Liberation Psychology as Heir to and Unforgotten History of Psychoanalysis

Whoo boy are you in for a treat! I had not expected to like so much, or be so overwhelmed with the riches in, Daniel José Gaztambide's new book, A People's History of Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Liberation Psychology (Lexington, 2019), 270pp. But riches there are in all kinds of new, or previously under-explored, connections not just between liberation theology and psychology in Latin America and psychoanalysis, but also between some of the pivotal figures in the latter, including Ferenczi, Fromm, and Freud--to name just the most prominent. This is historical scholarship of a rare and welcome sort, but it does not dwell in the past, or fondly indulge a propensity for nostalgia: it is scholarship with a view to what's happening on the street today and how insights from the past can inform and propel forward our struggles today for justice and a better world. 

The author--whom I will interview on here in the coming days--has gone back to the first generation of analysts, including Freud, to bring forth some of their early social justice initiatives that were later lost as psychoanalysis became more and more medicalized and bourgeois in the United States in particular. In this, the author is explicitly indebted to such important recent works as Elizabeth Ann Danto's fascinating 2007 book, Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938. 

But he also draws on figures such as Paulo Friere and his famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The author skillfully shows connections ranging from Vienna to Harlem to Latin America, across Jewish and African-American and Latin American histories of oppression and injustice. The conclusion alone is worth the price of the book to read his careful and discerning insights into that topic everybody scorns today without understanding it: "intersectionality" and the quest for justice. He ends with a very moving appeal to raise "critical consciousness and political mentalization," here weaving in some of the insights of Peter Fonagy et al. towards an "insurgent universality" of love.  

I could go on and on, but already did in my interview with him. My point is this: not only is this a work of fascinating historical scholarship, but it also brings to the fore critical ideas that clinicians today, charged with responsibilities of advocacy and attending to the social conditions and contexts of our patients, will find hugely invigorating. 

Psychotherapy and Christianity in Scotland

My mother and her entire family were all from the west of Scotland, up and down the coast along the Firth of Clyde and into Glasgow. One day, God willing and the pandemic receding, I may get over to see it.

Partly because of that, but also partly because of a sense that events in London, as always, tend to outshine and overshadow others in the United Kingdom, I have cultivated for several years an interest in figures in Scotland who have been important and influential in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. E.g., W.R.D. Fairbairn's pioneering work on the schizoid personality type remains fascinating to me, as does his life, some of it covered in John Sutherland's 1989 book, Fairbairn's Journey into the Interior, which I read last year.

Even more fascinating, in part because more dramatic and "radical," is the life and work of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, whose Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist I read last year.

Along comes a new book to deepen our knowledge of Scottish developments in mental health in the last century. Set for release at the end of June is Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-Century Scotland by Gavin Miller (Edinburgh UP, 2020), 184pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Although a tide of secularization swept over the post-war United Kingdom, Christianity in Scotland found one way to survive by drawing on alliances that it had built earlier in the century with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis was seen as a way to purify Christianity, and to propel it in a scientifically rational and socially progressive direction. This book draws upon a wealth of archival research to uncover the complex interaction between religion and psychotherapy in twentieth-century Scotland. It explores the practical and intellectual alliance created between the Scottish churches and Scottish psychotherapy that found expression in the work of celebrated figures such as the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing and the pioneering psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn, as well as the careers of less well-known individuals such as the psychotherapist Winifred Rushforth.