In the Garden of Eden: The Content of My Psychoses

Subjectivity

Radical Philosophy, 2000

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2019

Cover photograph: © Hollandse Hoogte Cover design: De Kreeft, Amsterdam ISBN 978 90 5356 911 5 e-ISBN 978 90 4850 156 4 NUR 741 / 717 © ISIM / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2010 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. -+ To: Eric Hobsbawm, historian par excellence.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1990

In his historical account of the psychoanalytic movement, Russell Jacoby (1983) laments the loss of the radical psychoanalytic tradition. It was a tradition shattered by the rise of Nazism in Europe and the trauma of emigrating to a country that was hostile toward European radical ideas. Coming to America brought a certain amnesia about the past for those Central European psychoanalysts whose vision of psychoanalysis was intertwined with radical political commitments. The horrifying realities left behind made them grateful for the haven they had found in America, but it was a haven that demanded silence about the past. As Jacoby has argued, the price of this retreat into the safer and narrower world of affluent clinical practice was to shed their political radicalism, to relinquish subversive ideas that threatened to be maladaptive in the New World. For a significant number of European psychoanalytic practitioners, however, the critical tradition of psychoanalysis is not dead. In this paper, I describe a recent conference I attended in Frankfurt, Germany that was organized by the Siegfried Bernfeld group, a group of left-wing German psychoanalysts who draw inspiration from the radical psychoanalytic tradition. The conference, attended by approximately 250 psychoanalytic clinicians from various European countries, was based on a unifying interest in the critical potential of psychoanalysis and its social emancipatory role within contemporary society. Participants were individual practitioners, as well as members of psychoanalytic societies. Some sought allies in forming new organizations independent of the established psychoanalytic societies. Others felt that there was a necessary tension between their association with these institutes and their need for separate socialization experiences based on common politica] and intellectual interests. THE SIEGFRIED BERNFELD GROUP The Frankfurt conference brought together a loosely organized network of progressive psychoanalytic groups and individuals from a number of European

Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action, 2021

This fascinating volume uses psychoanalytic theory to explore how political subjectivity comes about within the context of global catastrophe, via the emergence of collective individuations through trans-subjectivity. Serving as a jumping-off point to address the structural linkage between collective catastrophe, subject, group, and political transformation, trans-subjectivity is the central tenet of the book, conceptualized as a psyche-social dynamic that initiates social transformation and which may be enhanced in the clinical setting. Each chapter investigates a distinct manifestation of trans-subjectivity in relation to various real-world events as they manifest clinically in the analytic couple and within group processes. The author builds her conceptual arguments through a psyche/social reading of Kristeva’s theory of signifiance (sublimation), Lacan’s 1945 essay on collective logic, Heidegger’s secular reading of the apostle Paul’s Christian revolution, and Žižek, Badiou and Jung’s conception of the neighbor within a differentiated humanity. The book features clinical illustrations, an auto-ethnographic study of the emergence of an AIDS clinic, an accounting of trans-subjectivity in Black revolutionary events in the U.S., and an examination of some expressions of care that arose in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action is important reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamic based therapists, psychologists, group therapists, philosophers and political activists. Table of Contents Foreword by Ladson Hinton MD Introduction: Healing is political Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness From leper-thing to another side of care: a reading of Lacan’s logical collectivity A subversive reading of Kristeva and sublimation Trans-subjective agency illustrated in the reals of U.S. (post) slavery racism Author(s) Biography Robin McCoy Brooks is a Jungian Analyst in private practice, educator and consultant in Seattle, WA. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Robin is also a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology and active analyst member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Further, she is a nationally certified Trainer, Educator and Practitioner of Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry and Psychodrama. She currently is sheltering in place aboard a wooden boat on Salmon Bay with her husband and with two Siamese cats, or their home in Bellingham, WA. Reviews A bold and challenging book that interrogates the awakening of ourselves to our responsibilities as political agents. McCoy Brooks takes us deep into the complexities of the self as it is wrenched away from its personal concerns and called into political action. By exposing this shift in concern and the extent to which it can be mastered we are treated to invaluable insights into the psychodynamics of social transformation and into the socio-political crises we continue to wrestle with on a global scale. Her forceful argument is both grounded in and used to critique key ideas of Heidegger, Lacan, Jung, Kristeva, Žižek and Badiou, making it an astute and thought-provoking book on many levels. Lucy Huskinson, Professor of Philosophy at Bangor University, UK, author of various works including Nietzsche and Jung (Routledge 2004) and Architecture and the Mimetic Self (Routledge 2018) For too long the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political has felt forced. In a work of invigorating scholarship, McCoy Brooks revisits questions central to psychoanalysis and political philosophy alike, exploring the themes of solidarity, the nature of the subject, collective blindness, abjection, and the trans-subjective. It is rare that one finds such a bracing series of intersections between Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalysis and the philosophies of Žižek, Badiou and Heidegger, which so originally foregrounds the political crises of today (of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, global warming, etc.) that define our times. She uniquely incorporates the clinical and theoretical perspectives of her theses throughout. Derek Hook, Duquesne University, USA, author of Six Moments in Lacan (Routledge 2018), (Post)apartheid Conditions (2013 Palgrave) and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid (2011 Routledge). Robin McCoy Brooks has brought the therapeutic and the political – the individual and the collective – into delicate tension in what is nothing less than a masterful study of what it means to ‘do’ applied psychoanalysis. By mobilising the notion of trans-subjectivity, McCoy Brooks opens us to the potential for radical change in times of rapid upheaval. Through careful, comparative analysis and a determined focus on that which binds humanity together, she weaves a compelling narrative of relationality – a continuum of I and Other – that is only overshadowed by an equally relentless compassion, delivered through critical analysis and psychological insight. Give hate the right to exist and it will. Provide a doorway leading to greater mutuality, dialogue, and understanding, and the possibilities are endless. Stated succinctly, I would follow Robin McCoy Brooks down the rabbit hole of boundless futures yet to be imagined. Dr Kevin Lu, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Critical and Radical Social Work, 2015

