Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Authenticating

Richard Ekins and Robert Porter examine how psychoanalytic traditions are constructed, contested, and sustained within the Basic Socio Political Process of Authenticating, the organizing principle of the book’s theoretical movement. Drawing on grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, and decades of clinical, sociological, and archival work, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Authenticating follows the trajectory of authenticating from Freud’s original constructions through the Freud–Klein controversies (1941-1945), the Controversial Discussions (1942-1944), and its long aftermath in the British Psychoanalytical Society. This argues that authenticity in psychoanalysis is best understood in terms of standpoint, especially the distinctions of being/becoming and center/periphery, tracing how these all shape the development of psychoanalytic ideas and institutions. Part I offers a memoir based analytic autoethnography that provides the experiential ground from which the later analysis emerges. Part II develops a comparative substantive grounded theory of authenticity, examining how psychoanalytic knowledge is constructed, reconstructed, credentialed, adopted, applied, and adapted across historical and institutional contexts. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Authenticating shows how different figures return to Freud’s early foundations in divergent ways, illuminating the politics of “authentic” Freudianism and its possible futures. Combining methodological clarity with lived experience, it reframes psychoanalysis as a dynamic field whose traditions arise within authenticating struggles rather than from doctrinal unity.