Sexual Politics of the Extreme Right: An Intervention Into the Primal Scene

Abstract

The mass migrations of the past decade have rekindled political narratives that center on perceived threats to society. Refugees are often portrayed as socio-economic, cultural, or biological threats to the identity and existence of nations. While these narratives reached their peak in the first half of the 20th century with racial theories, eugenics, and mass genocide, they have resurfaced in contemporary society in a diluted yet structurally comparable form. I attempt to investigate these narratives through psychoanalytical means, using Serbian extreme right wing politics in a last several decades as an example how ideology relies on vehement emotions, unconscious fantasies as well as sociological structures. Several psychoanalytical authors have written about extreme right ideology within the framework of psychosexual development and early anxieties related to otherness and primal scene. These anxieties are taken over by existing societal structures and it is this transformation of unconscious fantasies into hostile political action may elucidate the mechanisms that distort perceptions of society and the world, mobilizing vulnerable individuals to align with populist and extreme right ideologies.