The psychoanalytic "thought stile" and the risk of self-referentiality Luciano Mecacci

In Arnold Richards' (2016) analysis of the psychoanalysts linked to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) there are three themes that deserve to be explored. In the first place, there are complex historical-political factors dependent on the peculiarity of American communism, in relation both to the emigration of the left intelligentsia between the two World Wars and to the formation of elite groups in which the Jewish component is fundamental. The second critical aspect concerns the fact that it is not sufficient to consider a perspective as Marxist if it incorporates the concepts of conflict and dialectics, but without specifying what concrete effects they have at the level of social praxis. Finally, precisely the concepts of "style of thought" and "collective of thought", which Richards borrowed from Ludwik Fleck, lead to a reflection on the historical reconstructions of psychoanalysis understood as a self-referential conceptual system.