Abstract
Amy Allen’s new book returns to one of critical theory’s old themes—its foundational but contested relation to psychoanalysis—and calls for a renewal of the bond. The book argues that central figures of contemporary critical theory, such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, lack sufficient accounts of the source and status of negative drives, such as power and aggression, and that they conversely tend to overdraw positive drives as innate. Allen turns to Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to develop a more well-rounded philosophical anthropology. The resulting interpretive project of the book develops the “strand of psychoanalytic drive theory that stretches from Freud through Klein to Lacan,” and then integrates it into the methods and aims of critical theory (185). This interpretive project contributes to the book’s political project, which argues that psychoanalytic theory can help explain the psychic dynamics animating contemporary phenomena of political polarization, patterns of demonization and resentment, and conspiracy theory proliferation. Containing an introductory overview, five theoretical chapters, and a brief conclusion that draws out some political implications, the book makes the case for a critical theory that renews itself by returning to its roots, expanding upon the project begun in Allen’s 2016 monograph The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory.
The common theme in both that earlier work and the present one is that contemporary critical theory too uncritically inherits its rationalistic, Euro-American, and modern form of life. Fortunately, the critical theory tradition, within which Allen stages her psychoanalytic intervention, itself contains resources for an immanent problematization of its inheritances. Allen recounts that, for the early Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis offered indispensable resources for opposing a conformist society. Specifically, Freudian drive theory—the interplay between Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives—was foundational to early critical theorists’ elucidation of resistance. Allen therefore criticizes Habermas for dropping psychoanalysis in favor of developmental psychology. Furthermore, she regards as inadequate the subsequent endorsement by Honneth and Robin Celikates of rationalistic strands of psychoanalysis that fail to appreciate the foundational role of the death drive, and that generate idealistic theories of subjectivity. Allen argues that Klein offers a more realistic theory of subjectivity that can explain “human drives for destruction, mastery, aggression and omnipotence (in short, for power)” (7).
Allen reconstructs Klein’s psychoanalytic model to develop a view of the psyche suited to critical theory. This reconstruction involves three major moves. First, Allen’s Kleinian model holds that the ego, with its ambivalent relational drives of love and aggression vis-à-vis objects, exists, if in rudimentary form, even during infancy. Allen favorably contrasts this model with Freud’s theory of primary narcissism, in which infants experience a “state of undifferentiated merger or fusion not only with the primary caregiver but with the external world as a whole” (30). The theory of primary narcissism, she argues, views relationality as a peripheral and secondary component of the psyche, rather than as its foundation, as Klein would have it. Indeed, a danger of the theory of primary narcissism is that its central notion—that subjectivity begins in a state of perfect fusion with the world—too easily construes the goal of politics as recovering fusion while mitigating irreducible difference.
Second, Allen accepts the ineluctability of primary aggression even as she takes seriously the worry “that drive theory commits us to the assumption of an innate, biologically determined, and deterministic antisociality at the core of human nature,” which would be incompatible with critical theory’s presupposition that humans are socially and historically constituted (53). In Allen’s Kleinian model, the death drive is not an innate antisocial or antirelational tendency. It is redescribed as primary aggression, a hostile form of relationality but a form of relationality nonetheless.
Third, Allen develops a view of the ego in keeping with Klein’s view and argues that “ego integration is a never-ending process, founded upon loss, in which ambivalence is not overcome but rather withstood and ongoingly worked through” (88). Allen’s Kleinian understanding of the ego-id relation as one of “integration” differentiates her view of the ego from that of Adorno, for whom the ego, a force of rational mastery, enacts “the domination of inner, instinctual nature” (87). Klein’s positive representation of ego integration also distinguishes her view from that of Lacan, for whom “the ego must be dismantled rather than strengthened” to fulfill the purpose of engaging the unconscious (57).
These three claims allow Allen to argue that positive and negative expressions of relationality—aggression and hostility as well as love—are equally ineluctable aspects of the human psyche. Her model posits that the ego’s responsibility is to persistently work through and integrate unconscious paranoid fantasies and persecutory anxieties.
In chapter 3, Allen defends this model against critics’ concerns that models of psychic development are implicitly racist because they resemble racist theories of civilizational development. Allen argues that Klein’s model instead offers a “radical reconceptualization of the psyche that moves beyond developmental models altogether” (112). The centerpiece of Klein’s mature psychic model is the distinction between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. The former is often defined as the first stage of development and is characterized by a rigidly Manichean constellation of defenses, anxieties, and attachments. The depressive position is often defined as a subsequent stage in which one tolerates ambivalence and seeks to make relational repairs. Allen represents Klein’s positions as configurations of object-relations rather than as consecutive stages, though, and emphasizes that either can recur throughout a life and that neither is ideal. Because Allen represents the relation between the two positions as neither developmentally sequential nor straightforwardly normative, her interpretation evades the recapitulationist charge of problematic symmetry with models of civilizational development.
Arguably the most edifying aspect of the book is its reevaluation of the death drive and its associated criticism of utopianism. The death drive is a complicated aspect of Freud’s work that Allen initially describes as primary aggression but later elaborates as a complex force for the inner development of morality. This argument unfolds through an engagement with the work of Herbert Marcuse. Whereas Marcuse called for withering away the death drive in favor of a liberated and playful Eros, Allen argues that Marcuse mischaracterizes the death drive and misses its moral function. What Marcuse portrays as the utopian eradication of the death drive “would so drastically transform the human condition as to make it unrecognizably human,” Allen argues, and the creative play of Eros that Marcuse desires would be “difficult if not impossible to imagine” absent the negative features of human existence—death, loss, struggle, destruction—that often give rise to art (130, 131). Instead, Allen characterizes the death drive as the source of moral responsibility: “precisely because the death drive is ineliminable . . . reparation can never be complete” (135). Meanwhile Eros, released from the utopian demand of achieving a full reconciliation between the individual and society, appears as part of the ongoing and incomplete work of reparative mourning. By framing the aggressive element of the psyche as the ultimate source of the perpetual ethical obligation to repair, Allen demonstrates that a utopia without the death drive would in fact be undesirable, a bracing contribution of the book.
