal’ politics that we take to be about consensus and compromise. However, the current political conjuncture presents an opportunity for us to revisit our conceptual tools and core assumptions about politics. While the post-Cold War optimism about the future of the liberal-centrist Western model has faded away, something similar cannot be said about the liberal-rationalist paradigm itself that still predominates in political theory. This makes the Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory an extremely pertinent and timely resource. The Handbook has been edited by Yannis Stavrakakis, a scholar well known for his own contributions to political theory from Freudian and Lacanian perspectives.
The discovery of the unconscious brought a true revolution to our understanding of subjectivity, which made psychoanalysis, since its inception by Freud, a major alternative to positivist and rationalist approaches to human behaviour and social pro