Feeling of Certainty

Nikolay Mintchev is a research associate at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, UK and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, where he was previously a lecturer. He specialises in ethnic diversity, social transformation and psychosocial approaches to identity and difference.R. D. Hinshelwood is a professor in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and previously Clinical Director at The Cassel Hospital, London, UK. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He authored A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989) and other books and articles on Kleinian psychoanalysis. He has an interest in how psychoanalysis may contribute to social and political science.

• Chapter 1. Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial Approach.- 2. The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search for Truth.- 3. What is Subjectivity and How Can We Study it Empirically? Understanding The Feeling of Certainty through Psychoanalysis and Ethnography.- 4. Haunted by Uncertain Refrains.- 5. Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset.- 6. Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation of the Personality.- 7. Numinosity and Terror: Jung’s Psychological Revision of Otto as an Aid to Engaging Religious Fundamentalism.- 8. “Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try To Screw You”: The Feeling of Certainty and the Mexican-origin Border Patrol Agents.- 9. Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime Sexual Violence.- 10. The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties and Defences in Times of Trauma and Uncertainty.- 11. Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container.