The Politics of Psychoanalysis in History
Colonial Afterlives and the Remaking of Self and Society

Convened by

Mischa Suter
Senior Fellow 2025–2026

Details

Venue & accessibility info: Rudolf Wolf Room, Collegium Helveticum

This is a public event. Participation is free of charge.

Please register here your interest in attending the panel before May 29, 2026. 

Please contact Joshua Klein for access to precirculated papers.

Making sense of our historical conjuncture necessitates inquiring into the unconscious as a political force. The resurgence of fascism underscores the need to explain political motivations in more complex ways than by referring to manifest interests alone. The afterlives of colonial rule perpetuate structures of inequality that need to be addressed beyond the confines of political economy. Historical study and activist practice both suggest that social intervention depends on the remaking of political subjectivities.

Psychoanalysis is at the core of such understandings of politics. But just as psychoanalysis has always maintained a tense relation to the discipline of history, its politics have been complex and have never been tied to a single political project. The interdisciplinary workshop explores some of these dimensions. It is conceived as a forum for discussing work in progress.

It can be argued that the politics of psychoanalysis become discernible on at least three levels, and some of these will be reflected in the workshop’s contributions. Psychoanalytic theory offers a way to explain politics, as it did especially from the interwar period until the “long” moment of decolonization, 1930–1970. Psychoanalytic theory also informs politics: political movements aimed for the remaking of selves and thus the “dis-alienation” of relations in society, as in revolutionary psychiatry and libidinal politics. And psychoanalytic categories not merely describe but also prescribe forms of being and relating, thus both opening and limiting forms of political agency on a foundational level, that of subject formation.

Program