Sutherland Trust Spring Lecture 2024
DISAVOWAL, LYING AND THE MANIC DEFENCE IN POLITICAL CULTURE: THE CASE OF BORIS JOHNSON AND ‘PARTYGATE.’
Lecture given by Candida Yates
Wednesday 8th May @ 7pm (doors open 6:45pm)
Augustine United Church, 41 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1EL
A constant refrain of the late modern world is the difficulty of focusing, of taking time to process one’s thoughts and feelings. Beset by intersecting crises nationally and internationally, there is a defensive wish to look away as a means of overcoming feelings of helplessness that consciously and unconsciously threaten to overwhelm, both at individual and collective levels of experience. In a post-truth era, this pattern of denial and disavowal is present more widely in our engagement with the processes of mediatised political culture, where the boundary between knowing and not knowing is variously echoed in the behaviour, style, and rhetoric of politicians such as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.
In this talk I will draw on object relations psychoanalysis to discuss the affective relationship between the culture of lying in politics and the psychosocial processes associated with the manic defence, addressed in different ways by Freud (1900) Melanie Klein (1940), Donald Winnicott (1938) and more recently, Lynne Layton (2010).
At a time when lying has become common place in Western democracies, it is useful to examine when and why the public collude with the duplicity of their leaders and what needs to happen for a healthy sense of scepticism and doubt to emerge to enable change.
Candida Yates, Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University, is an interdisciplinary scholar and applies a psychosocial approach to culture, politics and society and has published widely in that field. She works with academics, clinicians, and cultural organisations to create new understandings of emotion and affect in the public sphere. She teaches on the Political Masters Programmes at BU and supervises students; she is a Co-Director of the BU Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice. She sits on the Executive Board of the UK Association for Psychosocial Studies and is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council and is an Academic Associate of the Freud Museum, London. She is Joint-Editor of the Routledge book series: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture, and is a Contributing Editor on the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
For further information and to purchase tickets use the following link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/826222934037?aff=oddtdtcreator