Overview and Motivations
My research takes an interdisciplinary, critical, and psychoanalytically-informed approach to (1) the relational dynamics between leaders and followers and (2) the relationship between the human body and conceptions of the ‘self.’ Seeking to understand how leaders can (or should) navigate the psychological consequences of bodily vulnerability and mortality, I found that a majority of Western political thinkers sought ways to separate the ‘self’ or what is most truly human from the body, rather than confronting the body and its inevitable loss directly. Fascinated by what this separation means for the ‘self’-interest and ‘self’-preservation underpinning liberalism, I explore how assumptions about the self and its location are constructed and reinforced through interactions between leaders and followers, and what is at stake when the body is cast from view.
Dissertation Project
My dissertation, A Good Grief: The Psychological Consequences of the Human Body in the Thought of Freud, Hobbes, and Thucydides, turns to three thinkers who all warn that when humans fail to confront the body, personal and political turmoil results - from self-destructive behaviours to tolerance of oppression and an increased readiness for violence. I focus on Freud, Hobbes and Thucydides because they each foreground bodily vulnerability and mortality in their accounts of subjectivity and the challenges facing political societies, and because their approaches emerged amid crises that echo our own. Writing in the aftermath of plague or pandemic and warfare, they witnessed their contemporaries upholding visions of the self freed from the body attempts to uphold visions of the self freed from the body and its limitations. While acknowledging that such visions can promote hope and courage in the face of loss, they ultimately find that separating self from body risks fomenting madness and a devaluation of physical security incompatible with social and political stability.
Publications
“Private Bodies, Public Lives: Learning from and Leading Through the Outbreak Narrative.” In
Exploring Personhood in Contemporary Times: From Leadership to Philosophy. Edited
by Lemuel W. Watson. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, 2023.
White, Jonathan, Glenn, Daniel, and Wagner, Rachel. “We Didn’t Start the Fire: the Unknown
History of Flag Desecration.” The Federal Lawyer 66, (2017): 66-73.
Working Papers
“Thomas Hobbes’s ‘Body-Self’ and the Fear Behind the Fear of Death”
“A Good Grief: Freud’s Riddle of Mourning”
“A City of Former Selves: Toward a Freudian Account of Political Subjectivity"
“Sigmund Freud and the Human Soul: Psychoanalysis as a Continuation of the Socratic Project"
Future Research
In my dissertation, I show that Freud, Hobbes and Thucydides offer a critical lens through which to approach the promises and perils of our own post-pandemic, AI-driven era. Whereas their contemporaries separated self from body in speech, we are witnessing attempts to enact this separation in practice. As I revise the dissertation into a book manuscript, I will add a chapter on rhetoric in contemporary life-extension and artificial-intelligence industries, examining how leaders in these fields frame the body as a problem to be escaped or mastered, and how these discourses shape public understandings of human limits.
More broadly, I am interested in how the rise of artificial intelligence and digital technologies reshapes political psychology and mental health. I plan to examine the cults of personality that have formed around prominent figures in the AI industry, as well as emerging reports of distress and disorientation among users who personify algorithmic systems. Bringing these phenomena into conversation with earlier accounts of melancholia, madness, and spiritual psychosis in Freud and Hobbes, I aim to show how new technologies revive old fantasies of mastery and disembodiment.
My second book project will recover a Freudian approach to the study of leadership and political subjectivity otherwise inaccessible due to mistranslation, popular misunderstandings, and a tendency among contemporary readers to overlook the role of infantile bodily vulnerability in psychoanalytic theory. Against the backdrop of democratic backsliding, resurgent authoritarianism, and deepening political polarization, I argue that Freud helps us unsettle assumptions about human psychology underpinning liberalism and paradigmatic approaches to leadership in generative ways.