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A key premise of this bracing book is that ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ interact and shape each other. Severing the two - as Rod Tweedy writes in his intelligent introduction - has led ‘to a devitalised and dissociated form of politics, and to a disengaged and disempowering form of therapy and analysis’ (p. xxvi). The book offers multiple (but not, surprisingly, group analytic) perspectives on how we are, already and necessarily, ‘political selves’. Therapy and analysis are in central focus, starting with Andrew Samuels' foreword, which lists ways in which the terms ‘psychotherapy’ and ‘politics’ tend to be linked; the ‘mental illness’ of the title, invoked so uncritically, might suggest a book of narrower scope.
The stage is set in the late David Smail's opening essay: we are each ‘a point in social space-time through which powers flow’ (p. 19). Psychotherapy, ‘one of the greatest cultural and commercial success stories of the Western world’ (p. 3), has, from Freud onwards, sought the reasons for distress within rather than outside the person. It is pulled to this position, and sealed off from the rest of reality, through the action of its own ‘interest’ (p. 6). A change of perspective is needed, in which motivation is seen not as driven internally but pulled from outside, socially and environmentally. Otherwise, we are stuck with ‘magical voluntarism’ (p. 10), the idea that it is up to us individually - with the help of a therapist, of course - to change things. Smail excoriates therapeutic ‘scientism’, CBT, ‘the myth of mental illness’, the ‘psychotic’ idea that we are merely the stories we tell about ourselves, and humanist therapies in general. Neither can much be expected from psychoanalysis, thanks to its founder's irredeemable conservatism; attempts like the Frankfurt School's to marry Freud and Marx are doomed.
Joel Kovel would disagree. His closely argued ‘Therapy in late capitalism’, first published in 1976-7, is a touchstone for the rest of the book. Kovel and Smai