You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Carolyn Laubender's focus is the clinic as a political site. This book explores the work of six 20th-century analysts, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, D. W. Winnicott, Thomas Main, and John Bowlby, examining concepts such as “authority, reparation, anticolonialism, mothering, communalism, and security” (p. 3) to illustrate how politics and ideology undergird the practice of each analyst. She states her purpose thus:
I therefore consider how psychoanalysts become formidable political actors precisely through their clinical work, where they implicitly transformed the privatized space of the clinic into a prototypical laboratory for reimagining formations of race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy. By deliberately examining clinicians and techniques that represent some of the most conservative and orthodox traditions of psychoanalytic practice, part of this book's claim is that even the most “classical” psychoanalytic clinics perform implicit (and often explicit) political work. (p. 3)
Using postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories to examine the political imaginaries that are structured by the clinic, she offers a critical sensibility in which psychoanalytic theories and practices are read through a political lens revealing the underlying situatedness of those theories in political and social ideologies.
In Chapter 1, Laubender places Anna Freud's child analysis at the forefront of politics and psychoanalysis. As a cofounder of child psychoanalysis, Freud's psychologizing orientation makes her a highly contentious figure in the psychoanalytic archive. Freud's “turn away from the excavation of the unconscious” (p. 39) toward ego psychology ran counter to the work of her father, Klein, Lacan, and others. Rigid in her analysis of children, Freud deemed them in need of “authoritative governance” (p. 39). Laubender suggests that Freud adopted a distinctly colonizing framework arguing that “the analyst's job is to ‘civilize’ the (presumably ‘savage‘