Thinking psychoanalytically about the nature of social exclusion involves a self-questioning on the part of the interpreter. While we may all have some experiences of having been subject to stereotyping, silencing, discrimination and exclusion, it is also the case that, as social beings, we all, to some extent, participate in upholding these practices, often unconsciously.

The book poses the question of how psychoanalysis can be used to think about the invisible and subtle processes of power over symbolic representation, in the context of stereotyping and dehumanization: What...

This volume questions 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 main stream politicians and in main stream 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...

This book aims to question the junctions of the private and the public when it comes to trauma, loss, and the work of mourning - notions which, it is argued, challenge our very ideas of the individual and the shared. It asks, to paraphrase Adorno, 'What do we mean by 'working through the past'?, 'How is a shared work of mourning to be understood?', and 'With what legitimacy do we consider a particular social or cultural practice to be -mourning-?' Rather than aiming to present a diagnosis of the political present, this volume instead takes one step back to pose the question of what mourning...

This book examines how people cannot escape being tainted, whether actively engaged or not, by violence in its countless manifestations. The essays encompass a wide range of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and geo-political areas. They describe how images and fragments of traumatic and violent scenarios are transported from one generation's unconscious to that of another, leading to cycles of repetition and retaliation, restricting the freedom to imagine alternatives and inhabit alternative positions. The authors all work within a psychosocial framework by unsettling the...