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Editor David Morgan's cover for this collection of essays depicts a rally from 1930s Germany. The crowd, with one exception, all give the Nazi salute. The lone man, August Landmesser, stands, arms crossed, watching, thinking, refusing. This is Morgan's emblem for psychoanalysis' role vis à vis the neoliberal, populist, racist, climate-change threatened — and now covid-ravaged — challenges faced by contemporary Western societies.
In its inception, psychoanalysis was politically neutral. The prevailing liberal ideology of the early twentieth century drew a sharp boundary between private and public life. Therapy entailed informal contracts between patient and analyst. Psychoanalysis, while aspiring to be universal in application, did not especially concern itself with questions of inequality, poverty or environmental deprivation. One of Freud's most celebrated patients, the ‘Wolf-man’, so-called, was a Russian Count. Nevertheless, most of the early analysts — and their patients — were partially assimilated Jews, as outsiders well acquainted with the fragility of their status, and ultimately with the mass murder that entailed.
Neoliberalism smashed the liberal consensus. Capital has invaded the psyche. The shopping imperative keeps the wheels of capital turning, the corporation coffers brimming. Freud's ‘ordinary human misery’ — sadness, grief, pain and rage — are suppressed with therapies that counteract such post-spiritual apostasy. Counselling, life-coaching and wellness spas proliferate. Surfaces prevail: tattoo shops, nail bars and selfies squeeze out the sacred spaces of the inner world. Shopping-culture feeds on the oxymoron of happy hunger, rushing to fill the maw of inner emptiness with hamburgers and theme park excursions. Nature is there to be tamed and subjugated. Society's cracks and fissures are attributed to outsiders — foreigners, ‘immigrants’, invading hordes.
Psychoanalysis stands as a rallying point for concepts and practices that resist the prevailing n