Burn Out: On the Emotional Experience of Political Defeat 
Hannah Proctor
Verso, £14.99

BURNOUT is now ubiquitous as a term to describe the exhaustion of working too hard in a capitalist world. But, as Hannah Proctor notes in her new book, capitalism does not have the monopoly on this kind of nervous collapse. Burnout is two-sided: it is experienced by those struggling to defeat the system just as much as those struggling to succeed within it. 

Proctor first encountered burnout in activist circles, where it was used to describe the physical and emotional exhaustion of those who take part in prolonged political organising, and the psychic distress of those who experience political defeat. These are the objects of this book which elegantly and forensically investigates the historic suffering of revolutionaries and the pain of living in the gap between communist dreams and capitalist reality. 

Burnout itself was first described by HJ Freudenberger in his studies of volunteers in the free clinics of 1970s New York. It is this malaise of those exhausted by their work for a better world that Proctor reclaims; not as a transhistorical definition but as a framework for thinking about what political organising and activity does to our psyches. About how revolt and defeat make us feel, personally and collectively.

Proctor quotes the Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah as he wonders what happens to us between the elation of the square and the devastation of the prison cell. She references the Red Therapy members who tried to build a better world that would allow for personal self-actualisation through therapy and action but found it “all harder than we thought.”

This is in many ways a book about finding it hard. It is a taxonomy of the melancholy, nostalgia, and exhaustion of the Paris Commune, of May ‘68, of the Arab Spring. It asks where does this misery come from and how should a left that is driven by hope contend with such an immiserating reality. 

And how should a movement, which has too often viewed therapy as bourgeois and psychology as prison-like, take care of its many casualties?

There is a great and productive tension at the heart of Proctor’s book, that between the individual and the collective. And it is a synthesis of these two things, the compassionate relation of inner and outer struggle, that makes it such a helpful contribution. 

Proctor delves into the question of whether it is a measure of sanity to be well adjusted to a sick world but, more than that, she asks how one can heal in a sick world without adjusting to it. How one can find peace within the struggle? How we can feel OK without compromising with the systems of oppression? 

This is not a book that looks to eliminate political depression, but instead to confront it and help people through it. It is a gesture of solidarity to past and future comrades. A book about the very real attempts to storm heaven which may leave us burnt out but which also leave our selves and our world transformed. 

As a Passerini character quoted in the book remarks: “I began to understand that depression is necessary in order to get to the bottom and fish something out.” In Burn Out Hannah Proctor dives to the bottom and emerges gasping with arms full of the still living hopes of long dead comrades.

This is a book of beautiful images and subtle ideas, though they are sometimes hampered by an over-academic habit of writing. Despite the moving personal accounts of political engagement and depression in the book, a scholarly distance sometimes seems to separate writer from reader, revolutionary from researcher. This is a false division. 

In the end this is not a book about defeat. It is a book about struggle and about suffering, but most of all it is about finding a humane way to carry on, to “fight like the Red Army among the rubble of Stalingrad,” to taste hopelessness and desperation and find comfort nevertheless. 

In Burn Out, Hannah Proctor offers us a psychoanalytic study of communism’s long delay, and makes the case again for the necessity of the revolution’s eventual triumph.