Adrienne Harris: It is unlikely that politics is absent from your clinical practice

Can psychoanalysts be public intellectuals — write for newspapers, join protests — without compromising their clinical stance? Adrienne Harris, a leading figure in Relational psychoanalysis, thinks they not only can, but should. In this conversation, she dismantles the classical ideals of neutrality and anonymity as untenable fictions in a two-person psychology, proposing 'safety' as a more honest description of what the analyst actually provides. More interesting, though, is the question of whether psychoanalytic concepts belong in social and political analysis. Harris thinks they do, but not by simply scaling up individual psychology to explain collective phenomena. Phobic hatred, for instance, may be useful for understanding racism — but not without sociology, history, and political theory alongside it. She is less convincing on neuropsychoanalysis, where her position amounts to a cautious 'yes, but': engage with neuroscience, yet beware of premature translation. First part of a two-part interview recorded in Prague during the 2nd Fenichel's Conference: Psychic Change, October 2017.