Political Freud: A History by Eli Zaretsky (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2015;  248 pp.)

Psychoanalysis is first and foremost a method of treatment, since Freud's ideas were in principle triggered and shaped by the clinical observations of his patients. Psychoanalysis is also a theory of an almost philosophical kind, applied - not without criticism - in politics, culture and history. Ultimately, psychoanalysis is a worldview, a lens through which one perceives and attempts to understand things, a personal vocabulary so to speak. Having explored the history of psychoanalysis mainly as a therapeutic approach in the illuminating, perhaps by now classic, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis , Eli Zaretsky returns to the field with his latest book Political Freud: A History (2015). This time, Zaretsky's aim is to focus not on the history of psychoanalysis as a therapy, but rather on its intriguing and autonomous trajectory outside the clinic. In so doing, he manages to write the history of the employment of Freudian theory in political, cultural and social analyses, while reflecting at the same time on his own psychoanalytic worldview.

The book consists of a brief but comprehensive introduction, five chapters and an afterword. The chapters are divided thematically rather than chronologically, so that each chapter deals with a separate and largely independent section of what Zaretsky calls ‘Political Freudianism’. Thus, in chapter 1, Zaretsky discusses the ‘spirit of capitalism’, and the interaction between psychoanalysis and the new consumerist culture of capitalist society; not only did capitalism influence the content of unconscious phantasies, Zaretsky argues convincingly, but psychoanalysis facilitated at the same time the birth of a new spirit of capitalism. More specifically, the emphasis of Freudianism on sexual tolerance and the desires of individuals legitimized a consumer-centred ethic that, ironically, also contributed to the gradual decline of psychoanalysis itself as a theory and a clinical practice.