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It may be a bad sign when the first theorist in a political movement is a psychologist. (Janice Haaken, 2007)
For psychoanalysis, the question of its own relation to radical politics is bounded by Freud's methodological prescription that, within the confines of the clinic, psychoanalysts should steadfastly maintain neutrality on political issues. It is, however, an open question to what extent this prescription precludes the application of psychoanalytic techniques or knowledge to politics in the broader public sphere. On the one hand, it seems ethically inappropriate to use clinical techniques in changing people's minds about political positions - the specter of “brainwashing” looms large in thinking this possibility. On the other hand, it seems appropriate to use psychoanalytic insight into the human condition as a guide to more enlightened social policies. And, indeed, at the end of his discussion of the Little Hans case, Freud (1909, p 146) himself uses psychoanalysis along exactly these lines, as a basis for suggesting reforms in Austrian educational policy.
Eli Zaretsky's paper in this issue provides valuable insight into this vexed relation between psychoanalysis and radical politics. Zaretsky points out that in the political arena there have been two Freuds: On the one hand, the conservative Freud of ego-psychology, dominant in the US at the beginning of the 1960s, who centralized the positive role of reason as a means for the subject to adapt to reality. On the other hand, a second Freud, excluded from the professional canons, whose work is represented in the US through the writings of Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse: a