In the second episode or our new season, Professor Michael Rustin shares insights from a career spent bridging the worlds of psychoanalysis and social theory, offering a unique perspective on how unconscious processes shape political and social life.
Rustin, who has spent years associated with the Tavistock Clinic while maintaining his sociology professorship, explains how British psychoanalysis developed its distinctive focus on early infant development and object relations. He traces how thinkers like Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion created frameworks for understanding not just individual psychology but the emotional underpinnings of social institutions and political movements.
The conversation explores how psychoanalytic concepts illuminate political phenomena: from the welfare state as a “container” for societal anxieties to Brexit as an expression of splitting and projection. Rustin explains how Klein’s ideas about the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions help us understand political polarization, while Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother” offers insights into what makes societies capable of nurturing human development.
We discuss Rustin’s influential work on “the good society”—his attempt to envision social arrangements that support human flourishing by taking seriously our psychological needs for security, creativity, and genuine relationship. He argues that understanding unconscious dynamics isn’t just therapeutic but essential for creating more humane institutions and policies.
The episode addresses contemporary challenges through a psychoanalytic lens: why climate denial persists despite overwhelming evidence (our inability to bear painful realities), how neoliberalism damages our capacity for concern and mutual care, and why conspiracy theories flourish when containing institutions fail. Rustin offers his view of how psychoanalytic thinking can enrich political analysis without reducing everything to psychology.
