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As issues of social justice and injustice increasingly insist on our attention, the question of the relationship between social justice and psychoanalysis has been hotly contested. On one end of the spectrum are those who think of psychoanalysis as primarily, if not solely, a highly sophisticated clinical practice undertaken between two people; the individual psyche as the only beneficiary of psychoanalytic inquiry by way of the dyad and concepts that incorporate triadic arrangements. From such a perspective, psychoanalytic forays into social justice are misguided attempts to influence matters outside of our discipline. Even considering the impact of social injustice on individual analysands may seem suspect. For many adherents to this view, using psychoanalytic theories to advance understanding of social injustice is highly problematic, raising frustration and skepticism, extending to apprehension about the reputation of psychoanalysis. As González (2023, p. 576) writes in a recent articulation of this controversy, psychoanalysis is being taken to task by some for its “turn toward the social,” cast as “excessive and polemical, an abrogation of what makes psychoanalysis uniquely psychoanalytic, and at its worst, as an unethical intrusion that amounts to political indoctrination of the patient by the analyst.” This vantage point holds that sociopolitical dimensions of life are “properly outside of our domain,” with attention to them constituting “an anti-psychoanalytic concretization” (p. 570).
From the perspective of applied psychoanalysis, however, the answer to the question “does psychoanalysis have anything to with social justice?” is a clear and unequivocal yes. An editorial appearing in this journal over a decade ago addresses this bidirectional relationship, both sides of which are addressed in this special issue: “One can apply psychoanalytic ideas to human social and community problems…but our cultural and social issues also impact psychoanalysis” (Twemlow &