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When Russell Jacoby wrote a new introduction in 1997 to his classic work from 1975, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology, and asked himself what had changed, his answer was clear-“absolutely nothing.” In his original work he criticized post-Freudian psychologists and psychoanalysts for gyrating from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, from conservative to reactionary agendas, failing to grasp the social implications of their own thinking with an undue lack of rigor. In 1997 he said, with a sigh, that we continue the oscillation that has always contributed to the social amnesia he sought to diagnose twenty-two years earlier. We seem incapable of mounting a resistance to what he calls pseudohistorical consciousness paraded under banners of new radical liberation psychologies, or cries for more and more fetishistic forms of objectivity. Whatever criticisms of the past we might make, they tend to be fundamentally shallow, betraying what is clearly more an infatuation with an imaginary future of prosperity and progress then any critical understanding of history, no less the history of one's own discipline.
Psychoanalysis-with its sham innovation and empty psychological categories-blindly works in tandem with the most blatant forms of social injustice. While Jacoby's book may be thought of by some as a classic, this label functions with a double edge-it is classic for its time, 1970s Freudian-Marxism. With the most extreme contradictions threatening the base of psychoanalysis, from calls for more politically viable forms of thought to demands for an evidential base, perhaps we should return to this classic work, which, he says, “is less about political than intellectual resistance, thinking against the grain-an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever” (Jacoby, 1975). For Jacoby, Freud remains the original figure of intellectual resistance, whose work attempts to think through the contradictions of his own time. It is this that makes Freud's work m