Transitional Subjects Critical Theory and Object Relations

Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and complex engagement with psychoanalysis. Freud, Lacan, and Fromm were important cornerstones for Adorno and Horkheimer, providing insight into the nature of the subject and its symbiotic relationship with capitalism. In the 21st century this engagement has focused on the object-relations school of psychoanalytic psychology. Frankfurt School and feminist critical theorists have drawn on it to enrich and augment their understanding of the self as intersubjectively and socially constituted and to support their diagnoses of "social pathologies." The work of late Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott has opened up new and productive ways of thinking again about such phenomena as reification, alienation, disrespect, and misrecognition. However, as yet no author has provided a synoptic view of current developments or offered a space for further innovations in the field. Among those innovations are appreciations of psychoanalytic theorists whose work has yet to be embraced by critical theory (e.g., Kohut), critical discussions about which strand of object-relations psychoanalysis is most productive for critical social theory (e.g., Winnicott vs. Klein), and explorations of the implications of object-relations psychoanalysis for democratic politics, social transformation, and gender identification. Together the essays will advance the argument that the engagement between object relations and critical theory has not only enriched critical theory--by giving it a more complicated conception of the self and more subtle tools for analyzing social pathologies—but it has also enlivened psychoanalysis--by allowing practitioners to see how their theoretical commitments and clinical methodologies connect with critical theories of society and visions of social transformation.