Hook, Derek (2014) Love, artificiality and mass identification. Psychodynamic Practice 20 (2), pp. 128-143. ISSN 1475-3634.
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Abstract
How are we to understand the phenomenon of mass identification, epitomized in recent exhibitions of national feeling such as that of South Africa’s 2010 Football World Cup celebrations? Rather than focussing on the concepts of discourse and nationalism, or advancing an analysis of empirical data, this paper outlines a conceptual response to the challenge at hand, drawing on the tools of psychoanalytic theory. Three explanatory perspectives come to the fore. Firstly, such exhibitions of mass emotion might be understood as demonstrations of love, as examples of the libidinal ties that constitute and consolidate mass identification. Secondly, the marked artificiality of such displays of emotion and the fact of the ‘externality’ they entail might be seen, paradoxically, to be essential rather than inauthentic or secondary features of the displays in question. Thirdly, we might advance, via Lacan, that many of our most powerful emotions require not only recourse to the field of the inter-subjective, but reference also to the anonymous, ‘fictional’ framework of available symbolic forms.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | "This is an Author’s Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Psychodynamic Practice 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14753634.2014.894224" |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Ego-ideal, emotion, identification, libido, mass psychology |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Apr 2014 12:06 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:09 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/9184 |
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