You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis has always been engaged with progressive politics, from Freud’s early “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (Freud 1908), with its argument that neurosis is in large part caused by the hypocritical relations governing sexuality in the Europe of the early twentieth century, through his great social texts The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930) and on to the Freudo-Marxists of the 1920s to 1950s (Reich 1946; Marcuse 1955), the radical leftists of the 1970s (Jacoby 1975), psychoanalytic feminists (Mitchell 1974; Benjamin 1988, 2018; Rose 1996), anti-racists and black activists (Fanon 1952), postcolonialists (Greedharry 2008), left-Lacanians (Stavrakakis 2007), sociologists (Rustin 1991; Honneth 1996), social philosophers (Butler 2005; Žižek 2006), queer theorists (Giffney and
Watson 2017) and social historians (Zaretsky 2015; Ffytche and Pick 2016). Notably, this apparent radicalism has often been countered by the apolitical or even conservative position of the institutions of psychoanalysis, most famously in Germany during the Third Reich (Frosh 2005) but also in Latin America (Damousi and Plotkin 2012; Frosh and Mandelbaum 2017) as well as in the USA during the Cold War (Herzog 2017), although this depressing history is offset to a certain extent by Elisabeth Danto’s (2005) demonstration of the tradition of social democracy surrounding the “Free Clinic” movement that began in the 1920s. Many individual psychoanalysts have also been committed to social justice and have at times bravely stood out against authoritarianism and murderous state violence (Langer 1989; Hollander 2010). It is, however, the case that the majority of the most creative political uses of psychoanalysis have not come from within the formal institutions of psychoanalysis, but rather from social and political theorists and activists outside the movement, but open to its ideas and principles and willing to use them in the servic