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August 30, 2022

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Communists in the Clinic

Ian Parker reports on the progress of the Red Clinic and the role of communism for its workers and supporters

We all know well the toll that capitalism takes on our lives, and the physical and mental strain that exploitation and oppression involves. Distress intensifies in times of austerity, with isolation of people from each other giving new actual and virtual twists on alienation at work, and for those excluded from the workplace. Capitalism is bad for your mental health.

Whether or not everything would be hunky-dory when we have overthrown capitalism is a moot point, and anyway we cannot wait, so what should communists involved in the field of mental health do now, and how should they think about their role and aims? One answer has just been given by Dorotea Pospihalj of the Red Clinic, an avowedly internationalist collective of therapists committed to providing accessible treatment who define themselves as communist.

Free associations

This recent thought-through answer in the online paper For a Communist Clinic is conceptualised using specific theoretical resources; it is psychoanalytic, which not all radical mental health practice is nor should be, and Dorotea’s paper is aligned with the work of the old Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou. For Badiou, the ‘communist hypothesis’ is about an always open possibility that we enact through a range of events that will include the domains of politics, of course, and science, art and love, the last of which frames much clinical work whether it is psychoanalytic or not.

This does not mean that communists in the clinic attempt to indoctrinate, nor even subtly suggest that their patients become communists, but there are aspects of the ‘free association’ that is possible in the clinic that chimes with the kind of ‘free association’ that we struggle for in the field of political economy. As Dorotea Pospihalj points out, there are psychoanalysts of the right as well as of the left, and she draws on her own experiences of political activism in Slovenia – she is based in Ljubljana – to show how some bizarre political choices can be made by therapists who think they are ‘radical’.

There is a sometimes jokey recent webcast with Dorotea, who stood as a candidate for the ecosocialist Left party in recent elections in Slovenia, available on the Psy-Fi Psychology and Theory show, and another Psy-Fi episode is about similar initiatives in Brazil with Christian Dunker and myself; we can see here how important an internationalist perspective and organisation is to the Red Clinic, and to anything that pretends to be ‘communist’ in clinical work. We not only learn from each other’s quite different experiences as we talk and act in solidarity with each other, but we are able to break out of the national peculiarities and limits of our own national traditions. We need to break out of those limits in our therapeutic work and in our conceptualisation of what it is we are doing.

The politics of truth

What underscores communism in the clinic in conditions of capitalism – and who can say whether this kind of clinic will actually be necessary under communism – is a politics of truth combined with theoretical reflection. This argument, again drawing on the work of Alain Badiou, is something that is actually familiar to revolutionaries outside the clinic; we bring our analytic understanding of the nature of capitalism to bear on our politics and we know that we must speak the truth to power. We are beset by lies in this society, and our political activity is grounded in truth; speaking truth to others and speaking truth to ourselves about what we are doing.

The Red Clinic is one of the sites for taking this work forward, but not the only site. Meetings about the Red Clinic have grappled with the role of particular models of therapy and our relation with treatment that is already available on the National Health Service. The NHS is a valuable resource, and anticipates in its form – free medical support at point of treatment for all – what we would hope for under communism. It is not for nothing that rabid right-wingers hate the NHS and want to privatise it, destroy it.

While we fight to defend the NHS we also mobilise to extend what is good about those services, increase participation of service users and make the treatment something that is empowering rather than demobilising, something that embeds support in social networks instead of increasing the isolation of people who are simply doled out antidepressants because that is cheaper and quicker. Here we need to link with other radical initiatives like the Free Psychotherapy Network and the recently formed campaign for universal access to counselling and psychotherapy.

Local and global

These initiatives need to be local as well as international. In Manchester, for example, the CHARM network that was set up to challenge attempts to concentrate mental health care in a large hospital in north Manchester has also been extending its links with activists and users of services to address questions of racism. The Red Clinic has been devoting energies to the struggle against racism and apartheid, with its practitioners supporting a group of clinicians in Palestine, and hosted an online discussion of work on ‘Mental Health in Palestine: Resisting Settler Colonial Partition’.

Communism is an opening to another world beyond capitalism, something that needs to be built now, and we know well from radical mental health initiatives around the world, whether that is in England and Wales or work in indigenous communities in Amazonia, that working class self-activity needs to be intimately linked with struggles against racism and sexism and other forms of oppression. The work in Brazil reflects on the process of listening as the core of progressive work, not immediately obviously communist, nor necessarily psychoanalytic, but congruent with what it is to be a communist in political activity.

For a communist clinic

There is a long history of radical therapy that has known, in its heart, that the capitalist system must be overthrown before the crisis in mental health services can really be resolved. The reflections on communism in the clinic pick up the threads of those debates. Meantime, we need to defend what services we have and build better ones, the kind of services that are democratic and open, and that facilitate the kind of free association that enables people to fight for communism.

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Red Clinic: Strikes Manchester

Ian Parker reports on debates in the context of political struggle over what radical therapy might look like

One of the teach-outs on 31 March hosted by UCU during the ‘four fights‘ strike over casualisation, diversity, equality and pensions in Manchester, after an anti-casualisation picket at the university, was on ‘Red Clinic’. This was a collective discussion in solidarity with, and as part of the strike, asking how we could build a Red Clinic that was oriented to developing truly accessible and sustainable provision of psychotherapy for the working-class and the oppressed in the broadest senses of the terms, attentive to the interrelations between axes of oppression, and transcending national borders.

This initiative, we said at the outset in the publicity, would be informed by Marxist, anti-racist, queer feminist and radical disability theories. It should be explicitly internationalist. We began with an outline of where we were up to so far and gave examples of the kind of work we had in mind.

Mental Health

The Red Clinic initiative is in its early days. It began in London following a Mental Health Workers Inquiry to explore clinical approaches that foreground anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. We are dealing here with at least two issues. One is the nature of global capitalism which, intersecting with vicious racism and sexism, is driving spiralling rates of distress; mental health suffering is a political matter. The other is access to mental health support, with privatisation of services replicating the isolation that people feel; mental health provision is a political matter.

So, there was a decision by a small group of radical therapists, lawyers and activists to set up something that would badge itself as run by communists. This term ‘communist’ is deliberately chosen to point to the need for collectively run services that increase peoples capacity to themselves engage in conscious activity together with others to change the world. Solidarity in the practice of therapy, in its form as well as its content, is crucial here. Perhaps it would be possible for those committed to this project to bring in therapists to work face-to-face and online.

We began to advertise for therapists, thinking to employ therapists who would take on a high fee-paying client in order to subsidise work with a low or no-fee paying client. We started to think about how to manage this, and then we took a step back. It seemed too much of a stretch with the small group we had working with us to do all of this. Now Red Clinic is taking another step forward, but on two tracks of work. One is to engage in political dialogue with practitioners, and to set up a political education programme to discuss how to connect therapy with radical theory and practice. The other track of work is to build bases for the Red Clinic, and work out how to offer practical clinical support to those in distress, including to working with trades unions, grassroots organisations and social movements.

Dilemmas

So, we need to be clear that this is a project that is riddled with problems, with issues that we believe can only be worked through in collective discussion and in practice. These problems cannot be solved in the abstract by good theory, so we begin this process now by setting out some of the dilemmas we face.

First, what do we mean by ‘therapy’? Is it to be underpinned by radical psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious and the way that past relationships are replicated and worked through in the clinic, or does it also include ‘client-centred’ humanist approaches that focus on personal growth, and cognitive-behavioural approaches that offer short-term alternative ways of reframing problems, and group analytic approaches that are already collective? We think it includes all of these things, and more, and that means that practitioners with different understandings of the ways that societal distress gets inside people will be working together in the Red Clinic. So, how do we handle those disagreements?

Second, what do we mean by radical politics? We say we are communist, and we hope it is clear that this means that we work in the spirit of the most open and materialist ‘intersectional’ understanding of how exploitation and oppression works. But, does that mean that a good therapist is necessarily a communist of this kind, and should say so, and what are the consequences of that for the expectations that those seeking help will have of the therapists they meet in the Red Clinic. How does that political commitment express itself, if not in turning the therapy itself into a form of political education, which, to be clear, we think it should not. So, how do we avoid turning therapy into propaganda?

Third, must people be radical or turned into radicals? There is a question here about what commitment we expect from those who access the service, if they are not paying, which they should not and which they do not even now in rapidly-shrinking NHS services. We need to ask how therapy can operate as a space for people to speak in confidence without being judged, can operate if there is an implicit expectation that they are, in some way, ‘radical’. How could they be engaged in a radical political project called ‘red clinic’ alongside and as an intimate part of the project to understand their distress and change the way they engage in the world. So, how do we release service users from the demand to be good radicals?

Fourth, what do we mean by ‘collective’. The signifier ‘communist’ is not enough, given the history of the way the term has been used and abused, to guide us, and there are institutional obstacles to this. The therapy as a private enclosed space is necessarily in some way outside the collective sphere, and it is a refuge and space to speak, to speak without the usual consequences of speaking to a family member, or an ‘expert’ or, indeed, a comrade. Advice is absent and so is commitment of the usual kind in everyday life. The collective work of the institution of any clinic is suspended in the actual clinic room. So, how do we square our social project with personal change?

Challenges

If these were not problems enough, there are more. The very small numbers involved and the conditions in which we work mean that online therapy will likely be the main option, but that is a form of work that has an alienating isolating effect that runs counter to the ethos of the Red Clinic. What it is to be ‘collective’ in these conditions changes radically. That also means that ‘internationalism’ threatens to be reduced into tokenism as we link with radical therapists in different parts of the world and work out what we can offer each other practically in terms of support.

There are in post-pandemic global capitalism, a host of issues that compound those that have beset red or radical therapy initiatives in the past. We know we are reinventing some of those past initiatives in new conditions, and we need help to do that, which is why a meeting in a context of a strike seemed a good place to begin again. We are asking whether we can do this, how, and whether different questions and answers can be developed if we are to have any success in the project.

Laya Hooshyari gave a vivid account of her work in South Tehran with ‘subaltern’ women, those who face oppression that is very different from the usual middle-class clients in psychotherapy. The group took on the name ‘Women with Red Lips’ after a participant in the group there who confronted the cancer she lived with, putting on red lipstick as a sign of her defiance. Laya described how different this work was from the usual therapeutic fake ‘empowerment’ of clients. She also insisted on the significance of the workers’ own presence in meetings and discussions about the formation of the Red Clinic.

Sohrab Resvani talked about his work in a co-operative clinic, run by an assembly of ‘shuras’, self-governing workers and consumers councils in Iran that was focused on ‘social self-understanding’ or, what could also be translated as ‘socialist self-understanding’. He raised a key question for the Red Clinic about its ‘internationalism’; whether we are concerned with simply transferring resources from privileged wealthy sites we work in to other places we are in solidarity with, or whether we are willing to support some form of ‘convoy’ that would physically practically take aid to, say, Mariupol or Gaza. Moreover, he argued that critical psychology needs not only to make a critique of the therapeutic and educational content of psychology, but also the ‘organizational form’ of clinics. It will be self-defeating, he said, if we build a Red Clinic as, for example, a private company or a charity.

Artemis Christinaki, who has worked with asylum seekers in the transit camps in Greece could not attend due to Covid, but a point that she wanted to make was relayed to the meeting, that there is a difference between most versions of psychotherapy and some versions of psychoanalysis that have political consequences. Much psychotherapy aims to soothe people and enable them to happily adapt again to existing conditions, while some psychoanalysts do not at all pretend to make people happy. Instead, the task of analysis is to face up to the unbearable contradictions that we live with, and enable us to actively confront them. In a project such as the Red Clinic a task would not only be to confront them individually but equally build a collective of understanding and action within it.

The opening talks were provocative, and participants at the meeting picked up on these points and took the issues in a number of different directions. A therapist working with the IAPT (government funded ‘Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies’) services asked whether we are ‘experts’ handing down knowledge, and what our target clients are; is it, for example, that we treat radicals, those disappointed by the failure of Jeremy Corbyn, for example, or is this really to be for everyone.

A senior clinical psychologist who had been managing services in Manchester spoke, in similar terms, about the danger of a gap between some of the academic debates about how to provide therapy, and the actual lived oppression of those who are receiving treatment in the NHS. She pointed out that the NHS is the largest single employer in the UK, and that we need to engage not only in the development of something that may effectively function as another tiny ‘private’ service, but also in the context of existing NHS provision.

