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Published online: 30 July 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
In an era of seemingly intractable political and cultural polarization, one counter-intuitive approach for reviving pragmatic dialogue and even jump-starting the possibility of working toward shared goals is to augment rather than shrink the terrain of our taken-for-granted ideological divisions. This is the approach advocated by Robert Samuels in The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies. Samuels’s core thesis is that the stale and ossified dichotomy between Conservative and Liberal, Republican and Democrat, which structures the current political impasse has become a zombie-like antimony that serves to obscure profound differences between five competing ideologies that together constitute the actual driving forces of the contemporary cultural-political scene. Our inability to recognize and appreciate the differences between these five ideological outlooks has impoverished public political discourse and led us to often misperceive the distinct animating bases of both our own and other’s political worldviews. For Samuels, this state of confusion is unsurprising since one reason these political ideologies have become so illegible is that they are each informed by an unconscious fantasy shaping a person’s political outlook. Indeed, it is unconscious fantasy that interfaces the personal domain to the political group, motivating individuals to adopt specific consciously avowed political beliefs. Moreover, as contradictory ideologies form unstable alliances for the sake of political expediency, the distinctive phantasmatic basis of each political outlook becomes further muddled and obscured. Samuels’s psychoanalytically and historically informed cognitive mapping of these five political ideologies provides much needed clarity concerning the key unconscious fantasies that are structuring contemporary cultural-political fault-lines.
Samuels unfolds his argument via a series