What is it about people? Why does Donald Trump inspire such intense devotion, identification and – on the other hand – rage?
Psychoanalyst, cultural interpreter and former journalist Daniel Jeffreys will be exploring the emotional and unconscious forces that have helped make MAGA one of the defining political movements of our time, at Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution on Saturday, October 24th.
Drawing on his own experience of interviewing Trump twice, and on the communities he encountered while writing America’s Back Porch, Jeffreys asks what Trump offers his followers beyond policy or ideology.
Through Freud’s ideas of mourning and melancholia and Lacan’s thinking on lack, desire and identification, the talk considers how feelings of loss, humiliation and dislocation can become organised around fantasies of recovering status, belonging, certainty and a supposedly stolen past. Rather than asking whether Trump is simply “mad”, the evening asks a more unsettling question: what desires does Trump speak to, and why have those desires become so powerful now?
Mad about Trump offers a psychoanalytic reading of contemporary politics that looks beneath argument and opinion to the fantasies, losses and identifications that help bind political movements together.
Following hot on the heels of Mad about Trump – MAGA on the couch, BRLSI are delighted to host award-winning novelist of The Shock of the Fall, Nathan Filer, with his talk on ‘Storytelling that honours Psychosis.’
The Shock of the Fall was the recipient of several major literary awards, including the Costa Book of the Year and the Betty Trask Prize and during the talk, this award-winning author, broadcaster and former mental health nurse will explore how literature can honour the complexity of mental illness. Challenging our impulse to reduce human distress to diagnostic labels, Filer asks what stories can reveal that medicine alone cannot.
As he moves between psychiatry, politics and literary history (with appearances from Holden Caulfield and Winnie-the-Pooh), this thoughtful, funny and personal lecture makes the case for paying exquisite attention to the complicated stories of people’s lives.
All talks in the series can be watched live at BRLSI’s base in Queen Square, Bath, and are also available to livestream.
For further talks from the Psychoanalysis in an age of anxiety series, and to explore the wider BRLSI programme:
October 24th 2:30 pm: Daniel Jeffreys, Mad About Trump – MAGA on the couch
.https://www.brlsi.org/whatson/mad-about-trump-maga-on-the-couch/
October 31st 2:30 pm Nathan Filer: Storytelling that honours Psychosis
All talks in the series can be attended at BRLSI’s base in Queen Square Bath or livestreamed from home, and audience members will also be given the chance to participate in a live Q&A at the end of each talk.