A number of participants raised the question of the link between education and clinical provision, and asked how the Red Clinic could function as a cooperative, how transparent it could be in its functioning. For example, a recently qualified counselling psychologist asked what the implications are of using money from wealthy clients to subsidise or provide no-cost treatment for those who could not afford to pay. What would be the consequences, for example, on the perception of treatment of those who are paying, knowing that they are subsidising others.

An impossible collective process

Lydia MacKinnnon from the Red Clinic, who had come over to the meeting from Paris, responded to many of the questions, but acknowledged that these were questions that we need to work through. The questions had implications not only for how the Red Clinic might develop as a service, but also for the political education process it wanted to set up. This meeting was part of that process, a collective process. Also mentioned by another participant was the work of the ‘Clinique Contributive’ in Paris, and researchers involved in this work are interested in linking with the Red Clinic.

The Red Clinic, someone commented, was impossible but to say that something is impossible is no reason to say that it should not be attempted. Such a project is necessary. There was commitment by some of those now engaged in therapy, and by some present who have experience in managing services to help with the project. Ten people signed up to stay in contact with the Red Clinic, and others emailed to say they wanted to be kept in the loop. Red Clinic is on Facebook. To keep up to date with the development of the Red Clinic, email Ian Parker at discourseunit@gmail.com

You can read and comment on this article where it was originally published here

This is also part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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Socialisms and psychoanalysis

The book Socialisms: Revolutions Betrayed, Mislaid and Unmade did not concern itself with psychoanalysis. The book is a description and political analysis of eight failed attempts to build socialism in this capitalist world so hostile to collective self-organisation. But these failures do raise questions about the place of psychoanalysis in the world, both as a therapeutic practice and as a form of political critique.

Practice

First, there is the claim that psychoanalysis offers a place for ‘free association’ that may threaten regimes that are based on surveillance of their people. This is sometimes even extended to the idea that the political ethos of psychoanalysis leads to the kind of ‘free association’ we hope and aim for in a socialist society. Such an ethos is threatening to regimes that claim to be socialist but are not, that have betrayed fundamental principles of Marxist politics in which, as Lenin put it, we should expect and demand debate, open governmental processes that are a thousand times more democratic than in bourgeois parliamentary regimes. The issue here is whether or not psychoanalysis connects ‘free association’ and the right to speak freely inside the clinic with a political programme; there are plenty of regimes that do actually seem to believe that is the case, and oppose psychoanalysis for that very reason.

So, in the case of the USSR, there was a first flourishing of psychoanalysis in the 1920s, with prominent psychologists like Lev Vygotsky and AR Luria joining the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, and then leaving the society when Stalin tightened his grip on the apparatus, when psychoanalysis was seen as a threat. I saw minutes of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society signed by Luria, and then a hand-written note from Luria and Vygotsky when I visited Izhevsk, and it was clear that, with the end of the regime there were new possibilities, new openings for psychoanalysis, but within limits. As the regime shifted from bureaucratic state management to capitalism through the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s we saw, in fact, even greater hostility to what were viewed as aberrant decadent ‘Western’ forms of sexuality than under Stalin. Stalin outlawed homosexuality, and the Putin regime demonises it, and discussions of queer theory in an Izhevsk psychoanalytic congress that I attended were very difficult.

There is another indication of this in the case of Cuba, where, during my second visit that I describe in the book, I attended a psychology congress that included a session devoted to the work of Fernando González Rey, who was head of the Cuban Psychological Society and Vice-Rector of Havana University for many years. González Rey fell out with Castro during a visit to Brazil when his wife needed medical treatment and he defied Castro’s order that he should return to Havana, and for many years after that he was persona non grata in Cuban psychology, but the congress was a sign that things were opening up again. It should also be noted that González Rey was, during his time at the head of the psychology department and then vice-rector in Havana University, a key figure in brokering unusual path-breaking meetings which brought psychoanalysts, both from the International Psychoanalytical Association and Lacanian groups, from outside the country. I guess we could take this as a sign that Cuba has, through the years, been more open to dissent. Not completely so; it has always been under threat from the US and has had good reason to be suspicious of ‘dissidents’ working for foreign powers, but relatively more open than the Soviet Union. I met with some young Cuban academics, not psychologists, and we went walking through Havana, chancing on a street bookstall near the University on the way, and there was a little book, published in Cuba, of writings of the Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. Again, perhaps this is a sign of relative openness in a regime that broke from capitalism but is still subject to it, that collectivised key industries but which has now had to relax restrictions, just recently abandoning the ‘dual currency’ that separated tourists and foreign entrepreneurs from the locals.

As well as repression of psychoanalysis as such, which was fiercer in the Soviet Union and the satellite states under its control, there was also some relaxation as the hold of Moscow was also lessened. In the case of Serbia, for example, the break between Tito and Stalin was, perhaps, more significant than I made it seem in my description in the book. I emphasised more the continuity between Tito and Milošević and then the current regime, which is well on the way to embracing fully-fledged neoliberalism, than focusing on the positive aspects of Tito. We have to remember that Yugoslavia, of which Serbia was a dominant cultural bloc, was also a place of intellectual ferment, which included more openness to psychoanalysis. Wilhelm Reich’s writings were translated quite early on, and my main guide and friend in Belgrade during my visit was one of those who translated Reich when Serbia was, as she still sees it, ‘socialist’. Slavoj Žižek wrote a lengthy introduction to a Croatian translation of Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism, and, of course, psychoanalysis was a resource for the countercultural movement in Slovenia.

There are now psychoanalytic trainings in these countries, now that they have become capitalist societies, as there are in China, and I have discussed this with friends who studied in the West and then returned to China, during which time, psychoanalysis had blossomed. The trainings are, however, often linked to medical institutions which is where the training by Western organisations is often pitched. When I briefly discussed psychoanalysis in North Korea, by the way, I was met with the blankest of faces, and futile attempts to engage with what I was saying – which was rare because those assigned to deal with Westerners very quickly change the subject when conversation touches on things that are out of the tour frame – indicated that they had not the slightest idea what I was talking about. There were no psychoanalytic books in the libraries we were permitted to enter in Pyongyang.

Here again we need to reflect critically on the claim that the existence of psychoanalysis in a society is an indication that the society is ‘freer’. The claim that psychoanalysis can only really function in a democratic society, and that the two – the realm of therapeutic practice in the clinic and the realm of political debate – mirror each other, is often assumed to be the case by liberal and even some radical psychoanalysts, but I am not so sure it is true. We just have to consider, for example, the case of Hungary, where psychoanalysis did flourish under the Horthy regime, before the incorporation of the country into the ‘Eastern Bloc’ and Soviet control, or South Africa, where psychoanalytic associations operated during the years of apartheid. The flipside of this is Argentina, not by any stretch a socialist country, where it is true that some psychoanalysts, like Marie Langer, had to leave the country during the dictatorship, but this did not at all spell the end of psychoanalysis. Other psychoanalysts stepped in to fill the positions of those who left the country, and the practice, depoliticised perhaps, even so survived.

There are two other issues closely connected with this. One is that psychoanalysis is a child of the Western Enlightenment, and, contradictory though it is, and perhaps precisely because it is contradictory, difficult to pin down, make sense of, some regimes are suspicious of it. I heard in several places the claim that psychoanalysis is ‘Western’, and suspect for that reason. The other issue, which I’ve already flagged up briefly, is the link with non-normative sex, well the link with sex actually, which is always necessarily in some ways ‘non-normative’. I describe in the book attacks on vegans in Georgia, and the conservative pro-family activists there are as hostile to feminism as they are to psychoanalysis, seeing the two sets of ideas as equivalent.

Critique

Second, alongside claims about whether psychoanalysis is or is not ‘radical’, or even liberal about the need for ‘free association’ – which is no bad thing, to be honest – there are some deeper conceptual questions about the interrelationship between forms of socialism and psychoanalytic views of what subjectivity is. The two are connected, of course, through feminism, particularly socialist feminism in the claim that the ‘personal is political’, and that is why feminism has been an absolutely necessary and unavoidable bridge-point for many activists and analysts between Marxism and psychoanalysis. That is one reason, by the way, why conventional so-called ‘Freudo-Marxism’ and the strand of work that eventually led back to the pro-family complaints of the likes of Christopher Lasch failed, why they ended up down conservative dead-ends; hostility to feminism blocks, at some point, possible connections between the idea of socialism and psychoanalytic practice.

One block, one obstacle, to linking the two, or, another way of putting, distorting both, is in the bedrock claims about ‘human nature’ and the spiralling of ideological claims about what the human being is not capable of because of this or that aspect of their nature. It is here that the operation of psychoanalysis as some kind of worldview is so reactionary. There is a key question about ‘socialism’ here, and the way that regimes I discuss in the book often turn Marxism into a worldview. This was clear in the case of China, where I was told by one Communist Party apparatchik that Marxism was their ‘faith’, and that’s why students needed to learn about it. In the case of North Korea, incidentally, this belief system is transformed into something more mystical, the ‘Juche’ idea. One of the cultural-political limitations of the ‘socialisms’ I discuss, is precisely that they were governed by a belief system functioning as if it was a faith. Maybe I am too liberal here, but it is precisely because I am a Marxist that I do not see ‘Socialism’ as being defined by its belief system but by the creative ability of contradictory ideas and practices to work together; that is ‘free association’, an aim if not completely possible. Likewise, it is because I am a psychoanalyst that I am averse to psychoanalysis being turned into a ‘faith’, and to talk about ‘splitting’ and ‘projection’ and ‘aggresivity’ and ‘jouissance’ being used to tell us what we cannot do as human beings, and so used to sanctimoniously explain why socialism has failed.

Another block, another obstacle is in common assumptions about subjectivity and change that are sometimes actually shared by psychoanalysts and the left. This is the old hydraulic model of the unconscious that is so popular in psychologised representations of psychoanalysis, and that still seems to be even believed by some psychoanalysts, an idea that has also entered into popular consciousness as an implicit model of the emergence of political resistance and action. Marxism is very clear about this, and in opposition to this point, arguing that the contradictions of capitalism are a function of the specific nature of its political-economic functioning, and that the working class is constituted as a force that will overthrow capitalism. That is, dialectics does not posit the force of upheaval and overthrow as primary but as a function of the system.

Capitalism distorts Marxism, so that even socialists often argue their corner using rhetorical tropes and even historical narratives that are antithetical to it – conspiracy theories being a case in point – and capitalism very efficiently distorts psychoanalysis too, making it seem as if psychoanalysis stirs up the instinctual depths of the individual, exacerbating these when individuals associate with each other and turn into mobs. That returns us to the image of psychoanalysis that so concerns some of these regimes I describe in the book, and returns us to images of Marxism at the same time.

Representations

As well as including detailed historical-political context for the regimes I describe, and reportage to weave a narrative about the internal shape of the regimes, the book is about representations and self-representations of different forms of socialism. I begin the book with an introduction which points out that Marx never offered a blueprint for socialism, and Marxists have usually been careful not to specify exactly what communism would look like. The best nearest accounts of that we have available to us now are still in the vein of speculative fiction, in the work of writers like Ursula Le Guin. In other words, Marxist political activists do not, as some psychoanalytic conservative accounts would have it, present an ‘ideal’ which they then try to press the real world into some correspondence with.

We have real problems when we are trying to articulate psychoanalytic and socialist accounts of society because the domain of psychoanalysis is the clinic, not society. Attempts by psychoanalysts to generalise their favourite theory of internal psychic processes to society usually stumble over another problem. From Freud onward, psychoanalytic analyses of society are always themselves from a particular political position. Usually that political position is disavowed; psychoanalysts often wield their theory in such a way as to pretend that they are simply neutrally describing reality. Venezuelan psychoanalysts have often voiced opposition to the regime there because they want to defend their practice as something private, available only for payment, a political not a clinical position.

Many of the representations and even self-representations of socialism are, nevertheless, influenced by some version or other of psychoanalytic theory. There are two reasons for this. One reason is that Freud’s ideas have been a staple of popular media for over a century now, ranging from the reference and use and depiction of those ideas in Hollywood film to the motifs that structure novels, either in knowing winks to the reader in high-brow novels or in simplistic portrayals of underlying sexual motives in pulp fiction. The other reason is that Freud himself picked up and recycled many popular ideas about the mind and worked on them to develop psychoanalysis. This is especially apparent in his accounts of social processes, and in the work of succeeding generations of psychoanalysts. This is especially so in forms of psychoanalysis aiming to adapt their practice and their analysands to society instead of challenging it. There are then dire consequences for images of socialism in psychoanalysis.

