Law as Psychic Ontology: Prohibition, Fantasy, and the Affective Life of Authority

This paper argues that law operates not only as an institutional or political order, but also as a psychic formation embedded within affect, desire, and recognition. The endurance of legal authority cannot be explained solely through coercion, consent, or procedural legitimacy. It also depends on how legality becomes internalized within psychic life and woven into attachments to order, belonging, and social intelligibility. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, affect studies, socio-legal scholarship, and traditions within psychoanalytic jurisprudence, the paper develops an interdisciplinary account of how legal authority becomes emotionally compelling and socially durable. It examines how subjectivity is shaped through prohibition, fantasy, and ambivalent forms of recognition, and how collective symbols, rituals, and legal imaginaries sustain attachments to legality even under conditions of inequality, exclusion, or disillusionment. The analysis further argues that affect should not be understood as opposed to legal reason, but as part of the background conditions shaping how legal authority is perceived, interpreted, and inhabited. At the same time, affective responsiveness remains subject to normative constraints necessary for consistency, accountability, and procedural fairness. The paper concludes by proposing a psychoanalytic jurisprudence of attunement, one that treats legality as relationally and affectively lived while remaining attentive to the ethical and institutional limits of legal authority. Rather than abandoning legal reasoning, such an approach reconsiders how authority is exercised, experienced, and sustained within social life.