The Future of Politics and Psychoanalysis: Political Freud: A History. Eli Zaretsky. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2015.  228 pp. Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex. Rosine Jozef Perelberg. London:  Routledge, 2015.  xxii + 237 pp.

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