Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers hands is a playful exploration of how peoples desires, fantasies, and emotions shape political events and social phenomena. It highlights the mythical sources of todays political projects, the power of political imagination, and the function of symbolism in political thought. Eszter Salg argues that the driving force for the formation of political communities is fantasy illusions in a Winnicottian sense, phantasies in a Lacanian sense, phantoms as described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and dreams as interpreted by Sndor Ferenczi. She introduces the metaphor of the fantastic family as a symbolic representation of political communities, both to reflect on peoples deeply felt desire to find in public life the resolution, love, and wholeness of early childhood, and to unveil the political elites readiness to don the mask of the ideal parent. The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book explores the theories of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan: the matrimony on the stage of politics between the good-enough mother and the Symbolic Father which inaugurates the story of democracys fantastic family. The second part presents the fantastic families of selected countries such as Hungary, Italy, and the world community to explain the proliferation of cosmogony projects, and to document the failure of the political elites to offer a satisfactory performance of their maternal and paternal functions. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers hands presents a new way of considering the art of politics, based on the understanding that people perceive reality through imagination and unconscious fantasy. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, and academics from across the disciplines of politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and art.