ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and Politics argue that psychoanalysis is at its root a social or group theory, to which a theory of individual psychology is integral. This formulation follows from Freud's Group Psychology, which defines individual psychology as a derivative of group psychology, "still incomplete." The article historicizes the analytic conception of the individual in terms of the authors' conception of personalize, spelled out in Secrets of the Soul. Three versions of psychoanalytic social theory are discussed: Freudo-Marxism, the New Left and feminism and the "relational turn."
Subject(s)
Politics , Psychoanalysis , Psychoanalytic Theory , Humans , Freudian Theory , History, 20th CenturyABSTRACT
Situating psychoanalysis in the context of Jewish history, this paper takes up Freud's famous 1930 question: what is left in Judaism after one has abandoned faith in God, the Hebrew language and nationalism, and his answer: a great deal, perhaps the very essence, but an essence that we do not know. On the one hand, it argues that "not knowing" connects psychoanalysis to Judaism's ancestral preoccupation with God, a preoccupation different from that of the more philosophical Greek, Latin and Christian traditions of theology. On the other hand, "not knowing" connects psychoanalysis to a post-Enlightenment conception of the person (i.e. of personal life), as opposed to the more abstract notion of the subject associated with Kant.
