As a psychologist this is what I think led the nation to vote Brexit – and what we can do to heal the wounds it created

With Article 50 triggered today, Trump in the White House and the rise of right wing populism across Europe, many of those who voted Remain are struggling not to fall into despair. How can we understand this? And what might we do?

Psychologists connect despair and hopelessness with a lack of control, a lack of agency. One or two defeats are easy to cope with, but chronic defeats make people give up hope. Consequent feelings of despair can make us retreat into ourselves – they can shut us up and in. The urge to give up is reinforced if we are unable to vocalise what has been lost in a defeat, and if feelings are trampled upon by a jubilant other. The press reaction to the Brexit vote has been crucial here in shaping how we are allowed to think and feel.

After the Brexit vote there was a moment when a space for reflection appeared possible. The right wing press initially focused on Bregretters with a degree of sympathy; Boris Johnson was cast as having some doubts. But this form of discourse, which could have led to attempts to find common ground between Leave and Remain voters, to repair a rupture, to think what was best for the UK, was quickly shut down by a new denigration of Remain voters, now cast as Remoaners. Doubt was untenable and thus quickly expelled. Society was in what some psychoanalysts call the paranoid position where ambivalence and uncertainty are ridiculed.

The attacks and denigration which followed have been highly successful in selling newspapers, despite or actually because of causing ever increasing divisions between the angry and the scared. This is because dichotomisation plays to what the Brexit vote was actually about – a desire for certitude in the face of a backcloth of anxieties, a sense of belonging to a group ideal. Globalisation, the financial meltdown, primitive anxieties about whether we have enough to go around, and the projective object par excellence of the immigrant are all likely suspects here. These factors produced a terrain where Leave leaders were able to sell a narrative of unshackling ourselves from EU oppressors, to “take back control”.

The counter argument – that the EU was kind of rubbish, but better than nothing – stood little chance given ambivalence can only be tolerated in a context where individuals feel safe and valued. It is not, as the current discourse goes, that Remain leaders failed to provide enough facts. It is that they failed to produce a narrative that could make people feel unified at an individual and national level, if only temporarily, at a time of profound uncertainty.

Though protests remain crucial right now, so too is the need to keep this motivator to human action in mind, and produce new narratives that both acknowledge otherness and contain our primitive anxieties. But to do this, Remain voters must be aware that we too are immersed in a paranoiac culture of certitude. Remain voters have tended to focus on why Leave voters acted as they did. Underlying this is an idea that only Remain voters knew the facts and understood the role of the EU. This smacks of the very certitude, the very superiority people voted against, and shows a fundamental lack of interest in the psychodynamics behind how people operate. Claims of “lack of knowledge” are also a form of violence against the other’s subjectivity, albeit one that more subtly masks liberal sensibilities.

Rather than project lack or hate onto the other, or retreat into despair, Remain voters must offer something new by cultivating a culture where curiosity and thinking are possible and safe for both sides. To do this, to re-find energy in the face of disdain, we must not presume an ongoing rightfulness, but unpack what it is that has been lost in this defeat, why we valued it, and how to keep something of it alive. We might ask at individual and group levels: What does the EU mean for us? Why? How does that link to the individual and group ideals we identify with? How might this connect with the histories of migration, displacement in our own families? Our beliefs about the need for a regulator outside the country/parent state?

Freud argued that pretending a loss has not occurred, or becoming entombed with the lost ideal – in this case of what the EU was for us – blocks progress and deprives us of vitality. It inhibits the process of mourning, making us at risk of falling into melancholic despair. We can only move forward from defeat and loss if we engage instead in a constructive rather than destructive process through taking small aspects of what we have lost in recognition that it was always incomplete, and building something anew. Whilst protests against Article 50, right wing populism, and a Trump presidency are important, we must offer, now, something alternative from the fragments of what we believe we have lost. But to build this without attending to what the other has also lost, and the anxieties underlying this, would be yet another example of repetition rather than renewal.

Dr Jay Watts is a clinicial psychologist and an honorary senior research fellow at the British Psychological Society