Book review: Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is inescapable in the contemporary public sphere. The language of collective trauma, often framed as concerns about triggering psychological suffering, is pervasive. Political developments like the election of Donald Trump and the outcome of the Brexit referendum are diagnosed as social pathologies that we need to process and work through. More technically, the human tendency to lash out during hard times is interpreted as a sign of collective insecurity and a persecutory anxiety that results in forms of communal disintegration. With the rise of ‘alternative facts’, our projections about the world are increasingly out of touch with reality. As these examples show, psychoanalysis ‘gives us a rich and resonant vocabulary for talking about certain logics that continually reemerge in and shape politics in the present’ (p. 193).

Despite its ubiquity, the application of psychoanalysis to broader social and political issues is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although Sigmund Freud made this connection in both Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (first published in 1921) and Civilization and Its Discontents (first published in 1930), the thinkers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School were ahead of the curve in their early attempts to develop ‘the missing link between ideological superstructure and socio-economic base’ during the interwar period by supplementing Marxism with psychoanalysis so that they could ‘flesh out materialism’s notion of man’s essential nature’ (Jay, 1973: 92). Using this theoretical synthesis Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm sought to theorize the social implications of individual psychological predispositions during the interwar period, culminating in the four volume Studies in Anti-Semitism (first published in 1944) and the pathbreaking Authoritarian Personality (first published in 1950).

Since then, however, psychoanalysis has largely dropped out of the research program of the Frankfurt School. Critique on the Couch explores this renunciation and makes the case for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis for critical theory. Amy Allen’s argument, however, is not for a return to the Freudo-Marxism of the first generation; instead, she contends that critical theory would be better served by turning to the ‘realistic psychoanalytic account of the person that is at the same time thoroughly psychological and social’ (p. 8), which she locates in the work of Melanie Klein.

By pushing back against the rationalistic notions of historical evolution Allen associates with Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and much of the contemporary Frankfurt School, Critique on the Couch is a continuation of The End of Progress (Allen, 2016). Originally planned as a single volume that would call for a return to ‘the interrelated Freudian and Nietzschean critiques of the rational ego and of historical progress’ (p. vii), Allen instead tackled the latter in her previous book while saving the former for this volume. Critique on the Couch thus centers on the call for critical theory to return to the psychoanalytic foundations of the early Frankfurt School in order to ‘rethink its understandings of emancipation and progress beyond abstract utopianism and transformative praxis beyond narrow rationalism’ (p. 17).

In her explanation of why critical theory has moved away from psychoanalysis, Allen emphasizes the fact that many contemporary thinkers build on a conception of the individual that jettisons drive theory as the animating force of the psyche. The early thinkers of the Frankfurt School whom Allen admires were committed to drives both as explanations for both the human destructiveness displayed over the course of two World Wars and as sources of resistance to increasingly reified and administered forms of life. By contrast, subsequent critical theorists have embraced revisionist psychoanalysis, which in Adorno’s words seeks to ‘sociologize’ the psyche by emphasizing external factors ‘at the expense of hidden mechanisms of the unconscious’ (quoted on p. 69).

Allen sees the revisionist turn to society and intersubjectivity as a mistake. She argues that by making ‘the seamless integration of individual and society as the goal of analytic work’ (p. 2) such an approach domesticates critique by inscribing a ‘sympathy for adaptation’ (Adorno, quoted on p. 70) within its basic methodology. Although she does not want to abandon intersubjectivity completely, she thinks that critical theory still needs a philosophical anthropology based on drive theory to properly conceptualize the ‘fundamental antagonism between individual and society’ (p. 69).

While Allen rejects Freud’s rather crude biological conception of drives, she also wants to avoid the problems Adorno identifies in revisionism. She argues that Klein’s metapsychology succeeds in threading this needle ‘because of her distinctive psychological and relational conception of the drives – according to which drives are modes of relating to others either destructively or lovingly’ (p. 72). In addition to offering a conception of the psyche that is sensitive to the role that power plays in both individuation and socialization, she also argues that it can help to combat the developmentalism that is inherent in notions of historical progress by replacing stages with psychological ‘positions’ that define how the individual relates to itself and others.

As is already clear from this brief overview of its key arguments, Critique on the Couch is an ambitious, thought-provoking book. In addition to these forward-looking normative and methodological arguments, it also provides a wonderful introduction to the reception of Freud’s work, the role that psychoanalysis played in early critical theory and the state of the debates within this field today. Allen engages with these difficult ideas in her usual lucid style, which presents clear summaries and critiques of the work of other thinkers as a springboard for her own substantive positions.

Given the role that psychoanalytic categories continue to play in both critical theory and the public sphere more generally, Allen’s desire to place psychoanalysis back on the agenda of the Frankfurt School is most welcome. I (Verovšek, 2019c) sympathize with her desire to develop a ‘broader critical methodology that takes the analogy with psychoanalysis seriously’ (p. 181). However, I am less convinced by her claim that critical theory should adopt Klein’s metapsychology in order to develop a ‘realistic philosophical anthropology [that] puts constraints on how much and what sort of social and political progress we can hope to achieve’ (p. 149).

