Facing political truths

Abstract

This response to Layton, Hollander and Gutwill's Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Layton et al., 2006) begins with an exploration of the political effects of analytic ‘neutrality’, giving two examples (psychoanalytic approaches to homosexuality and the treatment of Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s) to show how this can be, and has been, used to mask political conformism. The paper then takes up the issue of how politics becomes manifest in clinical psychoanalytic encounters, and focuses in particular on Jessica Benjamin's appeal to a notion of emotional ‘truth’. This is linked to a different form of neutrality – one that is fundamentally political because it involves looking unflinchingly at whatever is there to be seen.