Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

A moving exploration of political activism and its mental toll, with the raw emotion of Maggie Nelson's Argonauts and the daring theoretical analysis of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism

Hannah Proctor prescribes a healthy dose of criticism for psychoanalytic or psychiatric approaches that fail to grasp how it feels to struggle for a better world -- especially struggles that end in defeat, disillusionment, and exhaustion.

Meditating on trauma, anxiety, mourning, and rage, Proctor draws from the diverse ways that activists and revolutionaries have confronted the emotional impacts of their political experiences to offer an alternative that asks, 'should we have to choose between Freud's couch or a march in the streets?'

Burnout deftly situates self-care and wellness in a long historical perspective, visiting and exploring:

• Former Communards who fought on the Parisian barricades as they gaze in anguish at the Pacific Ocean
• A young Bolshevik who leaves the city to seek treatment for despair
• An ex-militant who lies on a psychoanalyst's couch describing dreams of ruined landscapes
• A trade union organizer calling on a spiritual healer
• A group of young feminists padding a room in a squat with mattresses so that they can scream together about the patriarchy

Jettisoning 'therapy talk' and its stranglehold on our language and visions of the good life, Proctor offers a different way forward. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants make sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organize, altogether and at once.