The following essays by our esteemed colleagues and friends serve to mark an important occasion, namely the 25th anniversary of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. A venerated journal that has seen many of the leading lights of our field published in its pages. The EJP enjoys a wide and diverse readership, and many highly regarded psychoanalysts, philosophers, and academics continue to publish their most vital works with us.

This article highlights that psychoanalysis continues to be what it has always been: a theory and a clinic never stabilized, shifting perpetually. In the current moment, necessarily, this situation cannot be separated from the disturbing occurrences tied to the Covid-19 pandemic and, in addition, it relates to the centennial of Freud’s Oeuvre: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) in which arguments aimed at deepening our thinking regarding the reactions of human masses newly formed by telematic technologies, are sketched out. Considerations are added about psychoanalysis itself, and its practitioners as integrated to a materialized “artificial mass” in institutions that follow or pretend to follow lines designated by the two founders: Freud and Lacan. Changes to the analytic frame consequent to social distancing laws and to fear of contagion between participants in the psychoanalyst-analysand encounter are also discussed. These have led to the almost universal acquiescence of “telematic sessions” which imply irreversible changes to the practice and technique of psychoanalysis.

In 2020 I published The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (New York and London: Routledge). As its title indicates, this book brings together my two disciplines and identities: Professor of Sociology, now emerita, at the University of California, Berkeley, and psychoanalyst, originally in Berkeley, now in Cambridge, MA.

Taking advantage of the hundredth anniversary of the first publication of Freud’s controversial essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, this paper questions why this seminal text has proven so difficult to read and examines its enduring significance for the contemporary state of the human condition. It is demonstrated that the key paradox pervading Freud’s essay is not that there is a death drive which operates beyond the pleasure principle, but that it is the libidinal investment of the ego, in the form of narcissism, which drives the human life form towards its own extinction. It is argued that the more a living organism is narcissistically invested in protecting its own existence, the more it is at risk of unwittingly facilitating and expediting its annihilation, because auto-sexual investment does not contribute to solid community building, creative cross-fertilisation and progressive revitalisation. Even though this first, biogenetic axis of Freud’s ontogenetic theory is extended with an equally controversial, anthropogenetic axis in Moses and Monotheism, the first axis is already routinely rejected owing to its traumatic impact on the reader’s own narcissism. This process of repression and displacement of Freud’s message is equally, and perhaps even more at work during these unprecedented times of a global, human-made pandemic, because narcissism may be more prevalent now than it was one hundred years ago, driven by the accumulative economic conditions of global capitalism.

This essay confronts the problem of the enjoyment produced by right-wing populism through a psychoanalytic interpretation of this phenomenon. The structure of right-wing populism is instructive because it enables us to thoroughly disentangle the enjoyment that it produces from power. As a result, we can recognize how the supporters of the populist leader enjoy through the very threat to their identity that the leader promises to eliminate (primarily immigrants). This, in turn, permits a new theorization of the structure of enjoyment as such.

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” Henry Kissinger “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis…” Dante Alighieri

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the seventh of a series of twenty-seven or twenty-nine seminars, is but a fragment of some thirty years of speech. Duration, insistence, continuity and discontinuity. Don’t miss the general meaning by examining too closely the single moments.

One hundred years ago, Freud traced an outline of power, group-cohesion, identification, and a form of the subjective/social bond. A century later, digital commodity capitalism and hyper-modernity have served to undermine the position and properties of both leader and masses, with a ubiquitous screen-mediated virtuality that requires a reformulation of Freud’s initial ideas on the subject. Towards that end, I will examine the “virtual” nature of the contemporary “leader”, a social-media composite best exemplified by the figure of Trump that is continually resurrected by QAnon followers. As well, I will analyze the “masses” or disparate conglomerations that are brought together by the virtual leader’s insistent “lifting of the veil,” a perverse articulation of statecraft endemic to our moment. I conclude with some considerations regarding what the next few years may have in store for us.

One hundred years ago, Freud traced an outline of power, group-cohesion, identification, and a form of the subjective/social bond. A century later, digital commodity capitalism and hyper-modernity have served to undermine the position and properties of both leader and masses, with a ubiquitous screen-mediated virtuality that requires a reformulation of Freud’s initial ideas on the subject. Towards that end, I will examine the “virtual” nature of the contemporary “leader”, a social-media composite best exemplified by the figure of Trump that is continually resurrected by QAnon followers. As well, I will analyze the “masses” or disparate conglomerations that are brought together by the virtual leader’s insistent “lifting of the veil,” a perverse articulation of statecraft endemic to our moment. I conclude with some considerations regarding what the next few years may have in store for us.

A few remarks to give back some hope to those who suffer from the dictatorship of the virus and the powerless passivity they are enduring because of it. They suggest that there are potentialities that we can explore not only for our survival but for clearing the way towards a more fulfilled life still unknown to us. They also address the psychoanalysts calling on them to consider the resources of sexuate, and not merely sexual, difference for the existence of each and the evolution that our humanity must achieve.

Given the strange collective amnesia around the Spanish flu in many cultures, will the covid pandemic undergo a similar repression? Starting with this question, we explore the themes of collective responses to trauma and emergency, obedience and disobedience, blame and guilt.