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Hannah ProctorPolitical Pathologies: US Social Science, Psychoanalytic Interviewing, and the Cold War
Thursday, April 16, 2026, 5:00–6:30pm
The combined and uneven history of the Freudian left is often narrated around significant heretical figures, experimental institutions, or landmark publications. Attempts to collide Freud with Marx have frequently flourished in moments of political upheaval and revolutionaries have often sought out therapeutic practices in their wake. Amid the current resurgence of political psychoanalysis, this lecture will approach the relationship between psychoanalysis and the left from a different angle. Rather than discussing radical approaches to psychoanalysis, it will instead explore examples of psychoanalytically informed projects that attempted to diagnose, pathologize, or make sense of the psychic life of people on the left through in-depth clinical interviews. From former Maoist Red Guards to Soviet kolkhoz members, black militants to student radicals, during the Cold War a range of projects based at institutions in the US set out to examine the motivations, proclivities, and neuroses of left-wing people from a range of contexts. Though these projects had broadly anticommunist agendas, they involved complicated interpersonal relationships, documented strange subjective experiences, and sometimes came to surprising conclusions.
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. 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.
