Amia Srinivasan · The Impossible Patient: Return of the Unconscious

London Review of Books [Vol. 47 No. 23 · 25 December 2025]

Amia Srinivasan

Link: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/amia-srinivasan/the-impossible-patient

Excerpts:

The unconscious is back. Why now?

In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere. No purely materialist or realist or folk psychological analysis seems to suffice. We need to go beyond talk of parties and platforms; of beliefs, values and identitarian affiliations; of class, jobs, wages and exploitation. We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death-drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty and racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.

... effective political organisers may know what psychoanalysis can teach: being sensitive to unspoken fear & desire, listening more than speaking, holding space for agency while acknowledging constraint, the importance of timing & ‘empathy’ & ‘tact’, even the workings of transference & projection.