Editorial

This general issue centres on a special section comprising roundtable responses to Carolyn Laubender's award-winning book The Political Clinic . Hannah Proctor in ‘The Psychic Life of Liberalism’ acknowledges that historical circumstances intrude into analytic sessions, and that psychoanalytic theories draw from the contemporary political vocabularies around them, before applauding how Laubender exposes in particular the manner in which the State was often incorporated unquestioningly into certain postwar liberal psychoanalytic notions of a healthy life: as if the book might be presenting at its core a ‘Mass Psychology of Centrism’. Stephen Frosh's ‘Politics in the Clinic’ asks whether clinical work can be radical in political terms, recognizing the emergence of social democratic visions of free psychoanalytic clinics in the 1920s and 1930s, and later on, socially aware psychoanalysis in Latin America – but he equally considers how the book confirms a judgment that psychoanalytic clinical practice has tended to be conservative, in terms of the ideologies it reproduces through day to day practice. Barry Watt, taking off from the provocation that clinical work might be ‘the continuation of war by other means’, and the proposal that every clinical intervention ‘is a ratification of a particular image of the nature of social relations’ or of their transformation, offers, in ‘Psychoanalysis, Community, Security’, some thoughts for what psychoanalysis might have to contribute to a renewed image of community, against the backdrop of a contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism and fascism. Finally, Ankhi Mukherjee, in ‘The Black Hamlet Case’, focuses on Laubender's account of Wulf Sachs's analysis of John Chavafambira, a Southern Rhodesian man, and places this in dialogue with Jacqueline Rose's essay ‘Black Hamlet’, emphasizing the importance of the way The Political Clinic refuses ‘to submit to a dichotomy between the political and the clinical’ that would lose the emanc