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Hannah ProctorCommunist Case Histories: Psychoanalysis and the Revolutionary Analysand
Friday, April 17, 2026, 3:30–5:00pm
This workshop will explore texts in which communists appear as psychoanalytic patients. The history of Freudo-Marxism is generally told as a history of experimental practices and radical theoretical ideas but communists and other left-wing militants have also spent time on the couches of psychoanalysts who generally did not share their political convictions. Interested in the case history as a genre, this workshop will explore how clinical portraits of individual revolutionaries present the relationship between the personal and the political. Do case histories focused on left-wing political radicals pathologize their subjects, reducing political conviction to a form of individual neurosis? Or by locating subjective experiences in broader systems and structures of oppression and exploitation do politicized analysands find ways of challenging the conventions of the case?
Please note: Registration is required, and a link to pre-workshop readings will be included in your confirmation email.
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is required. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde, UK, and has previously held positions at the ICI Berlin (Germany), University of Leeds (UK) and Birkbeck (UK). Proctor is a historian of the human sciences interested in intersections between left-wing politics and the psy’ disciplines, Communist and anti-Communist theories of the mind, histories and theories of radical psychiatry, theories and practices of Freudo-Marxism, and emotional histories of the left. Her books include Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024) and Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Proctor is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.
