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What follows are some comments in relation to the manuscript by Burston and Nelson on the current turmoil in APsA. I am not familiar with the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ details of this particular conflict, nor with the organizational cultures, or with the characters involved. So, my comments are based in large part on the interpretation of events provided by the authors. As a member of IPTAR- but not a psychoanalyst - and with decades spent in academia, I have some familiarity with the vicissitudes of change efforts and the considerable heat and animus that can be generated.
We must acknowledge that professional psychoanalysis and the organizations that reflect its interests have always been political entities. Here politics is defined as decision-making about who gets scarce goods, such as therapy slots, quality supervision ans status, and whose perspectives and rights are acknowledged, enforced or marginalized. To act on or to eschew certain actions in the social sphere is to take a political stance, and therefore to assert power in a Foucauldian sense (Koopman, 2017).
Therefore, to marginalize acknowledging the impact of politics on how we theorize, who we treat, and how much they pay, are still political acts. One way of understanding the current organizational turmoil is to ask which political constituency is perturbed and why? Which constituencies feel threatened and think their possible marginalization should lead to the decline of psychoanalysis? Therefore, this struggle offers an opportunity to understand the dynamics of the various political communities within organizational psychoanalysis.
Those who disrupt the normative and seemingly apolitical narrative, help bring into clarity the center's historical ambivalence, if not fear of overt political activism (Samuels, 1993; Dalal, 2006). This is due in part to the threat it constitutes to hyper-individualism, status and, of course, income flow within a capitalist therapeutic model. Therefore, we observe the pro