Take, for example, images of the crowd. Yes, it is true that Freud re-read and re-worked Le Bon’s nineteenth-century diatribes against ‘the mob’. So, we have in Freud’s ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ a more sophisticated account of the role of the ego-ideal in the form of a leader or a leading idea structuring identification and idealisation in groups. But Freud also carried into psychoanalysis from Le Bon a distrust of collective action as prone to be pathological, distrust that reflected Freud’s own political position, worry about things getting out of control, worry about irrational forces being unleashed.

So now when we look at representations of socialism, we find some of these self-same ideas at work, ideas that are of a piece with psychoanalytic diagnoses of socialism as a problem. In the case of the recent Netflix series ‘Crash Landing on You’, say, which is about a very wealthy young South Korean woman landing by mistake after a freak storm in the Demilitarised Zone and falling in love with a soldier from the DPRK elite, we have quasi-psychoanalytic elements structuring the narrative. According to this South Korean television series, the dictatorial regime north of the border is riddled with corruption and crime, and there are criminals and gangs running riot unchecked by the authorities. There may be no psychoanalysis in North Korea, but there is plenty of it around in the South in academic work and in popular culture.

The series pokes fun at the South Korean elite, yes, with images of wealthy Catholics asking God to intercede, but the North Korean regime is presented, represented as dangerous precisely because there is no such authoritative trustworthy societal structure in place. It is as if South Korea is organised around the figure of the Swiss policeman Freud speaks about – a strict but fair superego to be installed at the end of analysis – and North Korea, in contrast, is ruled by the Russian corrupt cop, a superego that asks to be bribed and that then licences self-destructive and anti-social behaviour. There are scenes of North Koreans being tutored in how to articulate their feelings, in the way that psychoanalysts keen on ‘psychological-mindedness’ would approve of. Switzerland does actually figure in ‘Crash Landing on You’, and the series was filmed in South Korea, Switzerland and Mongolia.

Conclusions

What I aim to do in the book is show how and why each form of ‘socialism’ failed, how it was betrayed, mislaid or unmade, examining the particular circumstances in which the revolutions occurred and the world-historical context in which they struggled to find their way. We need detailed analyses of actually-existing socialisms and analyses of forms of psychoanalysis too, showing how they intersect, how the failure of each reinforce each other and so working through how the success of each can provide resources for the other.

This is part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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Looping psychoanalysis into film

Our life-world of film, a domain of reality that is an intimate part of our society of the spectacle, has in some respects been shrunken down during this latest pandemic. Film is now not only an intimate part of the spectacle, but intimate to us; the forms of subjectivity it rolls in front of our eyes quickly unspool behind them, inside us, becoming part of our own subjectivity. Psychoanalysis has always had something to say about the big screen, and now, of course, it has more to say, it has an even more richly elaborated array of discursive devices to speak to us about who we become in the more intimate space of our own home, when the screen is smaller. But we need to ask why that is, why it is that psychoanalysis speaks to us about film almost as deeply as film itself does.

Contented form

First, there is a question of content, of the feeding of psychoanalytic motifs into film, so that film criticism becomes an exercise in unravelling what has been spooled into the object being examined. This happens in US and then globalised film culture remarkably early on, and film then becomes one of the virtual microbial cultures of psychoanalysis. Take Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, for example, from 1941, in which characters refer explicitly to ‘psychoanalytical’ explanations of the message unwittingly or covertly, it is not clear which, passed from Barbara Stanwyck to Gary Cooper. This box office hit also sent a message to the audience that marked significant interpersonal, and, by implication, intra-personal messages as being in some way ‘psychoanalytical’.

Second, more potent still is the question of form, of how it is that the texture of film, flickering snapshots of reality are chained together to fabricate the illusion that there is a moving image on the screen that is more vibrant, charged with affect; this so that the plot money-shot injects not only a sense that there is something cathartic about the compression and conclusion of a narrative, but also another message about the nature of reality and subjectivity itself. Directors have often struggled to portray dreams in film precisely because film already harnesses and reconfigures reality as if it were a dream fragment that, at some point, will yield its meaning. The Dalí sequence in Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound is a notorious case in point. The critic and academic are hooked into this game as surely as is the viewer, but they draw on a specific kind of language to pin it down, a language that is often structured as if it is psychoanalytic.

Then, as we learn to speak about film, those of us who are not critics or academics, the uncanny and unsatisfying, the realistic and moving character of what we have watched together in the cinema also become, bit by bit, structured by the same range of psychoanalytic rhetorical devices. Psychoanalytic discourse now inhabits everyday life, appearing to give access to hidden depths while repeatedly structuring the sense that there are hidden depths – in the film and in ourselves as we respond to it – in the working over of content and in the replication of form. In both cases, to be able to convey to someone else who has seen the same film that one ‘understands’ it requires that the meanings be grasped and moulded; the meaning of film always lies in its use. Filmic discourse does not only describe the world but creates affiliation, identification even, among those who employ that discourse, identification that often also requires disjunction, disagreement, the idea that the film is not completely exhausted of meaning. Film is, in this sense, constituted as if it were a subject, never fully able to reveal itself to us.

One of the effects of the streaming into the home of film, and of the blurring of boundaries between cinema and television, is that this enigmatic and inexhaustible character of the filmic narrative is intensified. The box-sets we glut on take on even more the character of a dream, extended, fragmented and inconclusive. In contrast to the apparently rounded out delimited vignette that a classic mass-market film usually is, the box-set narrative usually begins with a premise, a promise and then by series four, say, a lingering unsatisfying trailing off. This is then less triumphant finish than ruined orgasm, something closer to what it is to shy away from impossible enjoyment, and in that case the teasing and failing is a function of viewing figures and advertising revenue. The drivers are economic, but the drives are privatised, and the excitement and disappointment located inside each individual viewer.

The time-compression and sense of personal control of what streaming into the home brings are new questions for psychoanalysis. Or rather, an intensification of the old questions about how we are positioned as subjects in relation to a symbolic medium that seems to express what we want while impressing on us a complex contradictory series of wants from somewhere beyond us. Now it is as if the Other is with us inside our homes asking us what we want while instructing us about the permissible parameters of what we can want and tantalising us about the prospect of there being something more. It was ever thus, but now, in the context of the Pandemic, the small screen reminds us that there is a big screen to which we might one day return, should want to return to.

Looping

This is what ‘looping’ is, with psychoanalysis as one of the looping effects of film and television, and now the more intensely privatised experience of streaming the moving image into our own homes. Psychoanalysis is very well able to comment on what is happening here precisely because it is woven into the phenomenon itself. A looping effect is a particular kind of feedback in which we are subjectively implicated in what is described such that what we describe to ourselves becomes the stuff of our subjectivity. In the case of psychoanalysis, this looping is tantalisingly incomplete; it must be so for psychoanalysis to work, for film re-activates the discourse and the experience of there being something unsaid, something unconscious. One of the indications that the psychoanalytic looping effect is at work is when phenomena specific to the clinic, specific to the strange artificial relationship between analyst and analysand, spill out into everyday life. Then we resonate with them onscreen because we assume that what we see resonates with the kind of beings we are.

I have one TV example. The CEO of Netflix tell us that their only competition is sleep, but this example is from the dream-world laid out by Amazon Prime Video. Take episode three of the 2015 mini-series Mr Robot, for example. Mr Robot, played by Christian Slater, masterfully incites and manipulates what we might quite understandably take to be ‘transference’ to him on the part of Elliot Alderson, the neurotic hacker played by Rami Malek. Mr Robot, the master, goads Elliot about his relationship with his father and repeatedly ‘interprets’ this failed relationship as also concerning him, Robot; he thereby structures the choices Elliot must make, not so much as the way in, but as if the way out of his prison, and that means Elliot must choose to work with Mr Robot. It is as if Christian Slater is also simultaneously playing the part of a stereotypical IPA-analyst from hell, provoking, constituting the transference so that it can be put to work, as if what drives it comes from inside his victim. Never underestimate the canny ability of the writers to pop in to the box-set what we then imagine we are so clever in detecting there. What should be noticed here is not merely the framing of the relationship, but its own internal looping effects within the narrative of the series, and then, of course, the questions it raises about why it would be that someone should carry on watching the thing.

We carry on watching this stuff because we enjoy it, but it is the patterning of that enjoyment that is the issue here. Of course we then enjoy excavating new meaning, mastering what is unresolved in the narrative. Rather like this particular pandemic itself, which is a narrative with an uncertain beginning and even more uncertain ending, every attempt to create a metalanguage that will master film must fail. We can then be sure that the parasitic industry of professional academic criticism, including journals and conferences devoted to psychoanalytic discourse, will find confirmation of underlying psychoanalytic assumptions that they make. The work of interpretation here is unending because there is nothing to be done save plugging and unplugging the gaps in subjectivity that film plays its own part in creating and re-creating.

This is part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice

This book review of On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice (Fritz Morgenthaler, edited by Dagmar Herzog, London and New York: Routledge, 2020; 199pp.) was written by Ian Parker for the journal Psychoanalysis and History22, 3, pp. 382-384 [DOI: 10.3366/pah.2020.0357]

The fraught connection between psychoanalysis and politics has been forged, broken, rediscovered and remade in different cultural contexts during Freud’s working life, and, after his death, in different schools devoted to his clinical practice as well as in radical movements that have often been keen to find in psychoanalysis the promise of liberation. This book – ten lectures by the Swiss analyst Fritz Morgenthaler who died in 1984 – enables the reader to see something of the contradictions that beset attempts to make this connection from within the organisational heart of psychoanalysis, the International Psychoanalytical Association, the IPA.

Morgenthaler was a prominent member of the IPA, engaging with the tradition of ego psychology, dominant in the IPA diaspora after the Second World War, and, towards the end of his life, with the object relations and relational currents of theory developing in the United States. It is that ‘relational’ aspect of his work that is claimed in this book of lectures; the useful contextualising essay introducing Morgenthaler to an English-speaking readership by Dagmar Herzog, the chapter end-notes and the supplementary material are together deployed to shift emphasis from the more conservative aspects of Morgenthaler’s clinical practice to a particular conceptual and political project.

Herzog’s introductory essay explains why Morgenthaler is historically and politically important, drawing attention to two axes of his work that are relevant in that respect. The first axis of his work, questioning assumptions about ‘race’, was of interest to the West German Left; the title of the popular co-authored ‘Whites Think Too Much’ (Die Weissen denken zuviel) is both indicative of the nature of the question and contains a clue as to the rather romanticising answer Morgenthaler proposed. Morgenthaler adverts, in his lecture on ‘Modes of interaction in perversions’, for example, to the way that in Africa ‘rituals can be joyful celebrations that allow participation in sensual pleasure’ (p. 181).

The anthropological studies Morgenthaler carried out in Africa and Papua New Guinea, and published with his co-workers, were influential resources in the development of ‘ethnopsychoanalysis’. This anthropological aspect of his work is not explored in this volume, though it is present in the concern with opening up psychoanalysis to the possibility that there are different forms of subjectivity in different cultures, something that perhaps led Morgenthaler to make his well-known break with homophobic assumptions in clinical practice.

It is that aspect of his work, the second axis of psychoanalytic critique, that is more present in this book, though we still need the editorial and supplementary text apparatus to draw out what was most radical about it. It concerns sexuality; Morgenthaler makes an important distinction between ‘the sexual’ (das Sexuelle) of the primary process and ‘organised sexuality’ (organisierte Sexualitãt) which he likens to a kind of dictatorship. Morgenthaler was one of the first IPA psychoanalysts to speak out against the pathologisation of homosexuality, and, in one of the supplementary texts included in this book, he takes Heinz Kohut to task for that. Morgenthaler’s take on the distinction between ‘the sexual’ and ‘sexuality’ enabled him to key into the emerging lesbian and gay liberation interests of the West German Left in the 1970s, this without adopting the rather moralising precepts of Wilhelm Reich.

