Psychoanalysis emerged in opposition to the medicalized paradigm that dominated psychiatry and psychotherapy at the turn of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s, the third generation of psychoanalysts had already begun a critical reappraisal of the tradition, seeking to take into account the social conditions and cultural context in which both analysand and analyst exist. Younger psychoanalysts also called on the psychoanalytic movement to take an active role in transforming the social world, rather than reducing everything exclusively to the patient’s personal and medical problems. Representatives of the “lost generation” of psychoanalysis were actively involved in bold social projects around the world—from Soviet Russia and Red Vienna to Latin America—were expelled from psychoanalytic organizations, and were killed by the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century (Gabarron-Garcia, 2025).
Despite the tragic fate of radical analysts, their humanistic and critical impulse not only survived but also spread beyond the psychoanalytic tradition. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the flourishing of anti-psychiatry, humanistic therapy, left Lacanianism, critical psychiatry, and liberation psychology. Libertarian theories of the psyche gradually penetrated psychological, philosophical, and, more broadly, social and humanistic discourse (Vlasova, 2010).
Critical approaches to the psy disciplines* took diverse forms. Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, at the La Borde clinic, abolished the distinction between psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, orderly, and cleaner, while Wolfgang Huber’s “Socialist Collective of Patients” transformed a psychotherapeutic circle into a militant organization aimed at “curing” the pathological condition of society itself (Huber, 1993). In the 1960s, anti-psychiatry emerged as a radical response to the institutionalized violence of psychiatry and its entanglement with structures of power. Thomas Szasz accused psychiatry of usurping individual freedom by turning diagnosis into an instrument of social control. Ronald Laing, by contrast, understood madness not as pathology but as a particular form of human experience—a testimony to the crisis of modernity, in which “normality” becomes a mask of conformism (Laing, 1990). David Cooper and Franco Basaglia translated these ideas into practice by creating communes and open clinics where patients and doctors lived as equals. The peak of the anti-psychiatric project can be seen in the adoption of Italy’s “Law 180,” initiated by the Democratic Psychiatry movement, which put an end to the system of isolation and deinstitutionalized psychiatry, transforming treatment into a social and political task (Vlasova, 2014).
At the turn of the twenty-first century, anti-psychiatric and critical traditions entered a complex phase of rethinking. The French psychoanalyst Florent Gabarron-Garcia notes that psychoanalysis has gradually been integrated into dominant therapeutic and cultural practices, thereby losing part of its oppositional impulse. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher, criticizing the ideology of the “privatization of stress” and the spread of cognitive-behavioral therapy as a universal solution, redirects attention to the social and political foundations of psychic suffering. In popular perception, processes of psychiatric deinstitutionalization are increasingly associated not with humanization but with the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan (Timms, Craig, 1992; Murray, 2022).
But how accurate are claims about a crisis of critical approaches to the psy disciplines when, in the Russian context in particular and globally more broadly, revisionist concepts of understanding the psyche are increasingly emerging? Paul B. Preciado, I. Parker, and D. Pavón-Cuéllar continue to demand transformations of the psychoanalytic tradition, while Fisher reintroduced critical psychiatry into contemporary discourse (Fisher, 2010; Parker, Pavón-Cuéllar, 2021; Preciado, 2021). At the same time, psychotherapists around the world are actively working with marginalized social groups, and the experience of narrative therapy, liberation psychology, and other movements and approaches is generating debate about the progressive role of psychological practices and other forms of “care of the self” (Teo, 2014).
Historically, the social sciences and humanities have developed a cautious and critical stance toward the psy disciplines. In this regard, it seems productive to discuss how their coexistence is taking shape today, under conditions in which the psy disciplines have largely shaped the dominant language for describing subjectivity (Rose, 1990; Illouz, 2007, 2008). We thus find ourselves in a situation of a “critique of critique,” and the question concerns how this critique functions and transforms in the present. Since the most familiar and institutionally entrenched form of engagement with the psy disciplines in the social sciences remains left critique, it makes sense to problematize its heuristic limits and routinization, as well as to raise the question of possible alternative analytical registers.
Thus, we propose returning to the discussion of the emancipatory potential of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the revival of critical theories and practices of the psyche, the critique of critical approaches, and many other issues that connect, on the one hand, the phenomena of the “critical,” the “left,” and the “emancipatory,” and, on the other, “therapy,” “psychiatry,” and “psychoanalysis.”
* Psy disciplines is an umbrella term introduced by the British sociologist Nikolas Rose (Rose, 1990), which we use for convenience to denote the field of disciplines including psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychology.