The unconscious​ is back. Why now? Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people that has cost Israel a measure of its international legitimacy and led to the prolonged captivity and death of hostages, increased antisemitism and an exodus of Israel’s educated elite. The Israeli state performs its self-defeating operations under the sign of Jewish ‘safety’, and for that reason with the widespread approval of Jews in Israel and much of the global diaspora. Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration. In June 2024, the right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:

As Hitler … once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.

As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded in 2022 dedicated to psychoanalysis and left politics, ‘temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza.’

The refusal of genocide’s repetition – ‘never again’ – becomes the mandate for its inverted return: yes, again, genocide. As a consequence, Palestinians are left to excavate the bodies of their dead from the ruins of war and rebury them in the open-air cemetery of Gaza. The difficulty of the task arises not just from its magnitude – how to grieve more than seventy thousand people, a third of that number children? – but also from an ongoing occupation that erodes the psychic conditions necessary for mourning. For Freud, the work of mourning requires time in which the ego can discover the reality of its loss, and then choose its own life, moving beyond the fixation that he calls ‘melancholia’. But under occupation, loss is continuous, the choice of life never a given, and so the time for mourning never arrives. What is occupation, the Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar asks, but a ‘perpetual deferral of mourning’?

But surely the unconscious had made its presence felt even earlier, in another ongoing war, one perpetrated by a diverse coalition of authoritarian strongmen, feminists, manosphere influencers, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and centrist liberals who are, they insist, just worried about the kids. The crusade against so-called ‘gender ideology’ is more than an epiphenomenal culture war, waged cynically to distract from the material sources of social immiseration. Freud says a dream expresses a wish. We can say the same of war. What wish does the war against ‘gender ideology’ express?

There is again the wish for total safety, which requires the eradication of all possible threats, however remote. In her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021), the ‘gender critical’ philosopher Kathleen Stock argued that being trans should be legally protected as a species of gender non-conforming behaviour – but only, Stock qualified, to the extent that trans rights do not threaten the safety of non-trans women. This means, for Stock, not just the familiar demands for trans women to be excluded from women’s changing rooms and loos. It means that trans women have no right to female pronouns. The expectation that I, a non-trans woman, use ‘she’ and ‘her’ for someone who I suspect might be biologically male can operate, Stock says, like ‘cognitive Rohypnol’, slowing down my mental processes and making me more susceptible to violence –the violence, that is, of trans women.

So total is the cis woman’s right to safety that she cannot even be asked to stop and think of the other; just as the total right to Jewish safety means that any appeal to the dignity of Palestinian life is already an antisemitic assault. Vladimir Putin, like many authoritarian leaders a hero of the gender wars, longs for the restoration of the Russian Empire not just as an end in itself, but as a means, he says, to bezopásnost – total security, literally ‘the absence of threat’.

But there is a still deeper wish contained in the war on ‘gender ideology’. Like all our deepest wishes, it is an unthinkable wish, and so Freud says, one that must be repressed from consciousness. Indeed, for Freud it is the deepest of all wishes: not the wish to sleep with your mother or kill your father, but to be both mother and father, to transcend the forced choice represented by what Freud called the ‘great antithesis’ of male and female. The trans person reminds us of this denied wish, and so reveals that our sense of ourselves as simply a woman or a man is, in the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams’. The trans person is the chimera we all desire and dread.

It is no surprise, then, that the increasing visibility of trans life has led to the reassertion of sex as a self-evident distinction, rooted in biology and underwriting a natural social hierarchy. Nor is it a surprise that this reassertion of sexual division and hierarchy plays a central role in the global advancement of the far right. On the day of his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order: ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. The order affirms that there are only two sexes, male and female, as a matter of ‘immutable biological reality’; that men are biological males and women biological females; and that any suggestion otherwise has a ‘corrosive impact’ on ‘the validity of the entire American system’. This is the declaration of the reinstated father, who promises to restore the rule of fathers everywhere; to undo the psychic castration suffered by straight white men at the hands of invading immigrants, feminist women, ‘woke’ mobs, DEI initiatives and the democratic presumption of equality.

In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere. No purely materialist or realist or folk psychological analysis seems to suffice. We need to go beyond talk of parties and platforms; of beliefs, values and identitarian affiliations; of class, jobs, wages and exploitation. We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death-drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty and racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.

To what end? Despite more than a century of debate about the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de Beauvoir complained, seems to assume precisely what’s to be explained.) But can we doubt that there is more, much more, to our individual and collective lives than that of which we are consciously aware? Do we doubt that each of us encounters reality not directly, but through the thicket of our individual psychic realities, with their stubborn frames and secret desires, the vast sediment of our past histories? That, to put it mundanely but not inaccurately, each of us brings with us a helluva lotta baggage?

The interesting question to my mind is not whether there is truth in psychoanalysis, but whether its truth will set us free. This might seem an odd question for a philosopher to ask. Philosophers tend to be preoccupied with questions of truth and knowledge – and in the specific case of psychoanalysis, whether it deserves the status, as Freud thought it did and Karl Popper thought it absolutely did not, of a science. But insofar as a philosopher, or anyone, is interested in politics – interested, that is, not just in describing the world but changing it – the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us, not just from the violent divisions of our individual psyches, but from the violent divisions and resulting despair of our political moment.

There is reason for doubt. Psychoanalysis was born out of a collective retreat from politics on the part of the Viennese intelligentsia. In the 1880s, Austrian liberal hegemony, with its confident ideology of Enlightenment reason and social progress, was threatened by the emergence of new mass parties that channelled various anti-liberal currents – Christian, antisemitic, socialist and nationalist. In 1895, the electorate in Vienna voted for Karl Lueger, a populist antisemite and reactionary Catholic, as mayor. Emperor Franz Joseph, disliking Lueger’s antisemitism, refused to ratify his election; Freud, a liberal and a Jew, smoked a cigar in celebration. But just two years later, in 1897, the emperor bowed to the popular will, and Lueger became mayor, bringing the liberal era to a close. Describing the dying days of 19th-century Austria, the historian Carl Schorske writes: ‘Anxiety, impotence, a heightened awareness of the brutality of social existence … these features assumed new centrality in a social climate where the creed of liberalism was being shattered by events.’

