Abstract

What has happened to the idealism and radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Paul Hoggett reflects on the present plight of people who mean well in the face of the rise of conservatism and the crisis of the Left. He examines these in the light of the psychoanalytic ideas of Klein, Bion, Meltzer, and Winnicott and he asks what their work on primitive psychological processes can tell us about the institutionalisation of indifference and cruelty.