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A People's History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology
As inequality widens in all sectors of contemporary society, we must is psychoanalysis too white and well-to-do to be relevant to social, economic, and racial justice struggles? Are its ideas and practices too alien for people of color? Can it help us understand why systems of oppression are so stable and how oppression becomes internalized? In A People’s Historyof From Freud to Liberation Psychology, Daniel José Gaztambide reviews the oft-forgotten history of social justice in psychoanalysis. Starting with the work of Sigmund Freud and the first generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts, Gaztambide traces a series of interrelated psychoanalytic ideas and social justice movements that culminated in the work of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martín-Baró. Through this intellectual genealogy, Gaztambide presents a psychoanalytically informed theory of race, class, and internalized oppression that resulted from the intertwined efforts of psychoanalysts and racial justice advocates over the course of generations and gave rise to liberation psychology. This book is recommended for students and scholars engaged in political activism, critical pedagogy, and clinical work.
270 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 9, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 24, 2025
This, and Trauma and Recovery, are absolutely essential texts for newcomers to psychoanalysis, because where Judith Herman rightly knocks Freud down for burying rape survivors through victim-blaming discourses (oedipal or otherwise), Daniel Gaztambide traces various revolutionary impulses in and beyond Freud (to Ferenczi, Fanon, Freire, and others). Both are vital accounts of psychoanalysis, because they depict it as a contested terrain, neither fixed nor past, but a living tapestry as reactionary and revolutionary as its practitioners make it to be. While I've distanced myself from psychoanalysis, Gaztambide makes a damn good case for its continued relevance in liberation movements around the world.
So, let's begin with Freud. I hate Freud. I hate his cult-like status, his metapsychology, his abstraction of living experience to formal schemas, his authoritarian cowardice. When he and Breuer proposed the origins of hysteria in widespread incestuous, sexual abuse, they were met with stony silence by the male-dominated medical community. Rather than risk his career, Freud split with Breuer and reworked his hypothesis to be about fantasies. His hysterical patients hadn't been raped by their fathers, they'd merely fantasised about it, and the taboo of such a fantasy had led to nervous disorders. This is egregious stuff. It's deeply reactionary. A way to gaslight and victim-blame survivors of abuse. To take away their agency and reduce them to objects of analysis. A medicalisation of the male gaze.
Yet, Gaztambide shows that there's more to Freud. In the aftermath of WW1, Freud and his followers opened a string of free clinics across Europe. Inspired by his communist and socialist colleagues, Freud wrote of a "psychotherapy for the people" that would heal the wounds of poverty, racism, and authoritarian violence. His follower, Sándor Ferenczi, centred empathy, collaboration, and validation in his counselling—a far cry from Freud's cold and cognitive approach. Gaztambide's unearthing of history shows that the roots of patient-centred and compassion-focused therapies are much deeper than we think. However, with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Freud's followers were scattered across the world. Freud denounced many of them to save his own skin, and to distance himself from Bolshevism. It's understandable why he did this. He was a Jewish man trapped in a sea of fascist hatred. He witnessed decades of unrelenting violence directed against Jews. People literally chanted things like "Kill the Jew" outside his window. Hence his pessimism, his fragility, and his belief in the essential violence of men.
Fittingly, many of his successors wrote works that indirectly delved into Freud's fatalism, fragility, and flight from freedom. Wilheim Reich and Erich Fromm used psychoanalysis to interrogate the rise of fascism. Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon used it to investigate the effects of colonialism on both the colonised and the coloniser. At the heart of such works was a consideration of violence. Why we commit violence to one another (oppression), and why we commit violence to ourselves (repression). How dispossession and domination lead us to the twin fates of pessimism and authoritarianism—the very conditions Freud fell into. Rather than essentialise violence to human nature, these thinkers traced it to the structures of capitalism and colonialism. What is alienation? Reduction to an appendage of capital. Having one's fate determined by another. The total decimation of one's productive agency. How do you respond to alienation? By investing your agency in another, in a strongman, a commodity, an ideal past. By denying your body, your history, your culture and becoming white and bourgeois—in other words, an oppressor. You seek yourself elsewhere and otherwise, because what you are is unbearable. Yet, this path only leads to further violence: emptiness, hatred, aggression, shame, death. A third to scapegoat and destroy, from one's own race and class, to Jewish lizards, woke mobs, and transwomen who need to piss. Horizontal violence (class infighting, colourism, domestic abuse) dominates in lieu of the vertical, revolutionary kind.
