A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Fascism, Populism and the Social Transitional Space of the Democracy

Abstract

During critical socio-political conditions of profound uncertainty, social disquietude, frustration, and an inability to creatively imagine future scenarios, regressive and defensive processes of collective nature are acted out to provide an illusory sense of omnipotence, protection, and stability by evacuating psychic pain, anguish, fears, and disorientation. The spread of fascism in the last century and the contemporary forms of populism in Western countries dramatically demonstrate a series of psycho-socio-political dynamics. This includes a denial of alterity forms, the organization of social space architecture through paranoid feelings, the dilution of a group's subjective responsibility accompanied by the need for identification with charismatic leaders, sensemaking processes ideologically shaped on a unique homologated form without the possibility of divergence or diversity, and the emergence of new hyper-simplified languages based on the immediacy of thought-action. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, all of these circumstances show the difficulties of dealing with the social transitional space of democracy. Indeed, by their very nature, democratic institutions are potentially unsaturated areas of thirdness and otherness where subjective and collective levels can meet, where it is possible to work on limits, recognize borders, and undertake regulatory, intermediary, and symbolic processes in service of growth, learning, and development.