Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action

Winner of the IAJS Book Award 2023 for Best Applied Book

This fascinating volume uses psychoanalytic theory to explore how political subjectivity comes about within the context of global catastrophe, via the emergence of collective individuations through trans-subjectivity. Serving as a jumping-off point to address the structural linkage between collective catastrophe, subject, group, and political transformation, trans-subjectivity is the central tenet of the book, conceptualized as a psyche-social dynamic that initiates social transformation and which may be enhanced in the clinical setting.

Each chapter investigates a distinct manifestation of trans-subjectivity in relation to various real-world events as they manifest clinically in the analytic couple and within group processes. The author builds her conceptual arguments through a psyche/social reading of Kristeva’s theory of signifiance (sublimation), Lacan’s 1945 essay on collective logic, Heidegger’s secular reading of the apostle Paul’s Christian revolution, and Žižek, Badiou and Jung’s conception of the neighbor within a differentiated humanity. The book features clinical illustrations, an auto-ethnographic study of the emergence of an AIDS clinic, an accounting of trans-subjectivity in Black revolutionary events in the U.S., and an examination of some expressions of care that arose in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action is important reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamic based therapists, psychologists, group therapists, philosophers and political activists.

Robin McCoy Brooks is a Jungian Analyst in private practice, educator and consultant in Seattle, WA. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Robin is also a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology and active analyst member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Further, she is a nationally certified Trainer, Educator and Practitioner of Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry and Psychodrama. She currently is sheltering in place aboard a wooden boat on Salmon Bay with her husband and with two Siamese cats, or their home in Bellingham, WA.