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As many readers of Free Associations will know, Bob Hinshelwood has for decades been a very eminent figure within the professional world of clinical psychoanalysis, while also being a major presence in the expanding project of taking psychoanalytic ideas and insights out of the clinic and into various spheres of intellectual, social and political life. He was involved, from its early days, in the nexus of people and activity around the Free Associations project, which in the 1980s was one of the emerging areas of politically and culturally oriented work around psychoanalysis.
Interdisciplinary work involving psychoanalysis dates back to Freud and others in the 1920s, but - apart from in and around the Frankfurt School - it developed slowly until the 1970s. Then, the failures of 1960s revolutionary politics and the emergence of second wave feminism turned some political intellectuals to the study of how the individual psyche was shaped by the social order. The goal of a Freud/Marx synthesis was a major objective in that work, as it had been for the Frankfurt School, and it was an important influence in the development of psychosocial work in 1980s academia. Hinshelwood's purpose in this book is to revive that aim, and indeed to offer a theoretical model which could be the basis of such a synthesis.
For some of those who pursued that goal in the 1970s and 1980s, questions eventually arose about the value of the Marx side of it, as globalisation ushered in ‘postmodern’ society and intra-societal conflicts changed shape. Instead, a pluralistic approach to the sociological side of the synthesis came to seem more appropriate to those (this reviewer included) who moved away from, or had never embraced, Marxism. Hinshelwood is not seeking to promote Marxist ideology, but in his view, there is much still to gain from a return to Marx, or rather, specifically, to the psychology of the early, humanist Marx. While work in the Freudian-Marxist tradition usually sees the two paradi