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This brief essay takes up the interlocking themes articulated in a panel of papers by Margarita Cerejido, Karim Dajani, Orna Guralnik, and Klaus Poppersieker; all of them take up links between our varied ways of approaching culture and “the infantile.” The panel demonstrates the strength of today's emergence of a strong social psychoanalysis. It features the consolidation of several points that are applied to a number of specific clinical situations. It imports a number of powerful concepts from related fields that have taken up the interaction of the individual and culture, including ideology and different forms of internalization, including interpolation.
Overall, these papers are too rich to encompass at once, but I will try to review what strikes me as some of the most central of the points. Some of those that stand out are hidden in plain sight. First, there's a very broad agreement among the panelists that psychoanalysis has underestimated the place of culture, and that there's a crying need for a fundamental reworking of our theory to encompass the essential role of culture and social systems in the formation and ongoing being of personality organizations, as well as in psychopathology. There is also an explicit link in several of the papers, which is implicit in all, that psychoanalysis can become (re)vitalized as a tool for social progress. We are also invited to reflect on our own institutions from the point of view of their social impact and their place in history; this includes both the history of the organizations and their place in the larger surround.
With this general survey in the background, I want to quickly scan the presentations—without doing full justice to them. Karim offers a fundamental orientation to the notion that culture is ubiquitous, essential, and formative. He proposes a new tripartite apartheid scheme, self/other/culture. At first glance, that scheme can be seen as a modification of Freud's tripartite model, especially if you think of