38: Psychoanalysis and Revolution with Ian Parker

Ian Parker is a practising psychoanalyst, an academic and a revolutionary activist.  Ian discusses the radical roots of psychoanalysis and how these have changed overtime, to make psychoanalysis fit with contemporary capitalist society.   Ian believes that psychoanalysis should be a radical practice than impacts on individuals and society, rather than an elite practice that adapts individuals to conform to social norms. He writes “Our task is to connect social struggle with the kind of unavoidable internal struggle described by psychoanalytic theory.”  Ian challenges the standard idea of the unconscious being like an ice-berg where beneath our conscious surface lies a dark abyss of uncivilised, biological and instinctual drives.   He works with a Lacanian approach that addresses the unconscious as a social and external phenomena, one that we individually relate to.  He is critical of  the ‘Psy’ professions such as psychology and psychotherapy as being instrumental to keeping things as they are, rather than offering a past to individual and social transformation.   Ian is working towards developing a psychoanalytic practice that has a liberation ethic 

Enjoy listening to this fascinating and edgy podcast! 

 Ian Parker is a psychoanalyst and a member of the new revolutionary organisation Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and of the Fourth International. His academic work has always been critical of psychology and psychiatry. His most recent book, co-authored with his Mexican comrade David Pavón-Cuéllar, is Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements  https://psychoanalysisrevolution.com/.   Ian is Emeritus Professor at Leicester University and his academic writing is widely published and cited.