Psychopolitical Symbolics I

The Birth of a Psychopolitical Method

— Peering into the political unconscious

"And be not like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves."

—Surah Al-Hashr (59:19)

As the aftermath of October 7th 2023 unfolded, I became aware that we had entered a decisive rupture in our civilisational history. What was before is irrecoverably destroyed. We are at a rupture. An ending, and a beginning. We founded Dystopia Unmasked, to witness—this would not be allowed to become mere media. I began to forge a diagnostic framework to ask how we got here, what libidinal and symbolic dynamics compelled us and what psychic dynamics impel us into the unknown.

I did not set out to write a coherent system. But coherence came — not as doctrine, but as necessity. What follows are the Axioms of Psychopolitical Symbolics: a series of structural insights forged in the collapse of the familiar, offered as instruments for navigating the murderous geopolitical theatre that now emerges in its place.

What I have developed are not merely tools for reading politics and geopolitics, but instruments for decoding:

• the fantasies that sustain empires,

• the libidinal loops that drive geopolitical delirium,

• the symbolic ruptures that shape history more than armies ever could.

To make sense of this terrain I have walked with Foucault , Lacan and Mbembe, and let Fanon’s spiritual inheritance course through this work. I began to draw on three lineages:

• Foucauldian biopolitics—mapping the regimes that regulate and discipline life and who must be visible,

• Mbembian necropolitics—mapping the regimes that regulate death, who is sovereign and who is disposable

• and Lacanian psychoanalysis—revealing the libidinal structure, symbolic order and structure of desire of the subjects and their institutions.

The macabre genocidal events which followed October 7th demanded a brutal and ruthless honest confrontation of the insanity. We continue to witness an unbelievable level of cowardice, dishonesty, racism and complicity. It shattered the fantasy, which before October 7th, we had even come to desire.

This is for the courageous ones who must act, analyse, negotiate, forecast, survive — in a world where law no longer holds and fantasy reveals its nightmares. I intend to share this with you in this series of articles.

“But man is a witness against himself, even if he casts forth his excuses.”

(Surah Al-Qiyāmah, 75:14–15)

It was

Meticulous Prime

who kept asking me on our Wednesday Lives to reveal the method with which I read, analyse and map the patterns of geopolitical events and often predict what must necessarily occur with shocking clarity. Eventually I succumbed to his always gentle insistence. It is he that you must thank for forcing me to share what I had hesitantly held in secret. I feared that it was not yet ready. Now I realise that it never will be ‘ready’. This is not a time for cowardice. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some of the Axioms that I use in a method I have named Psychopolitical Symbolics.

These are not rules. They are instruments. They do not describe systems, but help us listen to the symbolic fractures, libidinal surges, and fantasmatic rewirings that structure our living history.

Thank you so much for accompanying me on this journey and for those who have sacrificed and supported me in producing this work.

Alexander Carberry
Co-Founder, Dystopia Unmasked & Founder of the School of Psychopolitical Symbolics

Note:

If, after 21 months of unrelenting horror, your 'analysis' still lacks a spine of compassion—if you're still performing some detached, both-sides pantomime while children are starved and burned alive—then you deserve to remain imprisoned in the corrupt academies and the venal media circus, that are complicit in genocide and have given birth to the resurgence of fascism. Your academic neutrality' is complicity wrapped in cowardice. Fuck off!

For those struggling to give birth to the new, here is a gift, a discipline born from the wound of rupture.

Photo by Marco Oriolesi on Unsplash

What Is Psychopolitics?

Psychopolitics, rooted in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, is the study of how Symbolic Structures organise power and desire in political life. In psychopolitics, we study how people relate to each other through the structures of power, desire, and symbolic meaning. These relationships are never neutral — they are always organised by an underlying Symbolic Order: deep patterns encoded in our languages, cultures, and institutions that shape what power is, who holds it, and how it is exercised.

This Symbolic Order determines how we accept or reject each other, who belongs and who is excluded, and how legitimacy is defined — and transgressed. Every political context carries with it an implicit understanding of what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate governance, and how much disorder or injustice can be tolerated before a rupture occurs.

Beneath this lies a lattice of fantasies, mythologies, and narratives — the imaginative grammar through which we make sense of political life as a web of relationships. These are what we call symbolic regimes. A symbolic order is the overarching structure; whilst a symbolic regime is its localised or historical expression—such as how 'democracy' functions differently in American liberalism versus European social democracy.

Psychopolitics explores how power relations are shaped not only by material force, but by these symbolic regimes — and how fantastic positionalities are inherited, projected, defended, and imposed at every scale: from interpersonal dynamics to global geopolitics.

In essence, psychopolitics reads political life as a theatre of the symbolic — one in which subjects and states act out inherited scripts, defend libidinal investments, and navigate the trauma of collapsing fantasies.

Here is the first Axiom

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

Axiom I — Politics as the Libidinal Mediation of Fantasmatic Relations

Politics is the libidinal mediation of fantasmatic relations.
That is: political structures, actions, and identities are not grounded in rational calculation or material necessity alone, but in the generation, defence, transmission, and disruption of fantasies that organise the Symbolic order.
These fantasies mediate the subject’s relation to the Other, to power, and to the Real—and are sustained through libidinal investments in coherence, exclusion, and identity.