Psychoanalysis, then, was born of a moment not dissimilar to our own: a moment when the image of the human as a rational animal seemed fragile if not preposterous, and the progressive liberalism founded on that image was revealed to be dangerously naive. In turning inwards to the drama of the human psyche, Freud was part of an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, what mattered was not objective reality but one’s affective response to it. Freud took this focus on inner feeling and instinct, synthesised it with the scientific rationalism of mid-century liberalism, and created in psychoanalysis a theory that at once offered a powerful reckoning with human irrationalism and a welcome refuge from its terrifying political manifestations.

As Schorske observes, Freud would put psychoanalysis to use in explaining away his own sense of political guilt. In his pivotal work of 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports one of his own dreams – he calls it a ‘revolutionary phantasy’ – in which he confronts an aristocratic Austrian statesman only to frantically flee the scene. The dream Freud rediscovers the statesman at a train station, now transfigured into Freud’s blind and dying father, whom Freud must help to piss into a urinal. On display in the dream is Freud’s guilt at having abandoned his youthful ambition to enter politics – to confront and conquer the old, antisemitic world represented by the aristocrat with the secular, liberal values that his father venerated. But Freud reads the dream as merely the phantastic fulfilment of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from the accusations of their fathers.

For Freud, the task of psychoanalysis is to help the patient unearth the origins of their neurotic symptom, finding at its root some unbearable idea that has been repressed by the conscious self into the unconscious. In so doing, the analyst promises to give to his patient a greater measure of agency, a new freedom to decide what to do with their previously unthinkable thought. Say it is an idea similar to the one Freud finds in his own dream: I wish to destroy my father and sleep with my mother. And, to make things more interesting, let’s also say that the patient is a woman rather than a man. Through the laborious process that Freud calls ‘working-through’, she comes to know the wish she has long repressed, and finds herself in a position to do something with this knowledge.

She may accept the reality of her wish and act on it, engaging in the ‘perversion’ of homosexuality – which is the reason Freud said that the opposite of a perversion is a neurosis. Or she may accept that her wish cannot be acted on, not without grave social sanction, and so set it aside in favour of a compensatory wish, substituting her desire to displace her father with, say, a desire to have a son. Psychoanalysis, in its orthodox Freudian form, makes no judgment between these options. This is not a comment on Freud’s own social views – in fact he was an advocate for the loosening of moral taboos against homosexuality – but rather a corollary of the principle that what matters, psychoanalytically, is not external reality, but the individual’s psychic representation of it. Not the actual aristocracy (the political class that dominates your social world) but the aristocrat in your head, who is really your overbearing father.

It follows that Freud’s many feminist critics, from the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney, to Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, were both right and wrong to charge Freud with encouraging women to ‘adjust’ themselves to patriarchal realities. As Juliet Mitchell argues in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), orthodox psychoanalysis charts a principled indifference between social accommodation and resistance. The task is to help the patient put her psychic reality in better order, an achievement which was compatible with multiple relations to social reality, and which could only ever be partial. Thus it is a mistake, Mitchell says, to read Freud as just another proponent of patriarchal morality, telling women they would be happy if only they submitted to the dulling pleasures of wifely and maternal duty. Indeed, Freud came increasingly to emphasise the impossibility of the ‘feminine’ role, the catastrophic splittings and sacrifices it demanded of the psyches of even apparently ‘normal’ women. At the same time, feminists are right in that Freudian psychoanalysis sees nothing disturbing in the woman who manages, perhaps against the odds, to remedy her neurosis by embracing the role patriarchy has assigned her – much less that patriarchal society is a moral disaster that must be collectively overcome.

Freudian psychoanalysis, then, is a form of self-historicising in the service of individual psychic liberation. It is individualistic not only at the level of practice, as an intimate and drawn-out encounter between patient and analyst, but also in its theoretical focus on the inner life of the patient. And yet, many powerful radical thinkers since Freud – Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Achille Mbembe, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Butler – have seen psychoanalysis as a tool for a more general, social liberation: from the psychically disfiguring systems of fascism, capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy. In just the last few years, a younger left has rediscovered in psychoanalysis, so recently dismissed as another expression of boomer decadence, a powerful framework of political critique. The pages of Parapraxis seem a confirmation of what an older generation of theorists have long been saying: that the missing term in radical political discourse is ‘psyche’.

Freud himself​ took an eventual if cautious turn towards politics, impelled by the ravages of the First World War. In 1919, the Social Democrats prevailed over their reactionary Catholic and German nationalist opponents, winning the right to govern Red Vienna. Their programme of Austro-Marxism stressed rational planning and scientific humanism. They made deep investments in social housing, adult education, psychology clinics and child welfare centres, winning over disaffected liberals, Freud among them, to their cause. At the same time, and reversing his prewar position that analysts should charge handsomely for their services, Freud called for the creation of free outpatient clinics ‘so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance’. Vienna’s free clinic, the Ambulatorium, was founded by members of Freud’s circle in 1922. All the most important ‘second generation’ psychoanalysts – Erich Fromm, Otto Fenichel, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud – served in free clinics, providing pro bono analysis for poor and working-class patients.

The younger members of Freud’s circle tended to be socialists or Marxists rather than liberals. Under the de facto leadership of Reich (who joined the German Communist Party in 1930), they enthusiastically debated how best to synthesise psychoanalysis and politics, Freud with Marx. Reich himself, unsatisfied with his work at the Ambulatorium – he wanted, he said, to prevent rather than merely to treat neurosis – began a mobile clinic which offered free sex education, contraceptives and Marxist instruction to young working-class people. Reich’s efforts would grow into his ‘Sex-Pol’ movement (short for the German Association of Proletarian Sexual Politics), whose motto was ‘Free Sexuality within an Egalitarian Society’. For Reich, all neurosis was created by the social suppression of a naturally free and healthy sexuality – as Freud disparagingly put it in 1928, Reich thought ‘the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis’ – and all sexual suppression was the result of a wholly surmountable economic form: capitalism.

With this simple formula, Reich brought together Marx and Freud, albeit at the cost of Freud’s most fundamental commitments: that the Oedipus complex is a ‘universal event of childhood’, produced not by any particular familial or social arrangement, but by the psyche’s necessary attempt to constitute itself as a subject in a world of taboo and prohibition; and that repression is the precondition of civilisation, capitalist or not. For Reich, sexual and political liberation went hand in hand: sexual rebellion would undermine the bourgeois moralism that ideologically scaffolds capitalism, and, in turn, ‘revolutionary struggle against economic exploitation’ would erode the material basis of sexual repression. For Freud – who was, more than a liberal or a progressive, a tragedian – it could never be so simple.

