Overview

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.

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9781839766053

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Reviews

Hannah Proctor is one of the best writers on the left today, and this is an extraordinary and extremely timely book - a kaleidoscopic work of revolutionary history on what happens when our day doesn't come and we have to cope with the consequences. Refusing both the easy temptations of left melancholia and forced 'just another push, comrades!' optimism, this is a book full of unromantic communist longing, deadpan humour and hard-won wisdom. -- Owen Hatherley, author of <i>The Ministry of Nostalgia</i> Not since Freud first described war neurosis have we been treated to such an astonishing taxonomy of the human mind. In Burnout, Hannah Proctor takes that feeling we all have, and names it again and again, helping us to resee the past and present of revolutionary struggle. A must-read. -- Hannah Zeavin, Founding Editor, <i>Parapraxis</i>

Author Information

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.

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