A book review has just been published in an academic journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and, very unusually in this heavily controlled publishing environment, it shows sympathy to the book’s critique of the social turn in psychoanalysis. The book titled Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique is an anthology of essays by scholars edited by Jon Mills and Danielle Burston.
The reviewer, Ilene Philipson, points out how the anthology illuminates the process whereby an earlier coherent critique delivered by Critical Theory has mutated in the hands of activist clinicians into a regressive incoherent one. She states that:
‘As Mills and Burston’s anthology demonstrates, critical theory rests upon the fundamental insights of Marx and Freud and thus the inherent nature of both capitalist exploitation and human aggression. Through what appears to be an ignorance of Marx and a turning away from Freud’s instinct theory, contemporary psychoanalytic activists seem to have little theoretical mooring with which to understand the astounding social and environmental breakdown happening around us. As clinicians we face not only our own but our patients’ anxiety, fear, and anger over our rapidly warming planet and the possibility of a sixth extinction, massive economic inequality, almost daily mass murders, attacks on democracy, and the spread of authoritarianism around the globe. And yet, the most vocal and activist psychoanalysts focus on essentialist, racial and gender categories, and the denunciation of what they see as racism and transphobia as their ‘‘single, definite object.’’ ‘
Philipson’s review is in unequivocal agreement with the basic premise of the anthology; she states that: ‘To believe that the demands for diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings at our institutes, or for the acknowledgement of systemic racism in our psychoanalytic organizations, or for the recruitment of more people of color into our field are what constitute the turn to the social and political, represents an extremely narrow rendering of what such a turn actually might be.’
This review and the book itself deserve to be widely read in the therapy field. The whole review is published on Springer Link (NB: this requires either institutional or paid individual access).
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