BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (2024) Unconscious Politics: Alienation, Social Science and Psychoanalysis. (London: Karnac).
The degradation of geopolitical relations in the world during the present century invites the question whether there are widespread unconscious dynamics interfering on a massive collective scale. This book has been long maturing and attempts to trace speculatively what might be those underlying factors. Much of the book rests on the psychoanalytic understanding of indifference to other humans, and the relegation of them to undesirable and evil commodities.
R.D. Hinshelwood and Giuseppe Caruso (2025) Alienation, Conscious and Unconscious: Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Sociopolitical Issues. London: Karnac.
This is a collection of my papers written on variius political topics over a period of more than forty years. They were selected by Giuseppe Caruso and, divided into five sections, they give rise to five dialogues between me and Giuseppe conducted slowly by email, and which expand and challenge the scope of the papers in each section.
BOOKS EDITED
Kurt Jacobson and R.D. Hinshelwood (2023) Psychoanalysis, Science and Power: Essays in Honour of Robert Maxwell Young. London: Routledge.
Bob Young was a significant figure in the psychoanalytic world in London from the mid-eighties for over thirty years. He was certainly an important figure in my developing reflections on society and particularly politics, emphasising the politics of values. The latter derived in part from his work on Darwin who Young convincingly showed based his survival of the fittest on the economic model of market forces. He died in 2018 and deserved a commemorative book dedicated to his work with chapters on his pre-psychoanalytic work as well as psychoanalysis.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (1983) Projective identification and Marx’s concept of man. International Review of Psychoanalysis 16: 221-226.
This was my first remarkable correspondence that I noticed. I his early writing Marx described alienation in terms very similar to the description by Melanie Klein of depersonalisation due to projective identification one hundred years later. Their descriptions of the causes of alienation and depersonalisation were, however, quite different.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1985) Projective identification, alienation and society, Group-Analysis 18: 241-251.
I reported the correspondence described in my 1983 in relation to groups rather than just individuals. Interestingly, the Editor of the International Review remarked to me personally at meeting how interesting the correspondence was, there was apparently no interest from the group analytic world.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1985) A dual materialism. Free Associations 4: 36-50.
My enduring interest was then in the alternative explanation of the causes of alienation and depersonalisation – internal psychology or the external social relations of production. This paper explores th problem of bring two quite separate explanations, both materialist, into some kind of cooperative harmony.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1986) Psychological defence and nuclear war. Medicine and War 2: 29-38. Republished in Covington, Coline, Wiiliams, Paul, Arundale, Jean and Knox, Jean (eds) 2002 London: Karnac.
The annihilation of civilisation and even of human beings is so unthinkable that it requires some explanation in terms of the unconscious for the developing and persisting interest in more and more devastating threats towards each other. The primal anxiety about survival needs disowning and displacing into some threatene enemy. Such illogical unconscious reasoning is however emotional relieving.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1987) Large group dynamics and nuclear war. Group-Analysis 20:137-146.
Although way and aggression can often be a reaction to and avoidance of depression and mourning, in the case of nuclear war it seems to be a near psychotic form of magical thinking that can eliminate our fears of annihilation and transport them into an enemy. Fear for survival is a profoundly effective unconscious force to unite a nation.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2009) Ideology and identity: A psychoanalytic investigation of a social phenomenon. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 14: 131-148.
Human civilisation owes its existence to the collaborative teamwork of individuals. But such collaboration goes wrong and a team, or group, becomes destructive in various ways by serving an ideology. In ordinary constructive groups, an idea is held in common as an abstract notion useable in aspirations and achievements; but in destructive groups an idea becomes an ideology, equating each individual with the idea, which becomes an end in itself. This latter is an unconscious response to social forces that distress the individuals. Then identity is formed and distorted by compulsive ‘ideas’, rather than realistic intentions.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2016) Democracy’s Freudian Slip? Who’d Have Thought It? Psychotherapy and Politics International 14 https://doi.org/10.1002/ppi.1385
In June 2015 a democratic referendum was held whether to leave the European Union. The result appears to have been a mistake, due probably to misjudgement. misinformation and unequal partisan funding. It leads to questions about democracy itself. It is clear that Democracy like everything else is not perfect. It is better not to idealise Democracy as if it was perfect, and to struggle with what to do when it lets us down, and why.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2017) Reflection or action: And never the twain shall meet. Psychotherapy and Politics International 15: 67-74. Republished in David Morgan The Unconscious in Social and Political Life (2019). London: Karnac.
This was a presentation for a seminar in the first annual series of The Political Mind at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis in 2015. It concerns the ‘action’ in psychoanalysis is reflection and insight, quite difference from political activism. This raises the question whether psychoanalysis can actually contribute to political debate.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2021) The disappointment of democracy. Free Associations 83, September 2021: 28-37.
There are various sources of disappointment with democracy. Not least is the promise it seems to give to the freedom for everyone to have whatever they wish for when in reality we can only vote for something we wish for. Our current notion of democracy is idealised, and in the context of the cold war, weaponised. A vigilance for its failures is a necessary antidote to idealisation. The disappointments are discussed and it is argued that modern democracy needs systems of accountability more than empty promises of freedom.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2023) Populism: The politics of emotions. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 43: 110-118.
