Even if they win superior explanatory power, psychoanalytic imaginings are useless in advancing political change

On the other hand, though in these ways and many others, psychoanalysis seems to promote the sorts of subjective dispositions and habits requisite for a thriving democracy, and though in a variety of ways psychoanalysis contributes to personal emancipation— say, by releasing individuals from self-defeating, damaging, or petrified forms action and reaction, object attachment, and the like—in light of the very uniqueness of what it has to offer, one cannot but wonder: to what extent, if at all, can the habits and dispositions—broadly, the forms of life—cultivated by psychoanalytic practice survive, let alone flourish, under modern social and political conditions? If the emancipatory inclinations and democratic virtues that psychoanalytic practice promotes are systematically crushed or at least regularly unsupported by the world in which they would be realized, then isn’t psychoanalysis implicitly making promises it cannot redeem? Might not massive social and political transformations be the condition for the efficacious practice of psychoanalysis? And so, under current conditions, can we avoid experiencing the forms of life nascently cultivated by psychoanalytic practice as something of a tease, or even a source of deep frustration? (2) Concerning psychoanalysis as a politically inclined theoretical enterprise, the worry is whether political diagnoses and proposals that proceed on the basis of psychoanalytic insights and forms of attention partake of a fantasy of interpretive efficacy (all the world’s a couch, you might say), wherein our profound alienation from the conditions for robust political agency are registered and repudiated? Consider, for example, Freud and Bullitt’s (1967) assessment of the psychosexual determinants of Woodrow Wilson’s political aspirations and impediments, or Reich’s (1972) suggestion that Marxism should appeal to psychoanalysis in order to illuminate and redress neurotic phenomena that generate disturbances in working capacity, especially as this concerns religion and bourgeois sexual ideology. Also relevant are Freud’s, Žižek’s (1993, 2004), Derrida’s (2002) and others’ insistence that we draw the juridical and political consequences of the hypothesis of an irreducible death drive, as well as Marcuse’s (1970) proposal that we attend to the weakening of Eros and the growth of aggression that results from the coercive enforcement of the reality principle upon the sociopolitically weakened ego, and especially to the channeling of this aggression into hatred of enemies. Reich (1972) and Fromm (1932) suggest that psychoanalysis be employed to explore the motivations to political irrationality, especially that singular irrationality of joining the national-socialist movement, while Irigaray (1985) diagnoses the desire for the Same, the One, the Phallus as a desire for a sociosymbolic order that assures masculine dominance. Žižek (2004) contends that only a psychoanalytic exposition of the disavowed beliefs and suppositions of the United States political elite can get at the fundamental determinants of the Iraq War. Rose (1993) argues that it was the paranoiac paradox of sensing both that there is every reason to be frightened and that everything is under control that allowed Thatcher “to make this paradox the basis of political identity so that subjects could take pleasure in violence as force and legitimacy while always locating ‘real’ violence somewhere else—illegitimate violence and illicitness increasingly made subject to the law” (p. 64). Stavrakakis (1999) advocates that we recognize and traverse the residues of utopian fantasy in our contemporary political imagination.1 Might not the psychoanalytic interpretation of powerful figures (Bush, Bin Laden, or whomever), collective subjects (nations, ethnic groups, and so forth), or urgent “political” situations register an anxiety regarding political impotence or “castration” that is pacified and modified by the fantasmatic frame wherein the psychoanalytically inclined political theorist situates him- or herself as diagnosing or interpretively intervening in the lives of political figures, collective political subjects, or complex political situations with the idealized efficacy of a successful clinical intervention? If so, then the question is: are the contributions of psychoanalytically inclined political theory anything more than tantalizing menu cards for meals it cannot deliver? As I said, the worry is twofold. These are two folds of a related problem, which is this: might the very seductiveness of psychoanalytic theory and practice—specifically, the seductiveness of its political promise—register the lasting eclipse of the political and the objectivity of the social, respectively? In other words, might not everything that makes psychoanalytic theory and practice so politically attractive indicate precisely the necessity of wide-ranging social/institutional transformations that far exceed the powers of psychoanalysis? And so, might not the politically salient transformations of subjectivity to which psychoanalysis can contribute overburden subjectivity as the site of political transformation, blinding us to the necessity of largescale institutional reforms? Indeed, might not massive institutional transformations be necessary conditions for the efficacy of psychoanalytic practice, both personally and politically? Further, might not the so-called interventions and proposals of psychoanalytically inclined political theory similarly sidestep the question of the institutional transformations necessary for their realization, and so conspire with our blindness to the enormous institutional impediments to a progressive political future?