This is where Morgenthaler’s clinical work is actually, potentially, most liberating, for he values the space of the clinic as one in which no particular presuppositions are made about what is ‘normal’ about sexual object choice (unlike Reich, who wanted to gear the clinical process to what he saw as a radical hetero-orgasmic political programme). More than that, Morgenthaler begins to question the implicit assumption in much psychoanalytic practice, one voiced by Freud, that the aim of analysis is to enable the analysand to live a more productive life. That productive element locks psychoanalysis into a concern with adaptation, something that Morgenthaler sets himself against; ‘Analysis is also no good for quickly reassimilating to the dominant societal morality a patient who is in a nonconforming position vis-à-vis society’ (p. 151).

Note the rather cautious and elliptical formulation here. It is potentially radical, but that needs to be drawn out and made explicit by his readers. Morgenthaler comes to the conclusion that there should be no prescribed end-point of analysis beyond it introducing some ‘turbulence’ into the analysand’s internal life. These arguments were enough to encourage the West German Left to invite Morgenthaler to contribute to their Kursbuch in 1977; his essay ‘Modes of interaction in perversions and perversion of modes of interaction: A look over the fence around psychoanalysis’ is reprinted as one of the supplementary texts in this book.

One can well imagine that Morgenthaler’s comments on the nature of an ‘ill society’ (p. 169) that requires psychoanalysis, and his suggestion (to Kohut, for instance) that interpretation of society as well of the individual in the clinic could be possible and useful would have been attractive to elements of the Left who were already intrigued by psychoanalysis. However, the lectures themselves are replete with existing ego-psychological and quasi object-relations themes, with quite long stretches of the text devoted to successful ‘reconstructive interpretations’ that would be avoided by many psychoanalysts today.

The subversive nature of Morgenthaler’s ruminations in these lectures and the suggestive comments he makes about ‘perversion’, including perversion present in the analyst, are well-worth excavating and making visible now, and that, perhaps, justifies the effort the reader must make. These lectures are not, Dagmar Herzog warns us, easy reading. There are hints and false starts and twists in the argument, and there is sometimes some special pleading on behalf of Morgenthaler in the chapter end-notes, reminding the reader that he does not really mean what he seems to be saying about ‘feeble-mindedness’ and ‘frigidity’, for example.

The title of the book is indicative. Although ‘dialectics’ will, no doubt, hook a reader who wants to find in these lectures a connection between the process of personal transformation in psychoanalysis and political-economic transformation and, perhaps, some attention to the nature of alienation in a society organised around the commodification of sexuality, they will be disappointed. Morgenthaler’s ‘dialectics’, it turns out, is concerned with the nature of ‘contradiction’, nothing more than that, contradiction that speaks of the internal conflicts of the human subject whatever society they live in. He edges towards Marxism in these lectures, but does not arrive there.

The next steps, beyond Morgenthaler, need to be taken through developing traditions of psychoanalytic and political praxis. His comments on the ‘sequential’ form of analysis are reminiscent of later attempts in psychoanalysis to return to the properly Freudian retroactive character of trauma, self-accounting and interpretation. The ‘relational’ current of work reads back into his lectures a particular trajectory, but his opposition to adaptation and his refusal of the once-popular image of the psychoanalyst as cleansed of pathology could just as easily lead us to other forms of psychoanalysis; to Fanon, who is absent from this book, or to one who was persona non grata in the IPA, the barely editorially end-noted Lacan.

The book speaks of the democratising hopes of psychoanalysis in Europe after the Second World War, but does not, in the lectures themselves, take us much beyond that. Editor Dagmar Herzog opens a door, shows a path, but readers will need to take the next steps themselves.

This is one part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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Coronavirus and the end of the world

David Pavón-Cuéllar address to the College of Psychoanalysts – UK international conference Psychoanalysis in Adverse Conditions on 7 November 2020

Perhaps the pandemic seems to us like an end-of-the-world movie. Maybe all we want now is to get back to normal. It may be that we have not realized that normality is the real end of the world.

Normality is the devastation of everything by capitalism. It is the destruction of all life for the sake of capital accumulation. It is more and more inert money at the cost of all life in the world.

Normality is the disappearance, in the last 150 years, of almost half of the fertile soil on earth. It is the loss of an equivalent of 40 football fields of tropical forest every minute. It is the daily extinction of 150 species of animals and plants. All this is already the end of the world.

We are also witnessing the end of the world when we read that wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years, that land-based insects have been declining at nearly 1% per year, that annual rate of current desertification is more than 3 per cent. This global devastation is the normalcy to which many want to return.

The normal is that air pollution kills twenty thousand people per day in the world, that is, more than double of the total number of deaths from coronavirus at the peaks of the pandemic. This data allows us to understand a puzzling news that was spread in the beginning of the pandemic. The British tabloid Daily Mail reported that thousands of lives had been saved in China since the coronavirus appeared. The information was right: the interruption of industrial activities due to the pandemic drastically reduced the emission of gases, which, in turn, saved more lives than were lost by the pandemic itself.

We see that the coronavirus is much less lethal than just one of the many effects of capital. We also know that the functioning of capitalism has been affected by COVID-19, which makes us place our hope in this viral agent to cure us of the capitalist terminal illness. It is with this hope that Žižek, from the beginning of the pandemic, conceived the coronavirus as a possible deadly blow against capitalism.

It is obvious that the capitalist system will not die of coronavirus and that Žižek is not naive enough to think this. He knows what we all know, that the circumstances created by the coronavirus can help us, but that we are the ones who must free ourselves from capitalism. At this juncture, as in any other in which the space of uncertainty expands, the outcome will depend mainly on us as subjects, on the subjects that we are and that we will become.

If we want to avoid the end of the world we are living in, we need to transform ourselves. It is necessary to reverse our subjectification by the capitalist system. We must stop being possessive and cumulative, competitive and destructive, compulsive consumers, white-collar murderers, ecocidal and ultimately suicidal individuals.

It is by shaking off capitalism that we will be other than who we are and thus avoid the worst and save ourselves. At the same time, as Žižek has said, “it is through our effort to save humanity from self-destruction that we are creating a new humanity”. All this is the same process of reinvention and salvation, of liberation and transformation, in which we do not distinguish what happens before or after, since everything has to happen at the same time.

Simultaneity requires a certain anticipation like that prescribed by Rosa Luxemburg at the time of the Second International. We have to save ourselves today in order to save ourselves tomorrow. We must anticipate our destiny, prefigure what we fight for, what is achieved through our own struggle, in its development and not only in its outcome. We have to understand that our time is up. We must get rid of capitalism now, at this precise moment, through each of the manifestations of our existence, because the next moment will be too late.

We have to reject a procrastination, such as that represented by Karl Kautsky in the Second International, which will only serve to let the current cataclysm continue to unfold until its final consequences. We cannot accept that the end of the world is, as Kautsky would say, “a necessary direction of evolution”, and that our only task is to “recognize it” and wait, without pretending to act as “revolutionaries at all costs”. What we need right now is precisely a revolution at all costs. There is no time to wait.

Instead of a typically neurotic Kautskian procrastination, we should opt for a Luxembourgian hysterical prefiguration in which we do not waste the only time we have left, the present. It has never been so pressing to learn from Rosa Luxemburg when she warns us against the “vicious circles” that condemn us to wait for something, whatever it is, “before we can make history”. The best thing for us, right now at the end of the world, is to decide once and for all to intervene in the catastrophe, thus making history, which is precisely, for Jacques Lacan, what we call “hysteria”.

No matter how much damage we cause, it will not be comparable to what is happening. The worst would be that everything remains the same until at the end there is nothing left. Any error is now preferable to the patience and supposed prudence of those who fear to rush and make mistakes. Currently, in the absence of time, the most prudent thing is the haste to anticipate the end. In Lacan’s terms, the “too early” of hysteria is better than the “always too late” to which the neurotic procrastination leads us.

Even when we behave like neurotically blameless citizens, we do not want the end of the world either. Death terrifies us and it is for this very reason that we prefer to wait, sometimes betting on the imminent collapse of capitalism. We thus play the neurotic role that Lacan associates with that of the slave in the Hegelian dialectic: that of the one who “yields to the risk of death”, since “he knows he is mortal”, but for the same reason “he also knows that the master has to die”, so that “he can accept to work for the master in the uncertainty of the moment when the master’s death will come”.

In the uncertainty, we continue to work for capitalism, for the end of the world. At least we are sure of staying alive. But perhaps we should not be so sure about it, because “while we wait, we are already dead”, as Lacan warns us. We are already dead like our gestures that translate the functioning of the system, being repeated in a blind, neurotic and compulsive, mechanical way. We are already dead like puppets, like the gears of any machinery, like the zombies, who not by chance obsess us today.

We are already dead in the first place because we renounce our life, because we allow all of it to be possessed and sucked out by the vampire of capital, only hoping in vain that some of it is returned to us at the end of the day, on the weekend, in the next holidays, in retirement or in the collapse of capitalism, which obviously never happens, not only because we are already exhausted to live, but because the lost life is never recovered. But we are also already dead because the only life that is lived is that one that is risked, because there is only self-consciousness of life, as Hegel has explained, in “the fear of death, the absolute master”. We can only exist, as Heidegger confirms, in the anguish of being for death. We only live fully when we relate immediately to death, when we touch it, when we fight to the death against what threatens to kill us, which at this very moment is mainly capitalism. Being anti-capitalist is perhaps the only way to be truly alive, alive before death, in our current situation.

At the point we’ve reached, resigning ourselves to capitalism is abandoning ourselves to our death for the very fact of forgetting it. It is dying in the unconsciousness of dying. It is allowing oneself to be killed in the absence of what Marxism still calls “class consciousness”: consciousness that our life is being annihilated by capital. Lacking this consciousness is, in Lacan’s terms, depriving ourselves of the “knowledge” that should stop us, preferring “jouissance”, the enjoyment of capital that drags us into “progress marked by death”, into the inertia of “death drive”, on the “slope towards the inanimate”.

Instead of knowing that we could face death and thus avoid the worst, we indulge in the ideological fictions of capitalism that operate exactly like the neurotic’s excuses for Lacan. They only serve to keep death “at a distance”, away from us, distracting us from it, forgetting it while we abandon ourselves to it. This is what the cultural industry of capitalism is for, but also the demagoguery of those neoliberal and now neo-fascist politicians who dedicate their lives to supporting fictions such as green capitalism, inexhaustible resources, perpetual growth, responsible companies, consumerism favorable to prosperity, the invisible hand, the self-regulation of the market, the benefits of the competition of all against all, and the democratic character of bourgeois democracy and its rule of law.

As Jorge Alemán has well noted, the “constitutive fictions of capitalism” have been “stripped” by the pandemic. This global crisis offers us a chance to break through fantasy and see capitalism for what it is behind its fictions. This is what we discover in the rows of graves for the victims of coronavirus, in the corpses scattered through the streets of Ecuador and in other images that remind us of end-of-the-world movies.

You can see David deliver this address to the conference here: https://youtu.be/7q83VlPcC9g

This is one part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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September 28, 2020

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Psychopolitical cults

The term ‘psychopolitics’ has a sinister edge to it now, but it was not always so. The term has undergone significant shifts of meaning. In studies of fascism in the 1930s to the New Left rebellions of the 1960s it referred to the attempt to connect subjectivity – our personal experience of who we are in the world – with political change. Progressive use of the term ranged from psychoanalytic accounts of the way relations to authority become embedded in individuals – ‘internalised’ – such that people feel isolated and unable to change, to feminist insistence that politics is to be found inside our intimate relationships as well as in the struggle against economic exploitation.

With the fading of revolt in the 1970s and the later apparent victory of capitalism in the 1990s, more was learnt more about the involvement of the security forces in psychological propaganda during the Cold War and against the Left. Now psychopolitics came to refer to the fear of brainwashing and the destruction of individual autonomy, but the horrible twist to these revelations was that psychological theories as to why the world was a miserable and destructive place became even more powerful. The increasing influence of psychological discourse – stories about what the mind is like and how it is possible to master it – has meant that psychopolitics is something that people are in awe of, even afraid of.

The accusation that this or that group is a ‘cult’ is infused with this new discourse, and psychopolitics in the sinister meaning of the term is used to mobilise our fear of groups and collective action. Now, instead of explaining why we are isolated and made to experience our oppression as individual – down to each of us to tackle on our own – the psychopolitical explanations of cult behaviour are designed to make us suspicious of anything other than individual experience. The ground-rules for this psychopolitics of collective action, and of organised groups that seem to threaten our precious individuality, mean that anyone who refuses to believe that the label ‘cult’ is useful must themselves be labelled as cultish.

