Psychoanalysis as revolution

Ian Parker, ομιλία στο θέατρο Εμπρός, 03/11/2023

I work as a psychoanalyst. That is, I see patients who lie on the couch and free associate and sometimes talk about their dreams and their childhood, and I draw attention to hesitation, repetitions and deviations in their speech. My role is to listen carefully, and their task, which is extremely difficult, sometimes painful, is to interpret. They, the patients, are the ‘analysands’, the ones who analyse. I don’t know what they are talking about, but they think I know, and that assumption, that I know, is a driver of what we call ‘transference’. That transference in psychoanalysis will also include them relating to me as significant figures from their own lives. The process of listening and analysing takes place, of course, through language, and that is why one of the first patients in the development of psychoanalysis called what she did the ‘talking cure’.

As well as being a practising psychoanalyst I am a communist, a revolutionary Marxist. To be absolutely clear, that means that my political activity is internationalist and anti-capitalist, working with and supporting my comrades inside Russia engaged in anti-war protests against Putin, and in solidarity with my comrades in China. Those regimes are capitalist, smearing the history of democratic collective struggle by working people in blood. To be a communist is to engage in protests, strikes and the building of coalitions of the exploited and oppressed, to be active in the liberation movements. That doesn’t mean that I believe in some utopia, either in the future or under any existing regime. There is something in the condition of being human that will always involve frustration, disappointment and compromise, but another world is possible, an alternative to this competitive destructive political economic system.

Free association

You could think of the building of an alternative in terms of ‘free association’ in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. That way of phrasing it is from Marx in the Communist Manifesto. We aim for that, but we know that it is impossible. To come back to psychoanalysis, ‘free association’ on the couch is also impossible. What Freud called the fundamental technical rule of psychoanalysis, that you say whatever comes to mind however embarrassing, unpleasant or ridiculous is impossible, but in the attempt to free associate you notice, by way of the hesitations, repetitions and deviations, what is being avoided, pushed out of mind, repressed. It is through that process that the role of the unconscious in our lives becomes apparent. We human beings are driven to speak, and driven to make unconscious what we cannot bear to speak about.

To be both a psychoanalyst and a Marxist is unusual, but it was not so unusual among Freud’s followers in continental Europe when psychoanalysis was flourishing there, and it is not so unusual in some parts of the world now. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism are attentive to history as well as being internationalist. But to remember, to hold in memory the links between psychoanalysis and radical politics is difficult. Many contradictory ideological and material forces in the context of the contemporary globalisation of capitalism are at work, repressing that history. But we need to retrieve that history to discover what psychoanalysis really is, and what it could be. That is what this book Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements is about. It is written for the liberation movements.

Liberation movements

This project began in July 2019 in Havana. I was in Cuba with my Mexican friend and colleague David Pavón-Cuéllar. We attended an academic psychology conference and met with supporters and opponents of the regime, and we talked about writing a short accessible book about psychoanalysis for the left. It quickly became clear that although both David and I are communists, though from slightly different traditions in Marxism, the book needed to have a broader more inclusive idea of what its audience was. So, by ‘liberation movements’ we mean not only those that are self-consciously communist, but also indigenous rights, anti-racist and national independence movements, and the spectrum of lesbian, gay, queer and transgender liberation movements. We worked on the book through the pandemic, with the manuscript shuttling backwards and forwards on email in English and Spanish.

This book, as I have said, is in some ways historical, reminding us what psychoanalysis was and could be, and internationalist, locating psychoanalysis not in one place, in one tradition, not in one limited way of understanding what its clinical practice is. So, David and I held onto the translation rights for the book so we could be in contact with independent radical publishers in different places. The first edition of the book was in Russian; then came Italian and then English editions, followed by Spanish and Bahasa Indonesian. There are translations completed now in Arabic, Chinese, German and Serbo-Croat, and those books will be published, along with other language-editions soon.

Repression

Psychoanalysis is concerned not so much with digging out the real events that are hidden away in memories of childhood or dreams, but in the process of repression, how those things keep being hidden, pushed out of mind. So, when Freud talks about the ‘dreamwork’, for example, the question is not what this or that dream is really about, but how we keep covering over, misrepresenting things to ourselves, shoring up an image of ourselves that then locks us in place. This is crucial to the book. So, likewise, we do remind the reader about the repressed radical history of psychoanalysis, but what you need to keep your eye on is how that repression works. What are the forms of repression that you need to work through if you are to connect personal liberation that psychoanalysis focuses on with political liberation. The repression of psychoanalysis itself is a political question.

