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The complex and contradictory history of psychoanalysis in relation to progressive politics is well known. The conservative aspects of psychoanalysis have always been visible, in its early days through Freud's attitudes towards femininity and his collusion with colonialist tropes when developing his speculative anthropology (Freud, 1913); and later on in the political ‘neutrality’ adopted by the psychoanalytic movement in Nazi Germany and in the Latin America of the dictatorships - a neutrality that in fact offered a cover for political conformism in the face of, and at times in collusion with, violently authoritarian regimes (Frosh, 2005; Rubin et al., 2016). Psychoanalysis's poor record in dealing with racism and the long period of reactionary mystification over homosexuality contributed to this generally conservative impression, not helped by its focus on private, high-fee clinical practice. Nevertheless, from Freud onwards, psychoanalysis has sustained a vision of human emancipation linked with an idea of being liberated from unnecessarily ‘repressive’ forces, whether those of the unconscious or of a ‘civilization’ opposed to the free expression of human desires. This tradition began with Freud and flourished especially in the 1920s and early 1930s in Berlin, where socialist psychoanalysts such as Otto Fenichel, Siegfried Bernfield and Wilhelm Reich traced a line of connection between Freud and Marx, both seen as revolutionary dialecticians - the former of the unconscious, psychology and sexuality, and the latter of politics, economics and society. This movement was wrecked by the rise of Nazism, but its intellectual and theoretical adherents moved abroad, notably to the United States where the movement found a variety of forms of expression: libertarian in the 1950s with Herbert Marcuse, social democratic