This is a good example of how everyday commonsense comes to feel so right when it is not, and this intense fear of cults, and especially cults that aim to change the world, is exactly the kind of fear that the old progressive psychopolitics tried to understand. Someone who does not believe in the devil is still capable of making a judgement about right and wrong, and someone who does not believe in ‘cults’ may have other very good explanations as to why some groups are or are not destructive.

In the early 1990s I went to New York to meet with the ‘social therapists’ led by Fred Newman. They combined some kind of radical politics with some kind of radical therapy, and I already knew that this explosive combination of Marxism and psychology had led some of their opponents to label social therapy as a ‘cult’. But why was it so explosive? Precisely because they were linking Marxism – dangerous enough when it was put into practice outside the academic institutions where it had been confined since the 1970s – and psychology. But they were doing something very different with psychology than psychologists do, and the fact they did not really seem to take it seriously as a collection of facts about behaviour and the mind enraged many academics and practitioners. The psychology, fear and awe of psychology coded as dangerous ‘psychopolitics’ seemed to overshadow all of the critical debate about their work. Ex-members and political opponents were more obsessed with Fred than other members of this supposedly cultish organisation or their ideas about social therapy (of which there are various forms).

I gathered a lot of material – journals and leaflets by and about the various social therapy front organisations, of which there were many – and wrote a long critical article called ‘Right said Fred “I’m too sexy for bourgeois group therapy”’. The allusion was to a British band called Right Said Fred that had a chart hit with ‘I’m too sexy’. Lois Holzman – one of the leaders of the group – wrote a reply ‘Wrong said Fred’, and our friendship cooled somewhat I think. But the sense of misunderstanding and betrayal eventually stabilised into an uneasy arms-length distance relationship with social therapy that was most probably helped by us being on different sides of the Atlantic. I did not mean my article to serve as a test, to see if they could withstand criticism, and it did take a while to puzzle over what they were up to, puzzling that continues to today.

This puzzling could be easily ended by grabbing onto the label ‘cult’, for that in itself would also explain why they do not really seem to behave like a cult. Psychopolitics today is like a kind of conspiracy theory that is directed at oppositional groups rather than at the powerful, and it works its way into images of groups that people do not like by making us feel that if they don’t seem like a cult then that must be because they are even more devilishly cultish than we first thought.

I know, for example, that saying how nice those folks are won’t cut much ice with people who don’t like them, and I know that telling you how Fred is at the centre of what social therapists do in their performance work and in their politics will only confirm what you think you know already, that he is obviously the cult leader. In fact, this perhaps hopeless attempt to persuade you that I am not just another gullible fool who has been taken in by this gang is bound to fail, and so I write this in a rather defensive and cautious way (even as I try not to be). To say I was ‘defensive’ is to borrow a term from psychoanalytic psychotherapy that now has wide currency among the Left and liberal chattering classes. As I write this account I am reminded about how defensive and cautious I was when I first met them, as if at any moment they were going to whip my brain out and wash it thoroughly in some East Side Manhattan magic potion. All the social therapy group talk about ‘transference’ (in which past relationships are replayed onto the figure of the therapist) fed my sense that I should keep up my defences when near to them. Their psychoanalytic reference points provoked in me some psychoanalytic responses, deep lived and even with this armoury a little fearful.

It is worth reading the stories circulating on the internet, and with prize of place on websites devoted to exposing social therapy, of people who have left Fred. The paradox appears time and again is that these people seem to have learnt a lesson about collective action from social therapy, but then, I think, drawn the wrong conclusions. At the one moment they have absorbed some of the progressive ideas about psychopolitics that are still alive in this group and at the next they have made sense of those ideas in the frame of present-day discourse about ‘cults’, a discourse that will explain nothing and which merely serves as ammunition against their old comrades. The narrative in the complaints often goes like this: I was in a bad state with lots of personal problems; I met the social therapists who said the problems were in the world; I got drawn into political activity that they said was therapeutic; I gave years of my life and got burnt out; I realised that this was a cult that manipulated people; I got out to save myself from being manipulated; I now campaign with others against the group to expose them.

You can hear this kind of narrative from many people who have once been involved in other radical political movements, and if they change their minds (when they decide that they cannot change the world) they then bitterly resent the resources they put into it. They feel they were duped, and they feel better if they can now put some energy into warning others against getting involved; and (so you can see how easy it is to psychologise political choices) we could then say that their activity now serves as a guarantee to themselves that whereas they were once in the grip of a cult they are now really free. But should we not treat this talk about ‘cults’ as something that also grips us all? We have a choice, it seems to me.

We can either notice how a set of terms is used to pathologise politics, in which case notions like ‘cult’, ‘brainwashing’, ‘internalisation’ and ‘defensiveness’ are treated as buzz-words which indicate that someone has bought into and is endorsing a particular version of psychology (a version of psychological commonsense that is infused with quasi-psychoanalytic notions which we might at other times treat with suspicion). That would give us some room for manoeuvre, and it would enable us to have a debate about different political strategies (even, heaven forbid, including members of the organisations labelled as cults). Or we can line up with those who tell horror-stories about themselves or others as if they were mindless victims who could never have really had any opinions different to what we take to be ‘commonsense’ unless there were deep and dangerous ‘psychological’ reasons, reasons to explain mistaken ideas away. Every few years there is a new wave of allegations and panic about Fred and Co., and every time the panic draws sections of the left into alliances with those who seek to use psychology against politics, and then, of course, this kind of alliance ends up using psychology as a form of politics to discredit all of the left.

The ground-rules of debate in psychological culture individualise our experiences, our responses to political debate and especially our membership of political organisations. Those who care enough about a political cause to join a group are almost immediately pathologised and treated with suspicion. Actually, the social therapists have had some very interesting things to say about this process, taking the link between ‘transference’ and power seriously for example, but while they have used some psychoanalytic ideas they have also refused to sign up to psychoanalysis or to any particular kind of ‘psychology’ as such. The irony is that while these ideas are wiped out of the debate, the ones who are actually drawing on psychology do so by surreptitiously attributing it to the ‘cult’ they attack. What if we could refuse to sign up to psychology too? Perhaps we would then really be able to take the political role of psychology as a form of psychoanalytic reasoning in popular culture more seriously and find something better to do with it than passively accept that we are victims of some peculiar cult mentality.

This article on Psychopolitical Cults was a chapter in Ian Parker’s 2009 Psychoanalytic Mythologies published by Anthem Press.

This is one part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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June 25, 2020

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Memesis and Psychoanalysis: Mediatising Trump

We need to be clear why we are fixated, for the moment, on Trump. There is actually some optimism in the business community and among financial analysts about the Trump regime and what it can deliver, optimism if you are sold on neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatisation and a strong state. If Michael Wolff’s insider book Fire and Fury is to be believed, much of the policy agenda is actually being driven by ‘Jarvanka’, that is Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Democrats who have the aim of installing Ivanka in the White House in the future (Wolff, 2018). Within the frame of this political-economic agenda, and a record of military intervention abroad, there is little evidence that Hillary Clinton would have been much more progressive in charge of the White House. The Trump vote should be set in the context of suspicion of elite machine politics that Hillary was into up to her neck and popular reaction to that, populist reaction peppered with a good dose of misogyny. In this regime, the figure of Trump himself stands out as an exception, an unpredictable element in a political movement which, as Steve Bannon feared, would be drawn into the establishment. Trump could become a generally conformist and typical member of the President’s Club. Trump is an anomaly, object of derision in the press, but should our response be in line with that derision?

The Trump election campaign was a media campaign. More than previous elections, which have been thoroughly mediatised in recent years as part of the society of the spectacle, this campaign revolved around mass media (Debord, 1967/1977). It was a campaign oriented to the media, by media and for the media. And we learn from Michael Wolff’s book that the Trump team had the media in its sights as the main prize, as the end rather than the mere means. Members of the Trump team had their eyes set on media positions at the end of a campaign they expected and hoped to lose, and Trump himself aimed to use the campaign to set up a media empire to rival Fox. They had in mind the advice by ex-Murdoch anchor-man Roger Ailes, that if you want a career in television, ‘first run for president’. The election campaign effectively continues after Trump has been installed with a proliferation of fake news and the signifier ‘fake news’ which haunts the media now. From this flows the kind of analyses we need, either analysis that will be really critical of Trump, or the kind of analysis that will easily and pretty immediately be recuperated, neutralised and absorbed by the spectacle.

It wasn’t just any old media that was crucial here, but new social media. Rapid decline in newspaper readership, which spells a crisis for the old media empires like Murdoch’s Fox News, and near-death for standard format news television programmes as a source of information, has seen a correlative rise in importance of platforms like Facebook, and, more so, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and 4chan. These are platforms for the circulation of particular kinds of information; information that works by way of what it says and, crucially, how it is packaged. These are little packets of semiotic stuff that hook and take, they are memes. Memes as tagged images or repetitive gif files provide messages which are intimately and peculiarly bound up with the form of the media. More than ever, perhaps even now with a qualitative shift in the speed and intensity of media experience and its impact on subjectivity, the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964). These are the memes produced and consumed in a significant component domain of contemporary politics, activating and replicating a certain mode of experiential engagement with Trump. There is something essential to be grasped here about the form of memes that keys into new forms of subjectivity and political engagement.

Take the example of the Trump open-book law-signing meme. In this gif, the big book Trump shows to camera as public evidence that a new statute has just been signed by him is inscribed with other messages; one of the earliest instances has the word ‘Kat’ and an arrow on the verso page pointing to a scrawled child-like image of cat recto (joke: Trump is childish); a later version after the exchanges with North Korea has an image of a little red scribble marked ‘his button’ on one page and a bigger splodge on the other page marked ‘my button’ (joke: Trump is childishly preoccupied with having something bigger than Kim Jong-un). The message content for this meme can be easily pasted in and posted by anyone using a mobile app that is advertised on the internet; the advertising also pokes fun at alt-rightists who might be grammatically-challenged but even so will find it simple to use (Salamy, 2017). There are elements to these gifs that are also very easy for pop-Lacanians to describe; of a Symbolic register in which the message also connotes Trump’s childish nature, of an Imaginary aspect which hooks us and replicates something childish about the intervention, and even a hint of something Real, of the stupidity of Trump as dangerous, this image-game inciting the very jouissance, the very deathly pleasure it pretends to ward off. It is as if, and only as if, we can connect with what we know about Trump, and find a way to tell the truth about him, about how we feel about him.

Take another example, Pepe the frog. This character was claimed and used by the alt-right to ventriloquise a series of often racist messages to support Trump during the election campaign. Pepe says the unthinkable, enunciates what is already said among the alt-right community. This is beyond dog-whistling politics; it includes humorous jpegs of Pepe with a Hitler moustache saying ‘Kill Jews Man’. The Anti-Defamation League is onto this, but that isn’t a problem for the alt-right; that merely heightens the peculiar pleasure of fans of Pepe. Here, you could say that an obscene underside of political discourse is relayed which pretends to connect with the unconscious, an unconscious realm which is configured as the repressed realm of what people really think and want to say. If there are perversions of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real here, it is as if they are already conceptualised and mobilised as part of the stuff of the meme; with the performative aim to feed a relay between Imaginary and Symbolic and make the Real speak. It is as if, and only as if, the unconscious can speak, with the construction of truths that have been censored now released, finally free.

Notice that there is a particular kind of framing and localisation of the enemy and resistance. This framing and localisation brings to the fore the Angela Nagle thesis, the argument in her book Kill all Normies (Nagle, 2017) that the Left prepared the ground for the rise of the alt-right; that arrogant attempts to enclose new media platforms and shut down debate, to humiliate and ‘no-platform’ political opponents, set the conditions for an alt-right that was then much more adept at scapegoating others in order to triumph. The Nagle thesis also raises a question about the complicity of what we like to call ‘analysis’ or even ‘intervention’ when we are being more grandiose, about our complicity with the phenomena our critique keys into. We can see the looping of this critique and phenomenon in the widely-circulated little video clip of alt-right leader Richard Spencer beginning to explain what his badge with an image of Pepe the frog on it means, explaining before being punched in the face; the video becomes an Antifa gif, it becomes a meme. In the process, opponents and supporters of Trump become mediatised, part of the same looping process of memesis. So, a fantasy about what censorship is and how to break it, and what ‘free association’ is and how to enjoy it becomes part of the media in which that fantasy is represented.