Reich sought to both politicise psychoanalysis and psychoanalyse politics. Psychoanalytic practice was to be radically democratised and socialised, emancipated from the strictures of bourgeois medicine. At the same time, and though Reich insisted that it was no substitute for Marxist sociology, psychoanalytic theory could help illuminate the present dispensation. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich sought to explain why Europe’s working classes were drawn to fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. At the origin of the phenomenon, Reich argued, was the patriarchal family, whose sexual repressiveness produced in its members an unsatisfied longing that could all too easily be channelled by authoritarian strongmen and blood-and-soil mysticism. The book was published in 1933, the same year in which Hitler became Chancellor, and Reich was banned from the Communist Party of Denmark, where he was then living, on account of his sexual heterodoxies.

In an attempt, both foolish and doomed, to save psychoanalysis from Nazi inquisition as a ‘Jewish science’, Freud and his more conservative associates denied that psychoanalysis had anything to do with politics. In a letter to Ernest Jones, the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Anna Freud wrote that her father couldn’t ‘wait to get rid of’ Reich. ‘What my father finds offensive in Reich,’ she explained, ‘is the fact that he has forced psychoanalysis to become political; psychoanalysis has no part in politics.’ A year later, in 1934, Reich was formally expelled from the Psychoanalytical Association. This and other appeasement measures didn’t prevent the Nazi state from ‘aryanising’ psychoanalysis: it burned Freud’s books, absorbed Berlin’s free clinic into its death apparatus and made refugees of nearly all its German and Austrian practitioners. In 1938, Freud fled to London ‘to die in freedom’. Three of his five sisters were killed in Treblinka.

Of the dual ambitions​ shared by Reich and the other second-generation ‘political Freudians’ – to politicise psychoanalysis and psycho-analyse politics – it is the latter that has been more fully realised. This is not to forget the important attempts, historical and contemporary, to politically reimagine psychoanalysis and mental healthcare more broadly. In the 1950s, before he became the fiery spokesman and charismatic intellectual of the Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon sought to revolutionise the psychiatric clinic. Before his arrival there in 1953, Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital was a typical example of the so-called Algiers School of colonial ethno-psychiatry, founded on the premise that native Algerians were constitutionally primitive, puerile and stubborn. (Fanon witheringly called this a ‘fertile idea’.) Drawing on his mentor François Tosquelles’s idea of ‘social therapy’, Fanon worked to transform Blida-Joinville into a place where patients, French and Algerian alike, could ‘rediscover the meaning of freedom’. He set up a Moorish café in the hospital, where patients drank coffee, played cards and enjoyed performances from Arab musicians and storytellers. He also laid out a football field, still used today, enthusiastically organising the patients’ matches. In an academic article he co-authored with his intern Jacques Azoulay on the experiment at Blida-Joinville, Fanon wrote that ‘a revolutionary attitude was essential, because it was necessary to go from a position in which the supremacy of Western culture was evident, to one of cultural relativism.’

Fanon increasingly became convinced that, however much it was endowed with a culturally specific sociality, the psychiatric hospital ‘condemns [the patient] to exercise his freedom in the unreal world of fantasy’. The asylum could not de-alienate the mad patient, just as the colonised subject could not be de-alienated through the ‘unreal’, as Fanon called it, world of traditional religion. What was needed was freedom, not its simulacrum. Only by emancipating the mad person from forced confinement and into the world could the meeting of doctor and patient be ‘an encounter between two freedoms’. In his final days, as the Algerian revolution raged, Fanon set up an out-patient centre in Tunis. He hoped it would serve as a model of mental healthcare for the decolonising societies that were struggling into being – and which, Fanon knew, would have to address their ‘pathology of freedom’.

Today, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, founded in 1926, continues to offer low-fee therapy to a limited number of patients. It is, according to the directory of the Free Clinics Network, one of more than 250 autonomous clinics in twenty countries which offer low-fee or free psychoanalysis to poor and otherwise marginalised patients. In Palestine, psychoanalysis has had a long life as a liberatory praxis, one that seeks both to understand and address the psychic ravages of occupation. The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, one of five Palestinian clinics listed in the Free Clinics Network directory, is the largest mental health service in Gaza. Despite Israel’s destruction of its centres, and the death and displacement of its staff, the programme continues to provide psychosocial services for a population suffering from trauma that, UNRWA has agreed, is too ‘chronic and unrelenting’ to fit the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. The programme’s interventions focus on Gaza’s children, 96 per cent of whom reported last year that they felt death was imminent, and nearly half that they wanted to die.

Even outside the extreme context of a genocidal war, attempts to democratise, much less socialise, psychoanalysis – an essentially exacting, intimate and drawn-out practice – always struggle with the mismatch between therapeutic supply and neurotic demand. This is especially true today, with our twinned global crises of ‘care’ and ‘mental health’. As Freud warned, ‘compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world … the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible.’

Little wonder then that the impulse to synthesise psychoanalysis with radical politics has more often expressed itself in theory than in practice. It is Fanon the diagnostician of colonialism’s psychopathology, rather than Fanon the caring doctor, whom we remember and revere. Many of the most celebrated psychoanalytic readers of politics, from Herbert Marcuse to Judith Butler, are not themselves trained analysts. ‘Knowledge sets one free’ was the slogan of the confident mid-19th-century liberalism that was formative for Freud. What knowledge do we gain when we psychoanalyse politics?

For Fanon, it is that colonialism is a mutilating madness for colonist and colonised alike, one that can only be overcome through a redirection of colonialism’s violence against its perpetrators and their ‘entire moral and material universe’. It follows that decolonisation, as a release of the colonised subjects’ repressed desire to take the colonist’s place, is at once a progressive moment in a world-historical dialectic and replete with dangers: of ethnonationalism, regressive traditionalism and elite capture. For Shulamith Firestone, Freud corrects Marx, revealing that the root cause of all oppression (economic, political, racial, sexual) is ‘the biological family – the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled’. In turn we come to know, Firestone says, that we require ‘a sexual revolution much larger than … a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems’.

For Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalysis tells us that the unconscious is the seat of ideology, its mechanism of interpellation and transmission. What’s more, because the law of sexual difference is a basic law of human society and thus too of the unconscious (a law against which every unconscious protests), feminism as the study of sexual difference takes us not to the ‘cultural’ edges of politics, but to its very heart.

