This article builds on Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural trauma theory to explain how the Zionist identification process utilises enjoyment and contributes to ongoing conflict and war, especially after the 7 October event. First, the article argues that a theory of the subject is needed to account for unconscious and emotional motivations of human practice. The article suggests such an approach by theorising discursively articulated national desires and fantasies, such as the Zionist Third Temple and Start-Up Nation. The article then analyses key features of Israeli public discourse, including public statements, cultural symbols and tropes, and claims that a culturo-political “vicious cycle of antagonistic identification” cultivates a traumatic theft of enjoyment sentiment that, when identified with and interpolated by, facilitates and solicits the continuation of war up to and including the collective participation in genocide.
This article examines Jorja Smith’s album Lost Found through Donald W. Winnicott’s concepts of play, transitional objects, and potential space, with particular attention to musical form and listener experience. While existing commentary has largely focused on the album’s lyrical themes and sociopolitical content, this study argues that Winnicott’s framework illuminates how psychic and social processes are enacted sonically through rhythm, repetition, silence, vocal timbre, and stylistic restraint. Through extended analyses of the tracks “Teenage Fantasy,” “Blue Lights,” and “Don’t Watch Me Cry,” the article shows how the album renders audible a series of oscillations between fantasy and reality, containment and disruption, illusion and exposure. Listening is conceptualized as an active transitional process in which listeners negotiate desire, vulnerability, vigilance, and loss within an intermediate zone between inner experience and social reality. By foregrounding Black British musical expression and the embodied dynamics of listening, the article demonstrates how Winnicott’s clinical insights can be mobilized to explore the cultural, political, and affective dimensions of contemporary popular music, while retaining their relevance for understanding subjective experience in clinical contexts.
In this overview of the volume, the editor, Amrita Narayanan introduces Sudhir Kakar (1938–2024) and briefly outlines the unique perspective each of the essays in the volume brings to Kakar’s contribution to psychoanalysis in India and internationally.
HBO’s The Sopranos offers an exploration of psychotherapy, particularly through the lens of treating personality disorders. Central to the series is the dynamic between a mob boss, Tony Soprano, whose psychological struggles reflect traits of antisocial and borderline personality disorders, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Their sessions highlight key challenges in therapy, including resistance to change, manipulation, boundary violations, and the chronic nature of personality disorders. The show also portrays countertransference and ethical dilemmas that are present in psychoanalysis. By depicting the frustrations and complexities of therapy, The Sopranos helps to demystify the therapeutic process and fosters critical discussions about societal responses to mental health and criminality, as well as broader ideological frameworks about therapy, masculinity, and mental health. Beyond its cultural significance, the series underscores the ethical and psychological complexities of treating high-risk violent patients, offering insights for both clinicians and society.
Looking at the social decay in today’s neoliberal capitalism, it’s clear that narcissistic psychopathology has become one of the most common problems, both individually and collectively, tying together many aspects of this decline. Many studies link this issue to the ongoing reproduction of capitalism, but what is often missing is an analysis of how narcissistic psychopathology works ideologically—helping to expand post-Fordist production and maintain the colonial and imperial character of global capitalism, in ways that reveal the ideological nature of capitalist totalitarianism today.
This article describes “the Kakarian discourse” and its location in psychoanalysis, culture, and the personal. The Kakarian discourse is illuminated in both the personal and the political through the elimination of “Or” in favor of a hospitality toward, and proximity to, an “And…”. With a focus on Sudhir Kakar’s works on mysticism, Gandhi, and Indian Oedipal development, the author draws on both personal and textual examples to elaborate: On Sudhir Kakar, The Magician.
In dialogue with Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes; Jacques Lacan’s idea of the quilting point from book three of his seminars; and Mari Ruti’s writing on mourning, melancholia, benchmark traumas, and creativity, “Small Hours” is a personal essay that contends with the quotidian movements of grief, love, care, suffering, and language by describing the author’s earliest days of parenting a colicky infant, some of the last days the author and her family spent with friend and mentor Mari Ruti before her death, and the imprint of Ruti’s ideas and presence on their daily lives.
This article examines Freud’s treatment of panic in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, where it appears as both the affect of group disintegration and an ill-defined form of anxiety. By connecting this problem to Freud’s later theory of anxiety in Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety and Lacan’s elaboration of anxiety, the article argues that panic functions less as collapse and more as a defensive mechanism that sustains minimal symbolic bonds at moments of crisis. Reinterpreted in this way, panic emerges as a paradoxical guarantor of social cohesion in the group rather than the sign of its disintegration.
In our current moment of crisis, we see themes of death, destruction, and the possibility of transformation playing out in television dramas and films as characters either face death directly or break through into another dimension, enacting the wish of rising like the phoenix from the ashes and being reborn anew, further entrenching us in our inexorable journey towards extinction. Psychoanalysis offers us lenses through which to recognize ways in which these stories become contemporary myths through which the viewer might vicariously face and potentially work through our own encounters with the horrors of our times.
This paper employs psychoanalytic theory and autotheoretical methodology to examine how Zionist discourse reproduces the very antisemitic structures it claims to oppose. Drawing on Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Green, I argue that Zionism functions as a collective false-self formation—a defensive identity structure that emerged from historical trauma but now operates through melancholic incorporation rather than genuine mourning. The analysis reveals how Zionist ideology transforms Jewish multiplicity into nationalist singularity, attacking the capacity for thought through what Bion terms an “attack on linking.” Through personal vignettes and theoretical analysis, I demonstrate how anti-Zionist Jews become targets of the same dehumanizing logic historically deployed against Jews at large, as the apparatus claiming to protect Jewish communities becomes itself a mechanism of persecution. The paper traces how contemporary antisemitism discourse, particularly through organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), weaponizes expanded definitions to silence Palestinian solidarity while ignoring actual white supremacist threats, ultimately arguing that authentic Jewish safety requires rejecting Zionist capture of Jewish identity.
Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego defined a field that turns not only to organized and enduring institutions but, above all, to discontinuous moments in which collectives suddenly emerge and bind individuals beyond conscious intention. It is this second dimension—the eruptive constitution of a group—that gives the discipline its specificity, for it reveals how the social itself is produced through unconscious processes of binding, displacement, and enjoyment, in which not only the individual but the social structure itself is suspended. This paper situates Freud’s account alongside his other treatments of the collective: his early theorization of hypnosis as a substitute for mass influence; his analysis of the joke as a shared mechanism of psychic release; and his conception of the analytic situation as a minimal yet decisive social bond. Read together, these texts articulate a metapsychological horizon in which group psychology is not an extension of sociology but a theory of the very conditions under which collectivity appears. On this basis, the present paper reactivates Freud’s legacy as a conceptual tool for analyzing contemporary formations. The specific case examined is the post 7 October constellation, in which actors with previously neutral or even contrary positions became inscribed into a collective dynamic that radically exceeded their intentions, demonstrating how fragile yet decisive binding agents can generate formations irreducible to institutional continuity.
This article examines the global proliferation of contemporary border walls as a psycho-political phenomenon. Despite limited practical efficacy in regulating migration or security, walls continue to multiply across the world. The article argues that their persistence cannot be fully understood within geopolitical or policy frameworks alone, but must also be approached through the unconscious dynamics of individual and collective psychic life. Drawing on Jung’s concepts of participation mystique and regression, and on psychoanalytic theories of the psychic skin and group envelope (Bick, Anzieu), the paper develops a framework linking early sensory boundary formation with the dynamics of large-group identity. It proposes that in periods of social and political instability the wall can function as a substitute group psychic skin: a material surface that reactivates archaic experiences of containment, belonging, and separation. Through this process, political discourse mobilises sensory and imaginal forms of identification that tighten collective boundaries while intensifying mechanisms of splitting and exclusion. By theorising the reciprocal relation between individual psychic envelopes and large-group identity, the article reconceptualises contemporary wall-building as a reconfiguration of the psychic architecture of collective life.
Across markers of difference (race, gender, ethnicity), psychic and material colonization enforces dominant cultural prescripts. The stranger dwells in shadow, caught between abject projections and melancholic demands to strive for all that they are not. One heavily cathected identity marker is disability, which in phantasy supports a reassuringly immutable boundary between the “damaged” and the “whole”. Projective identification positions the disability community as custodians of disavowed, yet universal human realities such as bodily frailty, interdependency and vulnerability. But here the other lies dormant within the colonist, as disability awaits us all, confounding authoritarian ideals and inviting depressive position functioning based on the recognition of human commonality.
