International Women's Day Lecture - 'Unconsciousness raising: Feminist burnout and psychoanalysis, 1968-1980'

"In a recent article for the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan describes a renewed interest in psychoanalysis on what she calls the 'younger left' that has emerged in the last few years. But why would politicized people turn to Freud now? Writing in New Left Review in 1981, Christopher Lasch set out to answer a similar question: why did people on the New Left get so into psychoanalysis in the aftermath of 1968? ‘What brought about this improbable alliance of psychoanalysis and cultural radicalism, of Freud and Marx?’ Feminist theorists of the family are central to Lasch's account, including Juliet Mitchell whose canonical Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) has just been reissued by Verso. This paper will return to Mitchell's text, situating in the context of the women's liberation movement, which it both arose from and addressed, arguing that an interest in the politics of psychic life and in psychotherapeutic practices that emerged on the left in the aftermath of 1968 partly responded to the emotional difficulties of political organizing and that a similar claim could also be made about the most recent return to Freud," - Dr Hannah Proctor                        

Dr Hannah Proctor

Dr Proctor is a Research Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde, a historian broadly interested in intersections between left-wing politics and the psy’ disciplines, including histories and theories of radical psychiatry, Communist and anti-Communist theories of the mind, histories of Freudo-Marxism (as both intellectual theory and clinical practice), and emotional histories of the left.

Speaker image: Matthew Arthur Williams