The Psychic Life of Liberalism

This contribution is a revised version of a paper delivered for a roundtable on The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century at the Freud Museum on Sept 18 2025.

When reading histories of psychoanalysis I often think of a passage from Jacques Derrida's canonical ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, which was first delivered as a lecture called ‘Memory: The Question of the Archives’ at the Freud Museum in 1994:

To want to speak of psychoanalysis, to claim to do the history of psychoanalysis from a purely apsychoanalytical point of view, purified of all psychoanalysis, to the point of believing one could erase the traces of the Freudian impression, is like claiming the right to speak without knowing what one's speaking about, without even wanting to hear anything about it. (Derrida, 1995, p. 38.)

The dream of exteriority and distance that Derrida identifies in the work of writer Yosef Yerushlami is, he claims, both impossible and illegitimate (although of course, too much of a dogmatically psychoanalytic approach to historical materials can also be frustrating and limiting). What I enjoyed most about The Political Clinic and what I found most psychoanalytic in spirit about Laubender's methodological approach to the various case studies that comprise it, is that she retains a deeply ambivalent relation to her objects. The ‘political’ in the book's title is certainly not intended as a synonym for ‘good’ or ‘radical’. The main psychoanalysts that are the focus of the book's respective chapters are presented as neither heroes nor villains, instead the complex and contradictory nature of their sometimes disavowed political positions are carefully teased out. The book's opening chapter on Anna Freud, for example, discusses how despite her participation in socially-oriented clinical experimentations in interwar Red Vienna, her early work on child psychology emphasized the importance of authority over democracy,