Freud on politics

Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter (“Prof. Sigmund Freud”). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

There’s a long history of psychoanalysis’s involvement in politics, which really begins with Freud – but that history is both controversial and mixed. On the one hand, you could see Freud himself as a sort of traditional liberal bourgeois with quite a conservative mentality. It’s true in his treatment of the women in his life. It’s true also in many of his attitudes towards such things as social revolution, Bolshevism and the possibilities of there ever being a truly liberated, emancipated world. He was always very cautious about that.

Some of the conservatism that you find in Freud himself is also reflected in the development of psychoanalysis as a kind of individualised, liberal-minded but nevertheless constrained bourgeois practice, in which people are seen one by one, normally in private practice outside public health systems. Over the course of the last century, people were often treated in line with a number of quite regressive social norms, particularly in relation to women. Ideas about what women’s “true” function might be, for example, pervaded psychoanalysis until at least the 1980s.

Photo by Richard Panasevic

Getting along with dictators

Psychoanalysis has also been conservative around other issues, such as homosexuality. In addition, it’s always struggled to deal adequately with the issues of race and racism, which are so significant in our society today and indeed have been significant across the whole history of psychoanalysis.

Sometimes we’ve even seen psychoanalysis adhering to a kind of authoritarian framework, or at least colluding (sometimes quite substantially) with authoritarian regimes. It was very noticeable in Germany in the 1930s how quickly the German psychoanalytical society found itself free of its Jewish members once the Nazis came to power and how soon they acted in accordance with the regime’s strictures. That was also true in Latin American countries like Argentina and Brazil during the dictatorships of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s. In Brazil, where I’ve done some research, the official institutions of psychoanalysis thrived during the dictatorship. These institutions were seen as aligning themselves with a version of familial ideology – ways of thinking about the family that were very coherent with a kind of normalising authoritarianism, in which family relations were seen as more significant than social ones.

Reaching out to poor people

There’s also an idea about neutrality that you find in psychoanalysis, that one shouldn’t take sides. Just hear what comes without making judgements of it. This neutrality, which has a lot of force in a clinical situation, was often understood as also representing political neutrality, meaning that psychoanalysis could not stand out against destructive regimes. Indeed, Freud himself said at one point during the 1930s that politics has no place in psychoanalysis, meaning that psychoanalysis should stay quiet for the sake of self-preservation, even when faced with Nazism.

However, there is another tradition, a socially critical one, which is really important and which I also date to Freud. It has both practical and theoretical elements. In practice, it’s very interesting to see that as early as 1918, Freud was speaking about the need for psychoanalysis to be available to everybody through low-cost clinics and public support. So many people were suffering, not because of some inherent aspect to their psychic structure, but because of their social circumstances. Poor people were suffering more than wealthy people, which meant that psychoanalysis would need to reach out to them.

Freud and other psychoanalysts: (left to right seated) Freud, Sàndor Ferenczi and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon and Ernest Jones. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

As a result of Freud’s intervention at the 1918 International Psychoanalytical Conference in Budapest, a number of free clinics started up during the 1920s in Vienna, Berlin and even London. In 1926, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis was set up as a way of making low-cost psychoanalysis available. That clinic is still going today.

Barefoot psychoanalysts

There was a barefoot psychoanalysis tradition in Latin America in the 1970s, as well as many attempts in the UK and elsewhere to make psychoanalysis available to ordinary people who couldn’t afford the huge cost of seeing a private psychoanalyst several times a week.

There’s also been more direct commentary by psychoanalysts, again beginning with Freud, on social processes and the political world. I date this particularly to Freud’s 1908 paper: “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness. What was so interesting about this paper was that Freud understood, as he always did, that there are ways in which society demands constraints on individuals – that we all have to adjust to the social world in which we live if we’re going to get along with one another productively. However, he also stated very clearly and strongly that it’s the hypocrisy – particularly the sexual hypocrisy – of society which causes most damage.

Hypocrisy and civilisation

“Civilized” Sexual Morality is a critique of Freud’s social environment. The so-called “civilisation” in which he was living was one which caused damage to people because of the way in which it inhibited their sexuality. Later on, particularly in the 1920s, Freud produced a series of very important texts which continue with the idea that society will always make us feel to some degree unhappy, because we have to restrict our desires in order to live with one another. Yet, we also need society to protect us against nature and other people, and to help us face up to the realities of death. Society is necessary, but Freud also thought and articulated really clearly that there were ways in which society imposed too much of a cost on us.

Freud expanded on this theme in several great works, including The Future of an Illusion, which was a critical analysis of religion, and Civilization and Its Discontents, which is a kind of sociological work about what society does to us. Those works stated in a very firm and clear way that society makes us unhappy, and so there is a legitimate way in which we should be critical of how society is ordered and structured. This social critique is rooted in a psychoanalytic understanding of what it means to be a fully emancipated human being. Later on, there were many people working either from within psychoanalysis or on the margins of it who took up this social critique really strongly. There was a tradition of what came to be known as Freudo-Marxists in the late 1920s and right through the 1930s, until they were scattered by Nazism.

The DNA of identity

There’s a very interesting set of issues around how social identity is transmitted across generations. Freud himself was really intrigued by this. You could understand his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, as an attempt to come to grips with certain key questions: how do we inherit something from one generation to another? How can it be that something which is experienced at one time is also experienced in a similar way, often at a later time, by different people? In Moses and Monotheism, he takes as his topic the question of Judaism and the invention of monotheism, but within that, these questions really loom large.

Take somebody like Freud himself: a completely secular Jew who had no national aspirations. He wasn’t a Zionist. He had no religious beliefs. From the start, he was highly educated in the European tradition – much more so than he was in the Jewish tradition – and yet he felt like he somehow belonged with his Jewish identity. It continued to be something that he held onto and stated as important for himself right through his life.

Psychoanalysis and feminism

Freud treated women psychoanalysts as equals. In turn, they clearly saw psychoanalysis as a profession and practice in which they could achieve and find ways of elaborating their own selfhood at a time when it wasn’t that easy for women to do that. Of course, the cultural movement that psychoanalysis spawned was deeply engaged with these questions of sexuality and desire that interested women writers and thinkers right through the 20th century.

Women’s liberation march from Farragut Square to Layfette, Lafayette Park. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Psychoanalysis did develop a reputation of being extremely normative and conservative in relation to women. In the origins of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s, there was a lot of rejection of psychoanalysis for its conformity and its attempts to therapize women’s desires out of recognition, so that they could accept their place in the home – and indeed there is some truth in that. From the 1970s onwards, particularly with the publication of Juliet Mitchell’s book Psychoanalysis and Feminism, it was increasingly recognised that whatever its ambiguities and blind spots, psychoanalysis might have quite a lot to say about the possibilities for understanding, engaging with and resisting patriarchal society in which women’s experiences are derogated. Because of that, contemporary feminists tend to engage very strongly with psychoanalysis, even when they’re very critical of elements of it. There’s a powerful and interesting tension both inside and outside the psychoanalytic movement. What can psychoanalysis contribute to feminism, and what can psychoanalysis learn from it?

Discover more about

psychoanalysis and politics

Frosh, S. (2018). Simply Freud. Simply Charly.

Frosh, S. (1999). The Politics of Psychoanalysis (2nd Edition). Red Globe Press.

Frosh, S. (2010). Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic: Interventions in Psychosocial Studies. Red Globe Press.

Psychoanalysis in politics