Abstract
This paper uses psychoanalytic theory to understand the motivation of pro-space activists – people campaigning to increase human activity in outer space. It suggests that activists are motivated by fantasies of a spacefaring civilization, which manifest unconscious phantasies of omnipotence and fusion related to the experience of self in primary narcissism. The argument of the paper is that in order to understand this pursuit of a phantasized self, we must locate activists within the cultural conditions that encourage secondary narcissism. This is one example of how psychoanalytically informed social theory can account for the relationship between social structure and the motivation of political activists.
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Notes
I use the standard convention of writing “phantasy” when referring to wholly subconscious desires, and “fantasy” when referring to at least part-conscious wishes.
The largest are the Planetary Society, National Space Society and Mars Society. See www.planetary.org, www.nss.org, www.marssociety.org, or, for a more complete listing, see Ormrod (2006, pp 279–280).
The majority of the data was collected at three pro-space conferences I attended in the USA, and two in the UK: (1) The NSS Legislative Conference 2003 in Washington DC. (2) ProSpace March Storm 2004 in Washington DC. (3) The International Space Development Conference (ISDC) 2004 in Oklahoma City. (4) The Mars Society UK Annual Conference 2004 in Leicester. (5) The Mars Society Europe Conference 2004 in Milton Keynes, UK. I conducted interviews with a total of 23 people. Because the conferences had busy schedules, I was forced to interview wherever and whenever I could. The interviews varied a lot in length, averaging around an hour.
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The data for this project were collected during an ESRC postgraduate studentship.
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Ormrod, J. Pro-space Activism and Narcissistic Phantasy. Psychoanal Cult Soc 12, 260–278 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100131
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100131