Radioactive Identifications in the Present: Introduction to a Roundtable Discussion of the Intersect of Politics, Social Formations, and the Clinical

Abstract

This is an introduction to a roundtable comprising three papers and a discussion considering the interweave of psychoanalysis and social and political life. Prepared for a 2017 conference in Prague, the three papers (and one discussion) address political and social changes in Central Europe and globally as they effect internal conscious and unconscious experience. The roundtable centers on how changes in political order, and in the environment, past and present, produce ongoing new and renewed trauma in citizens, both locally and globally. The introduction sets this work in the context of the 2017 conference and the subsequent election of Donald Trump to president of the United States, speaking to the unsettled “radioactive” effects of social and political change on the subject.