Earthly Powers & Institutional Failure

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British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)

Description

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

This paper examines the unconscious life of institutions and the psychic defences they mobilise in response to moral and structural collapse.

It’s useful for me, at least, to use Bion’s concepts of O, alpha function, and -K (the active destruction of knowledge), alongside Klein’s depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions. I argue that institutional failures involving accountability are not aberrations but structural necessities to avoid catastrophic change.

Institutions cannot occupy the depressive position because doing so would require acknowledging that they destroyed what they claim to protect, and that this destruction emanates from their core structure rather than from external forces or individual error.

Through an exploration of the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire and the Post Office Horizon scandal, and other whistleblower cases, I hope to demonstrate how institutions systematically attack not merely inconvenient truths, but the very apparatus by which truth can be discovered, or what Bion termed ‘attacks on linking’.

My paper concludes by examining some of the most harrowing contemporary tests of the moment and whether international institutions like the United Nations and Human Rights representatives can move beyond these defensive operations offering hope and justice or whether they maybe facing their final collapse.

David Morgan is a psychoanalyst and organiser of The Political Mind Seminars.

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