The Social Unconscious: Psychoanalysis Meets Public Consciousness

In this episode, Xiang Biao (Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) interviews Dr. Alf Gerlach, a senior psychoanalyst whose decades-long work bridges German psychoanalysis, Chinese social practice, and the Frankfurt School’s radical fusion of Freud and Marx. Together, they dissect a concept that reshapes how we see all social research: the social unconscious.

This episode dismantles the myth that "social science is neutral." It raises the question of the extent to which ignoring the social unconscious makes us complicit in the very problems we study.