For Judith Butler, psychoanalysis helps us see in acts of domination and violence a disavowal of our radical, mutual dependency. For Jacqueline Rose, psychoanalysis warns of the perilous temptation to reify the event of trauma into the identity of ‘victim’ – perils played out, for Rose, in both Zionism and radical feminism. While ‘psychoanalysis does not give us a blueprint for political action,’ Rose writes, it is in ‘a privileged position to challenge the dualities (inside/outside, victim/aggressor, real event/fantasy and even good/evil) on which so much traditional political analysis has so often relied’. Psychoanalysis compels us to recognise, as Rose puts it, the ‘infinite complexity of the human mind’ – including the minds of our oppressors.

Unsurprisingly, the contemporary rise of powerful far-right movements and leaders – in the US, UK, Brazil, India, Philippines, Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere – has turned many political thinkers, including Richard Seymour, Dagmar Herzog, Christina Wieland, Claudia Leeb and Joan Braune, back to the puzzle that preoccupied Reich and other left Freudians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, that of the psychic allure of authoritarian strongmen, blood-and-soil nativism and regressive sexual and familial norms. And like their 20th-century predecessors, these thinkers find themselves reaching not just for terms such as aggression, revenge and anxiety, but also desire, phantasy and pleasure.

In short, what we come to know, when we have psychoanalytic knowledge of politics, is the reason things remain stubbornly as they are, even when it seems obvious that they should be otherwise; the full cost of things being this way, the forms of psychic disintegration, dissolution and loss that underlie more obvious forms of economic and bodily harm; and, finally, a better sense of what we might hope for: what forms of collective life better answer to our natures as conflicted, desiring subjects – and what horizons of possibility might lie beyond human possibility.

Psychoanalysis can help us know all this. And yet, in politics, we always arrive at the vexing question: how to put one’s knowledge into practice? How to pull off the feat of simultaneously describing the world and changing it? Marx was wrong to suggest that so far the philosophers had only tried to do the former. In fact, philosophers have long tried, and try still, to do both. But philosophers tend to operate on the assumption, inherited from Plato, that knowledge of the Good is not just necessary but more or less sufficient for virtuous action – that, put differently, most wrongdoing comes from moral ignorance. If this is your starting point, then it makes sense to spend your time coming up with arguments to show that, say, gross inequality is unjust, that settler-occupation is impermissible, that none of us has the right to destroy the Earth for our personal gain. If, however, you take a different view of things – a more psychoanalytic view, on which all sorts of mechanisms of resistance, defence and disavowal might get between people’s beliefs and their actions – then the philosopher’s quest to change the world by morally enlightening it will seem foolhardy.

Psychoanalysis is not in the business of moral enlightenment, at least not directly. Its knowledge is descriptive rather than prescriptive: about the way things are, rather than what they ought to be. For those who have read their Marx, this is already a step in the right direction – that is, in the direction of a theory capable of producing change. For example, the politically important question, surely, is not whether Israel’s genocide is a grotesque moral abomination – every Palestinian already knows it is – but what possibilities exist for bringing it, and the state of occupation that produced it, to an end. To answer that question we need a better description of the Palestinian situation. We need what the Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall called a ‘conjunctural’ analysis: a descriptive mapping of the forces – economic, political, social, ideological – at play in a given historical moment, a mapping that can be used to identify possibilities for, and obstacles to, practical intervention.

Psychoanalysis, if you accept its basic power to describe aspects of reality, can in principle contribute to conjunctural analysis. But for Hall, not just any true description of the conjuncture will do. It may be that Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people is in part driven by a history of unmetabolised trauma, a trauma that is deliberately reproduced by Israel’s culture industry and weaponised by the Israeli state. What follows? Would knowing this help the Palestinian liberation movement identify sites of intervention, decide which levers to pull? Or, on the contrary, would it lead to a strategy with unintended consequences – the reification, say, of the Nazi Holocaust as a singular, hyper-trauma that excuses in advance any atrocity produced in its name?

The difficulty​ is that psychoanalytic knowledge is always knowledge of human vulnerability, of the helpless infant within each person, however outwardly powerful they may be. While he was giving haven, inside the Blida-Joinville hospital, to the Algerian rebels of the National Liberation Front, Fanon was also treating the French servicemen who were involved in torturing them. For Fanon, as his biographer Adam Shatz writes, the French torturers too ‘were victims of a colonial system whose dirty work they were required to perform’. But this did not stop Fanon from arguing, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that ‘for the colonised, life can only materialise from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.’ Decolonisation, defined by the demand that ‘the last shall be first,’ required an inversion of the dichotomy between coloniser and colonised; the humanity of the colonised subject must be absolutely affirmed, and the colonist enemy be made to suffer the symbolic and material terror that he so long perpetrated. It is true that Fanon longed for a humanist future, in which race was transcended and all men recognised one another as equals. But this future had to be achieved through a violent confrontation of radical unequals in the present. The psychoanalytic gaze, by its nature levelling, egalitarian and humane, could theoretically illuminate colonialism. But it could not, Fanon believed, provide the practical attitude required for the actual work of decolonisation.

A decade before The Wretched of the Earth, and two years before the start of the Algerian War, Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks. Its theme was what Fanon called the ‘massive psycho-existential complex’ of French colonial racism. Here he offered a more straightforward, and more hopeful, account of the political relevance of psychoanalysis: ‘By analysing’ the complex of racism, Fanon wrote, ‘we aim to destroy it.’ This destruction would be achieved through greater self-knowledge, on the part of both blacks and whites, to which his text would contribute: ‘Those who recognise themselves’ in Black Skin, White Masks will ‘have made a step in the right direction’. Fanon’s ‘true wish’ was ‘to get my brother, black or white, to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension’.

In so wishing, Fanon effects a simple transposition of Freud from an individual to a collective key. For Freud, psychoanalysis frees the analysand by giving her awareness of, and thus greater control over, the wish she finds unbearable to think, and which stands at the base of her neurosis. For the earlier Fanon – Fanon before the Algerian revolution – the same trick could be pulled off at the social level. By showing racialised society how its psycho-existential complex operated, the way it trapped black and white alike in a terrible dialectic, Fanon would free its members. More than just contributing to a third-person understanding of the colonial conjuncture, Fanon initially hoped that psychoanalysis could, in the political as much as the therapeutic context, serve as a form of second-person address, one that resulted in a liberating self-knowledge.