Differeent segments of society use each other to manage emotions, usually in terms of Freud’s ‘narcissism of minor difference’. These processes are unconscious as well as emotional and cannot be dealt with by conscious reasoning. Managing them requires us to know that unconscious dynamics do exist and interfere. These hidden dynamic processes are examined here. The conclusion is that democracy invites freedom of expression but allows only a freedom of ‘projection.’
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (1987) Between the devil and the deep blue sea: Relations with the dominant class. In Emilio Modena (ed) Between the devil and the deep blue sea: Psychoanalyse im Netz (Freiburg: Kore) pp. 184-196.
The Free Association group. For several years, this group linked up with similar continental groups to hold joint conferences. This was a paper I was invited to give at the first of these conference in 1987 in Zurich and focusing on ; Relations with the dominant class’. Based on my therapeutic community experience blended with the Tavistock Group Relation approach to organisations I considered especially the acceptance by the labouring class, of the ‘labour process’ as described by Marx, the production of value and ultimately its ownership.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1989) Social possession of identity. In Barry Richards (ed) Crises of the Self (London: Free Association Books) pp. 75-83.
In this book for academics that aimed to give an accessible contemporary account of the ‘self’ from a psychoanalytic point of view, I expressed a Kleinian view of the exchange of projections and introjects which gives a fluid picture of the personality. Whilst there are roles and identities that emerge in different social locations, there is a self that recognises that continuity of the individual that society possesses.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1994) Attacks on the reflective space. In Victor Shermer and Malcolm Pines (eds) Ring of Fire: Containing Primitive Emotional States. London: Routledge; pp. 86-106.
In this book on the therapy group and the primitive states of the individuals which it aims to contain. I contributed thoughts on the ‘reflective space’ in the group into which intolerable experiences are unconsciously and anonymously deposited. Individuals in the grou are jus like to attack that space whenever the experiences appear to threaten conscious suffering. It puts into group terms something of Bion’s understanding of the attacks, envious or otherwise of the individual containing link.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2019) Melanie Klein: Splitting or reality. In Stavrokakis, Y. (Ed.) Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Politics: pp. 31.43 London: Routledge.
The chapter in this reference book on Melanie Klein’s concepts showed how the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions could give some indication on the degree of maturity and of reality-based thinking of political debate and action. The pressure to divide policies and actions into exclusively all-good or all-bad categories needs to mitigated by the move towards a depressive position thinking in which there is a balance of some kind in all prospective decisions.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2022) Values: Inner and outer. In Jacobson, K. and R.D. Hinshelwood (eds.) (2022) Psychoanalysis, Science and Power: Essays in Honour of Robert Maxwell Young. London: Routledge.
Very much to connected with what I learned from Bob Young, this chapter view the values one gives to any object person or commodity as having en external and social value, but also an emotional and ethical value internal to each individual. These two orientations to value interact in us all the time. This is true even of money as the calculation of value which acquire sometime an overwhelming meaning of personal value.
People and their prejudices
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (2006) Racism: Being ideal Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 20: 84-96.
Racism is a significant social category. It plays powerfully on our emotional reactions. It touches on inner sensitivities about personal differences and an individual’s identity. The need to shape oneself perfectly is an inner need called the super-ego in psychoanalysis. There is a two-factor system of psycho-social interaction. In the clinical cases I mention there is a sudden awareness if an instant destructiveness in the patient that had to be suppressed; in the other there was a long-standing defensive structure involving the dismissive attitude to another person of a different race. Other social difference can play equally powerfully upon the inner dynamics of narcissism, for instance gender, or generations, or class, etc.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2007) Intolerance and the intolerable: The case of racism Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 12: 1-20.
This further paper on racism, I expand on the inner uncertainties of individuals. Because the identification of the alien ‘other’ is so deep in human experience, it is important to understand how this can be co-ordinated as a social from, racism. The two cases of the previous (2006) paper are examined in more detail to consider the uprush of an intolerable anxiety about one’s own aggression; while the other used racial difference as more or less permanent structure to deal with intolerable anxieties about herself. Freud’s idea of the internalisation of a group ideal (a social ideal) is important, but this paper explores conditions for this being acceptable or unacceptable to a specific individual, using clinical material from the two psychoanalyses
R.D. Hinshelwood (2016) Being racist: Certainty and some internal dynamics. In Mintchev and Hinshelwood (eds) The Feeling of Certainty. London: Pallgrave.
In this later paper, the focus is on the certainty that attaches to the sense of superiority to the inferiority of the other. This powerful insistence, though given an opportunity by persisting social conventions and attitudes, gains its power from inner concerns about the constitution of oneself. Self-criticism can be allayed by other-criticism, but the degradation of the other is proportional to one’s criticism of one’s self. The intractable certainty of aggressive criticism of others in most cases enhances the sense of doubt abut the virtue of oneself and feeds into a typical self-sustaining set of powerful attitudes and behaviour.