ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how psychotherapy either contributes to the circulation and expansion of capital or enables us to envisage another world beyond capitalism. It traces the reactionary role of psychotherapy by way of two transformations of capitalism since the end of the nineteenth century, concerning reification and emotional labour. The chapter then considers psychotherapy as a practice which functions as part of the superstructure of society which has a reciprocal influence on the economic base. Women who had been divided off from the world of work and consigned to the home to tend to the family, to care for children and their men-folk, now became a source of what has become known among feminist researchers as 'emotional labour'. One of the lessons of a Marxist analysis of capitalism as a regime devoted to the extraction of surplus value and as necessarily entailing alienation is that there is something beyond awareness, outside consciousness.
