On Not Getting What You Want: Elvio Fachinelli's Anti-Authoritarianism

Abstract

Many social theorists have drawn on Freud to analyse authoritarian minds. The literature on deconditioning, on the deliverance from slavish desires, is considerably less robust. This essay brings to the fore the fundamental problems facing psychiatric professionals who hope to contribute to the deconditioning process, by contextualizing the work of the Italian psychoanalyst, Elvio Fachinelli. It shows that, making creative use of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Monika Seifert and others, Fachinelli not only developed original analyses of anti-authoritarian social movements but also advanced concrete suggestions for how psychoanalysts might strike at the roots of mass conformism by facilitating revolutionary forms of repetition.