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Why bother?
I would have liked to begin by acknowledging the virtues of Burston and Nelson's paper, prior to offering some reflections on their achievement. This, however, is difficult, faced with a text intended to damage a much-valued colleague, Lara Sheehi, which, moreover, ignores her substantive contributions, never moving beyond a selectively presented history of social media posts, campus politics and quotations pulled out of context and nuance1. Uninformed readers must be bewildered: how has this latter-day Boudica, leading hordes of savage warriors to burn our once-orderly outpost of civilisation to the ground, managed to establish herself as a serious thinker at all?
The paper purports to frame (in more than one sense) Sheehi's stance as an expression of ‘Critical Social Justice Theory’ (CSJT). Burston and Nelson invite the psychoanalytic community to feel existentially threatened by a tribe who, they suggest, have donned civilised garb the better to lure their intended victims into a lethal trap. The following paragraphs summarise Burston and Nelson's portrait of Sheehi and those who think like her:
They are devotees of a dogma through which they proselytise a novel form of conversion therapy. Incapable of ‘genuine dialogue and debate’, adherents operate by ‘group coercion’ to impose their rigid belief that all mental distress is to be understood as an expression of social inequalities. Their monomania, reducing everything to the influence of gender, race and class hierarchies, threatens the disappearance of psychoanalysis: so antithetical are their ideas to psychoanalytic paradigms that only the naïve would attempt their integration.
Intellectually challenged, they cannot tolerate the ‘ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty’ that characterise true psychoanalysis. Moralising and confrontational, they bully and intimidate, where possible publicly humiliating their opponents. They are conspiratorial, operating some kind of group discipline, ‘merely pay[ing] lip