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    Radical Psychoanalysis: and anti-capitalist action
    Radical Psychoanalysis: and anti-capitalist action
    Radical Psychoanalysis: and anti-capitalist action
    Ebook55 pages1 hour

    Radical Psychoanalysis: and anti-capitalist action

    By Ian Parker

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    About this ebook

    Ian Parker is a practicing psychoanalyst in Manchester and a revolutionary Marxist. He also writes, and his books include Socialisms: Revolutions Betrayed, Mislaid and Unmade (2020: Resistance Books) and, with the Mexican revolutionary David Pavón-Cuéllar, Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements <

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResistance Books
    Release dateFeb 21, 2022
    ISBN9780902869288
    Radical Psychoanalysis: and anti-capitalist action
    Author

    Ian Parker

    Ian Parker is Professor of Management in the School of Management at the University of Leicester and President of the College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of Psychology and Society (Pluto, 1996), Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction (Pluto, 2004) and Revolution in Psychology (Pluto, 2007).

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      Book preview

      Radical Psychoanalysis - Ian Parker

      1

      Why do we suffer?

      Human beings suffer and also, against all odds, they thrive. They do both in very different ways in different cultures and at different points in history. We suffer now from a sick world, a capitalist world, and the suffering is quite specific. It takes different forms for each of us, and that is why a psychoanalytic approach to suffering listens to us one by one, listening to our distress, our different ways of living and barely surviving in this world.

      We cannot pretend to understand completely the complicated and hidden ways each one of us suffers, but what we do know is that capitalism as a sick system is grinding us down while it destroys the world. Capitalism, a system of political-economic domination, also intensifies other forms of oppression, including sexism and racism, and it turns us from being the ones who can change the world into our own worst enemies, so we become attached to our misery while blaming others for it.

      Separation and conflict

      We want a world where we can live and work, be creative and happy, but we are torn apart and torn from each other, while those who benefit from this terrible destructive exploitation rub their hands and encourage us to join them. Those in positions of power and privilege want us to scramble upwards, treading on everyone else, as they do.

      The false promise is that by working our way up, and abandoning those who suffer alongside us, we can be happy. The promise is that more money and more power, especially power over others, will relieve our misery. In the process this might, those in power hope, even dissolve our knowledge that things are wrong, that this kind of world is built on lies. Ideology that tells us we cannot change is a system of lies. It is just not true that we cannot change, be otherwise.

      Separation and conflict in this sad world are quite specific to capitalism; this is alienation, which has awful effects, and which psychoanalysis has insights into, insights into the depth of suffering and into the way distress paralyses us and turns our energy for change into resentment at each other.

      Alienation as competition

      We are already separated from each other in the market-place for labour power. That labour power is what we sell in order to get a wage, what we must sell in order to survive. Labour power is not only physical but also mental, and mental labour in a software company for example, is then treated as superior to physical labour. It is not, but that feeling of superiority is part and parcel of the competitive world in which we sell our labour power, a world that alienates us from each other. We then compete to get the job, compete to keep the job, compete with foreigners, who, we are told, are threatening our jobs; and we resent those who seem to have cushy jobs.

      In this way, alienation as competition with others drives us into our own little individual selves, the tiny world of the individual body separated from others, and we become convinced that it is only individual struggle and individual success that counts. This is ideology. This is the false self-destructive world, and the private inner world, where we imagine that all that counts is the ‘I’, what is good for ‘me’; this self-contained individual ‘me’ is what psychoanalysis calls the ‘ego’. Some psychoanalysts aim to strengthen the ego, to adapt it to society, to enable us merely to survive, help us compete, but radical psychoanalysis reminds us that there is more to us than this.

      We are who we

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