What is Psychopolitical Symbolics?

Before we can understand how politics functions as a libidinal system, we must first understand how human desire and hence political desire is structured — and how this structure mediates the theatre of politics. In Psychopolitical Symbolics, I draw from psychoanalytic theory not to pathologise political actors, but to reveal how all political life is structured through the circuits of fantasy and desire.

Libido, Desire and Fantasmatic Projections

Human beings are driven not simply by raw needs or instincts, but by libidinal forces that structure the emergence of desire. Here, ‘libidinal’ refers not narrowly to sexual drive but to a broader psychic economy — one that organises how we orient ourselves toward others, toward the world, and toward meaning itself.

Desire is never experienced as a direct expression of need. It is shaped by a gap — a structural lack introduced by our entry into the symbolic order. This happens as we learn language, it displaces desire from straightforward satisfaction. Our desire becomes entangled and mediated by what others see, what they expect and demand, and what they withhold. In Lacanian terms, our desire in its relation to our lack is always shaped through the field of the Other’s desire. Because desire is mediated through language, our desiring is structured by how we are initiated into language, by what our language makes possible and how those around us use it.

While biological needs can be fulfilled, drives operate differently. They do not resolve lack but rather circumambulate it. Drives repeatedly circle around an absent object, giving rise to the cause of desire which perpetually eludes desire. Here it is the gap of lack between desire and object of desire that sustains desire. Unlike biological needs, these drives are organised not by straightforward biology; they are instead psychic. Drives are psychically organised to sustain a relation to what is missing.

This relation is always mediated by fantasy. Fantasy does not simply obscure desire; it provides the stage upon which desire can appear. Fantasies are not personal daydreams but socially and symbolically structured frameworks that organise our libidinal life. Through them, myths, narratives, and cultural images shape how drives are given dramatic fantasmatic form and expression — and how desire finds its object.

These structures don’t just shape our behaviour; they shape who we are. Our identities are not self-generated but are formed within a symbolic order that offers us particular positionalties. It offers us, ways of being, speaking, and appearing — which we inhabit, contest, or resist. Even our most intimate sense of self is a way of navigating and investing in these shared symbolic co-ordinates. In this way of seeing things, we inhabit a Symbolic theatre, upon which our lives are staged, and in which we give dramatic expression to the characters and lines available to us.

Thus, our world, our desires, and our political imaginaries are never raw or natural. They are structured through fantasmatic projections, and shaped by our place in a collective symbolic field. Psychopolitical Symbolics begins from this insight: that political life is always saturated with libidinal meaning, and that to grasp the dynamics of power, identity, and belief, we must first understand how fantasy organises desire

Symbolic Order, The Big Other and Other Essential Concepts

Even our belief that human beings are first rational and are driven primarily by material necessity, is itself a fantasmatic projection, which is part of our collective modern political mythology. This structures how we understand and symbolise human life. These fantasies are generated, defended, abandoned, disrupted and transmitted and how we do this, organises our Symbolic Order.

This Symbolic Order gives us a cosmological grounding in the world. It is anchored by our shared acceptance of a Big Other—the imagined site of ultimate authority and coherence. Whether it takes the form of God, the State, Reason, Evolution, or History, the Big Other is what we must believe that others believe in. From it, we derive psychological stability, a sense of belonging, and derive the coordinates of legitimacy and illegitimacy.

The Symbolic Order is not simply a set of rules or signs—it is carried by language as a dynamic overarching network of connections that stretches across time, institutions, and psychic life. It is the receptacle of our culture, our myths, our narratives, and our exclusions. It orders our relationships, structures our desires, and sustains the very possibility of political and social coherence.

Desire, Reality and Identity

In Psychopolitical Symbolics we read the dramatic structure of desire and acknowledge the Lacanian assertion that the object of desire is always necessarily elusive. This impels the desiring subject to seek that which can never be truly fulfilled and keeps the subject circulating within the political theatre of desire. This sustains libidinal investment in the maintenance of coherence, who and what must be excluded and included and the fantasy of identities.

Events and phenomena occur and for us to live with them we must see them through our Symbolic lens and Symbolic machinery, which is unable to capture the Real— it can only produce a consistent enough illusion to sustain coherence

What we call Reality is our fantasmatic cosmological structuring, that we construct to protect us from invasion by the Real. The Real always overflows and ruptures our structuring. This forces us into a relation of anxiety, which impels us to repeatedly reconstruct the defence of our constructed reality. The Real simply cannot be integrated into our fantasy but we must try and must defend against it. This dramatic struggle in Psychopolitics reveals the theatre of political life. Allowing us to map and predict, the dramatic patterns which must inevitably emerge to fulfil the Symbolic Fantasmatic Projection necessary for political life.

Conclusion

This is the first axiom with which I read geopolitical events. Each has been forged from my need to penetrate, decode, and share the symbolic terrain of the genocidal imperial era through which we are now living. The point is not to explain the world away, but to offer tools — instruments for navigating the collapse of inherited meanings and the disintegration and construction of the world as we knew it.

This is the first axiom of the methodology that you see being applied in my articles on Dystopia Unmasked.

Know this: what we construct to survive through and beyond collapse demands not certainty — for that is dead — but clarity, courage, creativity, symbolic precision, and iconoclasm. We are not yet ready. But we must act!

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