Anxiety and the Governance of Risk and Opportunity

We live in anxious times, and not investigating that anxiety carries great risk -hence the value of these bold and psychoanalytically inspired arguments on the meaning and management of collective anxiety.

Risk and uncertainty contribute to collective restlessness and communities prone to conflict. Psychoanalytic ideas can be productively mobilized to better understand the unsettled community, and the anxieties circulating in governance systems continuously overburdened, obliged to overpromise and sell simple realities that can only be fiction. Whether such fictions are productive, or rather destabilizing, hinges on the transformations and migrations of anxiety, the emergence of objects of fear and desire, and the always imperfect translation of such objects into objects of governance. Rather than obsessively striving for certainty, for the maintenance of a stable order of thinking and things, the authors argue that a careful and ideally participatory examination of fear and desire comes closer to a realistic ideal of good governance. Pre-emptively banishing anxiety suppresses both its negative and positive meanings, prevents the recognition of problems real and imagined.

A must read for anyone interested in psychoanalysis and everyone with an interest in informed governance.