Trump is seductive, and so is psychoanalytic critique of him. It is tempting to home in on Trump as a pathological personality. Perhaps he is, as Michael Wolff says, ‘unmediated’, ‘crazylike’, without what neuroscientists call ‘executive functions’, perhaps he is only mediated by his own image. This is where Wolff’s spoof anecdote, which is unfortunately not included in Fire and Fury, is so enjoyable; the one about Trump watching a special cable channel devoted to gorillas fighting, his face four inches from the screen as he gives advice to them saying things like ‘you hit him good there’. But we don’t necessarily avoid wild analysis when we simply shift focus away from Trump himself and pretend instead that psychoanalysis can explain how someone like Trump could be elected; that is the argument in Robert Samuels’ book Psychoanalyzing the Left and Right after Donald Trump (Samuels, 2016), an argument that is actually underpinned by Lacanian theory, a very accessible clear book. There is a place for psychoanalysis, but the question is, what is that place, how does psychoanalysis key into the media phenomena it wants to explain? We need to take care, take care not to be hooked by that question. We should not extrapolate from the psychoanalytic clinic to psychoanalyse politics.

Trump is a paradoxical figure, not a psychoanalytic subject but a psychoanalytic object. He cannot not be aware of psychoanalytic discourse swilling around him and framing him, so pervasive and sometimes explicit is that discourse, but he seems resistant to that discourse, showing some awareness of it even as he rails against it. This use of psychoanalytic-style critique is one of the axes of the class hatred that underlies much of the mainstream media contempt of Trump and the representations of his stupidity. It is then also one of the sub-texts of populist reaction against the media, the media seen as part of the elite that patronises those who know a little but not a lot, here those who know a little but not a lot about psychoanalysis, who know what is being pointed at but who cannot articulate what exactly is being mocked in Trump and why. He is reduced to being an object of scorn, seemingly unable to reflexively engage with psychoanalytic mockery of him as if he was an analysand, to reflexively engage as an analysand would do. It is as if we have the inverse of the anecdote reported in the Michael Wolff book in which a model asks Trump what this ‘white trash’ is that people are talking about; Trump replies ‘they are people like me, but poor’. In this case the question might be ‘What are these psychoanalytic subjects, analysands?’; Trump’s answer would be ‘they are people like me, but reflexive’. He is in this language game but not of it, and the joke is that he doesn’t quite get the joke, our sophisticated psychoanalytic joke. Trump is what Freud (1905) would term the butt of the joke, and here the butt of psychoanalytic discourse as a class weapon used against him.

Take, for example, a Trump meme which frames him as what we might call the case of Little Hands. This meme picks up on a comment twenty years ago by a journalist – it was Graydon Carter in Spy magazine – that Trump has unusually short fingers. Trump reacted badly to this comment apparently, and ever since has been mailing the journalist cut-out magazine images of Trump himself with his hands circled in pen and the scribble ‘not so short!’ During the 2016 Republican Primary one of Trump’s rivals Marco Rubio said that Trump’s hands were tiny, and ‘you know what they say about guys with tiny hands’ – he waits for laughter – ‘you can’t trust them’. Trump’s angry response took the implicit reference to the size of his dick seriously, and he responded publically in a speech in which he said ‘I guarantee you, there’s no problem’. This is where the meme poking fun at Trump spins into psychoanalytic discourse. Stories circulated in the media about this, including about the formation of a political action committee, that is an electoral campaign group, called ‘Americans Against Insecure Billionaires With Tiny Hands’. You see how this works as a double-joke; Trump is insecure about power, but he doesn’t realise that it’s about power. You could say that the meme joke revolves around the fact that he doesn’t get the difference between the penis and the phallus. The Trump Little Hands meme drums home a message about what he knows but doesn’t want to know.

So what can psychoanalytic theory as such say about this process? We need to ask why it is so easy to make a psychoanalytic argument about these political phenomena. It does indeed look as if a Kleinian account of splitting and projective identification is perfectly suited to explaining not only why Trump acts the way he does, but also, better, it explains how we become bewitched by Trump, filling him with our hopes or hatred. It looks as if a version of US-American object relations theory perfectly captures the nature of Trump as a narcissist or, better, as an expression of an age of narcissism in which we stage our political objections to him as for a meritocratic ego ideal that we want to be loved by. It looks as if Lacanian psychoanalysis identifies a cause that drives and pulls Trump through the blind alleys of desire for he knows not what and, better still, this psychoanalysis explains what it is about Trump as objet petit a that is coming close to us and causing us anxiety. These are lines of argument rehearsed by Robert Samuels. The reason why these explanations make sense is not because they are true but because they are made true, woven into the stuff they are applied to (Parker, 1997). So, there is a deeper problem in the supposed ‘application’ of psychoanalysis to politics, but is there a way out of this?

Fig 1 One of the peculiar things about Lacanian psychoanalysis is that it is implicitly, potentially reflexively self-critical. One of Lacan’s conceptual devices helps us to understand a bit better exactly how recuperation operates under new mediatised conditions of possibility for political discourse. I have in mind the so-called ‘discourse of the capitalist’ (Fig. 1), though I am not sure that it is actually a fifth discourse that runs alongside the other four discourses that Lacan describes (Tomšič, 2015). In Seminar XVII Lacan (1991/2007) describes four discourses in one of his few extensions of psychoanalysis beyond the clinic, to understanding the political-economic context for the psychoanalytic clinic. These discourses are, discourse of the master as foundational, foundational condition of consciousness; discourse of the university, bureaucratically pretending to include all knowledge; discourse of the hysteric, productively rebellious questioning; and discourse of the analyst, hystericizing, facilitating critique. The so-called discourse of the capitalist that Lacan (1972) briefly proposes is a twist on the discourse of the master in conditions of commodity production and, I would say, of its mutation into the society of the spectacle. Here in this discourse, the barred subject is in the position of the agent, as if we are in the discourse of the hysteric, but it faces knowledge, the battery of signifiers as other. Underneath the barred subject in the position of truth is S1, master signifier, facing the objet petit a, product (Vanheule, 2016). The master signifier is where it would be in the discourse of the university, but the end-point of this is still a commodity, as it would be in the discourse of the master. So, the discourse of the capitalist is a diagnostic tool complicit in power.

We could re-label this fifth discourse ‘the discourse of psychoanalysis’, as Lacan himself implies it is. This is not the discourse of the analyst; no element is in the same position that we find in this mutation of discourse and the discourse of the analyst, but there is some significant mapping of elements with positions in the other three discourses, especially, of course, with the foundational discourse of the master. Here it is as if the agent, hysterical barred subject, is rebellious, questioning, but this agent attacks not the master but knowledge as such, rails against all knowledge, treating it as fake news. This agent revels in their division, aware of the existence of something of the unconscious in them, loving it; they are psychoanalytic subjects, ripe for analysis, up for it. It is as if the truth of this subject will be found in the little significant scraps of master signifier that anchor it, signifying substance that seems to explain but actually explains nothing. This is how memes function in the imaginary production and reproduction of politics. This kind of truth includes those signifiers that are cobbled together from our own psychoanalytic knowledge, rather like the way they function in the discourse of the university, chatter about the ‘ego’ and the ‘unconscious’ and the rest of the paraphernalia. Two key elements of the discourse of the master are still in place; knowledge as a fragmented constellation of memes mined for meaning, for signs of conspiracy or, at least, something that serves well enough as explanation, including psychoanalytic explanation; and there is the product, objet petit a, something lost, something that escapes, something that drives us on to make more of it. We know well enough the paranoiac incomplete nature of the psychoanalysis that lures us in and keeps us going; here it is again (Parker, 2009). We can draw on the discourse of psychoanalysis to make sense of Trump, and, more importantly, how he is represented.

This discourse is one manifestation of an ‘age of interpretation’ that now circumscribes and feeds psychoanalysis. Remember that Freud did not discover the unconscious, Lacan insists on this; rather he invented it, and that invention which is coterminous with burgeoning capitalism in Europe functions (Parker, 2011). It functions not only in the clinic, but in society. When it flourishes, its prevalence as an interpretative frame poses questions for psychoanalytic practice. Psychoanalytic subjects love psychoanalysis, love psychoanalytic discourse, they want more of it, want to speak it in the clinic and want to hear it interpreted, want it fed. The questions they pose in the clinic demand certain kinds of answers, psychoanalytic answers. In what Jacques-Alain Miller (1999) calls the age of interpretation there is a real danger that the analyst buys into this, feeds the unconscious. The appropriate analytic response to this demand is not to ‘interpret’ but to ‘cut’ the discourse, to disrupt it by a particular kind of interpretation, intervention which includes cutting the session. This is also why psychoanalysis should not be merely ‘applied’, for it will merely feed what it is being applied to. These conditions of discourse call for different kinds of interpretative strategies.

There are implications of this for what we think is psychoanalytic critique of meme-politics. Mere description won’t cut it. Perhaps it calls for what Robert Samuels describes as an ethic of neutrality combined with an ethic of free association; that is, neutrality of the analyst which does not rest on empathic engagement, and free association which does not feed the fantasy that something must be censored in order for correct speech to emerge. I’m not sure this will work. Perhaps it requires performative description in which there is some kind of over-identification with the discourse and unravelling of its internal contradictions; that is, deliberate use of the terms used, memes turned against memes. In which case we risk falling into the trap that Angela Nagle describes, one in which we replicate the conditions in which the alt-right emerged triumphant. Perhaps what we need is direct critique grounded in other forms of discourse, not only the discourse of the analyst which might work in the clinic but merely hystericizes, usually unproductively hystericizes its audience when it is ‘applied’ outside the clinic. Other forms of discourse, from Situationist critique and feminism and Marxism are necessary to break from the discourse that keeps all this going. Lacanian theory can connect with those other kinds of discourse as I have tried to show. This kind of anti-Trump in the media critique needs also be anti-psychoanalytic.

So, how do we speak as psychoanalysts about Trump? We can attend to the way that psychoanalytic discourse is mobilised in the public realm, but we need to take care not to simply feed that discourse. We should not pretend that we can speak as psychoanalysts. In fact, to speak as a psychoanalyst in the clinic is itself a performative impossibility. Lacan points out that what we say in the clinic may sometimes position us as psychoanalyst for the analysand, position us as subject supposed to know, but there is no guarantee that we are speaking there to them as a psychoanalyst. To pretend to speak from the identity of psychoanalyst is to speak as if we are a subject who does know. And so, then, to speak as if we are a psychoanalyst with a privileged position to interpret political phenomena in the public realm is to perform a double-betrayal of psychoanalysis itself. Words are weapons, Trump knows that. Psychoanalysis is a double-edged weapon, and so we need to take care over how to use it to speak about politics, including how we speak about Trump.

References

Debord, G. (1967/1977) Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red.

Freud, S. (1905) ‘Jokes and their relation to the unconscious’, in J. Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 8, London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Lacan, J. (1991/2007) The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII (translated by R. Grigg). New York: Norton.

Lacan, J. (1972) ‘On psychoanalytic discourse’, http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=334

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.

Miller, J.-A. (1999) ‘Interpretation in reverse’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks of the London Circle, 2, 9-18.

Nagle, A. (2017) Kill all Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books.

Parker, I. (1997) Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Parker, I. (2009) Psychoanalytic Mythologies. London: Anthem Books.

Parker, I. (2011) Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge.

Salamy, E. (2017) ‘Create your own Trump-signed executive order with online generator’, Newsday, 5 February (accessed 29 February 2018), https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/create-your-own-trump-signed-executive-order-with-online-generator-1.13066643

Samuels, R. (2016) Psychoanalyzing the Left and Right after Donald Trump: Conservativism, Liberalism, and Neoliberal Populisms. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tomšič, S. (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. London: Verso.

Vanheule, S. (2016) ‘Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, Frontiers in Psychology, 7, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5145885/

Wolff, M. (2018) Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. New York: Henry Holt.

