Her book Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice combined critical theory with psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, examining the underlying unconscious forces and structures that make up the phenomena of xenophobia, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and sexism. It provides an overview of how social prejudices, and the discrimination and violence that often tend to accompany the latter, come into being. Moreover, It argues that in order to fully understand how a complex phenomenon such as prejudice works, we need to alter our traditional Western philosophical understanding of the subject as a supposedly fully rational, autonomous and individual agent. Auestad argues that we need a more situated and relational understanding of subjectivity and the subject, as prejudice and acts of discrimination always take place in a contextualized setting between subjects whose thoughts and actions influence each other. Auestad has also written about the rise of nationalism in European countries, both in terms of its expression in extreme far-right groups and in the context of everyday political language and policy. Auestad suggested that psychoanalysis can be used to think about the invisible and subtle processes of power over symbolic representation, for example, in the context of stereotyping and dehumanization, and posed the question of what forces govern the states of affairs that determine who is an 'I' and who is an 'it' in the public sphere. She founded and runs the international and interdisciplinary conference series Psychoanalysis and Politics http://www.psa-pol.org, which aims to address how contemporary political issues may be analyzed through psychoanalytic theory and vice versa – how political phenomena may reflect back on psychoanalytic thinking.
Shared Traumas, Silent, Loss, Public and Private Mourning
Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination
Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia
Psychoanalysis and Politics: Exclusion and the Politics of Representation
Handling, frihet, humanitet. Møter med Hannah Arendt
Select articles
Translated books
Siri Gullestad/ Bjørn Killingmo, The Theory and Practice of Psychoanalytic Therapy. Listening to the Subtext. London/ New York: Routledge, 2019. Original title: Underteksten. Psykoanalytisk terapi i praksis. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Hannah Arendt, Makt og vold. Tre essay. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2017. Original titles: On Violence, "Mankind and terror", "Is America by Nature a Violent Society?"
Interviews
In English: About the book, Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice, podcast on New Books in Psychoanalysis 11 September 2015 About hate speech: "Fierce online debate brings more prejudice" Alpha Galileo 13 September 2013 About the conference series Psychoanalysis and Politics "Introducing Psychoanalysis and Politics" in Journal of Psycho-Social StudiesVolume 7 2013 in Swedish: •Lene Auestad, Iréne Matthis and Diana Mulinari: Vad ska vi med psykoanalysen till? in the journal Fronesis, special issue on the psyche, no.44-45 2013 in Spanish: Encuentro en la SEP del grupo Psychoalysis and Politics Interview with Lene Auestad and Jonathan Davidoff by the Spanish psychoanalysts Neri Daurella and Eileen Wieland, on the Spanish Society's webpages,
