The last two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis within political theory. From work on gender and queer politics, to accounts of political culture, to the psychosocial dynamics of political relations, and to critical theories of racialized spectacle and desire, political theory has seen a renaissance of inquiry into not just the work of Sigmund Freud but also other figures such as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Frantz Fanon, and others. Yet engaging with psychoanalytic work has a high bar. Psychoanalysis has a well-established canon that has evolved over nearly 150 years, along with a robust secondary literature. For newcomers to the conversation, sifting through, for example, Melanie Klein’s corpus and the uptake of her theoretical work across feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theorists, can be daunting.
Enter Carolyn Laubender’s The Political Clinic, an indispensable tour d’horizon that considers five major practitioners—Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby—and their enmeshed clinical and political settings. Laubender’s book “begins from a simple axiom that is still fervently disputed: the clinic is political” and that “psychoanalytic practice constitutes an important site of political thinking, theorization, and action” (pp. 2, 3). Over the arc of the book, Laubender challenges the usual claim by psychoanalysts that the clinical is a site of neutrality and instead juxtaposes key practitioners’ theoretical frameworks and clinical practice with their political context. The book’s introduction is admirably synthetic. It contextualizes psychoanalysis within interwar, postwar, and colonial politics and glosses the place for psychoanalytic clinical debates within broader academic discussions around subjectivity, agency, and epistemology that dominate the American academy from the 1990s onward.
Across its six chapters, Laubender tacks back and forth between political context and key elements of the Freudian psychoanalytic paradigm. The book opens by musing on the birth pangs of democracy by considering the place for authority and repair in child psychology (Chapters 1 and 2 on Anna Freud and Melanie Klein). It moves on to the postwar moment of anticolonial struggle and decolonization as they played out in conceptions of race, (dis-)identification, and interpretive association (Chapters 3 and 4 on Wulf Sachs and D.W. Winnicott). The final chapters move that postwar moment forward through conservative and radical backlashes to the family, commune clinics, and debates around psychiatric institutionalization (Chapters 5 and 6 on John Bowlby and others). Each chapter thus is tightly framed around the theoretical contributions of each analyst, the clinical practices that reverberate with the surrounding political context, and the subsequent re-appropriations of analytic work in light of new political demands.
The strengths and limitations of tracking these criss-crossed political and psychoanalytic itineraries are most readily seen in the superb chapter on Melanie Klein, a thinker who has been central for political theoretical work on theories of reparative reading (e.g. Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick), feminist critiques of affect (e.g. Robyn Wiegman), and the divisions of contemporary politics (e.g. Noelle McAfee). In “Beyond Repair,” Laubender opens by glossing Klein’s turn to play rather than speech, her move away from Anna Freud’s developmental model of the child, and her emphasis on relationality as key to the burgeoning object-relations school of psychoanalysis. She situates Klein’s child as “a being besieged, a psychosocial subjectivity always already at war” (p. 66) and uses an extended reading of Klein’s work with her child patient, Richard, to unpack how conflict organizes the internal, psychic life of children and gets projected onto external events. More than a turn inwards and away from politics, Laubender finds that this new model (unintentionally) allows psychology to be rethought by others as a site for direct political intervention, social democracy, and the welfare state—a thread that wends through each chapter (p. 70).
Laubender’s argument becomes more provocative as she reads Klein’s concept of “repair” in light of the political concept of “reparation.” Not only does she argue that Klein “reconceptualizes what counts as political,” Laubender also argues that “in [Klein’s] clinical work reparation functions as a protopolitical theory of justice” (p. 71). The next 15 pages masterfully gloss Klein’s repair as a process in which the child slowly becomes able to work with her inner conflicts and hostilities. Whether repair—this uneasy, ginger work with conflicting responses to a person or experience—can leave the realm of phantasy is quite another thing (as seen in the charged debates between Wiegman and Gail Lewis over Sedgwick on Klein). With Laubender, reparation is a phantastical horizon rather than a practical achievement.
