Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat | Book Review

Shaul Bar-Haim reviews Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024) by Hannah Proctor.

Hannah Proctor’s intriguing new book, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat addresses the challenge of writing an alternative history of the political left in new terms. Proctor responds to a gap in the literature – indeed, a gap in any public discussion in left circles – on the psychology of the defeated where a dominant ethos of resilience and anti-sentimentality in Marxist culture continues to deprioritise subjective experience (i.e., emotions) as unimportant. What matters is the collective. What matters is the revolution to come. It is precisely the accusation of self-indulgence against anyone who wishes to tell their story of emotional collapse following a political defeat, an accusation which is so ingrained in the vocabulary of the revolutionary left, that Proctor tries to challenge head-on.

The Burnout Archive

The archive presented in Burnout of different Marxist and anti-colonial movements, political struggles, literature, and historical and cultural sources is breathtaking in its depth. It covers so many events, people and places between the Paris Commune (and its aftermath), through the 1917 October Revolution (and its aftermath), 1970s Second Wave Feminism (and its overlooked heroines),  and up until the rise and fall of the Corbyn movement in the UK – a project that Proctor’s experienced firsthand and in many respects led her writing this book. Her sources are mainly countless texts of known and less known activists and revolutionaries such as Victor Serge’s autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) to contemporary political texts like ‘Graffiti for two’ (2014), co-authored by Ahmed Douma and Alaa Abd El-Fattah when they were both political prisoners at the Tora Prison in Egypt for their resistance of the then Muslim Brotherhood Morsi’s regime. Douma and El-Fattah, writing in solitary confinement, insist on discussing vulnerability and fear that many others insist on silencing: ‘Why are we afraid to admit weakness? To admit that we are human, that the APC’s [armoured personnel carriers] crush us and prisons desolate us and bullets scar our thoughts and our dreams’ (7).

Each one of the book’s 8 chapters is dedicated to a different emotional and mental state of the ‘political defeated’: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma and mourning. ‘Burnout’ was chosen as the title of the book not because it is more a central emotional state for Proctor than the others, but as it is a phrase ‘often used by activists [and so] captures something specific about an experience that results from prolonged engagement in political groups or movements’ (89). The history of the term – now endemic across discussions of neoliberal workforces and sectors – goes back to the 1970s free-clinic movement in the US, and especially to the psychologist and psychoanalyst Herbert J. Freudenberger, who described in the 1970s, the exhaustion of caring ‘in free clinics, therapeutic communities, hot lines, crisis intervention centers, women’s clinics, gay centers, runaway houses’ (91). Who will care for the carers, asks Proctor via Freudenberger. Indeed, a main goal of Proctor’s book is to put the connection between politics and care at the forefront of any political project from the left.

Burnout and ‘The Solidarity of Disappointment’

The chapter on depression – which begins with the author’s own years long experience of what she retroactively calls ‘depression’ – aims to challenge an idea that if a depression will follow a political defeat, then the suffering subject is now in the realm of health care (or lack of) rather than the politicised person that they were before. The chapter focuses on reading mainly later less-known texts by the renowned feminist authors Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and Luisa Passerini. Millet and Firestone – icons of early 1970s second wave feminism – wrote canonical texts that mobilised millions of women around the world for generations to come, but they also struggled with depression, mental breakdown and periods of institutionalization. In their more autobiographical writings, they discussed how they had to negotiate not only their mental crises and suffering but also their political positionality under conditions of hospitalization.

It is there, when trying to organize her peer-patients to resist the mental institution that Millet found new forms of politics that are less ‘euphoric, angry and visionary’ (as Proctor defines Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex), and more based on the ‘solidarity of disappointment’ (75). ‘The healing [Millet] advocates here’, Proctor explains, ‘is an anti-adaptive healing that refuses adjustment to the existing state of things’ (76).

Group Therapy: ‘Speaking Bitterness’

The sixth chapter on ‘bitterness’ is perhaps the most interesting one in the book, describing consciousness-raising among different groups, mainly in the 1970s. Proctor brings our attention to Members of the United Red Army in Japan, who regularly had collective sessions ‘that fuse[d] jikohihan (self-criticism) with sôkatsu (collective examination of organisational problems)’; to the ‘criticism-self-criticism’ sessions of ‘People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen)’; and to different Feminist collectives across the US. Those consciousness-raising sessions amongst Marxist leaning groups very often emerged as a strong opposition to therapy in any form, and yet they were not entirely different in many aspects from other group therapies that became so popular in the postwar years.

In Fanshen (1966), William Hinton documented some of those early experiments in the Chinese village Long Bow where he spent time in 1948. Hinton hailed the attempt by the Chinese to create a new form of psyche, not only a new society. People from the village met together to voice grievances, but also to ‘confess’ their weaknesses and vulnerabilities in light of the expected mass scale changes required by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Hinton writes:

The human consciousness may be compared to an artichoke. Its tender core is enclosed in layer upon layer of defences, excuses, rationalisations, approximations. These must be peeled off if one is to discover the true complex of motives driving any individual. Such a process would hardly be possible if an individual’s acts, as distinct from his words, did not reveal in a multitude of unconscious ways something of the core of his thought (136).

