Using Carol Carpenter’s words, I say that psychoanalysis has “only just begun.” Stuck within the prison of the clinical situation, this discipline has only recently entered the public arena and begun to interpret politics as a unique form of transference neurosis.

As one can readily see reading the piece about Vladimir Putin that I've put together below, it's not difficult to perceive how infantile fantasies are projected into and enacted in the political arena (inappropriately called "external" reality).

Of course, looking at the headlines below (and clicking through to where the links lead), the language seems bizarre and fantastic. But as Norman O. Brown used to say, this is the strange world "we all actually live in."

The fact that psychoanalysis has hesitated to enter in a substantial way into the political arena suggests a profound form of resistance, or cowardice.

Richard Koenigsberg