The goal of psychoanalysis, under the paradigm of liberation, is to free you from internalised violence. To kill the Freud in your head. If the diagnosis is alienation, the cure is consciousness raising. Who stole your being and replaced it with theirs? Who filled your heart with hatred? Who destroyed your capacity to trust the world and yourself? These are questions addressed through concepts like Césaire's Négritude and Freire's conscientização, concepts that involve the construction of alternative worlds through the unearthing of black histories or the establishment of communal pedagogies. It's a process of rehumanisation that gives value to an identity previously devalued, then repressed. It's the resuscitation of a soul condemned to hell, because the mere sight of it brings you abject shame. Yet, in the light of critical consciousness, your bonds of subjugation are revealed. And it's through this revelation that you may learn to grieve for yourself, to forgive yourself, and to even forgive others yet to comprehend the harms they commit.
That's liberation—freedom from oppression and ressentiment. Freedom to find joy in one's own creativity, buoyed by mutual recognition in otherness. Such a state cannot fully emerge while the world is filled with injustices. Exploitation, authoritarian violence, pollution, transphobia, neuronormativity—these forces burn through self-resilience like wildfire. Without transforming the world and those around us, we will only have fleeting glimpses of freedom in our lives. So remember, none of this shit is your fault. You are not your shame, nor your despair, nor your abuse, nor your suicide. You never asked to be put through hell, and to repeat that hell unto yourself and others. You are forgiven, always, but you are also accountable. You have to pick up the pieces, even when it's not fair, because that's all you can do to heal yourself and the world. That is the only freedom you can give others in an unfree world. The grace of love without borders.
If this sounds fluffy to you, let me just say, by all means, defend yourself from violence. But don't become it. Don't rely on it. Because that's the coloniser talking. That's the cop, the abuser, the trembling child striking out in terror because they know no other way. That's resentment so strong it consumes your every thought, until you have no thoughts of your own. Until your whole phenomenological world is paranoia and pain. The hatred of the oppressor. Hopeless rage. Don't let anyone dismiss your anger, but don't let it spoil into misery. Love and live beyond the confines of the neoliberal wasteland. Fuck atop the undying corpse of fascism and plant a flower in its skull. Maybe, then, a new world will be born.
So, let's begin with Freud. I hate Freud. I hate his cult-like status, his metapsychology, his abstraction of living experience to formal schemas, his authoritarian cowardice. When he and Breuer proposed the origins of hysteria in widespread incestuous, sexual abuse, they were met with stony silence by the male-dominated medical community. Rather than risk his career, Freud split with Breuer and reworked his hypothesis to be about fantasies. His hysterical patients hadn't been raped by their fathers, they'd merely fantasised about it, and the taboo of such a fantasy had led to nervous disorders. This is egregious stuff. It's deeply reactionary. A way to gaslight and victim-blame survivors of abuse. To take away their agency and reduce them to objects of analysis. A medicalisation of the male gaze.
Yet, Gaztambide shows that there's more to Freud. In the aftermath of WW1, Freud and his followers opened a string of free clinics across Europe. Inspired by his communist and socialist colleagues, Freud wrote of a "psychotherapy for the people" that would heal the wounds of poverty, racism, and authoritarian violence. His follower, Sándor Ferenczi, centred empathy, collaboration, and validation in his counselling—a far cry from Freud's cold and cognitive approach. Gaztambide's unearthing of history shows that the roots of patient-centred and compassion-focused therapies are much deeper than we think. However, with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Freud's followers were scattered across the world. Freud denounced many of them to save his own skin, and to distance himself from Bolshevism. It's understandable why he did this. He was a Jewish man trapped in a sea of fascist hatred. He witnessed decades of unrelenting violence directed against Jews. People literally chanted things like "Kill the Jew" outside his window. Hence his pessimism, his fragility, and his belief in the essential violence of men.
Fittingly, many of his successors wrote works that indirectly delved into Freud's fatalism, fragility, and flight from freedom. Wilheim Reich and Erich Fromm used psychoanalysis to interrogate the rise of fascism. Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon used it to investigate the effects of colonialism on both the colonised and the coloniser. At the heart of such works was a consideration of violence. Why we commit violence to one another (oppression), and why we commit violence to ourselves (repression). How dispossession and domination lead us to the twin fates of pessimism and authoritarianism—the very conditions Freud fell into. Rather than essentialise violence to human nature, these thinkers traced it to the structures of capitalism and colonialism. What is alienation? Reduction to an appendage of capital. Having one's fate determined by another. The total decimation of one's productive agency. How do you respond to alienation? By investing your agency in another, in a strongman, a commodity, an ideal past. By denying your body, your history, your culture and becoming white and bourgeois—in other words, an oppressor. You seek yourself elsewhere and otherwise, because what you are is unbearable. Yet, this path only leads to further violence: emptiness, hatred, aggression, shame, death. A third to scapegoat and destroy, from one's own race and class, to Jewish lizards, woke mobs, and transwomen who need to piss. Horizontal violence (class infighting, colourism, domestic abuse) dominates in lieu of the vertical, revolutionary kind.