I have emphasised the internationalist aspect of this alongside the historical aspect because the segregation of psychoanalysis into different cultural geographical locations is part of the problem. We need to learn about how psychoanalysis actually operates under different political conditions in different parts of the world. Another part of the problem is the caricature of psychoanalysis as it has became popularised in film, television, novels and advice columns in magazines. Many of us live in some ways, either consciously or unaware, in a psychoanalytic culture today, a psychoanalytic culture that has as little to do with actual psychoanalysis as the pronouncements of the Chinese Communist Party have to do with communism. Then we oftentimes expect the psychoanalyst to be scribbling down what we say before telling us to blame our parents for our bad sex lives. Then it is as if psychoanalysis wants us to be like Oedipus instead of exploring many other ways of relating to others.

Caricatured concepts

Each of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis are then also turned into caricature, almost at times into their opposite. I have mentioned these concepts already, and the book is organised around showing how four of them work, in psychoanalytic theory and practice and in social context, in society. One of them, transference, is about how relationships are replicated in the clinic in relation to the psychoanalyst who is supposed to know about them, and they can then be grasped better, understood better, worked through. Then the patient, the analysand comes to realise that the psychoanalyst does not know it all at all, but they themselves, the analysand, know what they are doing as they repeat those relationships. It is not as is so often caricatured, about turning the psychoanalyst into daddy or mummy or regressing the patient into little Oedipus.

Another concept we discuss is relevant here. There is a drive, something that pushes us to repeat relationships as well us pushing us to make relationships and, often, to sabotage them, to make them work or fail in the same miserable kind of way. To know better how we are driven, what drives us, is to enable us to fail better. This is miles away from the caricature of the drive as being some brute instinct that we will be at the mercy of as a biological imperative.

A third concept is repetition as such, our repetitive stupid attempt to make things turn out differently by doing the same thing over and over again. Marx comments that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and the same kind of spirit animates psychoanalysis. If we can notice what we repeat and what we think we are aiming it, we can better choose what we could do in times of crisis. We have agency in this, not, as some caricatures of psychoanalysis have it, of us as automata, as if addicts repeating bad behaviour.

At the heart of this is the fourth concept, the unconscious, in which repetition, drive and transference in the clinic operate. There is something beyond our conscious awareness. We do not control the meanings of our words, and we have to navigate a world we cannot completely comprehend, speaking a language that is a symbolic system bigger than us. My co-author David Pavón-Cuéllar puts it like this in his psychoanalytic work on the nature of discourse, that this ‘unconscious’ realm is beyond us, outside us, while consciousness is locked inside us as separate individuals, as if we are always separated from the world. So, there is an exterior unconscious and a conscious interior. Against this, there is a little trap which has much to do with the way the ‘unconscious’ is spoken of in the popular caricatured form it takes in commonsense. To say ‘the unconscious’ is to make it seem like a locked box, inside us, as if the drives are bubbling away as instinctual urges, pushing us to repeat behavioural patterns, and as if those phenomena then glue us like helpless infants to the psychoanalyst in the clinic.

History

There are implications of these ideas for personal liberation, for how we can come to take charge of our lives, make sense in the clinic, in the transference, of how we are driven to unconsciously repeat, including repeating ourselves when we talk about ourselves. And there are implications for political liberation, and this is where we connect our account at every point with predicaments and obstacles faced by the liberation movements. To insist that the unconscious is exterior, that it is grounded in the language we use to speak about ourselves and others, is to open up that political dimension of change.

All of the phenomena that psychoanalysis as a talking cure speaks of are grounded in language. Once you take that seriously, you can open up questions of the drive, repetition and the peculiar operations of transference in the psychoanalytic clinic as historical phenomena. There is psychoanalysis now, but it was not always with us, and we look forward to a world in which it will not be necessary.