Despite its many virtues, I want to briefly voice skepticism regarding two key points. I start by questioning the reasoning Allen offers for calling her drive-based, Kleinian understanding of the psyche more ‘realistic’ than other approaches. Since it is unclear which interpretation is correct (or even if this is a question that can be answered), I do not think that critical theory has much to gain by tying to itself a strong, stable and presumably immutable philosophical anthropology of any kind. The second point I want to raise regards Allen’s claim that adopting Klein’s drive theory will help critical theory to address the problem of Eurocentrism. In particular, given the problematic comments that Klein makes about colonialism and the fact that she also draws on the language of primitivity to draw parallels between individual and collective development, it is unclear to me that her work can actually help us to rethink the kinds of progressive philosophies of history that Allen wants to address.

Psychoanalytic, sociological, philosophical and critical theorists all clearly want to base their schemas on as accurate an understanding of the human being as possible. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. While the clinical evidence for psychological phenomena has increased over time, mapping this observational data onto the essential structure of the psyche or using it to confirm the existence of drives has proved more difficult. Problematically, it has tended to lead either to scientific naturalism or metaphysical realism. In light of their ultimate interest in explaining social phenomena, it is perhaps understandable that critical theorists have sought to avoid the temptations of crude biological reductionism through commitments to social constructivism.

Allen argues that although Kleinian metapsychology cannot be definitively proved, it provides a more ‘realistic’ foundation for the Frankfurt School by placing ‘human drives for destruction, mastery, aggression, and omnipotence (in short, for power, at least in some of its most recognizable forms)’ (p. 7) at the center of its philosophical anthropology. Allen defines her use of the term ‘realism’ with reference to contemporary debates within political philosophy. In contrast to the ‘moralistic idealism’ that she locates in the assumptions of contemporary critical theory, Allen calls for ‘what we might call a kind of Geussian political realism – that is, a clear-eyed, sanguine conception of what actually motivates persons to act in the ways that they do’ (p. 3).

Allen’s choice to use the work of Raymond Geuss, a trenchant critic of post-Adornian critical theory, is understandable as his claim that the contemporary Frankfurt School fails ‘to understand the concrete constellation of power within which [political action] is located’ (Geuss, 2010: 3) mirrors her use of psychoanalysis ‘as a realistic check on the tendencies toward excessive rationalism and idealism that might tempt the critical theorist qua normative theorist’ (p. 3). However, while elegant, it is unclear how this solves the epistemological problem mentioned above. While claiming that your theory is more realistic sounds good, without the support of further evidence this assertion merely serves as ideological cover for pessimistic assumptions about ‘the fundamental role that power plays in human psychic and social life’ (p. 7). Geuss himself recognizes this problem and has even admitted to me that as a result, ‘I never should have used the term realism’ (quoted in Verovšek, 2019a: 268).

Regardless of the problems involved in backing up these claims to greater ‘realism’, Allen argues that ‘Klein’s metapsychology offers powerful resources for working through the residual Eurocentric racism that pervades Freudian developmental schemas’ (p. 17) and the conceptions of progress adopted by the Frankfurt School today. More specifically, the claim is that Klein’s positional model of the psyche, which distinguishes between paranoid-schizoid and depressive configurations of object relations, does not require either problematic biological assumptions about antisociality or the positing of psycho-social stages of development. Instead, on Allen’s interpretation of her work, Kleinian drive theory offers us an account in which ‘aggression and destructiveness are relational passions – constitutive tendencies to relate to others in certain ways’ (p. 53) are analyzed using positions that ‘can never be fully overcome, but instead must be continually and ongoingly worked through’ (p. 17).

This is a very attractive vision. However, it is not obvious that the distinction between Klein’s ‘phases’ or ‘positions’ and the more problematic ‘stages’ of development actually holds up. To start with, as Allen admits, in developing her positional model Klein explicitly uses the language of stadial evolution in speaking of how the modern ‘individual repeats biologically…the stages which we still observe in primitive people: cannibalism and murderous tendencies of the greatest variety’ (quoted on p. 114). Insofar as individuals and societies can also fall back into earlier stages and must continually work through these ways of relating to others, it is unclear that the vocabulary of stages is all that different from phases or positions. After all, unless there is a possibility for both to regress back down the ladder, developmental stages would be of little use in diagnosing the ups and downs of sociocultural life in any society.

Additionally, Klein’s own use of such problematic language raises the issue of severability. As I have argued elsewhere, I do not think that Habermas is committed to the kinds of backward-looking stadial theories of development that Allen is rightfully worried about given his ‘shift away from comprehensive philosophies of history to the paradigm of collective remembrance’ (Verovšek, 2019b: 136). This is not to deny that he did indeed make use of similarly problematic evolutionary language in the past. However, if it is possible to sever the problematic colonial, Eurocentric origins of Klein’s drive theory from her mature metapsychology as Allen contends, I see no reason to be any less charitable to Habermas.

Critique on the Couch is an important contribution to contemporary critical theory. It is a must read for anyone interested in the connection between psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School. Ultimately, however, it underestimates the problems involved in a critique to Klein’s substantive notion of the psyche. While Allen is at pains to show that such an account ‘is compatible with critical theory’s distinctive methodology’ (p. 8), it seems problematic to assume that certain drives are ‘a permanent part of all of our relationships with others’ (p. 9) in the context of a social theory that is sensitive to external conditions and ‘attributes a temporal core to truth’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: xi). It thus seems better – to me at least – for the Frankfurt School to continue to use psychoanalysis as a methodological model for critique, rather than using it to ground a substantive philosophical anthropology, however ‘realistic’ it may seem.