President's Report

As I write this, my last report to the NCSPP membership as President, we stand on the threshold of a national election, the uncertainty of which is like sitting in a hospital waiting room, anticipating the news that will shape the months and years to come. It is a bit of a cliché to say that psychological knowledge is needed as never before in the history of humankind. It is also an insult to history, given the barbarism of the last century; psychological knowledge is always needed, and sometimes sorely lacking. Yet, from the perspective of an impending election—where machismo posturing and dirty tricks have laid siege to a rational discussion of issues (shades of 2000? or Nixon?), where a hot summer's day in Berkeley feels a little too hot (global warming?), and where health, wealth, and safety in American society assume an increasingly bifurcated distributionm—one can be forgiven for the occasional bout of historical amnesia. It does, indeed, seem that knowledge of the unconscious, of primitive defenses, and of the tension between paranoid and depressive anxieties is desperately needed these days, more so than ever.

Whether the knowledge we hold as psychoanalytic practitioners and thinkers is welcomed is another matter. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel Laureate in poetry who taught for several years at the University of California, Berkeley, and died in August of this year, offered the unforgettable line about writers attributed to him by novelist Phillip Roth. Milosz said, “When a writer arrives in the family, the family is finished.” It's like that with psychoanalytic thinkers, beginning with Freud's promise that psychoanalytic ideas would disturb the sleep of mankind. Better that, I would submit, than the waking nightmare wrought by those who don't remember their dreams, but project them onto “evil-doers,” and then go about doing evil, themselves, justified in the name of security. In such a climate, security is not possible, nor grieving; guilt fades into the b