The goal of psychoanalysis, under the paradigm of liberation, is to free you from internalised violence. To kill the Freud in your head. If the diagnosis is alienation, the cure is consciousness raising. Who stole your being and replaced it with theirs? Who filled your heart with hatred? Who destroyed your capacity to trust the world and yourself? These are questions addressed through concepts like Césaire's Négritude and Freire's conscientização, concepts that involve the construction of alternative worlds through the unearthing of black histories or the establishment of communal pedagogies. It's a process of rehumanisation that gives value to an identity previously devalued, then repressed. It's the resuscitation of a soul condemned to hell, because the mere sight of it brings you abject shame. Yet, in the light of critical consciousness, your bonds of subjugation are revealed. And it's through this revelation that you may learn to grieve for yourself, to forgive yourself, and to even forgive others yet to comprehend the harms they commit.
That's liberation—freedom from oppression and ressentiment. Freedom to find joy in one's own creativity, buoyed by mutual recognition in otherness. Such a state cannot fully emerge while the world is filled with injustices. Exploitation, authoritarian violence, pollution, transphobia, neuronormativity—these forces burn through self-resilience like wildfire. Without transforming the world and those around us, we will only have fleeting glimpses of freedom in our lives. So remember, none of this shit is your fault. You are not your shame, nor your despair, nor your abuse, nor your suicide. You never asked to be put through hell, and to repeat that hell unto yourself and others. You are forgiven, always, but you are also accountable. You have to pick up the pieces, even when it's not fair, because that's all you can do to heal yourself and the world. That is the only freedom you can give others in an unfree world. The grace of love without borders.
If this sounds fluffy to you, let me just say, by all means, defend yourself from violence. But don't become it. Don't rely on it. Because that's the coloniser talking. That's the cop, the abuser, the trembling child striking out in terror because they know no other way. That's resentment so strong it consumes your every thought, until you have no thoughts of your own. Until your whole phenomenological world is paranoia and pain. The hatred of the oppressor. Hopeless rage. Don't let anyone dismiss your anger, but don't let it spoil into misery. Love and live beyond the confines of the neoliberal wasteland. Fuck atop the undying corpse of fascism and plant a flower in its skull. Maybe, then, a new world will be born.
August 31, 2021
This is an important book. The writing is solid and not difficult to move through. I found myself not always being able to figure out whether I agreed with the author's arguments -- feeling like he made them well and pointed at important things but in a not always completely convincing (to me) way.
At the very least, this is a good corrective to young graduate student desires to write off Freud as just another dead white guy.
The punchline: "A preferential option for the repressed." (LOL)
See pp 30, 31, 82, 83, 198, 199, 200, 202 and 205
At the very least, this is a good corrective to young graduate student desires to write off Freud as just another dead white guy.
The punchline: "A preferential option for the repressed." (LOL)
See pp 30, 31, 82, 83, 198, 199, 200, 202 and 205
December 27, 2022
Absolutely loved this book. It provides an academic foundation for my understanding of the psychoanalytic writing that I have read.
October 7, 2025
To quote, "Judas Priest" (rock band), "Good God!" Senor Gaztambide has produced a volume of superiour content, only to be marred by editing of such egregiousness as to be risible. That said, from a historico-psychoanalytic perspective, Gaztambide smashes Capitalist imbecility, while empathising with those who fall prey to its overt and covert dehumanising essence (e.g., a cogent psychoanalytic explanation of as to why the White working-class would adopt the worldview of their Oppressors, the White Bourgeoisie).
Invoking classic names and works, while proceeding in loose chronological fashion to more recent times, Gaztambide treads terra firma via the provision of a solid foundation for desiderative, emancipatory/liberatory possibles.
A maiden volume--attended upon, as to be expected, by minor flaws and quirks--"A People's History of Psychoanalysis" proves itself both an important and enlightening read.
Invoking classic names and works, while proceeding in loose chronological fashion to more recent times, Gaztambide treads terra firma via the provision of a solid foundation for desiderative, emancipatory/liberatory possibles.
A maiden volume--attended upon, as to be expected, by minor flaws and quirks--"A People's History of Psychoanalysis" proves itself both an important and enlightening read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews