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“You can't be neutral on a moving train …” (Howard Zinn)
The political battles being waged today in our polarized society are in part a response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which shattered our sense of exceptionalism. Since 9/11, terrorist violence does not only happen to other people in other countries.
However painful and even traumatic 9/11 was for many Americans, I believe that “the uprooted mind” is an apt metaphor for the psychological impact of multiple threats in our society, ranging from deepening economic and political troubles, a war with no end in sight to ongoing threats of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction. The psychic residue of these social threats is apparent now in our consultation rooms as patients experience how the political is personal, the other side of the coin of the revolutionary idea proclaimed by sixties feminists that “the personal is political.” If we ever had any doubts, under the extreme social conditions we live in today, it is not possible to speak of psychic and social reality as exclusively separate registers.
Psychoanalytic treatment in this country has too often left our patients' relationship to the social system unexplored and therefore unconscious. This exclusion of the social domain has not always been the case in the history of psychoanalysis. In response to the rise of European fascism during the 1930s and to Latin American state terror during the 1970s, a rich and varied tradition within psychoanalysis explored the relationship between subjectivity and the sociosymbolic order. Russell Jacoby (1986), among others, documents how the self-repression of progressive psychoanalytic thought characterized American psychoanalysis from the mid-20th century on.1 Happily, today many psychoanalytic theorists are examining how psychological experience and states of mind are determined not only by conflicts in the domains of love and work, but also in relation to our insertion in th