Why Sigmund Freud is making a comeback in the age of authoritarianism and AI

Psychoanalysis is having a moment. Instagram accounts dedicated to Freudian theory have amassed nearly 1.5 million followers. Television shows like Orna Guralnik’s Couples Therapy have become compulsive viewing. Think pieces in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s, New Statesman, the Guardian and Vulture are declaring psychoanalysis’s resurrection. As Joseph Bernstein of the New York Times put it: “Sigmund Freud is enjoying something of a comeback.”

For many, this revival comes as a surprise. Over the past half century, psychoanalysis – the intellectual movement and therapeutic practice founded by Sigmund Freud in 1900 Vienna – has been shunned and belittled in many scientific circles. Particularly in the English-speaking world, the rise of behavioural psychology and a ballooning pharmaceutical industry pushed long-form talking therapies like psychoanalysis to the margins.

But there’s a more complex global story to tell. In Freud’s own lifetime (1856-1939), 15 psychoanalytic institutes were established worldwide, including in Norway, Palestine, South Africa and Japan. And around the world – from Paris to Buenos Aires, from São Paulo to Tel Aviv – psychoanalysis often flourished throughout the 20th century.

Across South America, psychoanalysis continues to wield huge clinical and cultural influence. It remains so popular in Argentina that people joke you can’t board a flight to Buenos Aires without having at least one analyst on board.

There are several reasons why psychoanalysis became popular in some countries but not others. One relates to the 20th-century history of Jewish diaspora. As the Third Reich expanded, many Jewish psychoanalysts and intellectuals fled central Europe before the Holocaust. Cities like London, which received Freud and his entire family, were culturally reshaped by this refugee crisis.

But another, perhaps less obvious reason concerns the rise of authoritarianism. Psychoanalysis may have been created and spread in the crucibles of wartime Europe, but its popularity has often surged alongside political crisis.

Take Argentina. As left-wing authoritarian Peronism gave way to a US-sponsored “dirty war”, paramilitary death squads abducted, killed or otherwise “disappeared” roughly 30,000 activists, journalists, union organisers and political dissidents. Loss, silence and fear enveloped the emotional worlds of many.

Yet at the same time, psychoanalysis – with its interest in trauma, repression, mourning and unconscious truth – became a meaningful way of grappling with this oppression. Therapeutic environments for talking about trauma and loss became a technique for responding to, and perhaps even resisting, this political disaster. In a culture of state lies and enforced silence, simply speaking truth was a radical exercise.

Many of Freud’s original followers used psychoanalysis in a similar way. Surrounded by the inexplicable horrors of European fascism, figures like Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm saw psychoanalysis, typically combined with classical Marxism, as an essential tool for understanding how we develop and desire authoritarian personalities.

Half a world away in Algeria, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon relied heavily on psychoanalysis to protest the oppressive racial regimes of French colonialism. For all these doctors and philosophers, psychoanalysis was essential to political resistance.

Something similar appears to be happening today. As new forms of multinational autocracy rise, as immigrants are demonised and detained, and genocide is live-streamed, psychoanalysis is thriving once more.

A tool for making sense of the senseless

For some, neuropsychoanalysts like Mark Solms have provided the necessary links to take psychoanalysis up again. In his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing, Solms uses neuroscientific expertise – specifically his work on dreaming – to argue that Freud’s theory of the unconscious was right all along.

According to Solms, while drugs may be temporarily effective, they offer only short-term solutions. Only psychoanalytic treatments, he argues, provide any long-term curative effect.

But Solms is just one among many such resurgent figures – a growing cadre of clinician-intellectuals whose work has returned psychoanalysis to cultural esteem. Where Solms veers towards neurology, others including Jamieson Webster, Patricia Gherovici, Avgi Saketopoulou and Lara Sheehi return us to psychoanalysis’s political urgency.

Their work shows how psychoanalysis’s core concepts – the unconscious, the “death drive”, universal bisexuality, narcissism, the ego and repression – help make sense of our contemporary moment where other theories fall short.

In a world of increasing commodification, psychoanalysis resists commercialised definitions of value. It emphasises deep time in a climate of shortening attention spans and insists on the value of human creativity and connection in a landscape of artificial intelligence overwhelm. It challenges conventional conceptions of gender and sexual identity, and prioritises individual experiences of suffering and desire.

The reasons for psychoanalysis’s contemporary resurgence mirror those that drove its earlier waves of popularity. In times of political upheaval, state-sponsored violence and collective trauma, psychoanalysis offers tools for making sense of the seemingly senseless. It provides a framework for understanding how authoritarian impulses take root in individual psyches and spread through societies.

More still, in an era where quick fixes and pharmaceutical interventions dominate mental health care, psychoanalysis insists on the value of sustained attention to human complexity. It refuses to reduce psychological distress to chemical imbalances in the brain or symptoms to be managed. Instead, it treats each person’s inner world as worthy of deep exploration.

The collective resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis is also challenging the field itself to transform. Old assumptions – like the idea that therapists should be neutral or that heterosexuality is the norm – are being challenged. And psychoanalytic practice is being reimagined alongside many social justice and solidarity movements. This is a moment in which many are coming together to reimagine what psychoanalysis can be.

Whether this renaissance will endure remains to be seen. But for now, as political crises mount and traditional therapeutic approaches seem insufficient, Freud’s insights into the human psyche are finding new audiences eager to understand the darkness of our times.

Carolyn Laubender does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.