Political Clinic : Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century,...

Political Clinic : Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, Paperback by Laubender, Carolyn, ISBN 0231214952, ISBN-13 9780231214957, Brand New, Free shipping in the US"The Political Clinic argues that European clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a heretofore unacknowledged site of political thinking, theorization, and action. While much psychoanalytic scholarship has focused on its intellectual, social, and political impact outside of the clinic, this book argues for the importance of understanding the clinic itself as a necessarily politicized space. Carolyn Laubender makes this case by (re)turning to the specifically post-Freudian traditions of psychoanalysis, exploring how prominent 20th-century analysts developed unique-and politically salient-clinical practices. Combining case studies and archival material from Britain and its (post)colonies, she examines how psychoanalysts like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, . Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and John Bowlby forged original clinical techniques for working with their patients that experimentally reimagined the political work that the clinic performs. Rather than applying psychoanalytic theory to political dynamics, this book considers how psychoanalysts themselves became formidable political actors precisely through their clinical work, where they implicitly transformed the privatized space of the clinic into a proto-political laboratory for reimagining the formations of race, gender, childhood, nation, and democracy. The Political Clinic thus (re)positions clinical practice as of a piece with social and political engagement, challenging tacit assumptions about its irrelevance in these contexts. Drawing on a new analysis of Frantz Fanon's radical politics as a "combined action" of the material-political and the psycho-clinical, Laubender concludes that it is only through such an integration that we can advance a progressive clinical politics for the future"--