WHEN POLITICS MEETS FANTASY: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL READING ABOUT FAKE NEWS AND POWER IN CONTEMPORARY TIME
psychoanalysis; fantasy; psychopolitics; fake news; disinformation campaign; mass.
In the face of fake news, which is intentionally manipulated and circulates rapidly, contemporary life has encountered a challenge of Homeric proportions. Prompted by this issue, the following problematic has come upon the researcher: how does Freudian metapsychology, and the Freudian-Lacanian field, help us read/theorize about the fake news phenomenon and the disinformation campaigns and their power relations? We hypothesize that disinformation campaigns, via dissemination of fake news, constitute political attempts to influence collective fantasies in order to sustain ideological speeches that align with the desires and beliefs of those who disseminate them. Thus, the leading objective of our study was to analyze the mechanisms of Disinformation Campaigns and their fake news, connecting them to the perspective of fantasy, the formation of masses, and power relations in contemporaneity, based on the Freudian metapsychology and the Freudian-Lacanian field. However, we also had to engage beyond psychoanalysis with the concept of psychopolitics in order to help us understand the power dynamics involved in the production and dissemination of fake news. Taking psychoanalysis as an investigative method of inconsistent phenomena present in the culture, we confirmed our research hypothesis. We then advanced by correlating that, through current technological mechanisms, the psychopower focuses on the realm of collective fantasy, as it is the psychic reality that directly influences a series of other phenomena, such as ideology, illusions, and the formation of political masses.