ABSTRACT
The tradition of psychoanalytically-informed social theory has been lively and productive, generating some of the most challenging and innovative thinking in psychoanalysis. Some writers, such as Michael Rustin, privilege the clinical as an arena from which to draw insights and theories that can then be used to make sense of social phenomena. Others, Marcuse and Russell Jacoby have rejected clinical psychoanalysis, seeing it as a place of compromise and defeat, in which the radical potential of psychoanalytic theory becomes defused by the familial ideology of bourgeois culture. Clinical psychoanalysis has, on the whole, gone its own way, neglecting or ignoring what are often seen as the wild speculations of political and cultural theorists, especially if they are not themselves actually psychoanalysts. If the contribution of psychoanalysis to the formulation of postmodern identities is impressive at the level of general theory, its concrete understanding and activity when faced with the demands and needs of particular subject groups is much more uneven.
