ABSTRACT
It is a great pleasure to engage with two thinkers whose work I have continually drawn upon over many years. Perhaps, almost inevitably, each develops my own thinking in different ways – John Steiner deepening the psychoanalytic dimension and Stan Cohen the sociological. For more than twenty years now I have tried to think and write in a way that brings together these two perspectives without reducing one to the other. Cohen wonders whether this is too ambitious. I think if the aim was to bring about a comprehensive integration of these perspectives, then I agree that this would be unrealistically ambitious. But I actually do not believe that such an integration between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ perspectives is possible. Some of what is ‘personal’ will always remain just that, part of a human nature that is the product of thousands of years of civilization, and some of what is ‘political’, such as the organized climate change denial lobby in the United States, is, as Cohen notes, perfectly explainable in terms of political economy (the pursuit of economic self-interest by Exxon Mobil, etc.). But even though these two perspectives cannot be integrated, this does not mean that they do not overlap, enrich and inform each other in places. In this chapter I have tried to bring these perspectives together through the idea of a ‘perverse culture’ – a concept that combines the psychoanalytic notion of the perverse with the sociological notion of an organized culture.
