The Politics of Psychoanalytic Neutrality

[M]an, whether a union member or an analyst, is by nature an ideological animal …

This paper attempts to show how ideology silently mandates the terms of psychoanalytic discourse, stipulating what can be legitimately thought and said and demarcating the criteria of authorized therapeutic exchange. Ideologies are systematic schemes of ideas that reflect important political and moral values and beliefs communicated through social institutions like the church, the state, family, the public and professional media, and the schools (Freeden, 1996). Ideologies become hegemonic when a culture's dominant ideas are successful in generating universal consent for their dominance (Gray, J. 2005); they are typically implicit and serve to represent social reality — to help us understand how the world works, how things really are and how they ought to be. They describe: (“We live in a democracy”) and simultaneously prescribe (“We must fight to preserve it”). Ideologies, in other words, function as maps of social reality that also rationalize, legitimize or justify the social order. They are normative rather than ontological and achieve consensual ends through psychological internalization processes. Without having to be identified but implicitly recognized as background knowledge, an ideology is a “truth regime”, to recall Michel Foucault's felicitous phrase (Foucault, 2000), a mapping device that codes and constructs the discursive realm in which it operates and assures that the knowledge it produces is consonant with its presuppositions. Ideologies are ubiquitous whether or not they are recognized. For example, the use of the term “free” in the phrase “free market”, serves to buttress the ideological contention that unrestrained market forces are in the national economy's best interests. Once a free market belief becomes the official position of the government, state regulation of the economy to prevent or react to a financial