ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic ideas provide quite convincing explanations for the intersection between social processes and personal responses to those processes. That was enough of a hook. I was being drawn in. This chapter shows how the link between psychoanalysis and sociology in the British tradition was worked at by those on the left keen to understand the relationship between personal threat and institutional defences. I focus on one attempt to draw on clinical experience to understand politics, a project that viewed ‘free association’ as the free development of each as a condition for the free development of all.