By the time of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon had seemingly abandoned this account of the political import of psychoanalysis. That he did so is perhaps suggestive of that account’s over-neatness. In the therapeutic setting, Freud says, the patient violently resists the emerging diagnosis. Part of her does not want the knowledge that will set her free. This is true even though the patient has chosen to enter analysis, and so is, at some level, prepared to treat herself as someone who does not wholly know herself, someone in need of the analyst’s insight. It is unsurprising that, in the sphere of politics, where as a rule no one asks to be psychoanalysed, the provision of a diagnosis is often received as an assault on one’s dignity. To treat someone psychoanalytically is to treat some vital aspect of her as a symptom, to be explained in terms of underlying and arational causes, rather than consciously held reasons.

For Freud, psychoanalysis was the third ‘impossible’ profession, along with teaching and governing – the profession of politics. In all three, he said, ‘one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results’. For Freud, it made sense to think of politics as akin to teaching and analysis; turn-of-the-century liberalism also endeavoured to form rational and free persons out of the raw matter of human beings. But following the Second World War, liberalism grew wary of the project of subject-formation, seeing it as the path to authoritarianism, the avoidance of which came to be both liberalism’s central aim and its chief selling point. For John Rawls, the most influential exponent of postwar liberalism, Freudianism, like Marxism, ‘destroys the game of reasoning’ by reducing ‘men’s opinions’ to hidden causes, whether repressed wishes or material interests.* In an unpublished paper from 1955 Rawls wrote:

What disturbs us about psychoanalysis … is that it suggests … that the self is a system of powers which doesn’t know itself in vital respects; although it is significant that for Freud the self as a system of full conscious powers was the goal to be won. What common sense takes for granted he regarded as a rare and difficult achievement. Thus what psychoanalysis might lead us to think is that people are not really, or not fully, persons.

For Rawls, to treat one’s fellow citizen as an analyst might treat her patient – to diagnose, say, their Zionism as resulting from a state-cultivated trauma, or their hostility towards immigration as expressing an infantile drive for safety and control – is to cease thinking of them as a person, and so to abandon an axiom of liberal democracy.

There is something to this. If we were all to engage one another all the time in the spirit of what Paul Ricoeur called – thinking of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche – the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, we would drive one another quite literally mad. Social life would become impossible. The contemporary culture war gives us a glimpse of this prospect. Psychoanalysis has no truck with the crude reductionism involved in saying that someone believes such and such ‘just because’ they are a white, cis, straight bourgeois male – any more than because they are a queer, brown, female metropolitan elite. (Indeed, one way of putting the core insight of psychoanalysis is that none of us is simply any of the categories under which we fall, no matter how much we may consciously identify with it.) But in its basic imperative to read people as determined by more than just the reasons they consciously avow, psychoanalysis shares something with this reductionist reflex. It is for this reason that the queer literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, observed that the choice to engage in a hermeneutics of suspicion is ‘ethically very fraught’ and should be seen as a ‘strategic and local decision, not necessarily a categorical imperative’.

Freud, though one of the founding fathers of paranoid reading, would have agreed with Sedgwick. In a footnote to his 1931 essay ‘Female Sexuality’, in which he argues that the girl’s envy of the boy’s penis is pivotal to her subject-formation, he wrote:

It is to be anticipated that men analysts with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree with what I have said here. They will hardly fail to object that such notions spring from the ‘masculinity complex’ of the male and are designed to justify on theoretical grounds his innate inclination to disparage and suppress women. But this sort of psychoanalytic argumentation reminds us here, as it so often does, of Dostoevsky’s famous ‘knife that cuts both ways’. The opponents of those who argue in this way will on their side think it quite natural that the female sex should refuse to accept a view which appears to contradict their eagerly coveted equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision.

Psychoanalysis is a knife that ‘cuts both ways’. My attempt to psychoanalyse you can itself be psychoanalysed. The Freudian can be put on the couch, just as the Marxist can be accused of dressing up his envy as class consciousness. When this happens, we arrive at a dialectical impasse; psychoanalysis then goes limp as a ‘weapon of controversy’. In the therapeutic setting, the patient’s resistance is carefully managed, its energy redirected towards self-knowledge. But in politics, where there is no mutually agreed ‘patient’ and ‘doctor’, it is less clear that psychoanalysis has anything to tell us, in such moments, about how to go on.

In their recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler attempts to psychoanalyse the global hysteria over ‘gender ideology’.† In a chapter on trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler does not just make the now familiar but crucial point that such feminists, whatever their intentions, give material and ideological succour to a patriarchal regime that harms all women, especially lesbians. (I say ‘whatever their intentions’, but surely many know better. After Trump’s second inauguration, Hadley Freeman and Janice Turner respectively called Trump a ‘feminist kween’ and ‘feminist hero’.) Taking J.K. Rowling, a survivor of intimate partner violence, as a case study, Butler identifies a ‘phantasmic sliding’ from a personal experience of male violence to the idea that all men, or all people with penises, are violent, and then to the idea that trans women must pose an existential threat to cis women. ‘Violent crimes are real. Sexual violence is real,’ Butler writes. ‘But living in the repetitive temporality of trauma’ does not produce

an adequate account of social reality … None of us was violated by an entire class, even if it sometimes feels that way. To refuse to recognise trans women as women because one is afraid that they are really men and, hence, potentially rapists, is to let the traumatic scenario loose on one’s description of reality, to flood an undeserving group of people with one’s unbridled terror and fear.

As I read this bit of Butler’s book what I wanted to know was not whether the analysis was correct, but how it would be received. Would trans-exclusionary feminists welcome it as a dialectical shift, seeing in it a refusal to write them off as moral monsters? An attempt to empathise with their justified anxiety about male violence, even if not an endorsement of the politics in which that anxiety results?

No. Kathleen Stock called Butler’s account ‘a compendium of smears’ and summed up the argument as follows:

If you are anti-gender … then you are very probably a patriarchal racist Christian nationalist nutjob, and also secretly gay. She is probing your unconscious, remember, and understands you better than you do yourself. Or perhaps – and this is about as charitable as it gets – you are simply a naive and credulous fool, for whom getting in a moral panic about gay marriage and LGBTQ+ library books acts as a psychic substitute for reasonable fears about climate change and neoliberalism.

Striking a similar note, the philosopher Nina Power wrote that Butler’s ‘diagnostic and psychoanalytic’ project is

remarkably handy if one wants to accuse people of holding beliefs they don’t actually hold. Thus the pope, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, mothers on message boards, doctors and psychologists, and whoever else you don’t like are all fundamentally bearers of the same bad thought. They have no good reasons for their position, because all their motives are unconscious (and bad).

