Eloquent, urgent, this breath-taking essay bristles with wit and analytic understanding. Our social settlements, our lying politicians, our very language of winners and losers has never undergone this kind of dissection before. A tour de force – or should I say a loser’s triumph…’

Lisa Appiganesi

The last decade has seen the ascendancy of a politics formed by wishes, bent on expunging the presence of loss from public discourse. It declares victory over the pandemic even as
countless lives and incomes are lost to it; it sells the irreversible losses of national wealth, influence and prestige inflicted by Brexit as an overwhelming win.
Being a psychoanalyst, I find this wishful politics makes me think irresistibly of another, much older region of human life built around the extirpation of loss. When Freud called the unconscious ‘timeless’ (Zeitlos), he was referring not to its universality but to the absence in it of any notion of time, and therefore of loss. This is a feature illustrated by the ‘borrowed kettle’ joke he liked to quote: B accuses A of having damaged the kettle he borrowed from him; A replies that it was damaged when he borrowed it, that he returned it undamaged, and that he never borrowed the kettle in the first place.
In waking life, these options cancel one another out; in a time-bound universe, a kettle cannot be both damaged and undamaged, nor can you return a kettle you never borrowed.
But in the timeless unconscious, where a thing can indeed both be and not be, such logical scruples are swept away. In its wishful confines, one need never reckon with loss, other than as a kind of furtive gain. How did it take Trump to see how effective a logic this might be for the conduct of politics, to discover that the machinations of the inner life could model
the conduct of external life? You incited an insurrection, say his accusers. No, he replies, you incited it, they did it of their own volition, and in any case there was no insurrection.

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