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When I first started supervision with the modern analyst Evelyn Liegner, she inquired if I had a socialist heart. A playful irony burned through this question, as she queried if I felt my fees were too low. She then quipped that I felt sorry for my patients. Liegner, was ninety-five years old at the time and practiced out of an assisted living facility for the elderly. Small in stature, her energy and psyche vibrated loudly with an old-world street wisdom. To enter her consulting room was to walk through her apartment-home. I share these details to touch on a uroboric quality that has been with psychoanalysis from its beginning. The treatment is a sensorial expression of an intimate whole, that makes room for the patient's infantile needs at a center. Therapists welcome patients into their psychic homes through their personalities, eccentricities, intention, etc. The sounds of Freud's home wandered into his session room. I imagine these everyday noises to be more of an ambience, like birds singing in the forest, then that of family members calling out about everyday things.
During my initial consultation with Liegner, she stated the need for therapists to develop a capitalist head. Before I could respond, she mused to herself that she too has a socialist heart and is still trying to develop a capitalist head. As she snickered about her struggle, she told me about a former resident who had lived down the hall from her, and had been thrown out of the facility earlier that week. “They just put him right out on the street. An old man,” a look of rye numinosity in her eyes, “This is a capitalist institution I live in.”
A perhaps unanswerable question that underscores this paper is: To what extent does an ineffable spirit of socialism permeate the psychoanalytic act for certain individuals? Not just as a reflection of Freud's politics of democratizing psychoanalysis, but an attitudinal function of unconscious empathy. Really, I am suggesting an overdetermined po