Dr Jeffrey Murer
Small Group Project 2019
Economy of Violence: Objectification, Psychoanalysis, and the Challenges of Recognition
This project explores how contemporary capitalism may create social norms of violence that are ego syntonic, whereby the superego is formed in the denial of human suffering, formed in the submission of authority, and formed in the denial of one’s own subjectivity, a denial of ego-reality testing. The project explores how such conditions could be worked through in a process of collective reflection, akin to cultural mourning. The project looks to also explore the ways in which psychoanalysis can offer modes of understanding as a way of retrieving emotional experience in the contemporary environment of emotional commodification.
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Biography
Dr Jeffrey Murer is Senior Lecturer in Collective Violence at the University of St Andrews. His research explores the psychological processes associated with collective and individual identity formation, particularly in the context of conflict and political violence. He is interested in how anxiety functions as a political motivator and how perceptions of material change can prompt collective action and violence, and has examined these phenomena in relation to anti-Semitism in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, the wars of the former Yugoslavia, and the conflicts of the Northern Caucasus. His current research analyses identity formation in immigrant communities in Western Europe, exploring how collectivities define themselves through exclusion and how new arrivals relate to majority identity forms or establish their own.
His work sits at the intersection of sociology, politics, and psychoanalysis, examining the performance of collective identity through acts of violence and works of imagination.
His work sits at the intersection of sociology, politics, and psychoanalysis, examining the performance of collective identity through acts of violence and works of imagination.
Biographical details correct as of 30.04.26