At metapolitics, we explore the hidden dimensions of politics that shape our world but often go unexamined. Hosted by Barry Richards and Mustafa Selek, this podcast delves into the psychological, cultural, and social forces underlying political behaviors and institutions. Each episode features conversations with leading thinkers—from psychologists and political scientists to journalists and philosophers—who help us understand the deeper currents moving beneath surface-level political events. Whether examining climate anxiety, leadership psychology, identity politics, or media transformation, metapolitics offers thoughtful analysis that goes beyond partisan talking points to reveal the human elements driving our collective political life.
www.metapolitics.co.uk (https://www.metapolitics.co.uk/s/podcast?utm_medium=podcast)
Darya Navidi is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Tehran, where she also hosts a podcast on psychological life in Iran. She spoke to Barry and Mustafa in late July, a few days after a new escalation between Iran and the United States and a night of explosions in the city. Psychoanalysis reached Iran through literature and translation long before anyone practised it there, and Persian had no settled word for the unconscious. The institutes that exist now work in isolation, many of their teachers trained abroad and supervise from outside the country, and Darya notices the ways of the state reappearing inside them, in how teachers can treat their students. What the sanctions leave is a narrow set of open doors, and students take whichever one they can rather than the teacher or school that would suit their work.
Psychoanalysis came to Iran through literature and translation long before anyone practised it there, and it survives now in isolated institutes, under sanctions, taught largely from abroad. Darya asks what a practice built on the true self can do in a society that demands a false one. Her answer is the analyst as witness, and during the war the word stopped being a figure of speech, because she and her clients were sitting in the same danger. From the same ground comes her reading of Iran as a “short-term society” of interrupted lives and unfinished projects, the subject of the book she is now writing on unfinishedness in the Iranian unconscious.
The conversation also hears Rumi in Bion, takes in how Iran is imagined from Britain and from Turkey, and pauses on Parastoo Ahmadi’s concert without hijab and the generation that grew up with Woman, Life, Freedom. Darya ends with a request to listeners abroad: to see Iranians as political subjects, not only victims and not only heroes, and to keep Iran difficult to simplify.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.metapolitics.co.uk (https://www.metapolitics.co.uk?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
19 Jul 2026
Tom Derose
What can psychoanalysis offer to public and political life, and what happens when a discipline built on the consulting room tries to step outside it? Tom DeRose is Research Manager at the Freud Museum, the house in Hampstead where Freud lived out his final year and where, uniquely in Britain, an institution has made it its mission to bring psychoanalytic ideas to a general audience. Barry and Mustafa talk with him about the museum in its fortieth year: its history and independence as a charity, and the resistances it meets; the sense that psychoanalysis is arcane, elitist, sex-obsessed and prohibitively expensive, even as its vocabulary seeps quietly into everyday life. Tom makes the case for the unconscious as Freud's most radical discovery, and for objects as a way of giving abstract ideas physical, resonant form; the museum as a site of memory and experience rather than mere knowledge transfer. The discussion turns, finally, to neutrality and politics: how an institution holds space for opposing views amid the field's own factions and the conflicts of the wider world, and why Tom is wary of psychoanalysis as a macro-political force even as he insists it should inform how we live and govern.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.metapolitics.co.uk (https://www.metapolitics.co.uk?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
7 Jun 2026
Farhad Dalal
Farhad Dalal is a psychotherapist, group analyst, organisational consultant, and training group analyst and supervisor for the Institute of Group Analysis in London. He convenes a group analytic psychotherapy training programme in Bengaluru, India, and is a former Associate Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire’s Business School. Over the past quarter century, his four books have each challenged received wisdom in a different field: Taking the Group Seriously, a radical extension of Foulkesian group analytic theory; Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization, which drew on Norbert Elias and power relations theory to rethink the psychodynamics of racism; Thought Paralysis: The Virtues of Discrimination, an early and prescient intervention into what we now call the culture wars; and CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami, a forensic dismantling of the evidence base behind Britain’s dominant therapeutic model.
In this episode, Barry and Mustafa talk with Farhad about the single provocation running through all his work: that psychotherapy’s deepest assumption — the primacy of the individual — may itself be part of the problem. The conversation moves from his arrival in Britain at twelve and his own erased experiences of racism, through his turn from humanistic therapy to group analysis, to a sustained critique of psychoanalysis as individualistic and internalist — explaining the social through the psychological while leaving unasked how social conditions arise in the first place. Drawing on Foulkes and Elias, Farhad makes the case for a genuinely psychosocial way of thinking in which power relations sit at the centre of how human beings are formed. The discussion closes on the corruptions of evidence-based science, the neoliberal logic reshaping healthcare and education, and a defence of enlightenment rationality against its distortion into a paralysing hyper-rationality.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.metapolitics.co.uk (https://www.metapolitics.co.uk?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
Contact Metapolitics - Conversations
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Metapolitics - Conversations?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
