Culture as the bad object

Abstract

This paper creatively extends Fairbairn’s theory to investigate the impact of the UK’s hostile environment policy on marginalised communities at the intersection of culture, politics and society. The hostile environment is conceptualised as a disruptive ‘bad object’ in the cultural dimension in alignment with Fairbairn’s theory. Its influence is explored in terms of its unconscious reproduction within the psyche. By juxtaposing context, theory and personal introspection, this paper offers a Fairbairnian exploration of how sociality and sociopolitical contexts interplay with the intricate processes of the human psyche. It provides reflective commentary on how external racial dynamics are internalised within the endopsychic structure, shaping one’s interactions with others, and, more significantly, how one relates to aspects of the self.

A living archive of the oppressed: Revisiting Taiwan's authoritarian past through Freud's “The Ego and the Id”

“…Through this investigation, attention is drawn to the intricate ways in which the "historical" fathers of Taiwan, who embodied unmistakably authoritarian personas, have significantly shaped the collective (un)consciousness of Taiwan and Taiwanese identity. It contributes to knowledge by venturing two points of disruption: Firstly, it aligns with the strand of activist scholarship linking psychoanalysis and social justice, disrupting conventional frameworks of analysis which tend to individualize and "domesticate" psychological symptoms (e.g., Auestad, 2013;Fang, 2020;Ffytche & Pick, 2016;Kerr, 2024;Krüger et al, 2018;Rao, 2021;Rolnik, 2023;Williams, 2021). It seeks to disrupt what Parker (2018) refers to as "the trap that many forms of psychoanalysis fell into," which tends to "idealize the family […] so that the attempts to describe the 'unconscious' as something beyond awareness also had the effect of familialising it" (p. 249; italics original).…”