This paper was published as a chapter as Parker, I. (2019) ‘Memesis and Psychoanalysis: Mediatising Trump’ in A. Bown and D. Bristow (eds) Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production. Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, pp. 351-364. [ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-23-6] [doi: 10.21983/P3.0255.1.17] You can download the whole book at this link: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/post-memes-seizing-the-memes-of-production/

This is one part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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June 4, 2020

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Mornington Crescent moments

There is no overarching rule that determines or predicts how rules can be broken, but it is possible to notice, after the event, how a certain sequence of interactions has given rise to a moment when something new could happen. One way of capturing this moment is provided by a game on the BBC radio programme I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue called ‘Mornington Crescent’. However, the fact that it is a game also draws attention to the automatic repetitive aspect of the process, so that while ‘Mornington Crescent’ names an ‘event’ of some kind that could not be predicted at the outset, it can also permit the voicing of formulaic ‘interventions’ that simply succeeded because they arrived on time instead of providing some new content. The Mornington Crescent moment can be exhilarating when it marks an eruption of the unexpected, even when it functions as the sign of an act, and it can be deadening when arrives at its appointed hour, an old train en route to the same old station. It is a moment when something psychological happens that is not inside subjects but between them.

How does it work? Mornington Crescent is a subway station in London. In the game participants produce an unscripted series of names of other London subway stations, a list that could include names of streets or landmarks. There is no prescribed sequence of speakers, and one simply says the next name to produce the series when there is space to do so. This means that the rhythm of the series can sometimes lag a bit, feel a bit flat, and at other times the pace can be rapid with a strange energy to the interchange. But there comes a moment when the participants arrive at Mornington Crescent, when one will produce this signifier which will punctuate the series, will end it. To say ‘Morning Crescent’ too early will be crass, inopportune and to wait too late will be to fall prey to the sense that there has been degeneration into dull routine. There is a hesitant and sometimes tense intersubjective aspect to the game.

One can notice this moment in traditional left political meetings, particularly committee meetings when someone finds exactly the right moment to point out that, say, no women have spoken yet. Usually they are right, but that’s not the point in terms of the game. The point is to seize the right moment to make the point. This moment, which sometimes provokes exasperation or guilty recognition, can be extended ad infinitum to draw attention to lack of speakers from this or that identity category or member of a group that is subject of the discussion or, in some variants, an ‘ordinary’ member of the public who should be included. To point it out too early will lead to it being easily dismissed, and to wait too long will have enabled some other member of the group to anticipate the point in another contribution and inoculate the group against it. You need to strike at the right moment. Such moments are necessary, but often merely indicate that one speaker has seized a moment rather than introduced something radically new to the discussion.

And, with a different more radical valence, Mornington Crescent moments appear in the wider political field, exemplifying a space of freedom for things to be said that could not be said before, to be said now before it is too late. When is the right moment to break from the government narrative that ‘we are all in it together’, for example, and to do that in a way that strikes a chord? It was always right to say that, just as it is always right to argue that, in principle, a general strike is needed, but most times to simply repeat the demand for a general strike sounds stupid. We need to say it just at the right moment. Maybe the moment appears at another break in politics, another break that shakes things and makes it possible to speak in a different way about things. Maybe now? Then there is a possibility that another world is possible has appeared within the frame of everyday life. Then a London subway station has appeared in political discourse.

This is one part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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March 13, 2020

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Twelve lessons from Freudo-Marxism

Twelve lessons from Freudo-Marxism*

David Pavón-Cuéllar

Freudo-Marxism and its actuality

Freudo-Marxism is usually understood in two ways. In a broad, vague and diffuse sense, it encompasses all efforts of synthesis between Marxism and psychoanalysis. In a strict sense, which we will choose here, it only includes the efforts made in the interwar period, between the 1920s and 1930s, when attempts were made to systematically integrate the Marxist and Freudian traditions under an assumption of profound affinity and complementarity between them.

Freudo-Marxism in the strict sense includes works by authors as diverse as the great Marxists Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui, the Austro-German psychoanalysts Siegfried Bernfeld, Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, the Soviets Vera Schmidt and Aleksandr Luria, the Frankfurters Max Horkheimer and Erich Fromm, the surrealists André Breton, René Crevel and Tristan Tzara in France, Karel Teige in Czechoslovakia or Xavier Abril and Elias Piterbarg in Latin America, the Freudian critics of Marxism Henri De Man and Max Eastman, and some unclassifiable ones like the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade, the Hungarian Attila József and the French Jean Audard.[i]

Many of the exponents of Freudo-Marxism have already fallen into oblivion. However, as we will see, they all retain their relevance and their great subversive potential. This is why they can still give us the twelve lessons that we will summarize below.

Remember the bodily, impulsive and sexual

Freudo-Marxists remind us that the material-existential basis of our consciousness lies not only where Marx placed it, in the social and economic realms, but where Freud located it, in the sexual and somatic spheres. It is to think about this basis that Trotsky resorts to psychoanalysis, conceiving it as a conjectural approach to the ‘physiology’ underlying any psychology.[ii]

Freudo-Marxism explains the psychological by something as subjective as the bodily, instinctual and sexual tendencies and configurations, and not only by something as objective as the forces and relations of production. Objectivity and subjectivity can even be merged and transcended into a single determining factor. This is what happens in Fromm, who argues that the adaptation of the instinctive to the economic is resolved in a ‘libidinal structure’ that in turn determines thoughts and feelings.[iii]

We think and feel not directly what is decided by capital, but what is determined by our body trapped and pierced by capitalism. Between the capitalist production and our psychological constitution, there is the mediation of what is approached by psychoanalysis. We need Freud to understand how the subject is psychically affected by what we learn from Marx.

Do not underestimate the importance of the psyche

Freudo-Marxism also helps us to understand that consciousness is not only effect, but cause of existence. This causality, belatedly recognized by Trotsky,[iv] allows to overcome the Leninist representation of mental content as a passive ‘reflex’.[v] In addition to reflecting the socio-economic reality, the psyche ‘falsifies’ it, and it is also for this, as Horkheimer noted, that Marxism needs psychoanalysis.[vi] It needs it for something that Attila József knew better than anyone: because we are all crazy, we are not realistic, our existence does not obey socio-economic reality, but it obeys our consciousness that distorts that reality instead of reflecting it.[vii]

Socioeconomic reality also determines our psychic life, of course. However, as Reich pointed out, it does not determine it externally by reflecting on it, but internally by ‘taking root’ in it through ideology. [viii] This ideological rooting is one of the factors why consciousness cannot perceive the socioeconomic reality without distorting it.

Deforming the same reality that determines it, the psychic-ideological structure determines this reality. It is transmuted into the determinant base of the socio-economic system. This is how in the inner world, according to Fenichel, the base and the superstructure are inverted.[ix] José Carlos Mariátegui[x] and Max Horkheimer[xi] show us that this inversion is characteristic of a liberal modern society, today neoliberal postmodern society, in which everything seems to obey the subjects, their freedom, their desires and drives.

Probe the irrational basis of scientific, technological and socioeconomic rationality

The weight of desires and drives in social life introduces an irrational dimension whose consideration requires the help of the Freudian method. This was very well appreciated in Freudo-Marxism. Breton[xii] and others taught us how to use psychoanalysis to approach a psychic irrationality that is inseparable from the supposedly rational socioeconomic system elucidated in Marxism.

The supposed rationality of society and economy in capitalism, as conceived by Bernfeld, is nothing more than a kind of ‘guilt ideology’ in which the rationalization, transposition and materialization of deeply irrational drives are carried out. [xiii] Henri De Man[xiv] and Max Eastman[xv] thoroughly analyzed how these impulsive forces underlie the seemingly rational interests that govern the capitalist system. Their analyzes highlight all the psychic irrationality of the socioeconomic rationality of capitalism.

Karel Teige[xvi] and Jean Audard[xvii] show us that even the perfect scientific and technological rationality of the productive forces is driven and sustained in capitalism by an irrational base of drives and desires. Audard[xviii] convinces us that the recognition of this basis constitutes an indispensable condition for materialism. To be fully materialistic, Marxists should also be Freudians.

Take desire and fantasy seriously

Freudo-Marxists, consistent materialists, make us go beyond interests and their idealized rationality, beyond needs and their ideological naturalization. They lead us to the irrational and unnatural materiality of the fantasy in which the drives move and desire unfolds. They teach us that we must go through this space to reach communism.

De Man[xix] explains to us, communists, that the emancipation for which we fight cannot consist in satisfying the needs that exist in capitalism, but requires us to go beyond the capitalist horizon and conceive other needs through our fantasy and based on our desire. This conception of other needs constitutes in itself a gesture, prescribed by René Crevel, in which the ‘cowardly’ and ‘opportunistic’ realism is challenged.[xx] This is how it allows to realize the surreal ideal, enunciated by Breton, of ‘changing life’ and not just ‘transforming the world’.[xxi]

There cannot even be a true objective transformation without that kind of subjective change in which desire is involved. Freudo-Marxism reminds us that it is with desire with which history is made. The history of humanity, as Tristan Tzara said, is ‘the history of man’s desires’.[xxii]

Consider sexuality and its repression

By making us take desire and fantasy seriously, Freudo-Marxists lead us to consider the sphere of repressed sexuality that lies beneath desire and fantasy. They also teach us that this sphere, studied by psychoanalysis, cannot be ignored by those who fight for communism. They help us to understand that we cannot ignore repressed sexuality because we are fighting against exploitation and oppression conditioned or at least favored by sexual repression.

Reich[xxiii] showed how sexually repressed people are also susceptible to being economically exploited and politically oppressed. They can be exploited and oppressed because they have already been subjugated, disciplined and tamed through their sexual repression. This repression made them obedient, docile, dominable.

If domination begins with sexuality, it is for a fundamental reason elucidated by the young Fromm.[xxiv] It is because the sexual instinct, compared to the needs of sleep, drink or food, is particularly ductile, manipulable, modifiable, adaptable, postponable, interchangeable, repressible and sublimable. This is why it represents the weak point of subjectivity, the most vulnerable to domination, that by which we must be caught when something or someone intends to dominate us.

Confront patriarchy

Freudo-Marxism teaches us how patriarchal domination uses a supplement of repression that selectively targets female sexuality. As Reich[xxv] explains to us, if a woman tends to be sexually more repressed than a man, it is to make her show a greater submission than he does. It is also to make her be oppressed by him. It is to allow the man to dominate the woman socially, politically and economically that she must suffer a greater dose of sexual repression.

We understand, then, that the purpose of women’s liberation is fundamental to freudo-Marxism. Freudo-Marxists are among the first to understand that we cannot fight capitalism effectively without fighting patriarchy at the same time.

Andrade[xxvi] and Fromm[xxvii] even claim matriarchy as their flag. Both feel that the revolution must be feminized to be deepened and radicalized. Fromm does not hesitate to place the matriarchal ideal in the ‘psychic basis’ of the ‘Marxist social program’.[xxviii]

Conceive a free and liberating education

Marxism requires the work of Freudo-Marxists to be well based on the subjective, psychic and bodily, sexual and instinctive plane. It is on this plane that repression in the service of domination is discovered. It is on the same level that radical forms of liberation can be conceived, such as those based on desire and fantasy, those that claim matriarchy, and those that take shape in free and liberating educational projects such as those promoted by Bernfeld and Schmidt.

Bernfeld and Schmidt, both inspired by Marxism and psychoanalysis, projected and implemented revolutionary strategies for the education of children and adolescents, which renounced repressive means and thus sought to engender the new men and the new women of socialism. In his colony of Baumgarten, Bernfeld[xxix] prefers understanding and persuasion to coercion and domestication, and tries to strengthen the feeling of community while weakening individualism and familiarism. On the other hand, in the Moscow Detski Dom, Vera Schmidt[xxx] resorts to love instead of fear and authority, and thus tries to develop in children the capacity for sublimation at the expense of repression.

Both Schmidt and Bernfeld aspire to undermine the repressive base of domination. It is for this purpose that they work in the educational sphere. They give us here a lesson in radicalism by using psychoanalysis to attack the root of what they fight against as communists.

Recognize and respect the concrete uniqueness of each subject

One of the teachings of Schmidt’s educational method is to recognize and respect the concrete uniqueness of each subject. This singularity is not here dissolved in abstract generalizations, much less annulled by a standardization of children. In contrast to the prejudiced image of unifying and massifying socialism, Schmidt’s school in the Soviet Union is a space of singularization that was inconceivable in the capitalist countries of the time.

