Politics in the Clinic

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.

Despite the public reputation of psychoanalysis as a bourgeois, sometimes reactionary discipline, it also has a long tradition of engagement with progressive politics. Carolyn Laubender's (2024) The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century is an unusual contribution to this tradition in that it locates psychoanalytic politics in the clinical practice of mainstream psychoanalysis (Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, Tom Main, Wulf Sachs – though my calling Sachs ‘mainstream’ is probably stretching things a bit far). As Laubender notes, this runs against the usual splitting in the literature (and practice) between clinical work and political and philosophical theory and action. The former is often seen as pragmatic and conservative in its unremitting focus on the ‘internal world’ and its relative reluctance to give full weight to the external forces acting on people (class, race, gender). The latter is seen as the source of radical ideas that understand how the social terrain impacts upon the personal and vice versa, including the specifically psychoanalytic contribution of recognizing the unconscious formation of social life and the social formation of the unconscious (Hinshelwood, 2024; Frosh, 1999). This makes Laubender's book a distinctively psychosocial work: one that contests the separation of politics from personal life and that actively, and to my mind successfully, links the two together historically and conceptually, with important practical consequences.

But can clinical work be ‘radical’ in political terms? There are several reference points for those who claim that it can. In recent years, Freud's personal commitment to social democratic politics has been called upon by those wishing to assert