Between Victory and Defeat

How can the left escape burnout?

Hannah Proctor; Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

the left can sometimes become “more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing.”

On December 22, 1897, Sigmund Freud wrote to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess about a patient who had suffered a grisly family nightmare. Her father, Freud writes in his startling, matter-of-fact way, “belongs to the category of men who stab women, for whom blood injuries are an erotic need.” Among his many heinous actions was raping his daughter and infecting her with a venereal disease. Perhaps, Freud offers, psychoanalysis needs to embrace a somber “new motto”: “What have they done to you, poor child?”

Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan? The line is Goethe’s, sung by the androgynous circus girl Mignon in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. It’s a poignant and simple summation of the Freudian enterprise: The analyst invites the patient to speak of their suffering and then listens. (It was likely not lost on Freud either that Mignon is the product of incest, or that Wilhelm’s feelings toward her cycle through those of the father, the protector, and the lover.) But Freud’s new motto was short-lived; in a matter of years, he went from believing that his patients were suffering from repressed memories of actual childhood sexual abuse (“I find it’s the closest relatives, fathers or brothers, who are the guilty men,” he wrote in April 1897) to believing their memories of “infantile seduction” were imagined: incestual fantasies. Thus, as Jeffrey Masson later charged, Freud shifted his emphasis “from a real world of sadness, misery and cruelty, to an internal stage on which actors performed invented dramas for an invisible audience of their own creation.”

Masson, who shepherded the Fliess letters to publication, was obsessed with discrediting his onetime hero; he was not Freud’s most charitable chronicler. It is difficult today to regret Freud’s turn away from the seduction theory and toward dreams and fantasy, the materials from which he derived his most luminous insights. But there is a kernel of bitter truth in Masson’s charge: After the oedipal turn, the reality of an unjust and wounding social order, especially for women, became a muted factor in Freud’s etiology of mental anguish. It is not an objectively cruel world that causes us to suffer, he concluded, but our failure to adapt to it successfully. The empirical question—what have they done to you, poor child?—then becomes almost beside the point. It is not what really happened that matters, or who or what is responsible. We may remain, in some sense, poor and broken children, but with less recourse to blame and to adjudication. Therapy is a matter of accommodating ourselves to this lack of real reparation. Mental health becomes the handmaiden of social stasis; madness, the provenance of would-be revolutionaries.

This antinomy between the psychic and the social—and the ways leftist radicals have variously sought to resolve it—is the starting point of Hannah Proctor’s provocative new book, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat. Proctor, a research fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, is not a partisan of the anti-psychiatry movement, which from the 1960s onward has depicted all extant mental health interventions as ideological disciplining. Nor does she wish to reify the dichotomy between internal and external sources of psychic pain. After all, she writes, “The ‘outside’ is a social world populated by other people, each with their own inner lives, each shaped by their past experiences in that social world, which they also participate in shaping.” Instead, Proctor is preoccupied with less abstract questions, at once more prosaic and more pressing: How can left-wing radicals simultaneously devise strategies for healing the wounds inflicted by a wounding world while also seeking to eradicate the social structures that wound us in the first place? And what can we do with ourselves when, inevitably, we are exhausted, physically and emotionally, by these efforts—and their failure?….

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/burnout-hannah-proctor

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