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The fraught connection between psychoanalysis and politics has been forged, broken, rediscovered and remade in different cultural contexts during Freud's working life, and, after his death, in different schools devoted to his clinical practice as well as in radical movements that have often been keen to find in psychoanalysis the promise of liberation. This book - 10 lectures by the Swiss analyst Fritz Morgenthaler who died in 1984 - enables the reader to see something of the contradictions that beset attempts to make this connection from within the organizational heart of psychoanalysis, the International Psychoanalytical Association, the IPA.
Morgenthaler was a prominent member of the IPA, engaging with the tradition of ego psychology, dominant in the IPA diaspora after World War II, and, towards the end of his life, with the object relations and relational currents of theory developing in the United States. It is that ‘relational’ aspect of his work that is claimed in this book of lectures: the useful contextualizing essay introducing Morgenthaler to an English-speaking readership by Dagmar Herzog, the chapter endnotes and the supplementary material are together deployed to shift emphasis from the more conservative aspects of Morgenthaler's clinical practice to a particular conceptual and political project.
Herzog's introductory essay explains why Morgenthaler is historically and politically important, drawing attention to two axes of his work that are relevant in that respect. The first axis of his work, questioning assumptions about ‘race’, was of interest to the West German left; the title of the popular co-authored Whites Think Too Much (Die Weissen denken zuviel) is both indicative of the nature of the question and contains a clue as to the rather romanticizing answer Morgenthaler proposed. Morgenthaler adverts, in his lecture ‘Modes of Interaction in Perversions’, for example, to the way that in Africa ‘rituals can be joyful celebrations that allow participat