The latter half of the book brings Klein’s ideas to bear on critical theory with both methodological and political purposes. Methodologically, Klein offers Allen a more affectively attuned rather than rationalistic approach to critical theory. “Even if we agree that the aim of this process,” she writes, evoking both psychoanalysis and critique, “is a more unified, integrated, rational, and autonomous self, the method for achieving this aim is neither solely nor even in the first instance a rational one” but is instead “affect- and desire-laden” (168). Rationalists may view the analyst’s rational insight as the driver of psychoanalytic transformation, and by extension, view the social critic’s role as making rational political interventions. However, Allen’s Kleinian view adds that affective attachments are necessary for producing the rational insights that spark social and psychic transformation. Minds, Allen argues, are not changed by rational discourse alone. If critical theorists participate in movements and build affective bonds with participants, those social actors can learn that their “idiosyncratic way of experiencing the world” is not necessary but contingent and co-constituted and therefore “open to practical transformation” (171). Affective bonds between theorist and social actor, like transference between analyst and analysand, can be usefully channeled for insight and transformation.
The book’s political project seeks to show that Kleinian psychoanalysis can explain the psychic dynamics animating neoliberal populist polarization and engages thoughtfully with recent work by Wendy Brown and others. In the context of Trump’s presidency and the social dislocation wrought by neoliberalism, Allen diagnoses an ascendant paranoid-schizoid style of politics characterized by conspiracy theories, ressentiment, and aggrieved persecutory anxieties, and argues that we must “learn how to practice democratic politics in a depressive mode” (195). This practice entails accepting ambivalent rather than Manichean views of other people, which Allen hopes might enable us to see those whose views we find abhorrent as “not evil incarnate, but whole people” (197). Allen describes depressive political practice as an antidote to demonization, and indeed, cultivating depressive subjectivities may contribute to repairing social rifts and co-constructing shared worlds, even as it accepts that perfect reconciliation will elude us. “Reparation and creativity for Klein are not about restoring a phantasied state of wholeness,” Allen writes; “rather, they are about reassembling the shattered pieces of a ruined, lost object and world in a way that acknowledges the depth of the loss and nonetheless resolves to make meaning and beauty out of the remaining fragments” (144).
Yet the application of the depressive position to politics runs into some limits. The concluding chapter slips into an abstract register in describing the American polity in general as paranoid-schizoid: “Politics . . . is increasingly governed by a logic of splitting” (193). Although this diagnosis seems accurate in the big picture, a closer look raises some questions. In diagnosing a polity-wide, paranoid-schizoid style of politics, does Allen mean to characterize the entire polity—left, right, and beyond—as equally responsible, and is such a characterization accurate? It is also unclear whether the narrative of left-right, paranoid-schizoid polarization adequately describes the multiple axes of conflict—involving class, racial violence, settler-colonialism, and patriarchy—as they intersect today. Furthermore, Allen’s notion of democracy in a depressive mode would benefit from some elaboration. Seeing others as whole people is a good start, to be sure, but what transformation of the conditions of social harm—whether governing institutions, norms, laws, or customs—is required of a society by its passage from a paranoid-schizoid mode of politics to a depressive mode? In the case of US racial domination, for instance, focusing on repair in the sense of seeing others as whole people may not go far without accompanying transformation of the structural conditions—such as economic, policing, housing, and carceral—that reproduce racial inequities. This is not to say that Klein cannot help us make sense of the dynamics of polarization, simply that more clarification could be beneficial.
Applying psychoanalysis to contemporary politics also raises a question of fit. Since psychoanalytic models such as Klein’s are based on the twentieth-century Euro-American bourgeois psyche, how much explanatory light can we expect them to shed on the psychic dynamics animating contemporary political actors of diverse social locations? Because the distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions describes the passage from experiencing illusory perceptions of persecution to taking moral responsibility for repairing one’s harmful actions, it seems better suited, in the context of Trumpian politics, to explain the psyches of the resentful white classes who feel displaced than the psyches of subaltern subjects of domination. Mobilizing Klein to explain the psychic dynamics animating a diverse and fractious polity—not just right-wing populist strands—points to the potential fruits of broadening the scope of psychoanalysis, a tradition long associated with the historical journey of bourgeois Euro-American subjectivity.
How does Allen’s notion of depressive democracy relate to existing schools of thought in democratic theory? Allen does not explicitly align her project with deliberative democratic theory, but she does approvingly discuss recent work associating Klein with that tradition. However, several of Allen’s moves—insistence that repair does not strive toward fusion, acceptance of irreducible difference, description of politics as ongoing and always incomplete, and explanation of human drives for power—also resemble key elements of agonistic democratic thought. The resemblance between Allen’s psychic model and agonism’s view of democracy suggests that psychoanalysis could offer resources for nourishing political actors through ongoing struggle. Though Allen mainly applies her psychic model to explain right-wing populism, it is clear from her account that drives for power are perpetual and not limited by partisanship. One conclusion that might be drawn from this thought is that a depressive politics of deliberation and repair must exist alongside continued struggle over sites of power and rule.
Critique on the Couch not only decisively brings psychoanalysis back into critical theory but also identifies Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalysis as particularly fit for critical theory’s purposes. Whether or not critical theorists follow Allen’s call to take up psychoanalytic theory, political theorists of all stripes have good reason to consider the arguments of her book in the service of the ongoing work of political repair.