Psychoanalysis and the Future of Global Politics: Overcoming Climate Change, Pandemics, War, and Poverty

This book offers a unique approach by using psychoanalytic theory to explain how we can resolve the most important issues facing the world today and in the future. One of my main arguments is that we need to move beyond national politics in order to provide global solutions to global problems. However, there is a misplaced fear concerning global governance, and much of this phobia is derived from a misunderstanding of history and human psychology. Not only do we have to learn to give up our idealized investment in nations and nationalism, but we also have to move beyond seeing the world from the perspective of a victim fantasy. Since we often repress real signs of global progress, we experience the global present and the future in negative ways. To reverse this perspective, we need to first understand the incredible progress humans have made in the last two hundred years, but we also should not ignore the real threats we face.

Robert Samuels is a Lecturer at UC Santa Barbra, USA. He holds doctorates in Psychology and English and he is the author of twenty books, including Viral Rhetoric, The Psychopathology of Political Ideology, and Freud for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2021). He has taught multiple courses on global progress.