Our Need for Roots: On Finding a Place for Tradition

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.

Definitions are difficult. The philosopher Simone Weil (1952/2001) keenly observed our need to be rooted as elemental to human flourishing and, nonetheless, one that resists systematic formulation. This tension was, for her, a project in itself, worthwhile for reasons that are almost self-evident, and one that resonates with the concerns of our profession. The idea, or image, of rootedness is pregnant with associations relevant to any psychotherapeutic modality that takes seriously the interpersonal processes underpinning human development and our ineluctable arrival in the broader social world. It calls to mind notions of attachment, belonging, community, family, and cultural inheritance; of adaptive engagement with reality and forms of self-understanding made possible through relationship and social bonds. Among these associations, it is the potentially organising idea of tradition that quietly asserts itself, and with it, the animating focus of this essay.

I begin with a simple observation: that tradition remains under-theorised within psychoanalytic discourse and this absence seems rooted in an ambivalence within the field itself. Suspended between an ideal and its shadow, psychoanalysis identifies with the legitimately subversive bona fides of its origins and yet remains in a constant state of reckoning with what it upholds (at the very least what psychoanalysis is sometimes accused of upholding): a traditional, perhaps even bourgeois, mode of being in the world (Meltzer & Williams, 1988). Still, there is room for a different reading. Reframing tradition as r