Laubender's argument in The Political Clinic follows from her premise that the psychoanalytic clinic itself is a political space. She is not interested in how psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic ideas have had an impact more broadly, for instance through cultural theory or psychohistory. Rather, she explores the way in which clinical work itself has been, as she puts it, “a protopolitical laboratory for reimagining the formations of race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy” (3). What may seem a private space, outside of political contestation, is for Laubender suffused with political meanings and intentions. As she rightly notes, the pretense that the psychoanalytic clinic is apolitical is really a statement of accommodation to the existing political order. While an apolitical stance may seem innocuous with respect to liberal democracies (although Laubender will argue otherwise), it is clearly a problem when that context is, for instance, a South American military dictatorship in the 1970s. In her introduction, Laubender rightly rebukes the International Psychoanalytic Association for its silence in such contexts of political repression.

Laubender's interests lie in other territories, however. She develops her argument through six transnational case studies, covering a period from roughly the 1920s to the 1980s. Her case studies include: Anna Freud's work with troubled children in Social Democratic “Red Vienna” of the interwar period; Melanie Klein's famed wartime child analysis conducted while evacuated to Scotland; Wulf Sachs's experiments with clinical boundaries in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s; D.W. Winnicott's model of the motherly analyst in the context of postwar British decolonization; Thomas Main's 1950s and 1960s experiments with therapeutic community at the Cassel Hospital in London; and John Bowlby's technologies for emotional security, as developed and promoted within a context of Cold War paranoia. While these case studies cover several different countries, they have Britain as a hub, since all the analysts were members of the British Psychoanalytical Society in its palmiest days, and all had some relationship, however contested, to its ideas and practices.

The chapters that focus on clinics within Britain are most likely to be of interest to readers of The Journal of British Studies. The connections to Britain in Freud and Sachs are real, but somewhat marginal to the arguments of the chapters themselves (although the account of Sachs's attempt to construct an anti-colonial practice in conjunction with a Black South African patient is particularly intriguing and a very valuable study in its own right). The discussion of British analyst D.W. Winnicott, for instance, focuses on his apparently successful treatment in the mid-1960s of a child patient, known as “The Piggle,” who was plagued by nightmares and fantasies that involved a terrifying figure, “Black Mummy.” Laubender clearly shows the racialized meanings of this fantasy in a period of British xenophobic reaction to Black immigration. She also shows Winnicott's difficulties in recognizing both this meaning, and in understanding his own role as a white analyst in reinforcing the Piggle's fantasized distinction between good whiteness and bad Blackness. This study is particularly enlivened by what is so often absent, for good practical reasons, from the historiography of psychoanalysis: namely, the voice of the patient. Laubender shows how the adult Piggle's words convey her conscious anxieties about the possible racial and racist meanings of her earlier infantile fantasy world.

Laubender is particularly astute in voicing suspicions about psychological luminaries of the British welfare state. Her study of John Bowlby's enormously influential attachment theory situates him in another geopolitical context, that of the Cold War. This is a particularly interesting move, because Bowlby's emphasis on the mother's supposed evolutionary role in supporting the infant's emotional security has often been read in feminist terms. For instance, it may be seen as promoting a harmful ideology of mother-child bonding that places the mother firmly in the sphere of reproductive domestic labor (and which implicitly diminishes working mothers, many of whom were of course working class or Black British, rather than ambitious professionals). Laubender goes further to show how Bowlby modelled the securely attached infant as the foundation of liberal, democratic, and even capitalist adults—in contrast to the damaged subjectivities supposedly churned out by the Soviet regime, with its glorification of the mother as worker.

Laubender's case studies are richly detailed, and full of fascinating vignettes and digressions. For my part, as a book historian who studies Penguin Books's psychological list, I was informed (and pleased) by her attention to the messages implicit in the cover designs of books by Winnicott and Bowlby. Moreover, as a historian of psychoanalysis, and specifically the Scottish context, I know how hard it can be to convey the complex and sometimes murky ideas promulgated within different schools. Laubender does excellent work in guiding the reader—who to be fair is unlikely to be a complete novice—through the ins and outs of some very different theories. Laubender is also very adept at bringing out the political meanings in the clinical practices that she analyses. Some of these meanings are perhaps more clear-cut than the others. For instance, I found her link between Klein's psychoanalytic reparation and collective reparations to be less convincing than the connections in other cases. But Laubender's studies are on the whole very well-argued—both thoughtful and thought-provoking. In a tantalizing hint that I hope will be developed further, Laubender ends her book with a cautionary note about fantasies of effective left-wing political action through the clinic—which might, after all, seem like the antidote the case studies she presents. Overall, The Political Clinic is an excellent addition to the flourishing scholarship on the historical and political significance of the psychoanalytic clinic.