Attacks on Linking: Satire, Sanctity, Thought
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Political Psychoanalysis
Description
Attacks on Linking: Satire, Sanctity, and the Limits of Tolerable Thought.
Online
Friday 19th July 6-8pm
David Morgan
A violent response to art, literature and ideas by orthodoxies both political and religious are not only political or theological events but a concretised defence against the anxiety that symbolic play produces in minds unable to sustain ambiguity. To understand it fully requires two kinds of thinking held together: the political philosophy and the psychoanalytic understanding of what happens to groups when the boundary between the thinkable and the unthinkable is approached and crossed. Neither is sufficient without the other. Together they illuminate something that neither discipline, working alone, can quite reach. And threading between them, with a clarity that now reads almost as prophecy, is the work of Hanna Segal, whose distinction between symbolic equation and true symbol formation provides not merely a theoretical lens but the central organising concept through which these attacks and the recurring pattern of events they inaugurate can be most precisely understood.
Segal argued, with characteristic directness, that psychoanalysis belongs to the great scientific tradition of freeing thought from dogma, whether religious or arising from an established scientific tradition. This is not an incidental observation but a foundational one.
David Morgan is a psychoanalyst and organiser/chair of the Political Mind seminars and a member of the BPAS BPA and BPF.
