The political scene is foregrounded in other sections, including Barry Watt’s chapter which brings into a compelling dialogue his twin investments of psychoanalytic therapy and political protest, to offer “analytical tools” for making sense of the often destabilizing and destructive psychodynamics at play within contemporary activism, as well as proposing a theory for taking activism beyond the ‘community of one’; whilst Stephen Frosh considers the politics of indifference in his chapter on ‘Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens’.
And in the final chapter, Anastasios Gaitanidis offers a critical engagement with Judith Butler’s proposal for new kinds of community based not on a unifying identity but instead on a common experience of loss. Gaitanidis challenges the assertion that melancholia might form a strong basis for such a community, and Butler’s apparent attachment to a never-ending mourning: he says, “she is trying to convince herself, that if nothing else lasts, mourning can.”
The chapters offer interactions with Freud’s papers in multiple different registers, reflecting the varied backgrounds of their authors: the contributors include psychoanalysts, psychologists, social and critical theorists. And the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis is gloriously over-represented – a third of the authors being Site members, including, of course, the volume’s co-editor and organizer of the original 2015 symposium, Julie Walsh.
As a relative newcomer to psychosocial modes of thinking, reading this book was a pleasingly horizon-expanding experience for me, but also a challenging one – I highly recommend the experience to others.