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Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory, edited by Yannis Stavrakakis, is an impressive collection of essays that showcase various ways that socio-political phenomena can be approached through a psychoanalytic lens. But as with all good interdisciplinary projects, fascinating questions arise. Dany Nobus, in his chapter ‘Psychoanalytic Geopolitics’, captures one such question. He wonders whether psychoanalysis can only thrive in democratic societies, where autonomy, self-governance, and freedom of speech are unrestricted. His answer is that psychoanalysis is more flexible as a field than commonly assumed, and that its adoption and sustainability in non-democratic societies depends largely on the ways it is developed. Nobus tells us that there is space to develop psychoanalysis (p. 364), as there is space to use the many registers of psychoanalytic theorising to interpret socio-political configurations. For psychoanalysis is versatile enough to produce insights that enrich and expand political analysis – or so the contributors to the collection argue. This is the claim that holds the collection together, prompting the reader to ponder the import of the confluence between psychoanalysis and politics. Of course, staging encounters between psychoanalysis and politics is not new. Critical theorists throughout the twentieth century, from the Frankfurt School’s pessimistic diagnoses of the future of civilisation to post-structuralist accounts of the place of identity and difference in politics, have turned to psychoanalysis to reflect on cultural, social, and political situations challenging the norms, instincts, and rationalities stored in hegemonic motifs of human nature. And there are other, more contemporary, works that intelligently use psychoanalysis to interpret political phenomena (e.g. McAffee, 2019). But what is remarkable, and indeed distinctive, about this collection, is that it carves out a space for psychoanalytic political theory as a specific orientation in political studies. This is a thoughtprovoking, and, as I will suggest, significant endeavour for any theorist dissatisfied