The term ‘psychopolitics’ has a sinister edge to it now, but it was not always so. The term has undergone significant shifts of meaning. In studies of fascism in the 1930s to the New Left rebellions of the 1960s, it referred to the attempt to connect subjectivity – our personal experience of who we are in the world – with political change. Progressive use of the term ranged from psychoanalytic accounts of the way relations to authority become embedded in individuals – ‘internalised’ – such that people feel isolated and unable to change, to feminist insistence that politics is to be found inside our intimate relationships as well as in the struggle against economic exploitation.

With the fading of revolt in the 1970s and the later apparent victory of capitalism in the 1990s, more was learnt about the involvement of the security forces in psychological propaganda during the Cold War and against the Left. Now psychopolitics came to refer to the fear of brainwashing and the destruction of individual autonomy, but the horrible twist to these revelations was that psychological theories as to why the world was a miserable and destructive place became even more powerful. The increasing influence of psychological discourse – stories about what the mind is like and how it is possible to master it – has meant that psychopolitics is something that people are in awe of, even afraid of.