Giorgio Agamben and Resistance: Bridging the Consulting Room and the Political in the Anthropocene Age

In a recent cross-cultural study, Caroline Hickman et. al. (2021) found that children and young adults experience eco-distress as a result of the realities of climate change and the abject failure of political leaders to take meaningful and effective action. “Young people,” they write, “are vulnerable to developing mental health problems through multiple psychosocial risk factors, lack of services, and chronic stress” (p.3). The intersection of mental health struggles and larger systemic political, economic, and cultural realities is not new. Freud recognized the cultural impact of sexual repression on psychic health. Decades later, psychiatrist Franz Fanon (2008/1952), who worked with Algerian patients suffering the effects of brutal French colonization, argued that therapy aims (a) “to ‘consciousnessize’ [the patient's] unconscious, to no longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification,” and (b) “to enable [the patient] to choose an action with respect to the real source of the conflict, i.e., the social structure” (p. 80; emphasis mine). Around the same time and on another continent, Ralph Ellison (1995/1953) depicted the aims of a psychiatric clinic in Harlem.

Ellison wrote, “Dr. Wertham and his interracial staff seek a modest achievement: to give each bewildered patient an insight into the relation between his problems and his environment, and out of this understanding to reforge the will” (p.302). Both Fanon and Wertham,1 building on Freud's work, recognized the intersection of the therapy room and larger political realities, and they aimed to facilitate patients' resistances and resiliencies toward the real social-political sources of their suffering. Unfortunately, more often than not, therapists of many schools, for various reasons, tend to bifurcate the consulting room and political spaces, which, in cases where systemic realities are the main sources of psychological distress, ends up mystifying the sources of patients' suffering and, at the same time,