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The British political left has never really had much time for psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, even though the personal beliefs and convictions of many analysts and therapists would place them at least somewhere on the left. Things have changed, of course, during the past 20 years or so as a great many feminists and socialists have turned to psychoanalysis both as theory, in attempts to explain more fully the mechanisms of oppression and to account for the apparent halt, however temporary, of the project of emancipation, and as therapy to come to terms with more personal matters. But the mainstream socialist project as such, it seems to me, has been largely untouched by the concerns and insights of psychoanalysis, and those leftists who profess an interest in. it tend to be seen if not as apostles, then as the disappointed, the men and women of too little faith.
Until the founding of the ‘Free Associations’ project in the early 1980s, one of the few places on the British left with any real interest in psychoanalysis was the journal New Left Review and its book publishing arm, New Left Books. It was one of the Review's editors Perry Anderson who, in a justly famous essay, ‘Components of the national culture’ bemoaned the fact that psychoanalysis had had such a vestigial impact on the general culture, being sealed off as a ‘technical enclave … an esoteric and specialised pursuit’. And it was the Review, not any psychoanalytic journal, which first published Lacan in English, and there too, at least for a time, that the ideas of David Cooper and R D Laing found a hearing. So too, did New Left Books publish Octave Mannoni's monograph on Freud as well as the work of Timpanaro.
Two of the key essays which make up Michael Rustin's book, published by Verso, the imprint of New Left books, were themselves first published in New Left Review (although the details in the book of which chapters were published before, and where, are incorrect) and the book itself represents a decade