Conspiracy theories arise in contexts of trauma, crisis, and uncertainty, where individuals and communities seek to manage overwhelming anxiety. Though lacking empirical grounding, they present themselves as coherent explanations by attributing responsibility to external, malevolent forces. This presentation explores their psychosocial function through a psychoanalytic lens, integrating Kleinian and Lacanian frameworks with examples such as the belief that COVID-19 pandemic was man-made.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this mechanism can be understood through Melanie Klein's concept of splitting: complex and contradictory realities are divided into wholly "good" and wholly "bad" objects, reducing anxiety through simplification. In Lacanian terms, conspiracy theories may also be read as defenses against the Real, which resists symbolization. When the Symbolic order (law, institutions, social discourse) fails to provide stability, alternative narratives step in. These narratives create pseudo-symbolic structures "everything is planned," "there is a hidden enemy" that externalize responsibility and deflect recognition of vulnerability, systemic shortcomings, or complicity.
Conspiracy narratives shape public health behaviors (vaccine hesitancy during COVID-19), influence political participation (framing crises as government "plots"), and erode trust in institutions such as science, media, and governance. By reducing complex realities to binary oppositions, conspiracy theories provide short-term relief but hinder constructive engagement with social challenges.
Using Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as a metaphor, we show how producing conspiracy theories makes the subject both victim and author of their own narrative, drawing others into shared fantasy while displacing responsibility. In line with Žižek's notion of the "decline of the symbolic order," conspiracy theories function as perverse substitutes that promise false clarity and agency. We term this dynamic "psycho-complotism," where the mind constructs and becomes trapped in its own conspiratorial logic.
This presentation contributes to applied psychology through a psychoanalytic and societal perspective on conspiracy theories, with implications for mental health and media literacy.