Actually, no. I had the idea in 2015. Now, I can’t place what was going on then that seemed so bad. I started writing in March 2020 at the start of the first COVID-19 lockdown when the election felt very recent and pressing. It made sense to start there because, at least within of British context, that felt like an important shared experience.

I wrote most of the book in 2020-21, so it was a product of that time. Obviously, I’ve redrafted it since, but it’s really the product of isolation. It’s interesting now it’s out because it feels so different to be discussing these things. It’s bringing these experiences into dialogue with people who have their own associations and contexts. It feels like an antidote to burnout in some ways because it’s now part of a process of sharing.

Yes. In the book, I wanted to historicise the concepts that people use to talk about psychic life, many of which we don’t necessarily use today in the same way. For example, nostalgia. I talk about that in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, when it was still a medical diagnostic category. As for burnout, many people know it in this ‘self-helpy’ context and it generally seems to be used to refer to workplace burnout and doesn’t operate much across class divides. I recently Googled it for a talk and most of the images were of youngish white women in front of a computer with their hands over their faces.

But the term has its origins in the free clinic movement. Its founder, Herbert J. Freudenberger took the term from hippie drug users that attended free clinics and so it emerged from a more activist context. The thing that interested me about his early formulations was that it had an emotional element to it — he talks explicitly about mourning as part of the experience of burnout, and that he experienced himself as a volunteer in the movement. So, it’s related to the loss of an ideal and the disappointment that comes with that — being involved in a political project that isn’t always going to plan, etc.

There’s a great article in Jewish Currents [by Bench Ansfield] that traces this history — a depressing narrative from the social justice movements of the late 1960s onward. It looks at the East Village in Manhattan, where Freudenberger volunteered, chronicling its gentrification, particularly the displacement of local communities. Burnout forms part of a familiar narrative that says there was this flourishing of radical ideas and projects in the 1960s, which got sucked into this neoliberal ‘flexibility’. And that’s the trajectory that Freudenberger took, because he was working in consultancy by the end of his career. That’s convincing, but I try to make a more positive argument which is that the free clinic where he volunteered didn’t just collapse — it exists in some form to this day, so there are positive legacies. It’s not just that a moment of radical energy simply burnt out.

Initially, I planned to structure the book around specific events. But I got a bit stuck. I was going to write a chapter on the Women’s Liberation Movement, for example, but I’m not an expert in that history. I thought I’d have to read every book ever written on it and it just didn’t seem plausible. As a reader, I don’t enjoy books that are processions of case studies as you might think you’re not interested in a particular history and so skip a chapter and miss important or interesting arguments within it, so I decided structuring it around concepts would be more effective.

I wanted to bring together disparate movements, and to think about different traditions on the left. In my introduction, there are some abrupt jump cuts where I go from Black Lives Matter to Raymond Williams to Che Guevara, for example. That was conscious — I wanted it to feel like that. Not to flatten things or suggest they’re all the same, but to look for commonalities across different movements and moments, and bring together things that might not normally be juxtaposed. That structure emerged as I was trying and often failing to write it.

I look at where various types of therapy circulate within activist movements. Because I trained as a historian of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology etc, I’m conscious that psychiatric concepts have histories, which aren’t always compatible with left-wing politics. It’s important to think about questions about mental health on the Left and to take emotional experiences seriously because they come up again and again. They’re serious and have political implications. But the question is how to think about these questions from a political perspective.

I’ve worked a lot on what you might call the long 1970s — 1968-80 or so. Then theories of radical psychiatry were present on the Left and now there is renewed interest in psychoanalysis, and it’s common for people in activist group to acknowledge burnout and ‘check in with each other’. But what feels different today is maybe that there’s less of a critical attitude towards mainstream psychiatric discourses, which I was trying to consider.

I decided quite early on that it wasn’t going to be an archival project — it’s broad rather than deep. Some of my academic historical work is more archivally focused and narrower in scope, which is typical of that discipline. Here, I was searching for documents that spoke to the themes I was exploring. I wanted things I could use to build a theory, not just to make a scrapbook of people describing how awful things were. For example, I focus on the films of Patricio Guzmán, which are not always obviously about psychological experience — his more recent films look at the natural world in a certain way. But for me, they took a very interesting approach to processing a shared historical traumatic event. They all work through the experience of the Pinochet coup and subsequent repressions but in a quite indirect way.

I talk about a few novels as well, such as The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara. Formally, it’s quite fragmentary and difficult. Someone recommended it because I was working on burnout and I remember struggling to find a way into it. I realised the importance of its form: it allows Bambara to convey something about fragmentation of movements but also psychic unravelling. These artistic approaches to the themes were important to explore because they provided something formally that seemed worth thinking about.

I’m ambivalent about my own argument there. In my afterword, I said we need something like pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. I came to write my conclusion, and at first, I went into autopilot and just wrote something quite hopeful and I felt I knew exactly how to do that, invoking dreams, prefiguration and the like.

There are hopeful moments from the past from which we can draw inspiration and we can still find hope among our comrades in the present or in small victories, yes. But I felt like it didn’t make sense for that argument to come at the end of this book — it felt a bit disingenuous or strained because the materials I’d spent months sitting with were so heavy and it just didn’t do justice to those experiences. I end the book with a Mike Davis quote about how we must ‘fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely’, which I found helpful because to keep fighting, and not become apathetic or lethargic or even reactionary, you need some sense of conviction but maybe this conviction isn’t the same as hope. I hadn’t really thought about the difference before. But there must be some hope or we’d completely give up, right?