Hannah Proctor, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (London:  Verso, 2024;  263 pp.); reviewed by Katie Keaveny

Burnout is a term with neoliberal significance: it describes the specific exhaustion of trying to succeed under late capitalism. Etymologically, it was a term that emerged not out of waged labour, but out of unwaged social justice work. In the 1970s, a psychoanalyst borrowed the term from hippies and drug users he encountered while volunteering in a free clinic in New York's East Village (pp. 91-92). The historical specificity of the term is something Hannah Proctor revisits in Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat. According to Proctor, burnout contains something that cannot be reduced to exhaustion or stress, specifically ‘the anger caused by grief’ that comes with disappointment or the loss of a political ideal (p. 92). With burnout there is something to mourn.

Proctor, a historian of left-wing politics and the ‘psy’ disciplines, is writing at the intersection of despair and revolutionary possibility, and considers the complex ways they are not only deeply entwined, but mutually constitutive. Burnout examines the object of political struggle, a desired future, and the exhaustion that comes from defeat in a dialectical way that troubles the causal move from the former to the latter. The novelty of the book is that the symptom is used to link a multitude of disparate historical and political moments, including her own. Burnout is a practical and an academic task, written for both historians and activists; it is an attempt to disentangle the experience of political stagnation precisely through the entanglement of revolutionary politics and negative feelings.

Burnout’s historical examples are sprawling but not exhaustive, and provide a throughline of various political struggles and psychological symptoms, elaborating the ‘historical specificity of certain concepts for describing psychic life’ (p. 89). Eight chapters name, explore and recuperate a particular formulation of