It would presumably not help to persuade Stock or Power to point out that their resistance to Butler’s diagnosis would, for Freud, hardly be evidence of its falsity – and indeed, on the contrary, that it might be a sign that we are approaching what Freud would have called the ‘pathogenic nucleus’ of trans-exclusionary feminism.

In the ugly war over ‘the trans question’, it would seem that ‘the use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision’. For Stock and Power are correct about this much: psychoanalysis does not presume that we in general know our own minds. Psychoanalysis is not ‘charitable’ in the philosophical sense (it is telling, I think, that both Stock and Power are trained philosophers) of assuming the maximal rationality and self-knowledge of the other. If psychoanalysis involves charity, it is the charity of empathy, not presumed rationality: a willingness to see, even in the most rebarbative aspects of human behaviour, an intelligible response to our shared condition.

With​ the substitution of empathy for charity comes the danger of what we might call ‘hermeneutical domination’: that in the name of liberating the other, we will imprison her in our favoured interpretation, insisting on the rightness of our diagnosis in the teeth of her violent resistance. This danger has animated the critics of psychoanalysis, and worried some of its practitioners, from the start. Freud’s Hungarian associate Sándor Ferenczi, in his 1928 paper ‘The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique’, diagnosed ‘over-keenness in making interpretations’ as ‘one of the infantile diseases of the analyst’. The remedy, Ferenczi said, was for the analyst to cultivate intellectual ‘modesty’ and ‘tact’. It was Fanon’s growing anxiety about the ‘master/slave, prisoner/jailer dialectic’ of the traditional therapeutic relationship that led him to abandon the asylum as a model of care. In his History of Madness, Foucault condemns Freud for ‘freeing’ the madman from the asylum, only to arrogate, to the single person of the analyst, ‘all [the asylum’s] powers’ to watch, judge, punish and induce confession. Freud, Foucault writes, thereby ‘amplified’ the doctor’s ‘virtues as worker of miracles, preparing an almost divine status for his omnipotence’. Rawls, as we have seen, thought psychoanalysis incompatible with the respect we owe each other as ‘persons’: a game of unreason that had to be kept out of the public square. Stephen Frosh, an academic and former clinical psychologist at the Tavistock, observes that psychoanalysis ‘accentuates the power of the therapist to such a degree that it appears to validate authoritarianism’.

Nowhere do we find more anxiety about psychoanalysis as an authoritarian practice than in the work of Jacques Lacan, Freud’s most influential interpreter. Lacan both defended Freud and, to do so, radically rewrote him. Using the same terms as Rawls, Lacan insists that psychoanalysis ‘respects the person’. For this reason, he says, it would be ‘paradoxical’ for the analyst to ‘aim to break down the subject’s resistance’ in order to secure his acquiescence to a favoured construction. Lacan insists that psychoanalysis, as Freud both understood and practised it, refuses hermeneutical domination, the ‘complete brutality’ of the ‘inquisitorial’ style of analysis, the ‘violence that speech can bring with it’. In Freud, Lacan protests somewhat too loudly, we find not the will to interpretative power, but ‘a more nuanced attitude, that’s to say, more humane’.

Underwriting this defence of Freud is Lacan’s transformation of psychoanalysis, from an archaeological science that seeks to recover or reconstruct the actual, infantile crisis that prompted the subject’s repression, into a structural endeavour that aims to articulate, and thereby reconfigure, the analysand’s relationship to the other’s desire. The ‘correctness’ of a psychoanalytic interpretation is no longer primarily a matter of its historical accuracy, a matter of tracing the true origins of what Lacan calls the analysand’s ‘fundamental fantasy’. What truly matters is the productivity of the analyst’s intervention – that the analyst’s speech, and his silence, allows him to embody, for the analysand, the enigmatic lack around which her desire circulates; and that, in turn, the analysand is prompted to speak that which is currently unspeakable for her.

In this schema, the analyst transmits no expert hermeneutical knowledge or aetiological discovery to the analysand. On the contrary, the analyst must refuse, Lacan says, the epistemic authority that the analysand ascribes to him, abdicating the role of ‘the subject supposed to know’. In fact, the Lacanian analyst does know many things: that desire is by its nature unsatisfiable; that the ego is a fragile mask for an essentially divided self; that the analysand must come to assume responsibility for the structure of her desire, seeing it not as an alien imposition of contingent circumstance but as something she chose. But this knowledge is to be operationalised, never performed. Indeed, the analyst must insist on a Socratic self-effacement: he knows ‘nothing other than his [own] desire’. For Lacan, the analyst’s theoretical grasp of psychoanalysis is less important than his practical know-how, his ability to ask the right question in the right way at the right moment. This practical ability, Lacan says, is akin not to philosophical knowledge, but to the knowledge evinced by wise statesmen: ‘If Themistocles and Pericles were great men, it was because they were good psychoanalysts.’

Lacan thus contains the threat of hermeneutical domination by reimagining the analytic task. In making his case, he also downplays – we might say resists – what we know of Freud’s actual clinical practice, which often shows a man, as his biographer Peter Gay put it, engulfed by a ‘rage to cure’. That rage is on disturbing display in Freud’s case study of ‘Dora’, an 18-year-old patient whose real name was Ida Bauer. During their sessions, Freud reports barraging Bauer with his diagnosis of her hysterical symptoms: namely, that the young woman was in love with her father’s friend ‘Herr K.’, whose sexual aggressions she had begun enduring at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and which she had violently rejected. Bauer’s anger at her father – for his long-standing and flagrant affair with Herr K.’s wife, and his willingness to sacrifice his own daughter to Herr K. in sexual exchange – was, for Freud, in fact an Oedipal desire, reawakened by Bauer’s repression of her love for Herr K.

Freud took Bauer’s repeated refusals of this interpretation as confirmation of it, just as Herr K. had taken Bauer’s repeated rejection of his sexual advances for a secret ‘yes’. Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester write that Freud’s readings of Bauer were ‘like erect, violating members requiring her assent’. As he pressed ‘himself on Ida’, they ask, ‘what did she feel – beneath his outer garb of civility, concern, acute comments and unexpected surprises – but the penetrating hardness of his theory?’ After eleven weeks of this ordeal, Bauer quit her treatment, which Freud interpreted as his tiresome patient’s desire to enact her revenge on him as a substitute-father. Bauer then took matters into her own hands, confronting Herr and Frau K. about their respective transgressions. Both husband and wife admitted the truth of the young woman’s allegations, and her symptoms temporarily subsided.

