Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Psychoanalytic Critique of Productivism' 33k
In February 1989 I was invited to give a talk to a conference of Labour students meeting in my old College - King's, where I was a graduate student, then a Fellow and Graduate Tutor 1960-75 - in Cambridge, the same weekend I spoke on 'The Role of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in the Human Sciences' at the university's Department of Experimental Psychology. This meant that I was reflecting from a psychoanalytic perspective on my original academic setting in Cambridge and on my own political trajectory after leaving Cambridge fourteen years earlier. I found myself putting forward some quite strong critical points about consumption, splitting, scapegoating and containment. The talk was published in Free Associations No. 24, 2: 507-14, 1991.