Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory

Yannis Stavrakakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032089409
  9781138696310
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315524757
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

The emerging field of 'psychoanalytic political theory' has now reached a stage in its development and rapid evolution that deserves to be registered, systematically defined and critically evaluated. This Handbook provides the first reference volume which showcases the current state of psychoanalytic political theory, maps the genealogy of its development, identifies its conceptual and methodological resources and highlights its analytical innovations as well as its critical promise. The Handbook consists of 35 chapters offering original, comprehensive and critical reviews of this field of study. The chapters are divided into five thematic sections:

• Figures discusses the work of major psychoanalytic theorists who have influenced considerably the development of psychoanalytic political theory.
• Traditions genealogically recounts and critically reassesses the many attempts throughout the 20th century of experimenting with the articulation between psychoanalysis and political theory in a consistent way.
• Concepts asks what are the concepts that psychoanalysis offers for appropriation by political theory.
• Themes presents concrete examples of the ways in which psychoanalytic political theory can be productively applied in the analysis of racism, gender, nationalism, consumerism, etc.
• Challenges/Controversies captures the ways in which psychoanalytic political theory can lead the way towards theoretical and analytical innovation in many disciplinary fields dealing with cutting-edge issues.

The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory will serve as scholarly reference volume for all students and researchers studying political theory, psychoanalysis, and the history of ideas.

Part I

Figures

1
Sigmund Freud

Stephen Frosh

The development of psychoanalysis in its early days—and arguably always—was dominated by Freud’s thought. Freud was the originator of psychoanalytic knowledge, its dispenser and its dominant figure, shadowing all that has come since. Every nuance of his speaking and writing has been pored over for its implications for psychosocial understanding, and his attitudes and prejudices, as well as his insights, have become an indispensable (or inescapable) background for understanding many aspects of the sociopolitical landscape. This chapter examines the political ‘philosophy’ that can be found in Freud’s work and addresses the question of what tools this work makes available for political theory.

Conservative, Liberal, Radical

Freud was not primarily a political thinker, but his theories, actions, and affiliations nevertheless allow for a great variety of political readings, ranging from traditional and patriarchal to those best understood as radical, or at least ‘critical’. His personal beliefs were certainly conservative: he was suspicious of Bolshevism and feminism (Roudinesco 2016; Makari 2008) and resistant to incorporating Marxist—or really any—political ideas into psychoanalysis. This resistance was explicit in the 1930s, when he supported the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich from the German Psychoanalytic Society on the grounds that, as Anna Freud put it in the name of her father, ‘psychoanalysis has no part in politics’ (Steiner 2000: 128). On the other hand, Freud’s awareness of the unequal conditions of social life was acute, driven in part by his personal experience of anti-Semitism but also by simple observation of the conditions of suffering that lay outside what on the face of it was his narrowly bourgeois circle of contacts. Once the First World War had dashed any hopes that he and others like him might have had that, as he put it in The Future of an Illusion, ‘infantilism is destined to be surmounted’ (Freud 1927: 48)—or more to the point, that destructiveness might be a secondary phenomenon and that the enlightenment project might eventually succeed—Freud became increasingly aware of privation and the necessity for psychoanalysis to contribute to a social reformist project. His speech to the Budapest Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1918 ended on a note that was stirring, effective, and true:

Compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world, and perhaps need not be, the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible… . On the other hand, it is possible to foresee that at some time or other the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis, and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. When this happens, institutions or out-patient clinics will be started, to which analytically-trained physicians will be appointed, so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work. Such treatments will be free.

(Freud 1919a: 166–167)

It is noteworthy how clearly Freud lays out the relationship between material privation (‘the poor man’) and neurotic suffering and how contingent this is: there is a ‘vast amount of neurotic misery … in the world’ that ‘perhaps need not be’. That is, misery is unnecessary; or rather—because Freud did not believe that people were capable of prolonged happiness—the quantity of misery was not determined by the propensities of the human psyche. ‘Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience’, he wrote (Freud 1930: 76–77). And early on, in Studies on Hysteria, he had set up an interlocutor who asked him, ‘Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?’ To which Freud famously replied, ‘You will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (Freud 1893: 305). Still, as can be seen from the 1918 speech, Freud did think something could be done: struggling people ‘may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work’.

