Yeah,

Alex, you touched on a little bit there. I think you used the phrase kind of suspicion about psychoanalysis and kind of Marxist circles. I've asked like a lot of people on this podcast about sort of repoliticizing mental health or kind of revolutionaries like Fanon and the French kind of cohort. And I think I kind of put the cart before the horse in a way and I've never really sat and asked someone sort of where this idea comes from that psychoanalysis is kind of inherently kind of depoliticizing or kind of individualizing. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about kind of where that comes from and where that suspicion comes from maybe.

Yeah, well, it's a there's a complicated historical answer to that question. And then I think there is a question of the praxis itself. You know, communists were in and around early psychoanalysis institutes Wilhelm Reich is probably the most famous character in this story. But I think the principal difficulty is that some psychoanalysis practitioners historically, maybe even the majority of them actually, have thought that a part of helping patients is to adapt them to their social circumstances, basically help them to like go along and get along with the kind of dominant compulsions in capitalist society. And the primary maybe the premier psychoanalysis school that really did that was ego psychology, which really blossomed in the in America, in the US. But even that story is very complicated because what you have is you have a bunch of mostly Jewish emigres going to the United States, trying to adapt to a new way of life, you know, and they wanted to be a container or find ways to help people adapt to the American way of life to make their suffering less extreme. But it was born out of fleeing fascism, right, fleeing genocide, fleeing these sort of destructive social forces that had already ripped up a lot of the psychoanalytic institutes in Europe. A lot of psychoanalytic is I mean, it's no it's no accident, actually, that Nazis targeted psychoanalytic institutes and and and smeared them as a Jewish science. This impacted for its personal life too, as is well known. So I think there's there's already there's just this incredible historical tension and conflict in the in psychoanalytic history around whether you counsel a patient to adapt to the circumstances to just to just survive, or you encourage an infoment, a kind of that very conflict and see it through for the left. And that really tore psychoanalytic society's apart over history in different ways. And so you're already in the division when you think about psychoanalytic history, like you're already in the conflict. And that is staged, I think personally was also staged world historically, both in the history of psychoanalytic institutes and also the history of particular patients as they passed through it. Freud, in his own way, championed free clinics, but he also was very, you know, he he he he suffered personal immiseration in different ways in his life and was made no sort of seeker of the fact that he was completely fine with taking rich Americans money to do analysis. And so I just think it's always been a kind of economic political economic problem in the practice of like, how do you serve patients and who is served by psychoanalysis and towards what end and it and you know, how it benefits the patient versus how it benefits the analyst the fee has always been kind of the contested question about psychoanalysis. And so I think, yeah, I think in terms of it being quote unquote a bourgeois practice, I mean, there's a concrete reason for that, which is that often the patients who are who are most served by psychoanalysis are people who are wealthy who are just trying to like, you know, ameliorate their everyday suffering. But at the same time, it has this other aspect that is is about trying to sort of foment the unconscious, which is itself destabilizing and brings people into conflict with themselves and with society, writ large. And that is something that's not necessarily just resolved in the clinic, it's resolved outside the clinic, it's resolved in politics. Or it becomes something much much more harrowing, which is actually society inflicts kind of conflict on the patient that they're trying to work through symptomatically. I mean, this is sort of Franz Bonon's real legacy is being like, how do you talk about the hospital system and psychoanalytic clinics, and the practices therein without just reducing psychoanalytic work to adapting a person to the colonial situation or to form other forms of oppression. And I think so it's a kind of sprawling answer. I'm just trying to cover a lot of ground there.