Desde el Jardín de Freud

nce the dawn of psychoanalysis, while discerning the unconscious determinants of his patients' suffering, in their symptoms, in their dreams, and in everyday life, Freud also gradually discovered that such determinants operate in culture and participate very effectively in culture. social organizations. It finds, then, that the unconscious has a fundamental place in the conformation and destiny of the masses. Given that, at the very origin of culture, society, law and morality, Freud located the unconscious, it is clear that it crosses politics, if not that it constitutes its cause, that which operates as an irreducible nucleus that makes governing an impossible task, as stated in "Analysis terminable and interminable."

Perhaps therein lies the renewed temptation to manipulate the masses based on unconscious determinations. This file is not new: in the heat of the rise of Nazism with Hitler at the head, when Freud had not yet written "The malaise in culture", Edward Bernays (his double nephew, the son of his sister and his brother-in-law), based in In the United States, in 1928 he published his famous book Propaganda, a kind of manual for managing public opinion, manipulating the masses and determining consumption patterns, based largely on his particular understanding of Freudian discoveries. Its success was resounding. In the following years, the role of this character, who used to boast of the effectiveness of his techniques, was key as an advisor to several presidents of this country; thus he became the pioneer of the art of influencing large conglomerates.

The question that animates this edition concerns, then, the ways in which the springs of the unconscious are appealed, with the aim of mobilizing societies towards one or another political objective, and the way in which these deliberate calculations are engaged in discursive functioning.