 Noëlle McAfee also draws on psychoanalytic theory to analyze the unconscious operations of democratic societies. In Democracy and the Political Unconscious (2008), McAfee blends poststructural psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, and semiotics with Deweyan, Rawlsian, and Habermasian democratic theories. The result is a sophisticated argument that when some members of a society are denied the ability to participate in the public sphere, that society will tend to develop a political unconscious. As McAfee explains, the political unconscious is not a thing or a place, but rather “an effect of processes: failures to sublimate well, desires unarticulated, voices kept silent, repressions reenacted without acknowledgement of their origins” (2008, 12). Understanding with Dewey that the public is called into being by particular problems and that it can have difficulty finding itself when those problems are immense, McAfee develops democratic strategies for public processes of mourning so that age-old traumas of repression and exclusion no longer are compulsively repeated.