What is meant by these proposed outcomes? ‘Work’ is clear: in Freud’s usage, it literally means work, something productive but also the capacity to sublimate, to contribute in a positive way to society. Sublimation is the other side of repression: in both cases, the unconscious wish is in some way transformed, but in repression it emerges as a symptom, in sublimation as a creative act. But resistance? This is usually seen as what has to be overcome in psychoanalysis. Resistance is the opposition experienced in the analytic situation to progress, to the subject understanding herself or himself fully in the light of unconscious life. Freud himself, as his thinking developed, was led to differentiate between a number of different types, or at least sources, of resistance, including resistances of the ego and of the id and those due to ‘secondary gain’. But the most interesting for political purposes is perhaps that arising from the operation of the superego, the ‘part’ of the mind in which guilt is held and which is constantly appealing for punishment. This is a source of one frustrating reality of psychoanalysis: patients can come seeking help but then reject it when it is offered, because they do not feel they deserve it. For Jacqueline Rose (2007), the title of whose book The Last Resistance plays neatly on the tension between psychoanalytic and political resistance, this type of resistance is the most important one for political analysis, the most ‘deadly, because it arises out of the pleasure the mind takes in thwarting itself… . Freud is talking about the superego—the exacting, ruthless and punishing instance of the mind through which the law exerts its pressure on the psyche’ (31). That is, this kind of resistance is the one which is most embedded in the subject, the one which arises not only out of a fear of change but also out of the sheer pleasure of resistance itself, the enjoyment that comes out of the investment of psychic energy in destroying the opportunities for progress. This is clearly not the kind of resistance that Freud is referring to; he seems to mean something like ‘resistance to the circumstances of life, to socially induced suffering’—hence, a political form of resistance that is in tension with the psychoanalytic idea of resistance as an interference with the capacity to live life to the fullest. The slippage between these two types of resistance is of considerable political importance. However ubiquitous psychoanalytic resistance might be, and however much humans might be programmed for unhappiness rather than lasting pleasure, for Freud, it seems that well-being requires resistance to the injustices perpetrated by a society that creates unnecessary suffering.

Freud’s 1918 speech fell on fertile ground, in that many of the analysts who heard it were social democrats, sick of the suffering of war and of the corrupt politics that had brought it about. It was seminal in provoking the analysts into action, with the result that ‘free’ psychoanalytic clinics were formed in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and London, aiming to offer high-quality psychoanalytic treatment to all who needed it. Moreover, as Elizabeth Danto (2005) documents, Freud was deeply committed in the1920s to the liberal or social-democratic cause, however much he was also concerned that psychoanalysis itself should retain its neutrality as a ‘science’. Danto (2005: 13) presents the context of Freud’s speech:

Until the end of his life Freud supported free psychoanalytic clinics, stood up for the flexible fee, and defended the practice of lay analysis, all substantive deviations for a tradition of physician’s privilege and their patients’ dependence. His consistent loathing of the United States as ‘the land of the dollar barbarians’ echoed his contempt for a medical attitude he believed to be more American than European, more conservative than social democratic.

The history, traced by Danto, of psychoanalytic free clinics in the 1920s and 1930s—the Polyclinic in Berlin, the Ambulatorium in Vienna, and the Clinic of Psychoanalysis in London are prime instances—is a practical example of how psychoanalysis tried to maintain a social-egalitarian perspective, at least in Europe, despite all the pressures on it. Freud treated many patients for free during the 1920s (charging exorbitant prices to his American patients to cross-subsidize this), and other analysts, out of purely ideological motives, committed themselves to financial contributions and voluntary work to sustain the clinics.

The idea of political neutrality could never be absolute anyway, given how the restrictions of any society affect the well-being of its citizens. For example, Freud’s (1908) paper ‘ “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, with its argument that neurosis is in large part caused by the hypocritical relations governing sexuality, can be understood as an intervention in the social and political mores of his time. In this relatively early paper, written well before he gave any systematic account of society, Freud made it clear that there might be a general problem with any form of socially induced renunciation:

It is not difficult to suppose that under the domination of a civilized sexual morality the health and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ultimately this injury to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may reach such a pitch that, by this indirect path, the cultural aim in view will be endangered as well.

(Freud 1908: 180)

Notably, Freud refers with irony to ‘civilized’ sexual morality—that is, the problem is not due to exceptional sexual restrictions but is built into the structure of ‘civilization’. As Freud considers the actions of society (‘civilization’) in its various ‘stages of development’ toward regulating sexuality and restricting it to monogamous marriage, he retains a highly critical stance, seeing this regulation as the source of neurosis in social life and also as damaging of society itself:

But even if the damage done by civilized sexual morality is admitted, it may be argued … that the cultural gain derived from such an extensive restriction of sexuality probably more than balances these sufferings, which, after all, only affect a minority in any severe form. I must confess that I am unable to balance gain against loss correctly on this point, but I could advance a great many more considerations on the side of the loss. Going back to the subject of abstinence… . I must insist that it brings in its train other noxae besides those involved in the neuroses and that the importance of the neuroses has for the most part not been fully appreciated.

(195)

The spread of neurosis under the conditions of Freud’s society is attributed to the impossible demands made by the hypocritical sexual morality of that time; and although Freud is cautious about making political suggestions as a consequence, he is pretty clear about the implications of his analysis. The restrictiveness of ‘civilized’ morality rebounds on society as a whole, corrupting it and creating misery for its subjects.

In this moment, we might also see a space opening up for a gendered set of political implications. Freud’s early clinical work in psychoanalysis was focused especially on female hysteria, and although there are plenty of examples of his adherence to a conventionally patriarchal and paternalistic set of attitudes around feminine ‘irrationality’, there is also a striking repositioning of the centrality of the ‘doctor’ as the one who hears the plea in hysteria as a sexual plea arising from inhibition and repression that themselves have strongly social sources. With everything else that goes on in his texts, including a colonizing impulse that makes irrationality and femininity (often run together) subject to psychoanalysis’ expert understanding, Freud’s ‘act of listening represents an effort to include the irrational discourse of femininity in the realm of science’ (Moi 1989: 197). That is, he gives the voice of feminine sexuality a space in which it can be heard and recognized as saying something of importance—notably, here, that women have desires and that these are repressed under ‘civilized’ social conditions.

Repression, Aggression

The tension around the issue of resistance is characteristic of how many Freudian notions have ambiguous implications for political thought. Perhaps most important, because the concept concerned is most central to psychoanalysis in that it establishes the necessity of the unconscious, is the concept of repression. Without repression, there is no unconscious. Famously, Freud’s (1923: 15) formula for their relationship runs, ‘The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us’, highlighting the dynamism of his system, in which unconscious material is refused entry to consciousness by an active process of censorship. As already noted, there is an important relationship between repression and sublimation. In both cases, following the standard Freudian model, an unconscious entity—a wish or idea—is kept from consciousness by defensive forces. This is a tiring process for the ‘I’, the ego where the defenses are located, demanding constant scrutiny and activity, interminable guarding of the city of the mind against breaches of its walls. In sublimation, the situation is resolved by the conversion of the repudiated unconscious idea into something acceptable in the light of day: an artistic creation, a piece of writing, or a set of activities that may be fueled by sexual or aggressive forces but that are nevertheless constructive and socially congruent. In repression, however, the continuing defense is one that is caught up in a series of substitutive processes that remain hidden and troubling. An idea is repressed, but the affect attached to it is relocated into another idea, and as the particularities of this shift so does the pressure for direct expression of the originally repressed idea become greater and greater, until neurotic compromises ensue.

The question here is whether repression of this psychological kind is linked to political repression, or at least is a model for thinking about it. For some of the classic Freudo-Marxists of the mid 20th century, it certainly could be considered that way, either naturalistically, as in Norman Brown’s (1959: 3) formulation that ‘In the new Freudian perspective, the essence of society is repression of the individual and the essence of the individual is repression of himself’, or in Herbert Marcuse’s (1955/1966: 11) Marxist version (and that of several other members of the so-called Freudian Left influenced by him—Robinson 1990): ‘According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression’. Marcuse went on to develop a sophisticated set of individual-social parallels focused on the idea of ‘surplus’ repression as that which conditions of domination adds to what is the necessary, base-level repression required for any society to function. But even in the simpler version given by Freud, although it is clear that repression is a psychological phenomenon referring to what goes on ‘within’ the individual, it is also apparent that this has social resonances and even causes.

This issue comes to the fore in Freud’s relatively late ‘sociological’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Diagrams
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Figures
• Part II Traditions
• Part III Concepts
• Part IV Themes
• Part V Challenges and Controversies
• Index