🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🌀⚔️💫 IPA/FLŽ 🌀⚔️💫

Toward a Manifesto for a Restored Critical Praxis

Abstract

This essay outlines a critique of the contemporary instrumentalization of psychoanalysis within dominant political discourses. It argues that the selective application of psychoanalytic concepts—especially Freud’s and Lacan’s notions of evil and the drive—serves to obscure, rather than expose, structures of violence and power. This abuse constitutes a form of societal gaslighting: an epistemic strategy that inverts the very purpose of analysis. The text concludes with a call to reclaim psychoanalysis as a radical tool of cultural and political critique.

---

1. From Interpretation to Legitimation

Psychoanalysis, in its Freudian and Lacanian articulations, was never conceived as a technology of reassurance. Its purpose was not to reinforce the symbolic order, but to expose its cracks—to lay bare the instability of the ego, the unmasterability of the drive, and the trauma embedded in language itself. Analysis was always political insofar as it confronted the subject with what could not be assimilated.

Yet, we now witness a reversal: psychoanalysis is increasingly mobilized in service of ideological stabilization. Where once it revealed disavowed violence, it now justifies it. Where once it unsettled identifications, it now reaffirms them.

---

2. The Concept of Evil Misused

Freud never posited evil as an external, moralized force; rather, it emerged from within the human psyche as a structural tension between Eros and Thanatos. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), evil is not the Other—it is the subject. Lacan, similarly, refused to moralize; the Real resists symbolization, but it is not to be vanquished by ethical certainty.

Contemporary appropriations of these concepts betray this legacy. The deployment of “evil” to describe one form of violence (e.g., armed resistance, insurgency) while silencing state violence (e.g., colonial domination, ethnic cleansing) is not theoretical analysis—it is discursive complicity.

---

3. Epistemic Violence as Gaslighting

This selective invocation of psychoanalytic discourse performs a kind of epistemic gaslighting: it distorts political reality while cloaking itself in the language of depth. Entire populations are pathologized, not analyzed. Power relations are neutralized through pseudo-diagnostic speech acts. What should be questioned is instead confirmed.

In this context, psychoanalysis becomes a rhetorical apparatus of domination. It is no longer a practice of unveiling, but one of concealment—of rendering violence invisible through the illusion of theoretical complexity.

---

4. Theory in the Service of Ideology

Once psychoanalysis begins to speak for power—diagnosing the resistance of the oppressed while leaving the violence of the state uninterrogated—it becomes a servant of ideology. The untranslatable, the traumatic, the unresolved becomes moralized. Ambivalence is replaced by condemnation. The subject becomes an object of discourse, no longer a site of inquiry.

What emerges is not a politics of the unconscious, but a theology of innocence and guilt—one that mirrors the very binaries psychoanalysis was meant to dismantle.

---

5. Toward a Restored Psychoanalytic Praxis

We call for the de-ideologization of psychoanalytic discourse. Analysis must not become an instrument of reassurance for hegemonic structures. It must not function to soothe, to clarify, or to divide the world into moral categories.

Psychoanalysis must return to its function as a practice of disturbance. It must remain with the ambiguity of the drive, the opacity of the subject, the irreducibility of the Real. It must resist instrumentalization—precisely because its value lies in its resistance to totalization.

---

6. Conclusion: A Manifesto

We refuse the use of psychoanalysis as a legitimating discourse for violence.
We reject the appropriation of theory to justify power.
We oppose all forms of diagnostic reduction that pathologize resistance while sanctifying state aggression.

Psychoanalysis must once again become a language for the unspeakable, not a grammar of control. It must speak where power demands silence.

Prompt: Fatoş İrem