Culture, Character, and the Analytic Engagement—Toward a Subversive Psychoanalysis1

THERE WAS A RECENT CARTOON in The New Yorker showing an obviously blue-blooded executive being interviewed on a television talk show about his successful career. Addressing the host with aristocratically locked jaw and hooded eyes, he said something like "Actually, Lou, I think it was more than being a self-made man, or being in the right place at the right time. I think it was being the right race, the right religion, the right sex, the right socioeconomic group, having the right accent, the right clothes, going to the right schools …"

Though the interviewee's comment was implausible coming from one of the elite, the cartoonist clearly understood the impact of membership in various social categories on individual identity and life experience. Psychoanalytic theorists have not always been so perceptive. However, to return to our beginnings, from its inception, psychoanalysis has implicitly concerned itself with the social roots of character. Thus it has promised a radical critique of the existing societal order. Freud himself suggested a sociallyfocused developmental theory, simultaneously initiating a tradition of cultural criticism, when he exposed the psychic damage wrought by repression and hypocrisy regarding the sexual and aggressive aspects of human nature. Further, the clinical method we inherit from him—that of inquiry and interpretation—is inherently subversive in that it potentially challenges, at the level of the individual psyche, all received meanings, including our most sacred canons.