Jared Russell on the Radical Psychoanalysis of Barnaby Barratt

This review of Barnaby Barratt's trilogy on his form of radical psychoanalysis first appeared in Psychoanalytic Psychology in 2020 (Vol. 37, No. 2, 169–172).

What Is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud’s ‘Secret Committee,’ by Barnaby Barratt, New York, NY: Routledge, 2013, 221 pp. Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free Associative Praxis, by Barnaby Barratt, New York, NY: Routledge, 2016, 231 pp. Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst, by Barnaby Barratt, New York, NY: Routledge, 2019, 207 pp.

 Reviewed by JARED RUSSELL, Ph.D., Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York, NY.

Barnaby Barratt’s three-volume set—comprised of What Is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud’s ‘Secret Committee’ (2013), Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free Associative Praxis (2016), and Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst (2019)—is difficult to evaluate. Over the years Barratt has been single-minded in his emphasis on the importance of free association for an understanding of the radical potential of psychoanalysis both as a practice and as a science. He has always drawn on both analytic and philosophical registers in order to portray the profound nature of the Freudian revolution as he sees it, and he has, since the appearance of Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing in 1984, been a maverick without any allegiance to any particular analytic tradition. This has allowed him to cultivate a unique and prolific voice operating outside the professional mainstream.

With these three volumes, Barratt’s project comes fully into focus. Conceived as a trilogy, it is invigorating in its creative originality and in terms of the massive critique it performs with regard to the current state of the discipline. At the same time, the project often tends towards being so idiosyncratic in its presentation that it risks not being able to contact the audience to which it aspires. The level of engagement it provoked in me was equal to the amount of reservation I felt while reading these three books in succession.

The first volume is the most cogently argued and states clearly the central motif of all that follows. As the volumes progress, however, the author’s seemingly endless theoretical commitments and ambitious efforts to demonstrate an impossible wealth of knowledge tends to undermine the project’s central message. Let me state my initial impression bluntly from the outset: these are very good books, and they deserve to be read—but cautiously. I found myself at first excited by their critical audacity, and by their recommendations for the future of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and as a theory of subjectivity. But as I sat down to write this review I found myself feeling the need to make excuses for the excesses of the author’s style so that his message would not be lost. Barratt is a serious thinker who does not always come across as a serious writer. His extra-analytic commitments permeate the trilogy and will undoubtedly be an obstacle for some, but the greater problem—and this becomes more and more the case as the project progresses—is that Barratt’s focus drifts so wildly from his initial premise that he invites accusations of being eclectic to the point of grandiosity. This is unfortunate because he has something extremely important to say to contemporary analysts.

The central theme on which the trilogy is based is that what is most specific to psychoanalysis as a clinical procedure is the method of free association, and that it is from this practice that the healing properties of the unique form of discourse that psychoanalysis consists in issue. Barratt charges all manner of analytic schools with having abandoned the “radical” nature of this practice, and of having as a result devolved into sophisticated forms of counseling or coaching that fail to live up to the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis in its original iteration. He argues that this trajectory can be traced to Freud himself who, beginning in 1914, became less focused on the clinical practice of free association and more committed to providing increasingly abstract models of mind. He pushes for a return to Freud not unlike that of Lacan, but one conceived as an effort to recover the “radical” nature of free association over and above the elaboration of any particular metapsychology. Barratt charges psychoanalysts—beginning with Freud—with having betrayed the initial understanding of a practice dedicated to the liberation of libidinal energies which he portrays as an address to the “existential” status of the “lived experience” of human “bodymind.” As a sexologist and body-healing practitioner in addition to being a classically trained analyst, Barratt charges psychoanalysis with having forgotten its discovery of the (again) “radical” experience of embodiment, retreating into a pre-Freudian commitment to Cartesian mind/body dualism. No analytic school— ego psychological, structural- functional, Kohutian, Kleinian, Lacanian, object relational, interpersonal and so on—escapes this accusation.

