Psychoanalysis, Community, Security: Reflections on The Political 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.

At the start of his long essay on group or mass psychology, Freud famously remarks that the distinction between individual and social psychology is in fact a false one, since individual psychology is always already social psychology and vice versa. From this, numerous implications follow. The one relevant to this article, marking and celebrating the launch of a vital book on politics and the psychoanalytic clinic, is that psychoanalysis is inescapably political insofar as it is concerned with the structure, function, and nature of the social bond. This repercussion, with specific respect to Freudian metapsychology, has been extensively explored by, amongst others, Theodor Adorno, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In her new book, The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (2024), Carolyn Laubender studies the confluences between the postwar period in Britain on British psychoanalysis and vice versa, with stunning results.

If every theory of the psyche carries political implications, then clinical practice cannot, strictly speaking, ever be disinterested with respect to politics: even under the most strained pretence of aspirations to value neutral, judgement-suspended and dispassionate description. ‘Objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ are, themselves, deeply and inescapably political positions with real-world consequences for patients in treatment, the ideological alignment – however submerged or disavowed – of psychoanalytic training organizations, and the wider sociopolitical