The Social is the Unconscious of the Unconscious of Psychoanalysis

Does being a psychoanalyst imply that one should hold a particular political sensibility? This article aims to approach this question in the aftermath of Donald Trump having become the president of the United States and the reverberations of this event, both political and personal, in analytic spaces. Contemplating the ways in which psychoanalysis addresses (or not) the social and political aspects of life, I argue that the social is the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis. The social is the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis in the sense that, unlike the unconscious that it traditionally assumes and aims to uncover—the unconscious of drives, of object relations, and of family life—psychoanalysis is reluctant to attend, both in theory and in practice, to the social forces that structure our very being and underwrite our lives. It is so reluctant that one might argue that the social is repressed into an even deeper unconscious, one that disappears completely out of sight. I suggest in the article that the reason for this reluctance is our collective historic trauma, as a discipline created by displaced people and refugees. And I try to imagine what might be our subject matter if psychoanalysis moves beyond its avoidance of the social.