This critique is persuasive in the way the author constructs it at its core, and despite the at times highly embellished nature of his prose. It is true that Freud initially conceived of himself primarily as having devised a method capable of rendering the study of mind scientific, beyond any metaphysical mind/body divide. It is also true that abandoning the centrality of the practice of free association has led psychoanalysis into a Babel of theoretical models that increasingly have little in common with one another yet that continue to describe themselves as psychoanalytic. And it is also true that the failure to appreciate Freud’s approach to the repressed unconscious as an irreducibly dynamic field of libidinality that cannot be contained as merely one dimension of human experience among others has led to the “evangelical fundamentalism” (2013, p. 3) of normative developmentalist models across the field. Barratt’s approach indicates that perhaps we are on the brink of a reconsideration of drive theory in its capacity to renew Freud’s vision in terms relevant to the twenty-first century, beyond the illegitimate reduction of the Freudian drive (Trieb) to the biological instinct (2016, pp. 77–82).

What concerns me, however, is that Barratt, who could indeed emerge as a major voice in this turn towards disciplinary renewal, potentially short circuits any such momentum by couching his approach in a naive appeal to liberation and to social justice on a global scale. His impassioned and audaciously brave critical voice notwithstanding, Barratt writes about the importance of free association in the manner of someone who is intellectually free associating, making clinical, theoretical and political claims in rapid sequence. There is no indication that this is a deliberately performative gesture. This becomes increasingly more problematic from volume to volume, obscuring the central point he is trying to make about what is so intensely specific to psychoanalysis as a form of discourse in which one person associates freely while the other responds with freely floating neutral reverie. There is undoubtedly a “call” (2019, p. 9) to freedom intrinsic to the originally Freudian mode of discursive relating, but the author is too quick to divide the trajectory of Freud’s career into an early and a later period with some sharp demarcation between the two, and he is so ambitious in attempting to draw every aspect of the contemporary analytic scene into the consequences of this demarcation that he risks being read less as radical and more as divisive. This is unfortunate because Barratt’s efforts to project psychoanalysis beyond the adaptive demands of the contemporary mental health industry are impressively attuned to what psychoanalysis has to offer as a form of critical-clinical discourse. If it is indeed everyday clinicians and not academic theorists that he wishes to contact, his insistence on surveying such a broad array of intellectual material—including virtually each and every analytic school in the history of the discipline, as well as everything from Eastern and ancient Greek to contemporary Continental philosophy, passing by way of German Idealism—in a way that is conceptually sophisticated but lacking in genuine scholarly rigor, undermines the “radical” nature of his project as he portrays it.

Perhaps it would be best to take each volume individually on its own merits, and not to judge the project as a trilogy. It is not clear that the project was initially conceived as a trilogy, rather it seems that the author decided to cast it as such with the appearance of the third volume. If I can recommend anything to the potential reader, it would be to approach each book separately before deciding on a response to the trilogy as a whole. However, since this is a review of three separate volumes, each overflowing with a staggering amount of ideas, I cannot do justice to the complexity of each text in the space of a single review.

What Is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud’s ‘Secret Committee’ appeared in 2013. In my estimation, this is the best of the three texts, and readers would do well to approach them in their sequential order. Here Barratt outlines the failure of psychoanalysis to appreciate the centrality of Freud’s early clinical method. The creation by Freud of a “secret committee” in 1912 is taken to symbolize the way in which from then on psychoanalysis nurtured a tendency towards becoming a religious movement and opted out of its status as a science. The effects of this gesture, Barratt contends, are still to be felt today in the tendencies towards orthodoxy that can be demonstrated in all of the major analytic schools. This is above all indicated by the reduction of the unconscious to a space of hidden secrets buried deep within the mind. Barrett rethinks unconscious processes in terms of complex temporalities of consciousness that cannot be figured in linear, narrative form. Thus, The [Freudian] discovery of the repressed unconscious is the free-associative finding that consciousness, in the sequential formation of its representations, always reveals and conceals desirous past-futures that are otherwise than what it takes itself to intend or mean. Self-consciousness (as well as personal history) is subjected to a more complex interaction of pluritemporalities than it can itself grasp. (p. 52)

Practicing free association, then, is according to Barratt intrinsically a process of liberating libidinal energies that does not require an interpretive response on the part of the clinician. Developmentalist, ego psychological, object relational, and interpersonal approaches are all portrayed as authoritarian in having rejected hand in hand both the concept of libido and the practice of free association, which Barratt understands (rightly, in my estimation) as mutually implicating one another. Encouraging free association and retaining the concept of libidinal energies, according to the author, leads us to a form of psychoanalysis that is both emancipatory and existentially oriented: “I am convinced that demoting the significance of free-associative discourse . . . actually misses the essence of psychoanalysis in terms of the way this discourse moves the subject’s being” (p. 75). And human being, for Barratt, is primarily embodied and sexual, therefore: “the notion of libidinality is required of any process that is genuinely psychoanalytic. Without the notion of libidinality, free-associative discourse can be understood as nothing but a meaningless caprice” (p. 103).