In criticising Freud’s treatment of Bauer, I do not mean to suggest that his interpretation was mistaken, at least not wholly: that there was no part of the young girl that had been excited by Herr K.’s attentions or that her feelings about her father’s affair were simply ones of moralised judgment. Even so, we should press Freud on his assumption that the actual realisation of the girl’s phantasies would bring her satisfaction, would not in fact be emotionally disastrous for her. In a famous paper on child sexual abuse, Ferenczi writes that ‘if more love or love of a different kind from that which they need is forced on … children,’ it may ‘lead to pathological consequences in the same way as the frustration or withdrawal of love’. Might it not be the horror of a phantasy coming real that made the adolescent Bauer react with such disgust to Herr K.’s sexual advances – rather than, as Freud insists, her jealousy that he had given similar attentions to the governess? And if so, isn’t Freud’s suggestion – that ‘the only possible solution for all the parties concerned’ was for Herr K. to divorce his wife and marry Bauer, leaving Frau K. to Bauer’s father – an indication of an all too literal understanding, on Freud’s part, of the workings of phantasy?

Later in his career, Freud would warn analysts not to ram interpretations down a patient’s throat, counselling something like Ferenczi’s ‘tact’. ‘As a rule,’ Freud wrote shortly before he died, ‘we put off telling [the patient] of a construction or explanation till he himself has so nearly arrived at it that only a single step remains to be taken, though that step is in fact the decisive synthesis.’ But Freud never renounced the constellation of ideas that Lacan plays down on his behalf: that the analyst has expert knowledge which the patient lacks, knowledge not just of analytic technique, but of the true origins and meaning of the patient’s neurosis; that it is part of the analyst’s task to help the patient acquire this aetiological knowledge for herself; and that, more often than not, the patient will refuse this knowledge, though it is precisely what is needed to set her free.

For Freud, successful analysis was nearly impossible. If the analyst was going to cure, he required a formidable suite of psychic, epistemic and ethical virtues. Perfect normality was an ‘ideal fiction’ that even the analyst could only approximate. Nonetheless, the analyst required ‘a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness’, and indeed ‘some kind of superiority, so that … he can act as a model for his patient’.

It is hard not to bristle at that phrase, ‘some kind of superiority’. Hearing it, we should think – again, insofar as we are thinking politically – of psychoanalysis as a materially instantiated practice, one that has so often been recruited for projects of social repression and normalisation, especially of female and queer sexuality. Lacan’s horror of the analyst’s enactment of epistemic ‘superiority’ and hermeneutical prowess, and his disavowal of such claims in Freud, has its mirror in liberalism’s horror of claims to privileged knowledge on the part of a designated sect, class or nation – claims, as Rawls says, that destroy the ‘game of reasoning’. For Rawls, the remedy is to meet reason only with reason. But for Lacan, this would amount to meeting the other’s ego with one’s own, when it is precisely the ego – our sense of ourselves as unified, coherent wholes – that needs to be ruptured. Reason is not to be met with reason, but with punctuation, silence and what Lacan calls ‘oracular speech’, gnomic utterances that disrupt the analysand’s smooth understanding of herself. ‘You say you cannot be safe so long as Palestinians want you dead. What dead do you want?’

There​ is a difference, I want to suggest, between allowing a rational fear of domination to shape our politics, and making that fear the totality of our politics. When we think of hermeneutical knowledge and its assertion, and the political risks such assertions carry with them, we should not think only of doctors and scientists and other custodians of expert discourses, whom Adrienne Rich called ‘the makers and sayers of culture’, and who are always presumptively male and Western and educated. To do so would be to abandon something vital to any liberatory politics, namely the recognition that knowledge often resides precisely where ideology says it is least likely to be found. Or, as Hegel put it, that it is the slave who knows the master best.

In 1931, Ferenczi wrote some notes published under the extraordinary title ‘Aphoristic Remarks on the Theme of Being Dead – Being a Woman’. He asks whether becoming a woman is a process of traumatic adaptation, a ‘partial death’. If so, could this explain ‘the higher intellectual faculties’ found in women? ‘In the moment of the trauma,’ Ferenczi writes,

some sort of omniscience about the world associated with a correct estimation of the proportions of their own and foreign powers and a shutting out of any falsification by emotivity (i.e. pure objectivity, pure intelligence), makes the person in question … more or less clairvoyant … the instant of dying – if perhaps after a hard struggle the inevitability of death has been recognised and accepted – is associated with that timeless and spaceless omniscience.

We should hesitate to go all the way with Ferenczi. Trauma is no guarantee of pure objectivity or omniscience, as indeed the Nakba and everything that has followed, including the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, remind us. It would be a dangerous romanticism to think that the Gaza genocide will result only in Palestinians seeing Israelis with greater psychic and moral clarity. Ferenczi himself thought that the same traumatic mechanism that produces women’s ‘omniscience’ also produced the capacity to take pleasure in renunciation and self-destruction – the pathology of female masochism.

But surely there is something to the idea that some people, by virtue of the place they are allotted in the world, do see things more clearly than others – indeed, sometimes see others more clearly than those others see themselves. We can ask: what is lost, ethically and politically, when this something is abandoned, so that we can uphold politics as a ‘game of reasoning’? Is this game guaranteed to end in dignity? Can the occupier be trusted to know himself?

Psychoanalytic practice​ is essentially dyadic, a collaboration between patient and analyst, however asymmetric or uneasy, and however many others (mother, father, society, Other) may invisibly populate the analytic scene. In this sense, the use of psychoanalysis to illuminate politics – in theoretical texts by Butler or Rose, Fanon or Firestone – is, strictly speaking, not an instance of psychoanalysis, but a derivative application of its theory. In such cases, the subject of the analysis cannot speak back; ‘collaboration’ becomes an effective impossibility. Resistance is almost guaranteed.

It follows that the political import of psychoanalytic texts rarely comes from any transformation in the psyches of the subjects they analyse – from emancipating the minds of far-right populists, climate-denialists or génocidaires. As political theory rather than praxis, psychoanalysis can do other things. It can help us better understand how the world, including our oppressors, works, and so what we might do about it, and them; and what wishes we might have for collective life, and which of these the reality principle demands we set aside.

