In this book, Eli Zaretsky does the difficult work of reconstructing the complex political history of Freud and his legacy. This may not seem, at first, like a compelling opening to a review of this nature. Zaretsky, of course, is not the first to urge the reader to return to Freud with fresh eyes and an open mind. Others, notably Kurt Jacobsen in Freud’s Foes (2009), have challenged the long and discouraging trend toward fashionable criticism of Freud as outdated and unhelpful. He is also not the first to look at Freudian politics. Many have analyzed this aspect of Freud’s life and work, and use his thought to serve various scholarly ends. What sets Zaretsky apart, and what makes this book a powerful contribution to contemporary theory, is that Political Freud does not just point to the tremendous gains made through a force possessed by Freudian insights and methods. This book is also a powerful study in loss and what it means to remember. Specifically, the author ably reveals what we have lost in dropping the political Freud, and points toward the difficult work necessary to break down what blocks us from recalling him in the present.

This impulse is present from the start of the book. Zaretsky opens with the jarring transition in psychoanalytic discourse made in the 1960s and 1970s, when a pivot was made from the insistence of scholars like Herbert Marcuse that politics can only be unpacked through a sustained psychoanalytic confrontation with its irrational aspects to the rejection of Freud by social movements that derided him as an impinging bourgeois patriarch attempting to naturalize Victorian orthodoxy in the most intimate spheres of identity and agency. Zaretsky draws his prescience from forcefully contesting this construction of Freud in both the present and the past, which psychoanalysis believes remains very much alive in mental life.

Structurally, Zaretsky’s work is both compelling and laden with an implicit challenge to readers to, in turn, work through Freud’s political legacy in their own terms. Political Freud takes the form of a series of essays, and derives much of its power from its ability to thereby stretch over a broad range of subjects, including everything from the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and late capital, the struggle for racial justice, the relationship between psychoanalysis and art, the use and abuse of psychoanalysis by various social movements, and more. The author utilizes each chapter to reveal that, true to his work, Freud has been used in practice by theorists and activists through both a “critical moment” when psychoanalytic work helped to uncover domination and an “affirmative moment” when psychoanalysis, having served its purpose, much like the child’s once-beloved toy, is dropped and forgotten by a subject that has moved on. Zaretsky works to remind us that the “goal of analysis, then, is not the internalization of any particular value but that of the analytic attitude itself” (p. 13). This is perhaps the key to Zaretsky’s Freud: It is absolutely vital that Freud be encountered not only as a thinker, in other words, but also as a militant standpoint toward a certain set of otherwise intractable psychological, cultural, social, and political problems that continue to haunt human life.

The range of this book, indeed, does more than show the diverse and profound impact that Freud made on our political landscape. By presenting his argument through a series of cases that he does not fully link together through an overarching argument—a tactic that would ordinarily weaken a volume of this nature—Zaretsky integrates a key aspect of psychoanalytic method, and an invaluable glimpse into some of the key problems that psychoanalysis alone can exposit, into the experience of the reader. Although this costs him a chance to pull the argument explicitly together as narrative, a price which is particularly apparent in the book’s promising yet abrupt Afterword, it makes a good deal of sense in the context of a thinker who reached so boldly into the paradoxical and irrational.

The ongoing value of psychoanalysis is that it arms the individual, the subject Freud so powerfully revealed as weak and desperate for the false solace of “palliative measures,” with the real tools necessary to confront both the concrete and the unknowable factors blocking him from reaching integrated selfhood. Psychoanalysis orients the subject so that this confrontation can occur in both the rational and irrational spaces we inhabit in our private and group lives. The analyst works, both in the treatment room and on the meta-psychological page, to enable the subject to expose the damage done by a wounding world and to make the connections and advancements that lead to real recovery by and for him- and herself. Zaretsky forces the reader to make this same journey by leaving some of the linkages in his book ever so slightly undone.

The most powerful chapter, “Beyond the Blues: The Racial Unconscious and Collective Memory,” serves as an excellent example of this tendency. Marginalized groups are particularly ensnared in the muddle of the irrational, seething forces that undermine individual flourishing through the alienating and regressive currents so often at work in modern mass societies. Although many methods allowed black intellectuals to declaim the external power structures crushing black autonomy, Zaretsky presents a thorough account of the engagement made by these scholars with Freud that reveals that psychoanalysis drove them to also confront the internal, personal damage done by institutional racism. It was through Freud that African Americans integrated a past that could not be accessed directly due to immense trauma, because psychoanalysis alone sees that, in such cases, “Memory required direct confrontation with authority” (p. 52). Through psychoanalysis, in other words, it is not just that rage and trauma can be felt and studied down to their life-negating roots; it is that they can be sublimated and utilized as a constructive force to rebuild both self and world in a life-affirming fashion.

The addition of psychoanalysis to the work of social theory is thus a painful one, not only because of the discomforting places it takes the argument but also because it raises the real prospect that we are ultimately internally complicit in our own subjugation, and must embrace the terrifying work of undoing the foundation of domination as it exists in our own hearts and minds. Because he refuses to make memory a simple thing, despite this being a historical work, Zaretsky opens up space within social theory to contest anew the factors that ensnare us in recalcitrant sociocultural cycles into the present. He thus never loses either the driving imperative that Freud still has a critical emancipatory contribution to make to politics in the present or his touch with the many ways in which psychoanalysis has been reified, institutionalized and domesticated since Freud’s death. That alone ought to commend this work to the potential reader.

In sum, Political Freud is timely and needed, both in terms of contemporary scholarly discourse and, more urgently, in terms of recent disturbing political trends. By pointing us toward a renewed, direct engagement with Freud himself (both though and in spite of his complex and often fraught legacy), Zaretsky indicates the need for a reengagement of both the personal and shared struggle on the multiple and shifting fronts of internal and external, rational and irrational, that psychoanalysis so poignantly identifies. Given the complexity of the many challenges faced by activists and everyday people alike today, this drive to remember the political Freud could not be more welcome.