 The book is equally concerned with answering the question as to what psychoanalysis is as it is with providing an answer to the question as to what psychoanalysis is not—and with regard to this latter question the author’s answer is bold: just about everything that has called itself psychoanalysis over the course of the last century. I took no offense at this position and I found the unbelievably wide scope of Barratt’s critique challenging. If anything, Barratt does inspire in the reader the sense that the discipline can and must be renewed today if it is to survive. He also does not fail to provide a substantive account—complete with clinical vignettes—of how psychoanalysis is to be practiced “radically” by describing a properly analytic mode of listening that emphasizes the priority of process in clinical work. Taken on its own, What is Psychoanalysis? is a strikingly original volume that deserves a wide readership and thoughtful consideration from the field in general. Had I been asked to write a review only of this volume it would have been purely appreciative. It is with the following two entries in the trilogy that I found myself becoming more circumspect.

The second volume—Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free-associative Praxis (2016)— does less to deepen the argument of its predecessor than it does to expand the range of references in support of that argument, and to consolidate further the notion that practicing clinically in the way the author suggests is “radical.”  

That is, the book essentially repeats the same arguments about the centrality of free association and of an understanding of the sexually embodied self in an authentically psychoanalytic practice. What it adds is a tone of insistent enthusiasm with which the author becomes increasingly intoxicated: “Can we embark from the proclamation that psychoanalysis concerns lived experience?” (p. 8; emphasis in original). Perhaps, but the author then goes on to cite in support of his thesis several thinkers for whom the naive notion of “lived experience” was the object of trenchant and sustained critique (e.g., Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida—who are treated in a rather cursory manner that falls far short of informed scholarship). “By contrast with the pabulum of therapy,” Barratt writes,

the movements of Love [sic] that animate psychoanalytic discourse, aiming toward truthfulness and freedom, cast the ‘I-ness’ of self-consciousness into the fire. To aspire to the authenticity of truthfulness . . . implies that one must deconstruct the inauthentic. To aspire to be free, one must become aware of one’s own imprisonment—an awareness of that which curtails the momentum of freeing. (p. 12)

This is the tone that increasingly infuses the author’s otherwise persuasive argument about the importance of free association and of an appreciation of libidinality. Passages such as this appeared to me to reflect the very same tendency towards an unscientific, religious delusion that the first volume had taken as the basis for its protest. When, early on in the text, the author presents it as a “manifesto” (p. 6), does this not betray the spirit of the project as an absolute critique of clinical authoritarianism? This is not an accusation on my part, but a warning to the reader not to lose sight of what is critically important in the project’s vision. The problem is that the author becomes less focused on further articulating his original insights and more focused on insisting that what he is doing is radical. The more he does so, the less radical it actually appears. This is unfortunate because, again, Barratt is genuinely onto something deeply original and potentially transformative.

 To give it its due, Radical Psychoanalysis does offer illuminating expositions of the importance of the concept of psychic energy (Chapter 7), of the relationship between theory and practice (Chapter 8), and most importantly of the concept of the drive (Chapter 9) which has been a profound disadvantage to the discipline since its having been illegitimately translated as “instinct” by the scientistic aspirations of James Strachey. Readers as impressed as I was by the creative dynamism of the first volume should make their way carefully through the second, not letting its relentless insistence on the radicalism of its approach distract from the fact that its core argument does actually offer an orientation towards disciplinary renewal. Barratt aspires to be encyclopedic, but too often he retreats into platitudes: “The psychoanalyst and patient are a flesh-and-blood encounter, a libidinally alive and highly charged relationship that is comprehensible to neither of them” (p. 119). For this reason, the book falls short of living up to what it implicitly announces with its unnecessarily large, thirty-page reference section, but that does not mean it is lacking in an insightful understanding of how the pervasive fragmentation of the contemporary field might be overcome through a return to disciplinary origins.

