PIERRE DELION ON PSYCHOPOLITICS: 'What Is Institutional Psychotherapy?' / 'The Republic of False Selves' (original) (raw)
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The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century
2024
For decades, psychoanalysis has provided essential concepts and methodologies for critical theory and the humanities and social sciences. But it is also, inseparably, a clinical practice and technique for treatment. In what ways is clinical practice significant for critical thought? What conceptual resources does the clinic hold for us today? Carolyn Laubender examines cases from Britain and its former colonies to show that clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a productive site for novel political thought, theorization, and action. She delves into the clinical work of some of the British Psychoanalytical Society’s most influential practitioners—including Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, D. W. Winnicott, Thomas Main, and John Bowlby—exploring how they developed distinctive and politically salient practices. Laubender argues that these figures transformed the clinic into a laboratory for reimagining race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy. By taking up the clinic as both a site of inquiry and realm of theoretical innovation, she traces how political concepts such as authority, reparation, colonialism, decolonization, communalism, and security at once informed and were reformed by each analyst’s work. While psychoanalytic scholarship has typically focused on its intellectual, social, and political effects outside of the clinic, this interdisciplinary book combines history with feminist and decolonial social theory to recast the clinic as a necessarily politicized space. Challenging common assumptions that psychoanalytic practice is or should be neutral, apolitical, and objective, The Political Clinic also considers what progressive clinical praxis can offer today. Preorder here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Political-Clinic-Psychoanalysis-Twentieth-Directions/dp/0231214952
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020
wishes to be considered a nihilist, and here I am using the term nihilist as a critical Nietzscheian compliment (Nietzsche, 1882). In the volume under review, Barratt is not concerned with the death of God as found in Nietzsche, but with the function of psychoanalysis within institutes, schools of thought, and as a tool that has the power to aid human life on earth. Here, explicitly linking his thought to Nietzsche's, Barratt's concern is that psychoanalysis is in danger of being dead, and that members of the proverbial marketplace (i.e., many if not most psychoanalysts and institutes) have yet to recognize that such a death has transpired. The extent to which such a proclamation is valid, and the implications of this statement are the concerns of the book under review. Nihilism is often felt to be a negative, and following Keats (2014) many within psychoanalysis find what is negative to be positive (Bion, 1991; Eigen, 1981; Green, 1999). The negative capability that resonates with many psychoanalysts harmonizes with Nietzsche and also Deleuze (1962) in that each points to the creative aspects of destruction once destruction is situated in an ethics of love. Love is understood, at least in part, as a signal of an un-defended openness of being fragile and fallible within a fabric of mutuality (Voela and Rothschild, 2019). Deleuze makes the argument that institutional rigidity is a first case of nihilism that creates conditions for the stasis that demands a loving and creative critique. Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche finds that institutional rigidity may be answered by this second loving nihilism-a creative negative that begins with the indictment that an institution or god is dead. The opening created by such an attack may be without a loving, undefended openness, and therefore an opening may be as misguided as the Nazi's use of Nietzsche. However, with a fallible love, an opening may be as ethical and appropriate as the idealistic yet pragmatic concepts found in the Nuremberg Code and the Hippocratic Oath. It is the opening of what is rigid that concerns Barratt, and the seriousness of his writing affords an astute awareness of the importance of love as openings may be harnessed for good or ill, with or without love. Barratt avows love, and writes of inhabiting the stance that a ''radical psychoanalyst is a friendly gorilla'' (p. 68, italics original) in a manner that reminds me of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's (2007) idea that the poet is a subversive barbarian at the edge of the city, non-violently challenging the toxic status quo. Although I picture a silver-back gorilla, Barratt is playing with Freud's military model, and to that end uses the term gorilla in the manner of a subversively engaged peaceful warrior. This gorilla's work is by no means simple, as Deleuze adds, the challenge to
Deconstruction Psychoanalysis Politics
“Cryptonymy: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Politics” in Philosophy, Language and the Political: Poststructuralism in Perspective. Editors: Franson Manjali and Marc Crépon. Aakar Books: New Delhi., 2017
What it is to reevaluate post-structuralism? How does one reevaluate? Can there be a general evaluation? Or do we reevaluate ‘at the seams’? Evaluate where post-structuralism is most edgy, most attacked and yet most creative: the question of the (geo)political? Which thinker do we take recourse to, to reevaluate? Do I take to Lacan? Or do I do it through Derrida? Perhaps, find instead a Lacan in Derrida. Or a Derrida in Lacan. The paper takes off from Derrida’s “Geopsychoanalysis“and the rest of the world” ” (1998) and arrives at Derrida’s Foreword – titled “Fors” – to Nicholas Abraham and Marie Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: Cryptonymy (1986). It remains a trifle undecided: does it arrive at Derrida’s Foreword to Cryptonymy? Or does it arrive at Derrida’s cryptonymy, at what is cryptonymic in Derrida’s work, itself? The Moebius of this indecision forms the context of the paper’s ‘reevaluation of post-structuralism’ from first without (titled ‘politics of psychoanalysis’) and then from within (titled ‘psychoanalysis of politics’).
Crisis and Resistance: Institutional Psychotherapy and the Politics of Care
Deleuze and Guattari Studies , 2023
This article seeks to explore institutional psychotherapy's politically informed practice by highlighting two key concepts: crisis and resistance. It first briefly sketches a conceptual overview of the two concepts, paying particular attention to the complicated interactions between their political and therapeutic meanings. Following each conceptual elaboration there is a discussion exploring the ways in which the concept has been used by two key members of the institutional psychotherapy movement, Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari.