Alienation, Conscious and Unconscious: Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Sociopolitical Issues
Book Details
- Publisher : Karnac Books
- Published : December 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 376
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98274
- ISBN 13 : 9781800133136
- ISBN 10 : 1800133138
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Too little is ever thought about the unconscious dimension of the mind when considering political and ideological issues and crises. To redress this lacuna, R. D. Hinshelwood presents eleven of his most inspiring papers on the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking to politics alongside a series of in-depth discussions with Giuseppe Caruso.
R. D. Hinshelwood draws from five decades of experience to present a collection of papers on the relationships between psychoanalysis and politics. Divided into four parts, each chapter begins with a short introduction from the author to contextualise the featured paper and each part ends on an in-depth discussion with Giuseppe Caruso to clarify and advance understanding of the issues raised. They discuss the relevance of psychoanalysis, the science of the unconscious, and the numerous political topics addressed. Politics involves conscious debate but it is inevitably intruded upon by unconscious determinants that key in with social attitudes and issues. Hinshelwood draws upon the theory and work of Melanie Klein, W. R. Bion, and Herbert Rosenfeld, as well as his work with and on organisations and therapeutic communities. His writing is imbued with an acute sensibility to social and political matters and engages not only those with an interest in psychoanalysis but also those interested in the social sciences and cultural studies.
Reviews and Endorsements
Drawing on decades of explorations of the interface between the social, the political, and the unconscious, R. D. Hinshelwood, a prolific writer, examines some important topics. These include the idealisation of democracy and how this idealisation inevitably leads to disappointments and grievances. Hinshelwood convincingly shows how disappointment in one’s own self can be unconsciously projected and dumped into other racial groups. He also shows how unconscious difficulties with sustaining uncertainty can lead to the prevailing attraction to conspiracy theories. These kinds of insights are crucial to understanding the rise of contemporary populism and fascism. Hinshelwood's conversations on these various topics with Giuseppe Caruso, an anthropologist, a social theorist, and a psychoanalyst, add depth and richness to this important book.
Era A. Loewenstein, training and consulting psychoanalyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
Here is an invaluable guide to R. D. Hinshelwood’s long journey to the core of the intersection between psychoanalysis in the Kleinian “British tradition” and Marxism, a life-work reviewed with the aid of Giuseppe Caruso as an attentive interlocutor, and how we might open our work to clinical and political consequences of rigorously thinking through the nature of alienation in social context.
Ian Parker, psychoanalyst, Red Clinic, Manchester, UK
This tremendously stimulating volume stands as a monument to a body of work by R. D. Hinshelwood spanning four decades by gathering together a set of seminal papers through which runs a central concern with the interplay of the psychical and the political, the individual and the collective. The extended and highly engaging dialogues with Giuseppe Caruso interspersed between the papers add further to the sense of animated thought in motion. In all its integrity and unity, the volume nonetheless encompasses a great array of concerns and topics, ranging from (to name but a few) the prospects – in the wake of Freudo-Marxisms of various kinds – for something like a Kleino-Marxism to the relations between projective identification and alienation, between the psychically intolerable and social intolerance, between neurosis and ideology. The work, as well as drawing on myriad insights from Klein and the wider psychoanalytic literature, makes crucial use of clinical material in a set of highly subtle and far-reaching arguments. The result is essential reading for anyone concerned to discover how the psychical is political.
Christoph Schuringa, philosopher, Northeastern University, London
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
About the authors
Abstracts of the papers
Introduction: A preliminary discussion
Part I: Setting out the psychosocial divide
Chapter 1. Marxist and psychoanalytic alienations
- Paper 1. Projective identification and Marx’s concept of man (1983)
Chapter 2. Seeking the synthesis
- Paper 2. Convergences with psychoanalysis (1996)
Discussion of Part I
Part II: Individual psychology with its interpersonal dimensions
Chapter 3. Affect flow
- Paper 3. The individual and the influence of social settings (2005)
Chapter 4. Fluid identities
- Paper 4. Social possession of identity (1988)
Chapter 5. Stability or annihilation
- Paper 5. Psychological defences and nuclear war (2002)
Discussion of Part II
Part III: The sociopolitical penetrated by the mental
Chapter 6. Tracking down ideology
- Paper 6. Ideology and identity (2009)
Chapter 7. Socially stabilising identity
- Paper 7. Intolerance and the intolerable: The case of racism (2007)
Chapter 8. Belonging and identifying
- Paper 8. The function of symbol-formation: Pinning down the ego function (2020)
Discussion of Part III
Part IV: How do we “take action”?
Chapter 9. Is reflection an action?
- Paper 9. Reflection or action: And never the twain shall meet (2017)
Chapter 10. Democracy weaponised
- Paper 10. The disappointment of democracy (2021)
Chapter 11. The inexistence of debate
- Paper 11. Political action, psychoanalytic action (2023)
Discussion of Part IV
Conclusion
Index
About the Author(s)
R.D. Hinshelwood is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He had a long interest in alternative psychiatry and worked as a part-time Consultant Psychotherapist in the National Health Service whilst also running a private practice as a psychoanalyst for more than forty years. Subsequently he became professor in the Centre For Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex University (now the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies), and is now Professor Emeritus. He has written widely on psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, as well as comparative psychoanalytic research, the psychodynamics of institutions, and a number of political topics (that make up the contents of this current volume).
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Giuseppe Caruso is a psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He works in private practice in London. As a social theorist he has published widely on global justice movements and cosmopolitanism and, more recently, integrating psychoanalytic insights to explore emotional cycles and leadership in groups. His earlier research involved ethnographic fieldwork with the Shipibo-Konibo people in Peru, leading to a monograph about their traditional medical practices.
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