Radical Psychoanalysis and Anti-Capitalist Action

by Ian Parker

Politicians of all stripes now talk about 'mental health'. They tell us how they have suffered, and promise more resources to put things right. At the same time, welfare services are being cut, people are told to sort problems out for themselves, and the state is beefed up to deal with dissent. With increasing misery comes increasing anger, some of it directed at capitalism and some of it turned around against ourselves, even into ourselves, so this sick system also makes us sick. Energy that could other throw this rotten system is turned around to sabotage our collective struggles for a world beyond capitalism. Mainstream 'mental health' and well-being' programmes are too-often focused on making us change our thoughts, urging us to be happy, and fit it. But there is an alternative. The alternative comes through political action, through anti-capitalist resistance and many other political struggles, and this is where radical psychoanalysis can be our ally. But to make it our ally we need to know what it is and what it could be. Another world is possible, and psychoanalysis opens up possibilities for personal and political change.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Politics

75 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Ian Parker is a British psychologist who has been a principal exponent of three quite diverse critical traditions inside the discipline. His writing has provided compass points for researchers searching for alternatives to ‘mainstream’ psychology in the English-speaking world (that is, mainstream psychology that is based on laboratory-experimental studies that reduce behavior to individual mental processes).

The three critical traditions Parker has promoted are ‘discursive analysis’, ‘Marxist psychology’ and ‘psychoanalysis’. Each of these traditions is adapted by him to encourage an attention to ideology and power, and this modification has given rise to fierce debates, not only from mainstream psychologists but also from other ‘critical psychologists’. Parker moves in his writing from one focus to another, and it seems as if he is not content with any particular tradition of research, using each of the different critical traditions to throw the others into question.

Reviews

[Yo Anastasova · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could’ve been a tweet

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

The content was thin and introductory. If you’re in a social work or social work-adjacent field none of this is new information. I can see how it might feel novel to some analysts. However, the content was repetitive in phrasing and didn’t offer any direct ideas for anti-capitalist action specifically, instead simply making many linkages between psychoanalysis, political action, and systemic forces.

[G. Miranda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this is a very short book, I feel it could have benefited from some critical analysis of the use of diagnoses. Aside from a brief mention of ‘mental illness’ (quote marks the author’s), there was no mention of the use of certain diagnoses as a form of oppression in traditional therapeutic spaces, or of the links between certain demographics and mental illness. What Parker DID say was good, but I’m not sure about the things he DIDN’T say — did he leave them out for wordcount reasons or because he didn’t feel them relevant?

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief book that centers the way conflict is pathologized and tends to move us towards some sort of resolution, which the author argues is a part of being embedded within capitalism. It discusses potential ways to engage and welcome ambivalence and conflict into our lives, and into our groups. I liked it.

[Liv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very simple (perhaps even simplistic) overview of how psychoanalysis can interact with a radical, anti-capitalist politics. The most useful elements, I thought, were the reflections on group dynamics (a definite subtweet of the SWP and similar Trot outfits, even if A*CR is also a Trotskyist group) and the reflection on how those from a psychoanalytic background ‘often [pretend] to be neutral, objective… simply [describing] the world instead of changing it’; that they often assume psychoanalytic approaches can analyse everything, forget they are not the ones who ought to lead on analysis (the ‘analysand,’ whoever/whatever that might stand for in a given circumstance, is), and, where they bend conservative, end up pathologising/analysing all radical social action as similarly ‘unbalanced’ and ‘extremist’ (ala the horseshoe theory of politics).

Parker’s pamphlet also shed a bit more light (for me, ie an amateur enthusiast) on the subject of the history of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology and counselling as disciplines and practices. His account of how psychoanalysts were expelled by fascist regimes in the early twentieth century (or maybe only the Nazis?) and therefore sought to be assimilators, developing a practice of supporting clients/analysands into functioning in line with society-as-is, is potentially reductive but nonetheless chimed with bits and bobs I’ve read of, eg, Adam Phillips and Eva Illouz about psychoanalysis itself and the sociology of therapeutic practices (respectively).

Similarly, it provoked (brief) thought on my part about ideas of mis/understanding in therapeutic/psychoanalytic practices. The psychotherapist as the practitioner who seeks to make their client feel ‘understood’ and the psychoanalyst as the practitioner who seeks to help bring to light what the analysand misunderstands in order that they, the analysand, may burrow through it.

The brief reflections on therapeutic/psychoanalytic processes being commodified and, on an entirely different page, the historicising of psychoanalytic practices as emerging out of the social pathology of capitalism both lit up some of my neural connections. This pamphlet-book would have been a very good, very simple accompaniment to the short course on political theory and ‘social pathology’ that I did at the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research a bit over a year ago.

All of this would seem to indicate that the pamphlet did more for me than I initially credited it with. What, then, accounts for the 3 stars? The prose style, for one. Concise, expedient and bone-achingly inelegant sentence after sentence (not that I’m claiming my verbose, unwieldy, adverb-laden sentences are better lol). That and the zipping over so many areas with such little depth, as is the function of a pamphlet of this kind but in such a way that it provoked moments of ‘ahh, interesting!!!’ without ever developing on them. It did harden my resolve to read at least one Fanon book this year, though, and that’s got to be a good thing!