‘Trumpism.’ The symptom of our times

February 6, 2018
Presenters: Paola Mieli and Peter Bratsis

Freud defined a symptom as “a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process of repression.” Many have commended on Trumpism as a symptom of America’s dark side; the return of repressed racism, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. New York Times columnist Charles Blow described Trumpism as “a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.” This meeting will bring together a psychoanalyst and a political scientist to discuss Trumpism as the symptom of our times.

Paola Mieli is a practicing psychoanalyst and the founder and president of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. The author of numerous articles on psychoanalysis and on culture published in Europe and America, her books include: Figures of Space. Subject, Body, Place (Agincourt Press, New York, 2017); A Silver Martian–Normality and Segregation in Primo Levi’s Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge (PLC, New York) 2014; Being Human: The Technological Extensions of the Body (Co-Editor, Marsilio Publishers, New York, 1999).

Peter Bratsis is a political scientist, currently on the faculty at BMCC. He has taught at the University of Salford, the London School of Economics, Brooklyn College, and Queens College. His research mainly concerns the categories and ideas that our political world is based upon and how these ideas are created and reproduced. He is the author of Everyday Life and the State and, with Stanley Aronowitz of Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered.