Mattias Desmet
Mattias Desmet is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium.
A practicing psychoanalyst, he has built his academic career around psychological theory and subjectivity, most notably demonstrated in his earlier work, Lacan's Logic of Subjectivity: A Walk on the Graph of Desire (2019).
His research interests bridge clinical psychology and broader societal critique.
Desmet gained international attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for his theory of "mass formation," which proposes psychological mechanisms explaining how societies become susceptible to totalitarian tendencies, drawing heavily on the foundational work of Hannah Arendt.
