Image: Pro and anti-Brexit campaigners outside Parliament, January 2019. Credit: Clare Doherty/SIPA USA/PA Images, all rights reserved.
As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who often works with couples, I regularly witness intransigent and extreme states of mind. The way the Brexit debate is being conducted seems to mimic these conflicted couples. So, I am now wondering if psychoanalysis and its application to understanding conflicted relationships might enhance our understanding of our current divisions and, perhaps, lead us back to a politics that feels more consensual and collaborative?
At the root of Brexit, as writers such as Barnett have observed, are betrayals of trust that date back to the deceptions around the Iraq war to the 2008 crash and the 2009 expenses scandal. These shocks led to a loss of faith in government. Added to this, austerity from 2010 onwards meant more people began to experience real hardship in their daily lives; money was short, job security was lost and services that had been depended on, disappeared. Could we think about these events as a national trauma? As we know, trauma isn’t good for people. It produces a lack of trust and creates fear and then anger. Trauma increases our wish to be self-sufficient and not depend on others. Trauma makes it hard for us to work out where our best interests lie. Trauma makes us retreat and avoid collaboration with those on the outside; those who are other and therefore at times of insecurity felt to be a potential threat. It pushes people into polarised positions; it makes it more challenging for people to tolerate ambiguity. In psychoanalytic terms we would say that it is likely to generate paranoid-schizoid ways of thinking, which is a state of mind where rigid beliefs dominate and where it becomes harder and harder to stay in touch with empathic, generous feelings. It’s a dog eat dog state of mind. And one could propose that this state of mind has arisen because we have become a dog eat dog society.
