Book Review: Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis, by Amy Allen

• Author: Siraj Sindhu
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211057102
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

656 Political Theory 50(4)

emphatically not a book about the nineteenth-century reception of Locke’s

texts; it is a book about how four radical thinkers took up Locke’s commit-

ments to self-ownership, nondomination, and relational equality in order to

formulate alternative theories of natural property rights fit to the task of cor-

recting the injustices of what they saw as a capitalist society gone awry. What

brings these radicals together most decisively is not the fact that they were

Lockeans, but that they each advanced distinct moral critiques of capitalism

on the basis of equality and liberty from an assortment of political persua-

sions and ideological orientations often seen as antagonistic to a “radical”

critique of capitalism. By meaningfully enriching our historical sources for

understanding and critiquing capitalist society, Layman’s book makes a

timely and important contribution to political thought.

Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis, by Amy Allen.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2020, 265 pp.

Reviewed by: Siraj Sindhu, Department of Political Science, Brown University,

Providence, RI, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211057102

Amy Allen’s new book returns to one of critical theory’s old themes—its

foundational but contested relation to psychoanalysis—and calls for a

renewal of the bond. The book argues that central figures of contemporary

critical theory, such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, lack sufficient

accounts of the source and status of negative drives, such as power and

aggression, and that they conversely tend to overdraw positive drives as

innate. Allen turns to Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to

develop a more well-rounded philosophical anthropology. The resulting

interpretive project of the book develops the “strand of psychoanalytic drive

theory that stretches from Freud through Klein to Lacan,” and then integrates

it into the methods and aims of critical theory (185). This interpretive project

contributes to the book’s political project, which argues that psychoanalytic

theory can help explain the psychic dynamics animating contemporary phe-

nomena of political polarization, patterns of demonization and resentment,

and conspiracy theory proliferation. Containing an introductory overview,

five theoretical chapters, and a brief conclusion that draws out some political

implications, the book makes the case for a critical theory that renews itself