Psychoanalysis, Politics and Truth

Abstract

In this interview, the psychoanalyst and professor Tales Ab'Sáber reflects on the dispute over historical ‘truth’ and the ways in which different subjects and for different purposes are appropriated, mobilizing it for electoral political purposes. Initially, he addresses one of these uses, discussing about historical revisionism and fascism. Then he presents the contributions that scientific and reflective fields such as Psychoanalysis can provide to deal with the current Brazilian political context in which revisionism and fascism joke in the modus-operandi of the anti-democratic, violent extreme right, which sets in motion a discourse of hate, as he and two other colleagues portrayed so well in the documentary Intervention: love doesn't mean much (2017), produced by them from videos on the web that circulated in 2016, the year of the impeachment, in which representatives from that extreme right called on the population to ask for “immediate military intervention” on the streets.