Political Agreements and Disagreements between Psychoanalysis and Person-Centred

Abstract

This paper draws on Marxist and Lacanian ideas to offer a response to Schmid's call for discussion concerning politics in psychotherapy and, more specifically, the political understanding inherent in the person-centred approach (PCA). After scrutinising Lacan's attitude towards politics, and discarding Lacanist politics, an alternative Lacanian Marxist political standpoint is proposed, in which seven points of political agreement between psychoanalysis and Schmid's conception of the PCA are discerned, namely: the rejection of a reductionist understanding of politics; the definition of the personal as something political; the conception of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as political activities; the assumption of a critical stance; the recognition of the necessity of dispute; opposition to scientistic–empiricist fetishism; and the renunciation of control and indoctrination. Despite these agreements, however, the article also shows that the Lacanian Marxist political standpoint permits detection of fundamental political disagreements between its idea of psychoanalysis and the use in person-centred psychology of the ideological discourses of humanism, selfism, empathism and therapeutism.