'Pouring politics down our throats': political CSR communication and consumer catharsis

This chapter theorizes the outrageous consumer response that may follow the communication of political corporate social responsibility (CSR). We consider two recent cases (Starbucks’s offer to hire refugees and Pepsi’s appropriation of protest movements in an ad) and how consumers-citizens reacted when these corporations communicated political issues. By drawing from psychoanalytic concepts, we illustrate how consumers’ outrage, expressed in angry social media comments, and in the creation and sharing of memes, is cathartic of unconscious repressed matter: the realization of their own powerless and the domination of corporations. We further note how these expressions of outrage may be understood to result from defense mechanisms such as denial, displacement, or more complex sublimation that help consumers maintain a position of passive domination by corporations. Like all psychoanalytic applications, our interpretation represents only a plausible metaphor that can explain the “irrational” behavior of consumers. Positivist traditions of CSR theorization may demand further causal studies to confirm the ideas we express. Our study is an original exploration of what underlies consumer responses to political CSR. These cases could inform academics and practitioners working in the business and society arena asking them to re-evaluate whether and how political CSR should be communicated, and the implications of the rapid diffusion of messages in social media that include mocking parody and offensive brand comments

The Irredeemable Debt: On the English Translation of Lacan's First Two Public Seminars

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Psychoanalysis and History . The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/pah.2017.0214Drawing on archival sources and personal recollections, this essay reconstructs the troubled history of the first robust attempt at making the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan newly available to an anglophone readership, after his death in 1981. It details how the project was initiated by John Forrester as part of a large-scale initiative to generate translations of both Lacan’s own texts and seminars, and various books written in the Lacanian tradition. If, almost seven years after it was conceived, Forrester’s project only resulted in the publication of English translations of Lacan’s first two public seminars, the essay demonstrates that this was not owing to disagreements over the quality of Forrester’s work, but because of two consecutive sources of resistance. External resistance from publishers first led to the initial project being reduced to the translation of two seminars, whereas internal resistance from Lacan’s son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller to Forrester’s vision of presenting the seminars with a full scholarly apparatus subsequently brought about delays in its execution

Self-enhancement: food for thought

Self-enhancement denotes a class of psychological phenomena that involve taking a tendentiously positive view of oneself. We distinguish between four levels of self-enhancement—an observed effect, an ongoing process, a personality trait, and an underlying motive—and then use these distinctions to organize the wealth of relevant research. Furthermore, to render these distinctions intuitive, we draw an extended analogy between self-enhancement and the phenomenon of eating. Among the topics we address are (a) manifestations of self-enhancement, both obvious and subtle, and rival interpretations; (b) experimentally documented dynamics of affirming and threatening the ego; and (c) primacy of self-enhancement, considered alongside other intrapsychic phenomena, and across different cultures. Self-enhancement, like eating, is a fundamental part of human nature