The limits to psychoanalysis: a response to Hannah, Philo, Secor, and Swyngedouw

Abstract

Engaging four reviewers of The Begging Question, this article reflects on what psychoanalysis can and cannot do for social-geographical inquiry. The author concedes that Lacanian theory, while illuminating the unconscious structures of antipathy toward EU déclassés in Sweden, struggles to account for historical change — a gap that only historical materialism can adequately fill. Rather than abandoning either framework, the article defends their uneasy combination as methodologically honest and empirically necessary. Social antipathy, it argues, functions like racism or patriarchy: a structural force expressed differently across contexts, irreducible to a quantifiable sum of intersecting variables. The article also clarifies why begging carries an objective potentiality for discomfort rooted in the asymmetric demand-structure of any gift relation under property relations. It closes by questioning whether spontaneous political rupture can realistically deliver post-capitalist transformation, and turns instead to Dean’s concept of comradeship as a more tractable, if unglamorous, path — one that must nonetheless reckon seriously with geographical envy and the destruction of place attachments that any genuine transition entails.