Psychiatry and Politics: A Panel

“These are the times that try men's souls.” The words of Tom Paine still describe our revolutionary situation. The black psychiatrist, Franz Fanon, knew this from his position as a black, as an outsider, and as a psychiatrist. Earlier, Wilhelm Reich knew this as a psychiatrist, as an outsider, and as a man of great imagination - insanity, some have said. We, his colleagues, were not very charitable to this man, and the government was actively destructive of him.

We are given, by virtue of our being doctors, an immense respect and power. We have not yet lost it, although our behavior in recent years has threatened the position we have held in the pantheon of the peoples’ trust. We are also experiencing some of the challenge that has been directed to all authority. Thus, we are obliged to maintain not only a close touch with the ethics of our profession and our Hippocratic oath, but we are especially bound to be consequent in our adherence to what we know, to the conclusions or the bearing witness that comes from the particular nature of our work.

Psychoanalysis is concerned with pathology, and hence we are involved in whatever pejoratives are applied to mental illness. Because we are privileged to enter into the areas of personal motivation, intimate wishes, fears, ambitions, and into the realm of the unconscious, we are also a voice — not the only voice — of that realm that lies beyond appearance. We are privy to the meta level of the personal life. This enormous privilege requires humility and an awareness of the ambiguity of humanity.

Psychoanalysis involves one-to-one relationships between people, and there is of course the recognition that no one is isolated from his world. We have gone beyond the dichotomy of heredity and environment as operational concepts for the understanding of the personality. Being in the world is of course being in the world of institutions, of society, of history, of the community. Whether the institutions are informed by a capitalistic or