The Future of Politics and Psychoanalysis

The politics of psychoanalysis has many facets. These include the internal disputes and maneuverings between groups; the response of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic institutions to authoritarian regimes; the micro-politics of the consulting room in which sexism, racism, homophobia, and domination have been sometimes enacted, sometimes confronted; and the engagement of psychoanalytic ideas with reactionary and radical political thought. There is also a related set of what might be called reflexive issues, in which the status of psychoanalysis as a cultural product comes into view. If psychoanalysis is a science in the positivist tradition to which Sigmund Freud was mostly committed, then these various aspects of its politics are encumbrances and interferences, distorting the pure vision of the unconscious that can be gained from a properly independent attitude. This might also be carried over to psychoanalytic training: what is compelled there is a kind of apprenticeship (though this underestimates the incredible emotional power of the transferential process through which trainees become fully-fledged analysts) in which psychoanalysis supplies a framework for understanding and the task is to learn how to use it in the consulting room. Once it is allowed, however, that psychoanalysis has a politics and a set of cultural resonances and applications—and indeed, that it has a specific history that is not simply one of progressively more accurate discovery—then it becomes clear that we must understand the nature and function of psychoanalysis in relation to the social conditions under which it arose, to those that sustain or damage it, and to how it is a player in these cultural shifts. This is what is meant here by reflexivity: psychoanalysis has certain conditions of origin; it has adapted, more or less successfully, as those conditions have shifted over the one hundred and twenty years or so of psychoanalytic activity; and it has shown a remarkable capacity to influence that same culture—indeed, many cultures in different places—so that the culture becomes psychoanalytically saturated even as it also offers up resistance to the psychoanalytic enterprise.

Accounts of the origins of psychoanalysis that attend sympathetically to the particularities of its formation have various emphases, but they tend to focus on either its scientific background in nineteenth-century biology, evolutionary theory, medicine, and psychology (e.g. George Makari, 2008) or on the specific social factors operating in Vienna (or more generally in Europe) at the time, most notably anti-Semitism and Freud’s position in the history of Jewish emancipation (e.g. Stephen Frosh, 2005) or the emerging gender politics of the period (e.g. Teresa Brennan, 1989). Eli Zaretsky’s previous and quite controversial history of psychoanalysis, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004) was unusual in offering a wide sweep of social history as a backdrop to psychoanalysis, in particular assessing it as a major product of, and contributor to, the second Industrial Revolution, which emphasised interiority and personal as well as family consumption and hence the expression and modification of desire. Secrets of the Soul was groundbreaking in some ways, but suffered from too strong a focus on American psychoanalysis that distorted some of its perceptions around the contribution of psychoanalysis in other parts of the world.

Zaretsky’s new book, Political Freud: A History, reprises some of the analytical framework from Secrets of the Soul, especially in its imposing opening chapter on “Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which traces the shifts in capitalism from the “work ethic and denial of desire” of the nineteenth century to what Zaretsky identifies as the more “hedonistic and expansive consumerism” of twentieth-century American corporatism. Freudian psychoanalysis was well attuned to the former, particularly in its interest in how the drives could be managed in the interests of society—its interest, that is, in sublimation—and it also contributed to the destruction of this mode of capitalism by identifying the repression and hypocrisy at its heart. However, the emergence...