Truth in the Time of Disinformation: Psychoanalytic Insights

Truth in a Time of Disinformation: Psychoanalytic Insights examines how the pursuit of truth—inner and outer, personal and collective—can restore coherence and integrity to a fractured world, illuminating the psychoanalytic struggle to discern psychic and external reality amidst illusion, denial, and the seductions of falsehood.

In an age where certainty has dissolved into opinion, and falsehood often travels faster than fact, Truth in a Time of Disinformation asks one of the most urgent questions of our era: what has become of truth, and how might psychoanalysis help us to find our way back to it?

From Plato’s forms to postmodern relativism, the book traces the long, complex evolution of humankind’s relationship with truth – its beauty, its necessity, and its fragility. Today, this ancient pursuit faces unprecedented threat as narcissism, power, and digital distortion corrode our shared sense of reality. The psychoanalytic lens offers a unique response: an exploration of how inner truth – our unconscious phantasies, denials, and projections – shapes both the personal and the political fabric of the world we inhabit.

At once a meditation on civilisation’s current crisis and a testament to psychoanalysis as a discipline grounded in truth-seeking, this book argues that the nourishment of truth – both emotional and intellectual – is essential for freedom, democracy, and psychic integrity.

Gathering leading psychoanalytic thinkers from across traditions and countries, the volume illuminates truth as a lived, relational process rather than an abstract ideal. The book features Jorge L. Ahumada, Jean Arundale, David Bell, Christopher Bollas, Ronald Britton, Giuseppe Civitarese, Sara Collins, Gregorio Kohon, Alessandra Lemma, David Morgan, Thomas H. Ogden, Elias M. da Rocha Barros, Eran J. Rolnik, Hanna Segal, Mark Solms, and John Steiner. They examine how truth emerges, is tested, and co-created in the analytic encounter. Their essays span philosophical reflection and clinical experience, linking the analyst’s consulting room with the public sphere and revealing the moral and emotional courage required to face reality without illusion.

Beautifully written and deeply relevant, Truth in a Time of Disinformation invites readers to reconsider what it means to know, to think, and to remain human in an age of distortion.