Research expert in extremist studies, specialising in radicalisation, political psychology, ideology, and the role of the unconscious in political movements.
PhD Research
23/06/2026
"The resistance of political psychologists
in implementing the psychoanalytic and unconscious components of Adorno’s personality theory risk missing the core
insight that far right propaganda may deprive its appeal not from rational self-interest, but through anxieties and
desires that are unconscious to far right actors (Haider, 2021; Adorno, 1950). Psychoanalytical theory contends that
individuals are not rational unitary processors of information who respond to the same content in similar ways;
rather the unique configuration of each individual’s unconscious means that their investment (attachment) in a
discourse — understood as an organised system of meanings cohering around a central belief — varies according to the
unconscious anxieties and desires that the discourse mobilises in the subject (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, p.15).
Psychosocial theory elaborates this idea by occupying the intersection of psychoanalytic and sociological
thought, maintaining that investment in discourses is reducible neither to unconscious processes nor to sociological
conditions alone, but emerges through their dynamic interaction (Frosh, 2011)." ~ Josh McGuire, PhD Candidate,
University of Essex, 2026
How Class Emerges In Psychoanalytic Literature
02/02/2026
"Appreciably, even though class manifests
and increasingly takes expression through these various tensions, as a whole it rarely takes a primary role in
psychoanalytic discourse. Even in the 2020s, few articles treated class as the single most significant variable;
almost as a rule, it emerged only in connection with gender, race, or immigration studies. This accentuates the
urgency of producing more scholarship focused exclusively on class. Class emerges in psychoanalysis but only in a
repressed form, its dreams surface indirectly through various conflicts and in the construction of the unconscious
it is theorised to elicit some meagre effect.
Rarely is class understood as a factor that could qualitatively alter
the inner workings of the unconscious. Certain traditions of psychoanalysis have approached class with a sense of
temporality; for example, class is recognized by object-relations theory as invoking quantitative shifts in the
unconscious. Nevertheless, in psychoanalytic theory as a whole, class is not understood as invoking qualitative
transformations in the unconscious, instead class becomes visible through the schisms and antagonisms that rupture
rigid, backward bureaucratic structures. The conflicts and factional divisions within psychoanalytic organisations
become arenas in which struggles over the authority and legitimacy of how the unconscious is constructed is
contested, and where revolutionary possibility emerges." ~ Josh McGuire, PhD Candidate,
University of Essex, 2026