Burnout On the Psychic Life of Political Defeat

A moving, must-read exploration of the emotional life of political struggle

Hannah Proctor prescribes a healthy dose of criticism for psychoanalytic or psychiatric approaches that fail to grasp how it feels to struggle for a better world — especially struggles that end in defeat, disillusionment, and exhaustion.
 
Meditating on trauma, anxiety, mourning, and rage, Proctor draws from the diverse ways that activists and revolutionaries have confronted the emotional impacts of their political experiences to offer an alternative that asks, 'should we have to choose between Freud's couch or a march in the streets?'

Burnout deftly situates self-care and wellness in a long historical perspective, visiting former Communards who fought on the Parisian barricades as they gaze in anguish at the Pacific Ocean; a young Bolshevik who leaves the city to seek treatment for despair; an ex-militant who lies on a psychoanalyst's couch describing dreams of ruined landscapes; a trade union organizer calling on a spiritual healer; and a group of young feminists padding a room in a squat with mattresses so that they can scream together about the patriarchy.
 
Jettisoning 'therapy talk' and its stranglehold on our language and  visions of the good life, Proctor offers a different way forward. Her cogent exploration of the ways  militants make sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organize, altogether and at once.

Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.