Political systems do more than distribute power and resources. They also shape how anxiety, desire, aggression, dependency, loss, and trauma are interpreted and managed. Psychoanalytic political theory offers many concepts for these processes, but they are often developed within separate traditions. This article proposes a functional framework of seven psychopolitical structures: generative, figurative, cathectic, defensive, institutionalizing, recursive‐temporal, and transformative. The categories identify different functions rather than equivalent kinds of phenomena. Together they show how diffuse psychic pressures acquire political meaning, affective force, institutional durability, and historical continuity. The framework does not treat societies as patients or reduce politics to individual psychology. Instead, it examines how narratives, identifications, defenses, institutions, and memories organize collective responses to uncertainty and conflict. These structures interact recursively and can stabilize around three ideal‐typical attractors: projective closure, adaptive containment, and reflexive reworking. Projective closure turns contradiction outward into enemyhood. Adaptive containment manages distress while leaving many of its political sources intact. Reflexive reworking keeps anxiety, implication, loss, and institutional defense open to interpretation and revision. The article argues that democratic psychopolitical capacity lies not in eliminating unconscious conflict but in making its political organization more contestable, responsible, and revisable.
Physical aggression in traffic settings is one of the concerning manifestations of aggressive driving that is a threat to public safety and health. Despite the rich literature on aggression in traffic settings, studies investigating physical aggression in this context are limited. The current study aimed to investigate the reasons for engaging in physical aggression while driving, based on the accounts of participants who had been involved in such incidents. Since traffic settings involve clear rules that all participants must follow, along with an inherent element of rivalry among them, the study's findings were discussed from a Lacanian perspective to provide a theoretical explanation for the behavior. A qualitative methodology was used in this study. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with five male participants, aged between 48 and 55, using convenience sampling. The interview transcripts were analyzed using the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis approach. Based on the results, three superordinate themes were detected: “irregularities as a cause for conflict”, “need to secure justice”, and “power struggle”. Experiences of physical aggression in traffic appear to be closely tied to power struggles, often accompanied by an intolerance for rule‐breaking. The participants' discourse also reveals underlying themes related to masculinity and gendered expectations.
ABSTRACT Contemporary debate on artificial intelligence is organized around two seductive questions: whether AI is, or is becoming, a subject, and whether it can occupy the place of the analyst. This article argues that both questions are themselves symptomatic, and that the Lacanian contribution is not to answer them but to displace them. Rather than asking what kind of subject AI is and cataloging what it lacks , I treat AI as an apparatus—a technoscientific inference engine—and ask how it mobilizes the human subject's fantasy, transference, and alienation within contemporary capitalism. Across Lacan's three registers, I argue that large language models compute a statistical syntax detached from lalangue , the equivocal, jouissance ‐bearing substrate of the speaking body (the Symbolic); function as a digital mirror and a lathouse , a gadget that plugs the division of the subject (the Imaginary); and generate not an irruption of the Real but a sampling variance that the user nonetheless receives as an address (the Real). I locate automated diagnostic systems within the University discourse serving the Master, and argue that the decisive risk of AI is not that the machine feels nothing but that, as an Other that never falls silent, it insulates the subject from the castrating friction of alterity. Writing avowedly from the position of the hysteric, I close by rotating that discourse, outlining where a Lacanian orientation could inform, rather than only criticize, the design and clinical deployment of these systems.
ABSTRACT This paper proposes that, beyond the familiar reasons for WhatsApp's widespread use—such as its cost‐free nature, user‐friendly interface, and immense popularity—the app possesses features that evoke common, often unconscious, psychodynamics linked to universal conflicts between unity and separation, or the negotiation of closeness and distance in relationships, making it particularly compelling. Drawing on two vignettes, the paper examines how conflicts around closeness and distance are expressed through WhatsApp interactions, inviting broader reflection on WhatsApp use. It contributes to a growing body of psychoanalytic work on increasingly nuanced facets of social media use, and of WhatsApp in particular. The material was drawn from psychoanalytically informed, unstructured interviews with emerging adults about their mobile phone use. Across seven of the eight interviews, WhatsApp emerged spontaneously as a distinct theme. Two especially compelling vignettes were selected for analysis, which focused on the interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics evident in the narratives.
ABSTRACT What occupies the other side of a delusional spiral with conversational AI? Accounts of AI psychosis and AI‐associated delusion describe the loop, failed containment, absent corrective friction. This paper examines the structure of the bond through one concept, folie à deux at an empty pole. Where recent psychiatric work treats the name as metaphor, the classical tableau is re‐read term by term, with one partner bringing no delusion of its own. Court filings and transcripts are read with Green's metapsychology of the negative, alongside quantitative studies. The exchange is mechanically bidirectional and structurally unipersonal: a bond with one psychic interior. This object can refuse, but from no position of its own; it does not withdraw, so no interval is left. Its constancy is availability, not the reliability that withdrawal and return establish. The opening sequence shows a refusal that did not hold. The paper proposes that this failure and non‐withdrawal can jointly close the bond, counterfeit its safeguards, and reverse its remedy. Message‐level scoring misses non‐withdrawal. In the counterfeit negative, all the words of the function are present, and the function nowhere. One documented exit suggests conditions for an outside third and a window where refusal can still be received as correction, not attack. From the empty pole the paper derives the spiral's geometry and a ratchet that forbids return. It sets evaluation a task: make the bond's state explicit, and ask not only what a system refuses but what its refusal does to the bond.
