An Urgent Declaration in Urgent Times
Living in a Bunker:
The Mind without an Unconscious
In war the enemy’s object is so to terrify you that you cannot think clearly, while your object is to continue to think clearly no matter how adverse or frightening the situation. – W.R. Bion
As human civilizations expand the scope of their pleasurable destructiveness, they commit genocide, ecocide, neocolonialism, often with acts of brutality and barbarity. When we wage war, the killing of all life is at stake, human and nonhuman, ensuring the destruction of the past and future for all. We count human deaths but bombs know no bounds: the soil, the air, the water, the birds and the bees, are unacknowledged victims. As are the future generations who will inherit the trauma and destruction wrought today.
While fascists promise the final solution to save us from all our problems, they need to create problems to maintain their reason for being, which means that they have to always win but also always lose. They respond to economic frustrations by pointing the finger at an external enemy (scapegoat) while actually growing the extractive power of our current techno-feudalist iteration of capitalism. Their true enemy is the thinking subject (equated with emasculation), the subject who cannot be tamed.
Ethno-nationalists and religious zealots, be they American, Israeli or otherwise, who act with impunity against their perceived enemies (e.g. the Arabs) construct their own reality founded on denial and disavowal to justify their actions while resistance forces, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, calling themselves liberatory, are tyrannical within their own communities; all are entrenched in their own bunkers, doubling down on their positions, while their lands are burning.
Rather than pretend it is not there, or resigning ourselves to the satisfaction of watching it burn, how can we tap into the fire from within and from without? Though we as humans are conservative in the sense that we, like any other biological organism, try to use the least amount of psychic energy as possible, we do so by extracting it from others/nature, disavowing the limits of our environments, ourselves and our realities.
Revolutionaries ignite our fire not for repair but for transformation of the self and the world. Psychoanalysis will often teach us that repair is actually not possible in the sense that we cannot go back to the previous state as if nothing happened. Perhaps psychoanalytic institutions can help foster a culture that resists the forces of the death drive, which includes the outsourcing of thinking.
At the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis, we speak at a time when we see too many psychoanalytic associations and institutions hide from their moral responsibility by declaring that our work ought to be confined to the clinic, that we have no societally authoritative wisdom, and that our profession doesn’t “judge” but instead makes a space for others to be heard, or worry that we will drive away prospective analysands when they see that we have minds. Are we going to just listen when authoritarianism attacks thinking, and attacks the thinking subject?
Civilizational death drive is Trump now, but it is also both Democratic and Republican Parties’ decision-makers throughout history, and across and upon all terra & demos in any way that serves Power’s insatiable greed. It is beyond contemporary U.S. fascism or, rather, as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari have put it, it is the fascist in us all. Passively condoning unjustified wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide, such as those currently being carried out against Iran, Lebanon and Palestine*, among countless other abominations, is so detestable that it is tempting to look away. But negative hallucination does not exonerate us. If we cannot name the hegemonic American, neocolonial, and globally voracious self-righteousness that is ruling the world, who are we, really? How dare we see ourselves as the keepers of full speech, when we ourselves rationalize our own muteness?
Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis
May, 2026
*The IDP is choosing to name these places in particular because this is where the United States government is currently carrying out or directly supporting military and economic warfare, which we as American taxpayers are funding and therefore are complicit in their immorality.
Psychoanalysis invites us to radically embrace the unknown, the unknowable and not yet known to come into being as lacking human subjects.
This is a lifelong challenge, requiring that we also recognize subjectivity in others, human and non-human, whether we happen to love them or hate them. But perhaps even worse is when we are completely indifferent to an other and their existence does not seem to matter at all.
We conceptualize that we shape and are shaped by our environments, but we often stop at the level of the nuclear family or the school, perhaps only recently trying as a discipline to include “the social” and “the cultural.” At the IDP, we go even further to broaden the borders of what we call “the sociocultural” to incorporate dominant and oppressed (or suppressed) eco-cultural systems. If marginalized races and cultures in our society are justifiable given significance, can we thereby deem the cultures of dolphins or chimpanzees as threatened as well, and worthy of our attention? Thinking about democracy as the “good of the all,” at the IDP we strive to adopt an inclusive vision of the common good and holistic understanding of the reciprocal spheres of influence upon our psyches.
Our embodiment as human mortals means that we must contend with the elements, what we take in and what we give out. Why should toxicity be limited to alienating projective identifications in our human interpersonal lives? Pollution is both material and spiritual. In wars, we often acknowledge that the underlying motivation is ideological and material, i.e., the desire to dominate or extinguish a rival group’s religio-cultural system of thought and praxis, to take their cultural-natural resources for our own selfish gains. Alongside the ravaging effects on people’s psyche-soma, there are those on the earth, its flora and fauna, which belong to no-one. To be a psychoanalyst is to think and speak about what harms are being perpetrated from all sides, to bring the dark side from within and from without into the light.
Perhaps it is the disruption of the psyche by the spirit (our unconscious core), which Willy Apollon describes as the trauma of being human or real castration, that constitutes the wildest dimension that we dare to explore in psychoanalysis. In doing so, part of the risk is not knowing which parts of us (inside and outside) will live and which ones will die.