The idea that people had to go through a psychical ‘self-examination’ – this peeling of the artichoke process – recalls Freudian assumptions about the unconscious, even if it appears in a very different context. The influential feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell described those ‘reinterpretation of a Chinese revolutionary practice’ methods as a practice of ‘speaking bitterness’, which she defined as ‘the bringing to consciousness of the virtually unconscious oppression’ (145). But the peeling of the artichoke – ‘criticism self-criticism’ methods – often turned into a violent tool for enforcing domination, suppression and power-holding among group leaders such as the American radical left group Weather Underground and different radical feminist groups in the 1970s who took their influence in applying those methods directly from Fanshen (indeed, one group in Seattle even called itself ‘Fanshen women’). When ‘speaking bitterness’, the line between emancipation and abuse is so thin it’s very often invisible. 

Political Subjects, Politicised Lives

In mapping the different emotional states of political defeat, Proctor holds an ongoing dialogue with a growing number of books, mainly by queer and affect theorists, who have insisted over the last two decades on looking closely into sets of less glorified emotions or emotional states such as ambivalence, exhaustion, depression and numbness. Proctor shows her own ambivalence with this literature in several places in the book.

Perhaps her most critical stance is reserved to Ann Cvetkovich’s book, Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). This book is partly a memoir of Cvetkovich’s own personal experience with depression, and partly an attempt to frame depression as produced by ‘feelings of despair and anxiety, sometimes extreme, sometimes throbbing along at a low level, and hence barely discernible from just the way things are, feelings that get internalized and named, for better or for worse, as depression’ (Cvetkovich, 2012, 14). For Cvetkovich, depression is a psychosocial (and hence inevitably political) syndrome that she herself embodies and examines. However, for Proctor, Cvetkovich’s own story doesn’t hold as a case study because it only illustrates how Cvetkovich’s memoirist writing,

consistently demonstrates the contradiction that characterises political depression as a concept: the inability of the depressed person to act politically is in turn related to an inability to perceive the experience of depression as political. But Cvetkovich neglects to identify the contradiction because she suggests that simply existing in a room under capitalism is already ‘political’ (Proctor, 2024, 67).

The challenge here is wider than depression itself, and touches upon large parts of Queer Theory in academic writing, by which the ‘ordinary’, everyday-life, the basic ‘sensorium’ – to use the late Lauren Berlant’s term – is assumed to be ‘always-already’ loaded with politics, and necessarily with political ‘action’. But living a life loaded with politics and being a political subject are not the same, Proctor insists. Politics is about power, class struggle, and making change in the world.

Cruel Pessimism

Proctor admittedly avoids discussing Berlant, especially Cruel Optimism’s highly influential theorisation of everyday affective life under neoliberal capitalism (Berlant, 2011). ‘Cruel optimism’ is about the conditions ‘under which certain attachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings’ (Berlant, 13). Their attempt to look at the ways that ordinary people, mainly working class, queer, and racial minorities navigate their lives under the condition of cruel optimism was supposed to be seminal for Proctor’s discussion. And yet she writes in a footnote that Cruel Optimism was ‘excluded from my discussion here mostly because [Berlant] say[s] much less about the experience of actually being depressed but perhaps also because I didn’t have the space – or do I mean courage? – to work through my ambivalent feelings towards their arguments’ (228, fn. 4).

But why is Proctor so ambivalent about Berlant? While both scholars are aiming to explore similar spectrums of emotional ‘defeat’ – Berlant is interested in how politics play out on the affective level among people who very often don’t show much interest in politics at all. Hence, Berlant is interested not in people’s failure to resist the system that fails them, but in their unwillingness to do so. People are not giving up – or at least not easily giving up – on the social and political system that created their oft-miserable life conditions at first place, because they believe that their fate will be different. They believe that their turn on the game will pay off. Hence, the optimism; cruel optimism. Proctor, on the other hand, wants to understand the mental lives of those who are ‘supposed to know’ that capitalist optimism is a dead end in light of neoliberalism’s inevitable ideological logic.

Proctor ends the book with the words of the late Marxist scholar and activist Mike Davis, who refused to allow any pause in the struggle for a better world in the name of ‘burnout’ or other forms of emotional exhaustion. In an act that seemingly contradicts many of her own calls, Proctor endorses Davis’s command to ‘fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely’ (213). After presenting such a rich history of different, often creative ways, of confronting a demand to ignore our own subjectivity in the face of social catastrophe, in fighting for political change, or for a bigger ideological cause – is Davis’s ‘fighting without hope’ not a different kind of ‘cruel optimism’, or indeed ‘cruel pessimism’?

Revolutionary Dreams

In one of the most poetic and beautiful parts of her ‘Afterword’, Proctor tells us about her fondness for collecting revolutionary dreams: ‘euphoric, expansive, utopian – revolutionary dreaming is usually conceived as an imaginative act that reaches beyond the constricting parameters of the present’)207). She shares some of her collection: Audre Lorde’s dreaming of sexual encounters in an imaginary utopian Moscow; Agnes Smedley dreaming about ‘infinity’; dreams about the sea in Muriel Rukeyser novel Savage Coast about the Spanish Civil War. I hope Proctor will reveal some more of her ‘collection’ in her future writings. We need revolutionary dreams more than ever.

About the Author

Shaul Bar-Haim is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex. He is the author of The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). His recent publications include ‘Revising Trauma: The Origins of the New Trigger Culture’, and ‘Jewish Self-Hatred and the “Internalization Paradigm”’.

References

Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press

Cvetkovich, A. (2012) Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press