Introduction

Psychoanalysis @ a Crossroads: The Whither, Why, and How of Ideology

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

“If Freud were alive today, he would not be a psychoanalyst.”

“Real people have to be treated roughly if the universe is to be made safe for imaginary people.”

Arnie Richards' provocative and thoughtfully engaging article on the relationship of psychoanalysis to ideology is like a well selected koan for the earnest practitioner of zen (Merton, 1968) or a truly contemporary psychoanalytically informed practice (Basch, 1988; Carpenter, 1977, 2004; Eigen 2007; Ingram, 2006; Rizzutto, 1981; Robbins, 2018). It presents a real-time opportunity for the psychoanalytically influenced of all contemporary clinical and scientific persuasions to recursively bring their attention to the management of the vicissitudes of psychoanalytic thought and breath. Or, to borrow Malcolm Gladwell's felicitous phrase, and apply it to Dr. Richards' article and emergent journal, psychoanalysis is at a “tipping point” (2000).

Dr. Richards' conjoined threads of conceptual practice and training, provide not only an insider's view of the flesh and bones of psychoanalysis' historical to contemporary thought and training; but also, a way to draw together the self-evident derivatives that both join and distinguish the ways in which Freud and his followers' work stimulate(d) and engage(d) the succeeding lineage of healers and co-creators of that skein of civil society which serves as the reality we live and breathe by.

My job, as this issue's editor, is to invite the readers to review with me the broad ways in which Arnie's article invites the reader-practitioner to consider the topic in a way that touches the furthermost reaches of what psychoanalytic ideology once posited and today offers to integrate at every level of science and cultural-academic-medical practice.

To start with, the basics of definition and the history of training,

Definition of ideology (per Merriam-Webster)

• 1a: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.

• b: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.

• c: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture.

Defined in this way, the reader instantly understands, as Robert Frost observed about “poetry … it proceeds on its own melting”. Although psychoanalysis is an ideology in all three aspects of the dictionary definition, both the nature of language in general (McWhorter, 2003; Robbins, 2018; Winchester, 2009) and the history of psychoanalysis' emergence, morphology, and spread (Carpenter, 2004; Kalsched, 1996; Rizzutto, 1981), a thoughtful reflection of both the definition and scope of psychoanalysis aptly demonstrates that in name and its myriad forms, it has also been used as a fetish, transitional object, heuristics, and a variable in modeling paradigm clash (Kuhn, 1996; Kahnemann, 2011; Leys, 2000, Lambert, 2004; Rizzutto,1981; Shamdasani, 1996).

In his paper, Dr. Richards introduces psychoanalysis as a misunderstood and blamed victim of its times, and their vicissitudes of managed clinical care, academic medical fashion, philosophical happenstance and causal modeling (Kern, 2004, Kuhn, 1996) in a post-Enlightenment era of reckoning (Hendriques, 2020; Muller, 1996), a hardening of its categories, and a clear and present victim of its manifold regimes of training.

Many streams of convergence are evident in its genetic and epigenetic, clinical and scientific variants: Psychoanalysis can integrate the extant clinical and scientific findings of other related disciplines by growing its constituent concepts such as unconscious process and psychic

determination or developmental psychopathology and situating them in criminology, developmental neuroscience (Shutt, Seidman, and Keshavan 2015), and forensic—correctional practice (Carpenter, 2003, Carpenter and Spruill, 2011; Smith, 2009) such as has already occurred by programmatic circumstances and the press of public health and political urgency, e.g., institutional racism, social justice, and reducing the economic and social burden of a carceral state (Prochaska, J.O., Norcross, J.C., and Saul, S.F., 2020).

Not unlike BF Skinner's rationale to hold formal scientific theorizing at bay until a broad and sufficient accumulation of hard science data had been accumulated, before erecting a more formal and shared superstructure, the hard science evidence and theory for the full range of Freud's ambitious undertaking can be tentatively laid out at every level for programmatic constructive replication, from ethology-evolutionary theory (Barrett, 2010; Moffet, 2020), cognitive-cerebral neuroscience (Kahneman, 2011; McGilchrist, 2011; Shutt, Seidman, and Keshavan, 2015), to more psychology based clinical outcome and personality derived theories and practice (Basch, 1988; Bowen, 11/2020, Eigen, 2007; Lambert, 2004; Prochaska, J.O., Norcross, J.C., and Saul, S.F., 2020; Solovay, MR, Shenton, ME, Gasperetti, C, Coleman, M, Kestnbaum, E, Carpenter, JT, Holzman, PS, 1986; Yellowlees, P., and Shore, J.H.; 2018).

In closing, as a supervisor once said to me, “Professional practice is not practicing what you learned in school, but using what you learned in school to practice” (Gerald Borofsky, Ph.D., personal communication approximately ). Like any aphoristic approach to a larger and complex topic, this bit of pragmatic philosophy is not concrete. Perhaps as Shakespeare had the ambitious Brutus recommend to his bro Cassius of his plans for the iconic (and Oedipal) Julius Caesar (Hodder, 2003),