ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts read ancient tragedy in search of the poets’ insights into unconscious processes. Tragedy is thought by scholars as a political institution. Recently psychoanalysts have been concerned with politics and consider themselves competent to think psychoanalytically about it. This book suggests that the ideas of Psychoanalysis and those of Euripides’ in Suppliant Women meet in a tragic reading of politics that links the foundations of the subject and our social institutions to the integration of split-off elements of psychic life. They enable us to think about the fractured societies of today which “heal” themselves through populism, autarchy, cruelty, fakery, and the culture of lying. Euripides’ painful diagnosis of the human condition is that us humans are deeply split and our public life is a struggle to integrate split-off, primitive, “supernatural” forces and limits that lie beyond the order of politics, words and reason, and which psychoanalysis also grapples with. This is a struggle to give our society a sense of tragic.
