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Presented at APsA, September 2021
Roundtable: Ideology and Psychoanalysis
We are living in a period of great upheaval. The psychological significance of multiple social crises is increasingly the subject of psychoanalytic research and a focus in clinical practice. As we consider how social structures and ideologies are core components of mental life and sources of mental suffering, a social psychoanalysis challenges ideological tradition within our profession. I want to begin my comments today with a brief clinical vignette to show the tenacity of the psychoanalytic politics of neutrality, which I believe sabotages our ability to engage patients in exploring how we are implicated subjects in the reproduction of asymmetrical relations of power, based on class, race and gender and sexuality.
Some years ago, Liza, a cis-gender White social worker in her late-thirties, then six months pregnant, came to our session still upset about her experiences the previous evening at a good friend's birthday party. Liza had grown up with this group of women, having shared the privileges of an upper middle-class life. While these women had all married wealthy men and were stay-at-home moms, Liza had a history of failed relationships and a lower middle-class lifestyle resulting from her employment at a financially strapped community mental health agency. Her feminist politics and social conscience had been undermined by her envy of her privileged female cohort and what she saw as her personal inadequacies. These states of mind had constrained for a time her ability to act on her wish to have a child. After several years of treatment, however, Liza had decided to become a single mom by choice. In this session, she bitterly complained that after an exhausting day's work she been obliged to stop at a market on her way to her friend's party to purchase a needed last-minute item. As I listened, I realized that she had crossed the much-publicized picket line of militant grocery workers, the ma