1st Edition

Nationalism and the Body Politic

By Lene Auestad Copyright 2014
    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume aims to question the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies in the light of what unconscious fantasies are involved in these developments. It examines both recent movements of right-wing extremism and the way in which rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas have been adopted by mainstream politicians and in mainstream public discourse. Politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties have tended to resist specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation. Governments across Europe have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies. Xenophobia and hostility towards 'others' is on the rise, along with appeals to "Tradition and Security". 'Cultures of fear' are linked with fantasies of fusion or 'imagined sameness'. Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body, echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) characterization of 'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics.

    New International Library of Group Analysis Foreword , Introduction , Bodies and Boundaries: Xenophobic Imaginings , Editor’s introduction to Chapter One , Fortress hypochondria: health and safety , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Two , “Budapest, the capital of Hungarians”: Rhetoric, images, and symbols of the Hungarian extreme right movements , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Three , Idealised sameness and orchestrated hatred: Extreme and mainstream nationalism in Norway , Constellations of Nationalism , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Four , Funeral policy: the case of mourning populism in Poland , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Five , The theory of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification as the fourth basic assumption in the unconscious life of groups and group-like social systems , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Six , The schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or the political between schizophrenia and paranoia , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Seven , Fundamentalism, Nazism, and inferiority , History, Longing, Identification , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Eight , The Mexican: phantasy, trauma, and history , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Nine , Psychoanalysis and peace: Erich Fromm on history, politics, and the nation , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Ten , The making of the isotype character in the panoptic system and its relation to globalised nationalism 1 , The “I” and Mourning , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Eleven , The evil I retreat from in myself: nationalism and das Ding , Editor’s introduction to Chapter Twelve , Between fantasy and melancholia: Lack, otherness, and violence , Appendix: Introducing Psychoanalysis and Politics: A conversation with Lene Auestad and Jonathan Davidoff

    Biography

    Lene Auestad