Why Nobody in Britain Is Talking About Brexit
Brexit is the great unmentionable of this election campaign. Yet Britain cannot avoid the subject forever.
We’re not going to talk about it.
Photographer: Handout/Getty Images EuropeSigmund Freud may no longer be a fashionable thinker, but his theory of repression provides us with the best explanation of the central mystery of the British election: why nobody is talking about Brexit.
Freud posited that repression is a necessary defense mechanism against unpleasant feelings — ensuring that “what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it” but which, if taken to excess, can lead to all sorts of soul-destroying consequences. In Freud’s world, the object of repression was sexual angst, particularly in relation to our parents; in today’s Britain, the object is our tortured relationship with the European Union.