When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle.
Category Archives: U.S.A.
“Signor Presidente, lei è pazzo?”: il New York Times auspica un “intervento” sul “re pazzo” Trump, riecheggiando la scena di Giorgio III — ultimo re d’America — all’origine della psichiatria (2026)
Quando la politica viene costruita per il pubblico come uno spettacolo psichiatrico.
NYT: “tutti i piani e le politiche a Washington”, “gli eventi globali” e la “psiche” di Trump (2026)
Nonostante il New York Times si presenti come radicalmente anti-Trump, il suo linguaggio e la sua operazione interpretativa, letti in una prospettiva psicopolitica, risultano in realtà pienamente coerenti con la logica anti-politica e tecnocratica dell’amministrazione Trump.
NYT: “all plans and policies in Washington”, “global events”, and Trump’s “psyche” (2026)
Although the New York Times presents itself as radically anti-Trump, its language and framing, when viewed from a psypolitical perspective, ultimately reflect the same anti-political, technocratic logic as the Trump administration.
The cyber-psychedelic transformation of capitalism and the economics of ego death [slides] (2026)
Originally presented at the Capitalism and Mental Health Workshop, Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, 15 January 2026
Federico Soldani: intervista TV, la psichiatrizzazione della politica dopo cinque anni è realtà (2024)
Intervista TV a Federico Soldani: la psichiatrizzazione della politica dopo cinque anni è una realtà – di Francesco Ippolito – Focus, 50 Canale – Sabato 3 agosto 2024
To attain visions at will? Loeb, 1933: “When a being is in possession of them, he knows or thinks he knows the meaning of life” (2024)
Harold Loeb’s utopia as the source of “capitalist realism” and “acid communism”?
V.R. and the Tranquilizing Chair of Dr. Benjamin Rush (2019)
Are we moving from the Tranquilizing Chair to Virtual Reality?
The former involves sensory deprivation and coercion, while the latter represents non-coercive, sensory overstimulation.
This shift could be seen as more cooptative.
Trump: “a President should take a cognitive test”, “they say it’s unconstitutional” (2024)
Trump on Biden: “We have this man negotiating nuclear weapons with Putin and with President Xi and he has no idea what’s going on”.
Putin vs. Biden, February 8th: spectacle and psyspeak (2024)
Putin’s “paranoia” and Biden’s “memory”. Two extracts from Putin’s interview and Biden’s press conference, both aired on the evening of February 8th 2024 on American media outlets.
Fentanyl, in Oregon è stato di emergenza. Ma c’è molto di più – ilGiornale.it (2024)
“La governatrice dell’Oregon ha dichiarato lo stato di emergenza per l’aumento di casi di overdose legati all’uso di questo potente antidolorifico oppioide. Nel 2020 un referendum depenalizzò l’uso di droghe. Abbiamo chiesto un commento all’epidemiologo Federico Soldani”
“The Hallucinogens”, 1967 treatise by Hoffer and Osmond (2024)
“It seems appropriate to continue using the term hallucinogens for a variety of substances which can produce reactions which may be psychotomimetic, psychedelic, or delirient, depending upon many other factors”.
Hallucinogens “may produce marked changes in our society”.
Harvard 30th President’s psyspeak: “a well-laid trap”, “obsessive scrutiny,” and “projecting every anxiety” (2024)
Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me
– The New York Times, Jan 4th 2024
Senzani, criminologo delle Brigate Rosse, 2014: “Nel ’68 sono stato da Basaglia, lì mi sono nate delle idee e sono diventato molto rigido contro l’emarginazione”(2023)
“La storia delle Brigate Rosse fa parte di una storia più grande, la Storia del Movimento Rivoluzionario”. “Bisogna partire dagli albori”.
Totalitarian “medicine”. George F. Will in the Washington Post, 1987 (2022)
“The Soviet regime applies ‘scientific socialism’, within which psychiatry has a special place.”
“Historian Paul Johnson notes that in 1919 the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced an anticommunist leader to treatment in a sanatorium.”
“Glasnost has not involved the release of any dissident from a psychiatric ‘hospital’.”
“Neal Ascherson, in the New York Review of Books, says German doctors were dazzled to discover that, under Hitler, medicine was ‘the central intellectual resource of the New Order’.”
“Since Freud postulated that the self is a fractious committee — the ego, id and libido — there has been ‘scientific’ doubt about the importance of reason in the individual’s life.”
“As Khrushchev said in Pravda in 1959 about people ‘who might start calling for opposition’ to communism: ‘Clearly the mental state of such people is not normal’.”
“Psychiatry, with its expanding arsenal of drugs, can be abused as a brutal instrument of social control. And the official Soviet premise, that only the psychologically disabled could fail to love socialism, enlists psychiatry as a rationalization for the regime.”