Strange human logic

Abstract

This review essay discusses the collection Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Layton et al., 2006). It approaches the book through the lens of one of its chapters, by Andrew Samuels, and considers seven themes from that chapter. The first two of these are not addressed by the collection as a whole: (1) the politics of the professions of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and (2) the use by politicians and political groupings of psychoanalytic ideas for furtherance of their own aims and objectives. The remaining five are also themes of the book as a whole: (3) the application of psychoanalytic ideas in a quest for deeper understandings of political processes and problems; (4) political projects of whatever kind undertaken by organizations of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; (5) psychoanalytic understandings of the growth and development of the political dimensions of the subject‐as‐citizen; (6) the struggle to apperceive the micropolitics of the analytical session itself; and (7) devising responsible ways to engage directly with the political, social, and cultural material that appears in the clinical session. I close by raising a further theme which Samuels appears to have overlooked: (8) the use of social and political theory in a quest to deepen psychoanalytic understandings of human subjectivity.