Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on
the Couch , Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of
its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and
...progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by
contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel
Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an
underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to
develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that
centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning.
Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human
subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive
self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when
critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic
thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book
opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of
psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims
of critique.
InImpious Fidelity, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg investigates the legacy of Anna Freud at the intersection between psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking and theorizing and its existence as a political ...entity. Stewart-Steinberg argues that because Anna Freud inherited and guided her father's psychoanalytic project as aninstitution, analysis of her thought is critical to our understanding of the relationship between the psychoanalytic and the political. This is particularly the case given that many psychoanalysts and historians of psychiatry charge that Anna Freud's emphasis on defending the supremacy of the ego against unconscious drives betrayed her father's work.
Are the unconscious and the psychoanalytic project itself at odds with the stable ego deemed necessary to a democratic politics? Hannah Arendt famously (and influentially) argued that they are. But Stewart-Steinberg maintains that Anna Freud's critics (particularly disciples of Melanie Klein) have simplified her thought and misconstrued her legacy. Stewart-Steinberg looks at Anna Freud's work with wartime orphans, seeing that they developed subjectivity not by vertical (through the father) but by lateral, social ties. This led Anna Freud to revise her father's emphasis on Oedipal sexuality and to posit a revision of psychoanalysis that renders it compatible with democratic theory and practice. Stewart-Steinberg gives us an Anna Freud who "betrays" the father even as she protects his legacy and continues his work in a new key.
Despite the pandemic upending in-person clinical treatments, psychoanalysis struggles to conceptualize a frame that is truly open to a world beyond the singular, human only dyad. This article ...challenges psychoanalysis to blowup the frame of practice by destroying the very subject of the work - the human. Integrating key concepts from anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author contends that the category of the human is inherently and irreparably violent; the undergirding onto-epistemological system for the formation of white settler colonial, heteropatriarchal subjectivity and its co-created violences of enslavement, dispossession, genocide, mass extinctions, and ecological destruction. Because psychoanalysis has evolved around this Enlightenment subject that renders certain people "human," and all others disposable, its frame and focus is designed to uphold, not resist, biopolitical and ecological violence. Thus, psychoanalysis is onto-epistemologically unfit and unable to effectively address social violences and the climate crisis while emanating from this exceptionalist "human." Integrating anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author, using examples from clinical work online, proposes a different form of subjectivity, one that is co-emergent with "dense temporalities" of the more-than-human. Only through such a temporally dense, transcorporeal subject can psychoanalysis hope to subvert the world of human destruction.
