Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Family aims to raise a sophisticated and highly accessible
debate around the family self-making and the political and cultural implications of
liberation. The text proposes a new way to read the Lacanian theory of Oedipus and through this
reading resituate a series of important political and theoretical debates that have concerned
intellectual life over the last forty years. It is written with an accessible style so that
both specialists in Lacanian and Marxist theory and a broader cross-section of readers
interested in understanding the implications of debates across populist and Marxist
perspectives that have occupied the global left since the 2008 economic crash. The text aims to
resituate the way theories of emancipation and liberation are theorized from a distinctive
psychoanalytic and Lacanian point of view. In resituating the infamous Oedipus complex in a new
light the text re-opens a series of debates with important theoretical interlocutors
including the influential American historian and psychoanalytic thinker Christopher Lasch
whose thought has witnessed a significant renaissance of interest today to the staunch critic
of Freud and Lacan René Girard to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their widely read
Anti-Oedipus series that disputes the Freudian and Lacanian notions of Oedipus.