Moved too quickly to politics, however, repair work is unbearably naïve. After working through a first reading of repair, Laubender notes that “experiences of love, creativity, gratitude, guilt, authenticity, empathy, interdependence, altruism, responsibility, and mourning are all stacked on the side of reparation, making it tantamount… to an ethical relation to the world as such” (p. 77), and she laments that critics have often uncritically idealized Klein’s repair. She then revisits her first reading in light of contemporary critics to underscore that Klein understood repair as a way to render the superego less cruel and beholden to guilt. Instead, repair operates in a psyche where creativity has greater scope; repair thus “gives the child the feeling of ethical action and thereby allows it to expiate its own guilt and reinvest in the world of object relations” (p. 84). On political terms, repair lessens the grip of a ressentiment that attaches us to law, debt, and punishment and sets the scene for a broader range of attachments to other people. The promise of Laubender’s reading is to create the conditions for—but not the guarantees of—relational connection … but a connection unbound to mutuality, recognition, or shared ends.
It comes as a relief when Laubender is quick to note that German reparations post-WWI operated with very different notions of “repair” indexed precisely to guilt, debt, and punishment and that subsequent visions of reparation have sought to index various forms of justice. Instead, she connects repair/reparation to explorations of the conditions needed for “different imaginaries for justice” (p. 83). Laubender also notes that reparations theorists, both psychoanalytic and political, often give too little attention to the “ethical pitfalls of identification and…the particular objects both taken up and cast aside” (p. 85). She asks, “Can an individual’s internal feeling of reparative care ever itself be enough?” More troublingly: what happens when one person’s repair is premised on another’s degradation?
In these tensile moments, Laubender quickly retreats to her primary thesis—the clinical is political—and the limits of her juxtapositions become clearer. Sometimes these are conceptual: the nuances that distinguish Klein’s “repair” could be better signposted for political theorists unused to object relations theory and over-used to liberal democracy, while the concepts of “repair” behind political reparations are never explicitly flagged and worked through. As a result, the juxtapositions become a site for potential misfires, where it is easy to assimilate concepts from one domain into the other. More importantly (and more interestingly), over the course of the book, the binary that divides political from clinical spaces itself becomes confining and the reader longs to return to the tensions that perhaps are sites of crucial interpretive friction.
Indeed, there really are three central spaces present in this project—the political, the clinical, and the critical—where the critical space of interpretation mediates between the first two and determines how “political” and “clinical” get cast, by whom, and for which audience. If psychoanalytic thinkers contribute to “prototypical theories of justice,” then how and through which actors does the psychological field become political, and vice versa? Which norms serve as touchstones for this project, and how does psychoanalysis shade them differently than political theory? To stay with Klein a moment longer, what mechanisms allow certain interpretations of repair (in patients, in psychoanalytic theories) to gather political salience and take root in broader symbolic forms, such as those of the family or the nation? Who and what serves to mediate across the three spaces just mentioned?
A partial answer comes in later chapters that tackle the unorthodox practices of Wulf Sachs, whose (dis-)identification with his South African patient pushes him out of the clinic and into domestic spaces; the rejection of the “domestic containment” of unconscious energies and experiments with commune clinics (p. 191); and the resurgent maternalistic discourses of John Bowlby and others (p. 208). More historical than theoretical, these chapters speculate that psychoanalysis played a role in alternately critiquing and upholding gendered and racialized processes central “to the West’s ideological project of securing capitalism and liberal democracy against… communism” (p. 203). Laubender does the laudable job of weaving together big processes; gender and the maternal are resurgent in the back half of the book, leaving me wishful that she had taken up gender and the family on more explicitly theoretical terms. As her interrogation of border-crossing concepts (authority, freedom, repair, dependency) recedes, so too does the frictive provocation that electrifies the Klein chapter. The book ends on a far-too-modest note of Foucauldian pessimistic activism: everything is not bad, just dangerous.
The Political Clinic offers a panoramic, thoroughly researched, and deft intellectual history of the interweaving of psychoanalysis and social change and nuanced interpretations of critical analytic figures. Substantively, these readings open rich terrains for future research; they also model an extraordinary citational generosity, thus making the project a collective one and inviting in new readers. Laubender’s book will be indispensable to future researchers.
