Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

From the ’Authoritarian’ to the ’Neo-Liberal’ Personality

Understanding the Socio-psychological Roots of Contemporary Right-wing Populism

 

Samir Gandesha

 

One of the key problems of contemporary politics is the presence and growing power of right-wing populist movements throughout the Western world from the US "Tea Party," to Britain's UKIP to Pegida in Germany and Golden Dawn in Greece. This paper poses the following question: To what extent is it possible to draw upon the social-psychological concept of the "authoritarian personality" in the work of Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno et. al. to understand the distinctive populist personality structure of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism?

 

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of "Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations" (Stanford, 2012). His book (coedited with Johan Hartle) "Reification and Spectacle: On the Timeliness of Western Marxism" (University of Amsterdam Press) is forthcoming later this year and he has also recently completed (also with Johan Hartle) "Poetry of the Future: Marx and the Aesthetic." He has recently lectured at the Centre for the Study of Marxist Social Theory at the University of Nanjing, the Taipei Biennale and at the School for Language, Literature and Cultural Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Conference: The Unconscious Today 2

Session 2: The Unconscious and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life

David Tuckett - Conviction Narrative Theory: Bringing Modern Psychoanalysis into the Heart of Economics and Decision Science

David Tuckett will take us on a fascinating journey through modern psychopathology of everyday life, demonstrating the paramount importance of the unconscious processes in problem-solving and decision-making, with a particular emphasis on the psychology of financial behaviour. Arguing that the human mind was designed to make decisions under uncertainty, he will explore the compelling stories consumers and investors constantly make up, to contain a range of emotional experiences and he will explain how these narratives of 'conviction' affect the wider economy.

David Tuckett is a psychoanalyst, Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty at UCL in the Faculty of Brain Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He trained in Economics, Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis and currently divides his time between clinical practice and research – since winning a 2006 Leverhulme Research fellowship for a "psychoanalytic study of investment markets" he has been collaborating with a range of colleagues in economics, finance, psychology, social anthropology, computer science and neuroscience to introduce psychoanalytical understanding to behaviour in the financial markets and the economy more generally. His book Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability was published in New York and London by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2011 and a further monograph written with Professor Richard Taffler (University of Warwick School of Management) entitled “Fund Management: An Emotional Finance Perspective” was published by the Research Foundation of CFA Institute. Prior to this he received the 2007 Sigourney Award for distinguished contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. He has published books and articles in sociology, psychoanalysis, economics, and finance and is a former President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Principal of the Health Education Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge.

Do we need a Critical Psychotherapy? Exploring Talking Therapies in Neoliberal Society 1

 Session 1: INTRODUCTION

Del Lowenthal - Is there an unfortunate need for critical psychotherapy?

Respondent: Julian Lousada