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In the recent history of books on psychoanalysis and politics, illustrated by the large collection edited by Yannis Stavrakakis (2019), the focus tends to be on identity and geopolitics rather than the ‘classical’ Freudo-Marxist positions identified with such past luminaries as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. There are some exceptions to this, for example Eli Zaretsky's (2015) partial history of political psychoanalysis, but the trend is distinctly away from analyzing the revolutionary potential of the working class. Instead, psychoanalysis is used to throw light especially on resistances of various kinds: resistance to multiplicity (racism), to fluidity (gender), to desire (sexuality), to existential threats (climate). Resistance also to resistance itself, as in historically based examinations of how psychoanalysis has fared under conditions of authoritarianism or, conversely, what it might have to offer liberation movements (Gaztambide, 2019). Some recent writers have extended the field to consider the political implications of clinical psychoanalytic work (Laubender, 2024) whilst others have concerned themselves with populism (Stavrakakis & Galanopoulos, 2024) or more generally (and often theoretically) with the place of affect in political life (Safatle, 2024). In much of this scholarship there has been a focus on Lacanian theory (for instance, George & Hook, 2021) though some of the examples given above have also evidenced a move ‘back’ into relational and object relations thinking that reads the political into, and out from, the psychoanalytic encounter (Benjamin, 2017).
Bob Hinshelwood's new book, Unconscious Politics, returns us to an older style of political psychoanalysis. Its emphasis is not on identity politics, which receive not much more than passing mention (mainly under the heading of ‘stereotyping’ and including a brief, unsatisfactory engagement with racism that offers a surprisingly ambiguous account of Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of the Nuba