ABSTRACT
The turn to therapy was not simply a part of the post-1968 revolutionary politics. It was a response to the failure of its utopian visions. ‘Therapy is for fighting internalized capitalist ideology’, wrote the Red Therapy collective in their pamphlet. It was a recognition of the complex ways individuals are held within unproductive and often destructive social relations. By the mid-1970s working-class militancy was in decline and the left was entering a political crisis. The forebodings of a major economic recession, a growing swing to the right in the country and its own internal contradictions, marked the beginning of the end of the libertarian left. As a response to this downturn a significant number of the intellectual left had made a ‘linguistic turn’. The publication of The Sexuality of Men in 1985 was the representative moment of MAS’s theoretical endeavours.