Crisis and Critique , 2014

Acta Academica, 2019

This book explores the relationship between subjective experience and the cultural, political and historical paradigms in which the individual is embedded. Providing a deep analysis of three compelling case studies of schizophrenia in Turkey, the book considers the ways in which private experience is shaped by collective structures, offering insights into issues surrounding religion, national and ethnic identity and tensions, modernity and tradition, madness, gender and individuality. Chapters draw from cultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, and political theory to produce a model for understanding the inseparability of private experience and collective processes. The book offers those studying political theory a way for conceptualizing the subjective within the political; it offers mental health clinicians and researchers a model for including political and historical realities in their psychological assessments and treatments; and it provides anthropologists with a model for theorizing culture in which psychological experience and political facts become understandable and explainable in terms of, rather than despite each other. Meaning, Madness, and Political Subjectivity provides an original interpretative methodology for analysing culture and psychosis, offering compelling evidence that not only "normal" human experiences, but also extremely "abnormal" experiences such as psychosis are anchored in and shaped by local cultural and political realities.

International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2019

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2008

It may be a bad sign when the first theorist in a political movement is a psychologist. (Janice Haaken, 2007

2024

Winner, 2025 Book Prize of the American Psychoanalytic Association For decades, psychoanalysis has provided essential concepts and methodologies for critical theory and the humanities and social sciences. But it is also, inseparably, a clinical practice and technique for treatment. In what ways is clinical practice significant for critical thought? What conceptual resources does the clinic hold for us today? Carolyn Laubender examines cases from Britain and its former colonies to show that clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a productive site for novel political thought, theorization, and action. She delves into the clinical work of some of the British Psychoanalytical Society’s most influential practitioners—including Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, D. W. Winnicott, Thomas Main, and John Bowlby—exploring how they developed distinctive and politically salient practices. Laubender argues that these figures transformed the clinic into a laboratory for reimagining race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy. By taking up the clinic as both a site of inquiry and realm of theoretical innovation, she traces how political concepts such as authority, reparation, colonialism, decolonization, communalism, and security at once informed and were reformed by each analyst’s work. While psychoanalytic scholarship has typically focused on its intellectual, social, and political effects outside of the clinic, this interdisciplinary book combines history with feminist and decolonial social theory to recast the clinic as a necessarily politicized space. Challenging common assumptions that psychoanalytic practice is or should be neutral, apolitical, and objective, The Political Clinic also considers what progressive clinical praxis can offer today. Preorder here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Political-Clinic-Psychoanalysis-Twentieth-Directions/dp/0231214952

History and Theory, 2000

The political unconscious " speaks " ; it displays itself in the symptoms of the political world, in the speech of policy, of decisions, of laws, of images, icons, and gestures, and in protest, resistance, and ordinary violences, and, insofar as it speaks, psychoanalysis can say something about it. In this article, we consider how psychoanalysis can speak to some of the symptoms of the political world as they emerge as a form of the political unconscious. We employ Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to elaborate the unconscious and discuss how some of the symptoms of this unconscious has emerged in the form of Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the right in Europe and the Antipodes. We then elaborate on the contributions to this special issue as well as mentioning how these contributions speak to these latest events.