It is with the third volume of the trilogy—Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst (2019)—that my reservations about the project became more burdensome. As with the previous volume, the argument concerning free association is not more deeply developed but instead more polemically insisted upon: “Only such a praxis decenters our discourse in a way that frees us from the compulsive repetitiousness of our lives and that thus liberates us into becoming more alive!” (p. 2; emphasis in original).

Barratt further rehearses his point about the importance of free association and about the revolutionary nature of Freud’s approach to sexuality as having achieved a properly scientific overcoming of the metaphysical, Cartesian mind/body split. An “authentic” psychoanalysis is depicted as distinct from merely psychotherapeutic approaches in the extent to which it is capable of listening to that which in our experience exceeds demands for coherence, structure, and immediately recognizable meaning. This is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from the suggestion-based practices on offer from the saturated marketplace of the mental health industry. In this way Barratt’s thinking offers psychoanalysis the possibility of becoming a formally independent discipline rather than a subspecialty of medicine, academic psychology, or social work. On Barratt’s reading, psychoanalysis is constitutively opposed to efforts at normative adaptation; it is an intrinsically left-revolutionary, anti-authoritarian practice of exquisitely empathic listening that is inherently oriented towards effecting social and political change by addressing the mechanisms of power and oppression as they are installed at the level of the individual. Perhaps that is true, but like Herbert Marcuse, Barratt assumes that simply emancipating the libido from its socially imposed constraints will magically guarantee “the happiness and freedom of all beings” to which the volume is dedicated. Here I wish he had not been so quick to dismiss the concept of sublimation—itself another crucial Freudian concept that has virtually disappeared from contemporary debate—as a bourgeois ideal, because as a result he misses the revolutionary potential of the binding function of Freud’s Eros.

 My biggest reservations about the text stem from the fact that it is ultimately unclear whether, with this third volume, Barratt is extending his critical perspective or whether he is encouraging us to consider the emergence of a new school with himself as the founder:

Radical psychoanalysis is about accessing (listening to, without the pretense of understanding) the vitality of libidinal energies that are repressed by the logical and rhetorical law and order of our thinking, feeling and speaking. (p. 124)

Is “radical psychoanalysis” intended as a formal orientation, and should we speak of it in the sense that we have come to refer casually, for instance, to “relational psychoanalysis” which similarly presented itself as a form of radicalism before developing its own rigid orthodoxy?

What began in the first volume as a critique of orthodoxy appears in this volume as an effort to provide a new foundational approach. This is where the project reaches its breaking point: The author encourages us to abandon metapsychological abstraction in favor of refocusing on the (again, and exhaustively) radicalism of the free associative method, while at the same time he wishes to demonstrate a mastery of such a vast storehouse of theoretical material that his approach never treats any theorist with an extensive enough depth of understanding. His appeals to Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida and other thinkers who demand careful attention and sustained engagement suggest only a passing familiarity with their actual writings. His critiques of Klein, Kohut, Lacan, Hartmann and so forth are provocative but insufficiently rigorous to be convincing to anyone already entrenched in any one of these particular approaches. Barratt could have restricted himself to a critique of predominant psychoanalytic schools by demonstrating a thorough familiarity with each. Instead he chooses to present himself not only as conversant with an impossibly vast literature, but as an intellectual leader capable of capturing and celebrating “lived experience” as such.

In sum: Barratt’s overall project is, stylistically, a mess, but his underlying vision is possibly among the most creatively rewarding available to psychoanalysis today. If I have been critical of his project here, this has not been out of a lack of admiration; rather it is in affirmation of the spirit of the texts themselves, and because I believe deeply in the importance of their central message which risks being lost on readers who may be intimidated by his overwrought ambition. I very much wanted these three volumes to deliver on their promise, because I believe psychoanalysis is indeed as clinically and socially radical as Barratt proposes it to be, but it is not a liberation theology in the way that it comes across in Barratt’s writing. Barratt is right to insist on the importance of free association and of the experience of libidinality, and I believe he is correct in suggesting that returning to Freud’s formative insights with regard to these experiences could restore prominence to the field by challenging a century of misrecognition of Freud’s most revolutionary discoveries. But Barratt’s voice is iconoclastic to the point of being alienating, and if only he were to proceed more slowly by carefully explicating many of the difficult concepts and thinkers he references so quickly he might better achieve his intended purpose. Nevertheless, this is unquestionably a highly original thinker who should be listened to, and if he is not listened to, that might be a testament to just how original he is.