Sudhir Kakar's body of work arises at the intersection between psychoanalysis andanthropology. This essay explores the affinities that Kakar's work has withthe psychologically minded anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, in particular thecapacity to take into account individuals who live in cultural contexts where beliefs inmagic and religion coexist with modernity. Tracing Kakar's intellectual affinity with DeMartino, Geza Roheim, Francesco Remotti and George Deveraux the essay clarifiesSudhir's Kakar's position in the landscape of anthropological psychoanalysis.
This essay revisits the archive surrounding Hans Kelsen’s encounter with Sigmund Freud to explore the irreconcilable relation between psychoanalysis and law. Kelsen drew on Freud’s Group Psychology in his career-long project to articulate a normative foundation for the state distinct from both sociology and Schmittian decisionism. Though Freud publicly resisted Kelsen’s normativity, their disagreement proved formative for Freud’s concept of the superego. Tracing this divergence through later theorizations of the impolitical from Étienne Balibar, Sergio Benvenuto, and others, this essay argues that psychoanalysis is not a resource for legitimating the State but a clinical discourse that confronts the contradictory imperatives of the superego and unsettles the political’s claim to authority. At stake in revisiting Freud and Kelsen’s encounter is not only the lasting intellectual impact of a brief historical episode, but the contemporary question of the unconscious in the face of authoritarian populism and the erosion of the rule of law.
This study offers a Lacanian investigation of the PTI phenomenon in Pakistan, focusing specifically on the affective response of the electorate to the deep state’s removal of Imran Khan from office – an event otherwise treated as routine by entrenched bureaucracies in an authoritarian context. Such a seismic upheaval as the one caused by Imran Khan necessitates a nuanced study beyond existing paradigms which examine his popularity along class lines, or trace his success to clandestine engineering in the past by the unelected elite itself. In conversation with such frameworks – including the rise of populism and the performance of political piety – this study situates the success of Khan’s message within the structural aporias of the “Pakistan project.” The article argues that Imran Khan offers a glimpse of jouissance in response to a constitutive and libidinal “lack” in the dominant centrist discourse of Pakistan – a lack stemming from the separation from the (m)Other (India), and from systemic sociopolitical repression, both of which lock the centrist discourse in a binary relationship with the next-door neighbour. Khan’s personal history and rhetoric tether a fragmented national imaginary that finds coherence primarily in the cricket stadium, and especially against India. By acting as a libidinal surrogate and born-again Muslim leader, Khan promises to take the nation back to its sacred foundations through the resurrection of the original “New Medina” fantasy promised to South Asian Muslims in 1947. Such is the intense gratification offered by the PTI bandwagon, seen to be “stolen” in Khan’s incarceration. Consequently, the PTI, though battered and beaten, is still a force to reckon with.
Jacques Lacan’s conceptual framework plays an important part in the development of Mari Ruti’s thinking. But not all of it. There are certain concepts that have pride of place, specifically that of das Ding. Das Ding or the Thing is the source of the subject’s singularity, what defines its desire in contrast with that of the Other. Lacan himself never theorizes the relationship between his understanding of das Ding and his conception that desire is the desire of the Other, but working out this relationship is the foundation of Ruti’s project. For her, we discover our Thing when we experience our failure to fit in with the desire of the Other or when we suffer from the attempt to do so. The failures of the desire of the Other end up being success in the establishment of our Thing. This conception of the relationship between das Ding and the desire of the Other takes Ruti where Lacan himself doesn’t go and gives a political valence to his thought that he does not anticipate.
This article examines the negotiation of gazes and looks in Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, focusing on the evolving relationship between Marianne, a painter, and Héloïse, her subject. Drawing on (post-)Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist theory, the analysis foregrounds a critical shift from the phallic gaze—associated with objectification and asymmetrical power—to the intersubjective potential of the look. Through textual analysis, the article demonstrates how Marianne initially adopts a normative, objectifying gaze, positioning Héloïse as the passive object of her vision. However, Héloïse disrupts this dynamic by returning the gaze, reclaiming agency and establishing a visual reciprocity that reconfigures their relationship. This visual shift is framed as a movement away from phallocentric power toward what Audre Lorde describes as “erotic power”: a shared space of mutual recognition and desire. By tracing this transformation, the article argues that Portrait of a Lady on Fire stages a feminist and queer reimagining of visual power relations. It offers a cinematic model for representing female desire and subjectivity beyond patriarchal constraints, emphasizing how the transition from gaze to look enables a more ethical and affective relationality between women. This study contributes to debates in feminist and psychoanalytic film studies by theorizing how the politics of vision can be restructured in queer texts.
