GCP Annual Lecture: Politics, Rage and Psychoanalysis - Josh Cohen

This lecture will develop and bring up to date some of the key themes and arguments of Josh Cohen’s 2024 book All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World. Drawing in particular on its discussions of 'righteous' and 'cynical' rage, Cohen suggests that the sealed self-certainty of righteous rhetoric and the predatory opportunism of cynical politics have merged to produce increasingly dangerous and disintegrative political dynamics around the world, giving rise to spreading violence, authoritarianism and lawlessness. Josh will explore the resources psychoanalysis can offer to help make sense of this malaise and to imagine different forms of political and social life.

Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, from which he recently received an annual prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Dissemination of Psychoanalysis. He is Emeritus Professor of Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and the author of many essays and books on psychoanalysis, culture and modern thought. He has published essays and reviews in, among others, The Guardian, TLS, New Statesman, Granta and Yale Review. His books include How to Read Freud, The Private Life, Not Working, How to Live. What to Do, Losers and most recently, All the Rage. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

This event will take place in person at
The Guildford Institute, Ward St, North St, Guildford GU1 4LH
on Saturday 27 June 2026 from 10am to 12.30pm BST

CPD Equivalent: 2 hours

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Host or Publisher The Guildford Centre for Psychotherapy