So, how did come to be like this, and how can we grasp what psychoanalysis is as a historical phenomenon so that we make use of it as something progressive, as something that can be of use to liberation movements? A clue is in the beginning of the word ‘psychoanalysis’ which it shares with the other ‘psy’ professions. It will be quite understandable if you have been thinking of psychiatry and psychotherapy as I’ve been describing what this is all about, and I have already mentioned psychology. Here is the crux of the problem, which is that the ‘psy’ professions reduce social, economic, historical and political phenomena to their own domain, to the ‘psy’, to the individual psyche. What they study and treat is abstracted from social context, so they not only reduce but they reify; that is, they shrink everything down to the individual, reduction, and they turn social historical phenomena into things, reification.

They each in their different ways have subjected psychoanalysis to the same process in the textbooks and popular discussion, so they, as it were, ‘psychologise’ psychoanalysis. David and I make it clear in the book that we need to understand this process of ‘psychologisation’ as an ideological political process. We need to understand that it is part and parcel of the repression of psychoanalysis; it turns psychoanalysis as a theory and practice of personal and political liberation into its opposite.

Medical psy

It is easy for those not in one of the ‘psy’ professions to confuse psychoanalysis with psychiatry. Psychiatry is the medical wing of the psy professions, and, although there are some psychiatrists who break with the governing medical model of their profession, sometimes working psychoanalytically, it has played an influential role in reframing psychoanalysis as a medical approach. This is where the history and translation from one cultural context to another is so important. When Freud’s ideas arrived in the United States, for example, there was a concerted attempt by enthusiasts in the US to make psychoanalysis medical, effectively to make it part of psychiatry. Freud actively supported his colleagues who were not medically trained, writing a key text called ‘The question of lay analysis’. Lay analysis is by those who are not medically trained. Freud emphasised that expertise in culture, language and literature were more important than psychiatric expertise. His text was translated into English with a significant distortion in the title as ‘The problem of lay analysis’, as if Freud viewed it as a problem.

The translation of Freud’s work was a constant source of psychiatric misrepresentation and then misunderstanding among the public. For example, the German term ‘Trieb’ was translated as ‘instinct’. That was useful for those followers of Freud in the English-speaking world who wanted to make psychoanalysis part of the natural sciences, to medicalise it. The correct translation, as we discuss it in our book, is ‘drive’. This ‘drive’ is, Freud says, on the border of the physiological and the psychical, and psychoanalysis itself is better situated in the ‘Geisteswissenchaften’ or ‘human sciences’. To make psychoanalysis useful for the liberation movements, you need in some sense to make it ‘anti-psychiatric’, critical of medical psychiatry, at least to differentiate it from psychiatry.

Behavioural psy

Alongside psychiatry as a toxic influence on psychoanalysis there is psychology as another of the ‘psy’ professions, perhaps now even more influential. I taught psychology for nearly thirty years, and I can tell you that most psychology textbooks get Freud badly wrong. This is partly down to the English mistranslations, which include rendering the German word for soul, which is ‘Seele’ as ‘mental apparatus’. Psychologists compete with psychiatrists to deal with distress, but instead of administering drugs, psychology is a discipline focused on the way we think, ‘cognition’ in the mental apparatus, and on observations and correction of behaviour. This is where, for example, the unconscious, which is exterior to us, in language, is re-described as non-conscious mental processing inside the head.

Psychoanalysts had to flee for their lives from Nazism, from continental Europe in the 1930s, and it was at that point that the link with radical politics was broken. The Nazis knew that psychoanalysis was a political threat, they knew that many psychoanalysts were either members or supporters of the socialist or communist parties, and labelling it a ‘Jewish science’ was part of a sustained attempt to destroy it. Some psychoanalysts who were Marxists held onto their radical ideas in exile, but many had to adapt to their new homes to survive, and so they also turned psychoanalysis from being a tool of questioning and liberation into a tool of adaptation.

Psychoanalysis was effectively ‘psychologised’, turned into an adaptation of patients’ thinking and behaviour to society, and many psychoanalysts turned their critique of society and of reductionism and reification into a form of psychology. That is why when we refer to ‘critical psychology’ in the subtitle of our book, we are connecting with those inside the discipline who are breaking from it, and we show that psychoanalysis is really a form of ‘anti-psychology’.

Therapeutic psy

The third influential player in the field of the mainstream ‘psy’ professions is psychotherapy. Now, it is true that psychoanalysis is in some ways a form of psychotherapy, not psychiatric or psychological but therapeutic. The self-questioning that someone undergoes during psychoanalysis has therapeutic effects, and many psychotherapists draw on psychoanalytic ideas, whatever their particular favourite model of therapy is. So, there is a blurring of lines between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and we do want to reach out and work with radical psychotherapists and radical counsellors who are attempting to connect personal change with political change. However, there are some important distinctions that make psychoanalysis revolutionary, on the one hand, while psychotherapy tends to be, let’s say, reformist. There are two places where this distinction is important; one is conceptual and the other is institutional.

