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The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century

Author(s) : Carolyn Laubender

Reviews and Endorsements

Laubender’s fiercely argued book rewrites everything we knew about the politicality of the psychoanalytic clinic. Seething with ironies and illuminations—there is no clinical gesture (defenses, reparation, secure attachment) that is not embedded in its Cold War and decolonial histories, its geopolitical imaginaries. It’s where psychoanalysis must struggle to go.
Matt Ffytche, coeditor of Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism

Revisiting previous historical experiments, Laubender gives us a searing perspective on our much-troubled present. Generous, deft reinterpretations of classic cases by legendary British psychoanalysts—including an ingenious take on Winnicott resituated in Windrush-era racial conflict—are framed by a brilliantly incisive assessment of the perilous politics currently roiling the wider therapeutic scene.
Dagmar Herzog, author of Cold War Freud and The Question of Unworthy Life

Laubender’s intervention into the clinical turn shows how political theories emerge in psychoanalytic praxis through the transferential and counter-transferential relation. Reading analysts in their clinics, she sheds light on the politics and situatedness of psychoanalysis, as well as its class, race, and national specificity.
Ranjana Khanna, author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism