Works in Progress is a monthly workshop where our candidates and faculty can present their work jointly in the institute. Coming together is the heart of our mission, as it creates a space of difference in which new ideas can emerge. These workshops are designed with this aspiration in mind. By resisting the individualistic pull and participating in this space, we could create a potentiality where things can happen organically in the presence of others, rekindling our thinking and the life of our community.
Diagnosing the New Left: case histories, psychoanalytic interviewing and the pathologization of political conviction
Writing in New Left Review in 1981, Christopher Lasch asked, why did people on the New Left in the US get so into psychoanalysis in and in the aftermath of the political explosions of 1968? ‘What brought about this improbable alliance of psychoanalysis and cultural radicalism, of Freud and Marx?’ In Lasch’s account, left-wing Freudians old and new were united by the conviction that the patriarchal family produces the unconscious basis for authoritarianism. But arguments about Oedipality were also central to the analyses of people who were trying to apply psychoanalytic insights to the New Left in the US. From curious liberals to disgusted conservatives, social scientists in the US rushed to diagnose political radicals in the 1960s and came to a range of conclusions about the family environments responsible for the surge of activism that erupted at that time. This work-in-progress presentation will introduce some examples of this work based on ‘psychoanalytic interviewing’ techniques and will ask if any of the case material included in these publications – which provide glimpses into the dreams and fantasies of student radicals, black nationalists, anti-war protestors and Communist Party members – can be read in ways that contradict or exceed the arguments of the social scientists who conducted the research.