First, let’s look at the conceptual difference. Psychoanalysis is focused on conflict, interminable unconscious conflict and social conflict. We do not believe that it is possible to resolve that conflict; the question for each analysand is how they may live with it. That’s why I said earlier that I am not a utopian communist. We human beings are ‘divided subjects’, born into conflict, it is inescapable. I also said that we as communists aim for another world in which free association becomes more possible. To say it is impossible is not to pour cold water on the attempt, but to recognise that this is what life is, to strive for social relations in which the conflict is more bearable, more constructive. Psychotherapy, on the other hand tends to try to resolve conflict, smooth it over, sometimes by appealing to simple humanist nostrums about individuation or self-expression.

Alongside this, there is the institutional difference which we can see in the blooming of private psychotherapies in the market-place of mental health, each brand selling solutions to distress, promising relief, sometimes promising complete resolution of problems of living. Here we need to attend to a conflict at the heart of psychoanalysis itself, which is that while Freud, and many psychoanalysts in continental Europe before the Second World War, worked ‘privately’, charging and treating individuals, there was another tradition of work that we retrieve in our book, another tradition that is coming alive again in different parts of the world. The lesson is that, despite the claims of many mainstream psychoanalysts today who have turned their practice into a form of private psychotherapy, it is not necessary for the analysand to pay for treatment in order to get better. For example, Freud gave a speech in Budapest in 1919 prompted by his radical followers in which he argued for psychoanalysis to be made available free of charge in what promised at that moment to be a version of a national health service. The best psychotherapists aspire to this, and so they are also, in some sense, engaged in ‘anti-psychotherapy’.

Practice

Psychoanalysts put this idea into practice in Budapest, Berlin and Vienna, and these institutions were to be known later as ‘Freud’s free clinics’, with psychoanalysts helping to financially support them through their membership subscriptions and through signed vouchers in which they would pay for someone’s analysis with another analyst if they could not take it on themselves. These ideas about free access were developed in times of conflict, and perhaps it is not surprising that this alternative radical tradition is now being implemented in contexts where psychoanalysts are themselves under massive political pressure.

We see the connection between this kind of psychoanalytic work in communities in Brazil, for example, and in Palestine. In Brazil, psychoanalysts working in the favelas also engage in political protest against Bolsonaro. In the case of Palestine, we should remember that Freud’s principle financial supporter and part of the psychoanalytic inner circle in Vienna was Max Eitingon. Eitingon funded the development of psychoanalysts in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel, and he also provided significant funds to the Palestine Communist Party.

Radical causes

Even in the United States there were radical psychoanalysts, those under pressure from McCarthyism, from psychiatry to make psychoanalysis medical, from psychologists who wanted to adapt people and turn them into well-behaved citizens and from psychotherapists who promised to resolve personal conflicts. I will finish with one example. The 1955 best-selling book The Fifty-Minute Hour which sold one and half million copies was by Robert Lindner, who earlier wrote Rebel Without a Cause. It carried a sub-title that did not make it to the screen version The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. Lindner’s training analyst was a refugee from Nazism, Theodore Reik, the very figure who unleashed the ‘lay analysis’ debates because he was not medically trained. Robert Linder was active as a socialist in different progressive organisations, something he did not keep hidden from his patients. His ‘fifty-minute hour’ book, which helped popularise the phrase and psychoanalysis more generally, was republished in 1986 in London by Free Association books run by a later generation of radical psychoanalysts.

In our book we draw a red line from these brave radical figures in the history of psychoanalysis to present-day revolutionary psychoanalytic practice. I am making visible some of those names that have been so important to David and I in writing our book here, but the book itself is not an academic treatise weighed down with references or footnotes. We want this to be an accessible practical guide to what is there already in psychoanalysis, for those who know in their bones that change is necessary. We want to make it, in alliance with our comrades and friends and radical psychoanalysts around the world, into something that redeems the promise of radical psychoanalysts to be part of the liberation movements. It is for those who want to change the world, to link personal and political change.