The consideration of the uniqueness of each one is a positive effect of the psychoanalytic gaze in Freudo-Marxism. Amongst what Gramsci[xxxi] values most in psychoanalysis is its attention to the singular. Such attention can serve to avoid the eagerness to level out everyone’s experience, the eagerness of those communists who have confused equality with uniformity and community with an undifferentiated mass.

Freudo-Marxism reminds us that community is made of singularities and that equality only exists between subjects irreducibly different from each other and therefore incomparable to each other as inferior or superior. These subjects, each with his/her own history, constitute the uniqueness addressed by the psychoanalytic method. What psychoanalysis offers Marxism, as Bernfeld[xxxii] well noted, is a historical science of case by case, of the unique history of each subject.

Do not ignore the tensions and contradictions of psychic life

Freudo-Marxists bring to Marxism a Freudian science of the subject that is not only historical, but dialectical. The psychoanalytic dialectic is indispensable to consider the tensions and contradictions of subjectivity. Bernfeld[xxxiii] shows us that this consideration requires thinking as dialectically as Freud did in conceptualizing the oppositions between the ego and the id, between the principles of reality and pleasure or between the drives of life and death.

The concepts of psychoanalysis unfold subjective division, tears in the subject, describe and explain them, rather than sidestep and hide them, as psychology generally does. In contrast to the misleading psychological images of harmonic and unitary subjectivity, the Freudian dialectical representation of the subject, as first pointed out by Voloshinov[xxxiv] and later by Gramsci[xxxv], is made up of conflicts and antagonisms that make psychoanalysis mysteriously compatible with Marxism.

Voloshinov[xxxvi] and others teach us how the tensions and contradictions that Marxists uncover in society are, in fact, the same ones that Freudians rediscover in the individual. This is something that no one could perceive as clearly as the Freudo-Marxists. We learn from them that our class struggles run through us and thus summon us to take a position within and not just outside ourselves.

Avoid psychological dualism

Freudo-Marxists not only make us consider the inner as well as the outer world, but they urge us to reconcile them, reconnect them, reintegrate them into each other. This impulse was crucial for the surrealist encounter between the respective fields of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Between the two areas, as well as between sleep and wakefulness or between madness and reason, Breton revealed ‘capillary tissues’ and ‘communicating vessels’.[xxxvii]

What it is about, for Luria[xxxviii], is to overcome the psychological dualism in which the psyche is abstracted from the body and the world. This dualism, as Crevel sees it, obeys a political strategy that seeks to ‘divide and rule’.[xxxix] Subjectivity is divided between the soul and the body in order to use the former to dominate the latter.

Freudo-Marxists teach us that fighting domination requires leaving dualism behind and adopting a monistic vision like that of psychoanalysis. In Andrade’s terms, we must undress the ‘waterproof clothing’ between inside and outside.[xl] Subjects must be recovered as what they are, as bodies that are indiscernible from their souls, from their ideas or from their spirits.

Do not idealize or spiritualize subjectivity

One of the greatest lessons of Freudo-Marxism is not to reduce the subjective to the ideal or spiritual. We receive this lesson from Oswald de Andrade[xli] and Elías Piterbarg[xlii] when we see them claim the material truth of body nudity against the ideas that cover it, suffocate and betray it. It is the same lesson that Xavier Abril teaches us when he rejects ‘spiritualist psychology’, opting instead for an investigation of the subject as ‘true body’, as revealed by Marxism and psychoanalysis.[xliii]

Marx and Freud inspire the materialistic representation of subjectivity by which Freudian Marxists go back from the ideas, reasons and justifications of people to their brakes and chains, drives and desires. This is how De Man[xliv] and Eastman[xlv] delve into the unconscious impulsiveness that underlies conscious rationality. This is also how Bernfeld goes beyond the ‘reasons’ given by the subject to discover the ‘repressed causes’ that induce them.[xlvi]

Freudo-Marxists instruct us in the art of not being idealistic when thinking about subjectivity. They make us accept that the existence of the subject is not guided only by his/her conscious ideas, by his/her visions, convictions, justifications and deliberate intentions. These ideal factors, in fact, do not constitute the sole determinant for the subject nor do they encompass all that he/she is and animates him/her, but are merely an expression of what is decisive.

Distrust existing psychology and reject any psychologization

What is decisive in subjectivity, according to Freudo-Marxism, does not correspond to what is studied by academic and allegedly scientific psychology. Nor could it ever be discovered by the psychological instruments of observation. Psychology is not used here to discover anything, but only to cover up, conceal and mystify, manipulate and subdue.

Freudo-Marxists teach us to be wary of psychology. Tzara condemns it for disconnecting us from the world and for shutting us inside our comfortable interior where ‘an armchair has grown’.[xlvii] Reich denounces it for its ideological, idealistic, metaphysical, individualistic, bourgeois, normalizing, adaptive, repressive, conservative and reactionary character.[xlviii]

In addition to questioning psychology, Freudo-Marxists criticize different forms of psychologization. One, denounced by Bernfeld, claims that our thoughts and feelings are the ‘driving forces’ of the economy, when we know that they only ‘justify’ certain economic conditions.[xlix] Another form of psychologization, denounced by Reich, is that of delegitimizing insurrections, rebellions and revolutions by psychopathologizing them, explaining them for ‘irrational’ psychological reasons, when we know that they are ‘rational’ actions that are explained economically, socially and politically by circumstances such as misery, exploitation or oppression.[l]

Lessons for the present

The twelve lessons we have just recapitulated show that Freudo-Marxism is not only up to date, but even more timely than in its time, when it was not yet fully timely. The 1920s and 1930s were still too early to elucidate such things as psychologization, the subjective irrational background of economic rationality, or the essential link between capitalism and patriarchy. Isn’t all this better understood nowadays?

We have had to wait a century for Freudo-Marxism to stop being premature. Now it is clear that its time has come. This is why it should no longer give rise to reactions of misunderstanding, aversion and persecution like those that surrounded it in the interwar period, when it was rejected by the communist parties as well as by the psychoanalytic associations.

It is high time for Freudians to concede that they need such radical means as those of Freudo-Marxism to prevent psychoanalysis from continuing to adapt, domesticate, gentrify, ideologize and thus degrade. It is also the time for us communists to resort to a sensitivity such as the Freudo-Marxist to clarify the subjective origin of many of our inconsistencies, failures, defeats and surrenders.

* First published in Spanish in Revista Ideas de Izquierda (2020).

[i] For a general review, see David Pavón-Cuéllar, Marxism and Psychoanalysis, in or against Psychology? London, Routledge, 2017. For a selection of the key texts of Freudomarxism, see Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar, Marxismo, psicología y psicoanálisis, Mexico City, Paradiso, 2017.

[ii] Leon Trotsky, Cultura y socialismo (1926), in Escritos filosóficos, Buenos Aires, CEIP León Trotsky, 2004, p. 154.

[iii] Erich Fromm, Sobre métodos y objetivos de una psicología social analítica (1932), in J.-P. Gente (comp.), Marxismo, psicoanálisis y sexpol I, Buenos Aires, Granica, 1972, pp. 119, 140-141.

[iv] Trotsky, Cuadernos de Trotsky (1933-1935), in Escritos filosóficos, op. cit., p. 68.

[v] Vladimir Lenin, Materialismo y empiriocriticismo (1908), Beijing, Ediciones en Lenguas Extranjeras, 1975, p. 54.

[vi] Max Horkheimer, Historia y psicología (1932), in Teoría crítica, Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2008, p. 32.

[vii] Attila József, Hegel, Marx, Freud (1934), Action Poétique 49, 1972, 68-75.

[viii] Wilhelm Reich, La psicología de masas del fascismo (1933), Mexico City, Roca, 1973, p. 29.

[ix] Otto Fenichel, Sobre el psicoanálisis como embrión de una futura psicología dialéctico materialista, en J.-P. Gente (comp.), Marxismo, psicoanálisis y sexpol I, op. cit., p. 183.

[x] José Carlos Mariátegui, Defensa del marxismo (1930), Lima, Amauta, 1976, p. 146.

[xi] Horkheimer, Historia y psicología (1932), op. cit., pp. 27-30.

[xii] André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), en Œuvres complètes I, París, Gallimard, 2008, p. 316.

[xiii] Siegfried Bernfeld, Sisyphus or The Limits of Education (1925), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973, p. 64.

[xiv] Henri de Man, Au-delà du marxisme (1926), París, Seuil, 1974.

[xv] Max Eastman, Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution, Nueva York, Boni, 1927.

[xvi] Karel Teige, Liquidation de l’art (1925), París, Allia, 2009, p. 82.

[xvii] Jean Audard, Du caractère matérialiste de la psychanalyse (1933), Littoral 27/28 (1989), 199-208.

[xviii] Ibíd.

[xix] De Man, Au-delà du marxisme (1926), op. cit., p. 416.

[xx] René Crevel, Le clavecin de Diderot (1932), Utrecht, Pauvert, 1966, p. 77.

[xxi] Breton, Discours du Congrès des Écrivains. En Œuvres complètes II, París, Gallimard, 2008, p. 459

[xxii] Tristan Tzara, Grains et issues (1935), París, Flammarion, 1981, p. 218.

[xxiii] Reich, Materialismo dialéctico y psicoanálisis (1934), México, Siglo XXI, 1989, pp. 60-61.

[xxiv] Fromm, Sobre métodos y objetivos de una psicología social analítica (1932), op. cit., pp. 114-116.

[xxv] Reich, La sexualidad en el combate cultural (1935), en Sexualidad: libertad o represión, México, Grijalbo, 1971, pp. 95-110.

[xxvi] Oswald de Andrade, Manifiesto Antropófago (1928), en Las vanguardias latinoamericanas, México, FCE, 2006, p. 180.

[xxvii] Fromm, The Theory of Mother Right (1934), en The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, Nueva York, Holt, 1970, pp. 109-135.

[xxviii] Ibíd., p. 135.

[xxix] Bernfeld, La colonia infantil de Baumgarten (1921), en La ética del chocolate, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2005, pp. 43-169.

[xxx] Vera Schmidt, Pulsions sexuelles et éducation du corps (1924), París, Union Générale D’Éditions, 1979, pp. 49-84.

[xxxi] Antonio Gramsci, Cartas de la cárcel (1926-1937), México, Era, 2003, pp. 301-302.

[xxxii] Bernfeld, Socialismo y psicoanálisis (1926), en Marxismo, psicoanálisis y SEXPOL I, op. cit., pp. 16-17.

[xxxiii] Ibíd., pp. 20-21.

[xxxiv] Valentin Voloshinov, Freudismo: un bosquejo crítico (1927), Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1999, p. 143.

[xxxv] Gramsci, Cartas de la cárcel (1926-1937), op. cit., pp. 382-383.

[xxxvi] Voloshinov, Freudismo, op. cit., pp. 160-162.

[xxxvii] Breton, Les vases communicants (1932), París, Gallimard, 1955, pp. 103, 160.

[xxxviii] Aleksandr Luria, Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology (1925), Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 40(1) (2002), 26-53.

[xxxix] Crevel, Le clavecin de Diderot (1932), op. cit., p. 67.

[xl] Andrade, Manifiesto Antropófago (1928), op. cit., p. 174.

[xli] Ibíd.

[xlii] Elías Piterbarg, Manifiesto (1930), en Las vanguardias latinoamericanas, op. cit., p. 471.

[xliii] Xavier Abril, Palabras para asegurar una posición dudosa (1930), in N. Osorio (comp.), Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de la vanguardia literaria hispanoamericana, Caracas, Ayacucho, 1988, p. 375.

[xliv] De Man, Au-delà du marxisme (1926), op. cit.

[xlv] Eastman, Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution (1927), op. cit.

[xlvi] Bernfeld, Socialismo y psicoanálisis (1926), op. cit., pp. 17-19.

[xlvii] Tzara, Grains et issues (1935), op. cit., p. 66.

[xlviii] Reich, La psicología de masas del fascismo, op. cit., p. 26-31. Materialismo dialéctico y psicoanálisis, op. cit., 16-24, 65-66.

[xlix] Bernfeld, Sisyphus or The Limits of Education (1925), op. cit., pp. 63-64.

[l] Reich, La psicología de masas del fascismo, op. cit., p. 31.

This is one part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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