Perhaps it is churlish to ask psychoanalysis to do more. But it is important, I think, to see that the distinctive connection between knowledge and freedom that Freud drew, operating through the crucial mechanism of the second-person address, is – in the standard way of bringing psychoanalysis to bear on politics – no longer at work. This is not a criticism. But it may contain a warning. In a moment in which psychoanalytic theory is returning to the cultural centre, but psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice remains exceedingly rare, it is very easy to forget what underwrites Freud’s original promise to liberate: that is, a conversational encounter between self and other. So too is it easy to forget that, from the psychoanalytic point of view, the will to greater and greater theoretical mastery can itself be a form of resistance to the real work of practical transformation.

Indeed, I find it striking how few thinkers propose to bring psychoanalysis into politics as a technical craft (the ‘talking cure’) that might make us more effective political agents, more endowed with the judgment and tact required to engage our fellow humans, especially when they are ensnared in bad ideology. The contributors to the 2020 Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory apply a psychoanalytic lens to illuminate contemporary political phenomena, including populism, racism, nationalism, capitalism and neoliberalism. In an essay on the climate crisis, Sally Weintrobe observes that:

disavowal is disavowal. There is no talking to someone who does not want, is not able, or is not ready to take something in. Climate communicators seem to forget that when they argue over the best way to tell people about climate change. The implication is if they could just find the ‘right way’ to break the news, then people would take the subject seriously. Psychoanalysts are familiar with this issue in the clinical setting, aware that insight, while it can be helped to form, can never be ‘imparted’ from analyst to analysand. It is always a spontaneous, owned, creative construction of the analysand that involves a radical shift in perspective.

This seems an important corrective. A friend of mine who has worked in climate advocacy for decades calls the idea that you can just tell people the facts and their behaviour will change ‘the lie of the 1990s’. Talk of ecological apocalypse, when global capitalism has alienated most of us from almost any sense of social belonging and collective power, is more likely to deepen impotence than it is to enliven agency. So it would be welcome were Weintrobe – a practising psychoanalyst – to offer guidance on the way to achieve ‘a radical shift in perspective’ in those who currently deny reality. But Weintrobe does not offer this. Instead she gives a theoretical account of the relationship between climate disavowal and neoliberalism: a perfectly plausible account, but not one that responds to the practical problem with which she opens – and on which our collective fate as a species, and the fates of many other species, rests.

In another chapter in the Routledge volume, on ‘Hate’, C. Fred Alford argues that psychoanalysis illuminates the importance of early bystander intervention in an unfolding genocide. Such intervention, Alford argues, interrupts the ‘shared pleasure in hatred and destruction’ of the genocidal psyche. But the intervention, he cautions, should not take psychoanalytic form: ‘It is neither necessary nor desirable that bystanders interpret the acts they observe as ones of sadism and pleasure in destruction.’ In other words, we should not speak aloud the psychoanalytic understanding of genocide. To do so would be to betray genocide’s ethical significance: to mistake ‘mass murder’ for ‘a teachable moment’. We are left then only with the recommendation that bystanders should intervene. But this thought, Alford concedes, is ‘not new’; it’s a standard ‘part of literature on genocide and its prevention’. On the practical question of what to do or how to do it, psychoanalysis has nothing to add.

Slavoj Žižek, the most famous of the so-called ‘Left Lacanians’, comes closest to modelling political action on psychoanalytic technique. Žižek celebrates what he calls ‘the Act’: an intervention that would, he says, ‘traverse’ the ‘fundamental fantasy’ of the hegemonic political order – just as the Lacanian analyst, at the moment of cure, ruptures his patient’s relationship to the phantasy that sustains her falsely coherent sense of self. But for even Žižek this is more analogy than application. Examples he gives of the Act include the French and Russian Revolutions, hardly instances of the attentive listening and sparse interjection that Lacan prescribes to analysts.

If such instances are going to be found in politics, it will be in the practice known as ‘organising’: the laborious task of persuading ordinary people, person by person, that their sense of powerlessness in fact conceals an untapped power. Indeed, the most effective political organisers may know already what psychoanalysis can hope to teach them: about being sensitive to unspoken fear and desire, listening more than speaking, holding space for agency while acknowledging constraint, the importance of timing and ‘empathy’ and ‘tact’, even the workings of transference and projection.

In the 1940s, the American civil rights leader Ella Baker travelled extensively in the American South, visiting churches, barber shops, pool rooms and grocery stores to organise poor black people. Despite her relative privilege – Baker was middle class, university educated and lived in New York – she dressed with deliberate modesty. Reflecting on this choice, Baker said:

I’ve had women come up to me and say, ‘Your dress is just like mine.’ And that’s an identification. See, they don’t know how to deal with the verbal part, but they are identifying with you. And instead of you turning up your nose to turn them off, you can say something that shows that that’s good. We’ve both got good dresses.

Baker sees in the comment ‘Your dress is just like mine’ nothing less than a moment of identification, not only with Baker herself, but more incipiently, more unconsciously, with the ‘verbal part’, the content of Baker’s speech: with the desire for Black liberation. And she answers with an affirmation of the unspeakable desire: ‘We’ve both got good dresses.’

But not everyone is Ella Baker, with a preternatural ability to have what the American labour organiser Jane McAlevey called ‘hard conversations’. The recentring of psychoanalysis in contemporary left thought provides a renewed impetus to see conversation as a technical craft, one, as McAlevey put it, that aims at getting people ‘to self-analyse the crisis in their life’. In turn, a left that was better at having hard conversations – at listening to the desire behind the refusal, the anxiety behind the apathy; at asking the right question in the right way at the right moment – is a left that would have less reason to treat theory as a refuge to which to flee.

For organisers, ‘self-analysis’ is a means rather than an end. The aim of organising, unlike that of psychoanalysis, is always collective action – with emphasis on both those terms: ‘collective’; ‘action’. And underlying this difference in aims is a subtly different account of the relationship between mind and action. For Freud, as for Plato, behaviour flows from the psyche; the symptom speaks the truth of the subject’s inner reality. To change our behaviour, we must first change our mind. Here, despite their apparent differences, is a fundamental moment of convergence between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Both presume that real change in our outward lives – becoming ethically better, less neurotic, more capable, as Freud says, of ‘love and work’ – requires first an inner, epistemic shift. It is knowledge that will set us free.

But organising rests on the insight – which was also Aristotle’s rejoinder to Plato – that the psyche can flow from action, that what is sometimes needed to become the sort of subject who feels empowered to stand up to the boss or the police or the state, is simply to act, in some small way, as if you already were that sort of subject. To stand up, and find yourself standing with others, find yourself winning with others. And then to find yourself a subject with a greater measure of freedom and power, and more desire too, than you ever knew.

12 December