Admitting Demons: Brexit and Psychoanalysis

2015年，当大卫•卡梅伦（David Cameron）的公关主管克雷格•奥利弗（Craig Oliver）要求他总结反对举行公投的理由时，他立即回答说：“你可能会释放出你不知道的恶魔。”正如奥利弗（2017）在他的英国脱欧内幕报道“释放恶魔”中所报道的那样，这些话被证明是预言性的，尽管奥利弗继续详细说明“释放恶魔”的含义，但这个短语已经将我们的想象力指向了虚幻和不可思议的方向；在精神分析的方向上。当然，面对一个人内心的“恶魔”，一个人可能会进入精神分析治疗，对于Stephen Frosh （2013, p.3）来说，精神分析实际上“故意挑起恶魔”，“坚持谈论我们宁愿隐藏或休息的事情”。然而，尽管从心理学角度解释英国脱欧的趋势一直存在，“尽管有不同程度的说服力”（Hughes, 2019），但一直缺乏持续和学术的精神分析研究。在这篇博士论文中，我建议通过开启一场关于当前危机的精神、幻觉和主观方面的社会学-精神分析（“社会心理”）对话，探索精神分析在英国脱欧“恶魔”问题中的“含义”（参见Felman， 1982）。正如Mintchev和Moore（2019，第453页）所指出的那样，社会科学的分析已经“为影响公投结果的许多因素提供了宝贵的见解”，包括经济不安全和对移民的焦虑。但是，由于从社会领域的角度出发，而不是从心理和社会过程的辩证相互作用出发，这种分析无法“充分理解为什么人们如此持久地依附于分裂的政治观念”（同上，第467页）。

On being asked to sum up the argument against holding a referendum by his director of communications, Craig Oliver, in 2015, David Cameron instantly responded: "you could unleash demons of which ye know not". As Oliver (2017) reports in his inside story of Brexit, "Unleashing Demons", those words proved prophetic, and notwithstanding the ways in which Oliver goes on to specify the meaning of "unleashing demons", it is a phrase which already points our imaginations in the direction of the phantasmatic and the uncanny; indeed in the direction of psychoanalysis. It is of course to confront one's inner 'demons' that a person might enter psychoanalytic therapy, and for Stephen Frosh (2013, p.3), psychoanalysis in fact "intentionally stirs up demons" and "insists on talking about the things we would much rather hide away or lay to rest." Yet while there is an ever-present tendency to explain Brexit in psychological terms, "albeit with varying degrees of convincingness" (Hughes, 2019), there has been a lack of sustained and scholarly psychoanalytic inquiry. In this PhD I propose to explore the 'implications' (cf. Felman, 1982) of psychoanalysis in the question of Brexit's 'demons' by opening a sociological-psychoanalytical ('psychosocial') dialogue about the psychic, phantasmatic, subjective aspects of the current crisis. Analyses in the social sciences, as Mintchev and Moore (2019, p.453) note, have already "provided invaluable insight into a number of factors that influenced the referendum's outcome", including economic insecurity and anxieties about immigration. But by beginning from the perspective of the social field - rather than the dialectical interplay of psychic and social processes - such analyses fail to offer "a sufficient understanding of why people are so persistently attached to divisive political ideas" (Ibid., p.467).