Yes, ideology can be dangerous. At its best, it helps define an identity. At its worst, it usurps freedom of thought—a freedom which should be a major goal of any psychoanalysis—to be oneself, whoever that is, buried inside. Most people come to psychotherapy, at first, to relieve symptoms. But whether they know it or not, they're really in search of help creating a life that is their own, one they haven't been allowed, can't for various reasons allow themselves, and don't know how to find. This takes space for imaginings—untethered to any ideology, those internally inflicted or (we hope) not imposed by an analyst. Creating an authentic life often requires a psychoanalytic journey. Yet, this isn't so frequently sought out in our 21st Century world. Why not?
In his important paper, Psychoanalysis in Crisis: The Danger of Ideology, Dr. Arnold Richards raises these essential questions: Why are we so deeply distrusted in the lay community? We have to be able to explain ourselves in ways that make sense to other people and to ourselves, but we can't seem to do it What is stopping us? “What is psychoanalysis, that we seem to be so powerless to halt its decline?” (Richards, p. 390). These are critical questions and, although they are hard to answer, I'd like to take the opportunity to explore two possible unconscious cultural forces acting against us. The first is in the general zeitgeist and the second, a fantasy about psychoanalysis itself.
The first: we live in a culture of narcissism. There is increasingly a determination to be “independent” spirits (witness the response to the pandemic). And, this narcissism means anti-need, anti-dependency, and
The page numbers in this article are from Richards, A. (2015). Psychoanalysis in Crisis: The Danger of Ideology. Psychoanalytic Review, 102(3):389-405.
anti-feeling. The question is, are we faced with a cultural superego not unlike Fairbairn's anti-libidinal instinct (1952) or Bion's (1962) ego-destructive superego—one that is not only against attachments but also deep exploration and psychic truth? Instead, there is a focus on superficial quick fixes and “self-help.” This superego coopts the mind and forces a perverse ideology that people cling to as a savior but, in its projective identification, creates terror of being controlled.
The second: a fear-based fantasy about psychoanalysis. This fantasy leads us to the fact that “a once fascinated public distrusts psychoanalysis as unscientific, authoritarian, deluded, reactionary, trite, arrogant, sexist, and/or passe (uneducated)” (Richards, p. 390). This myth neatly links up to my first hypothesis and is another massive projection of the said-cultural superego onto psychoanalysis. There are many myths about psychoanalysis that proliferate in our contemporary world. But this one, in particular, is an urgent one we must address and combat to survive. One that, as Dr. Richards points out, psychoanalysis has contributed to in our “theory wars” and APsaA battles. This authoritarian and arrogant myth views psychoanalysis as an unbending ideology.
“Isn't it a process,” the lay person might think, “that imposes predetermined ideas on my behaviors and fantasies, insists that I follow rules like lying down on a couch or swallowing my analyst's interpretations whole (as in ‘the analyst is always right‘)? After all, they say I don't know my own unconscious. If I don't, aren't I the prisoner of my analysis until my analyst says I'm done? And, I have to come 4–5 days a week? Am I really that sick? Besides, the analyst just sits there silently taking notes (that's what the cartoons say) and won't give me any advice. Why go for years if I have to come up with the answers by myself anyway?” This all contributes to the “dangers” of dependency.
Is this antagonism towards what is assumed-to-be psychoanalysis predominantly a function of a trend towards individualism that has increasingly come into the open? Are we, as a culture, less consciously willing to be “boxed into” any (seemingly rigid) structure not of our personal making? Or is it something more, something I've seen in those patients already living with inflexible ideologies in their minds (aware of it or not)?
Many patients come to us with perverse internal ideologies that have unconsciously taken over their lives—imposed by primitive fears; catastrophic anxieties about being wrong or hurting others; guilt about wanting to be separate; anger and hostility that's in combat with any perceived interference with thinking for themselves. It's our job to find the nature and roots of these ideologies and release our analysands from them, while showing them that psychoanalysis isn't about imposing more. They're already prisoners of the psychic bullies they live with in their heads. How do we understand these bullies who think they know best—constantly intimidating, exploiting, rejecting, humiliating them for reasonable needs, rooted in (often unmet) infantile longings?
Rosenfeld (1971) said it well when discussing his discovery of an internal gang of bullies that act against and shut down any real need. Some of our patients have been failed and traumatized, with their deprivations turned to envy, creating “omnipotent destructive parts of the self… directed against … any libidinal part of the self which experiences need for an object and the desire to depend on it” (Rosenfeld, 1971, p. 173). Bion's (1962) ego-destructive superego asserts a moral superiority over the child-self's needs. Fairbairn (1952) called this kind of super-ego, the anti-libidinal ego (as well as an internal saboteur.) O'Shaunessey (2015) says that these tyrannical internal figures, imposing hard and fast mind-control, are born out of “the earliest dissociations … inflicted and suffered in childhood” (p. 176). Here we see the death instinct operating in real time which, Segal (1993) shows us, is a defense against the pain of frustrated need. “The death instinct, then, aims at not perceiving, not feeling …” (Segal, 1993, p. 58).
Our patients (and potential ones) are often ruled by such defensive organizations. If they leave these safety shelters, turn to us in need—their fear is that we either fail them or impose a different kind of control. At least their bullies, their gangs, are their own; though too easily mistaken for friends, posing like they do, as protectors. Yet, as Michael Eigen (2007, p. 21) says: “Attempts to outlaw or ban the psyche—by science, spirit, laughter, or shouting—delays the work that has to be done. Work unknown. We cannot bully the psyche out of existence.” But this is where we are. Our patient's inner bullies try to do it. Our pop-psychology,
quick-fix, culture does their best, too. And, we see our country's collective psyche in terrible upheaval. No, the psyche won't be ignored.
Dr. Richards asks and I wish I had an answer: how do we get people to listen to us (even to each other)? How do we break through the polarizations and divisiveness in psychoanalysis, psychology, politics (half the country lacks empathy for others in the midst of a dangerous pandemic)? Here in the International Journal of Controversial Discussions, we listen to each other. It's a start. “My way is right” is antithetical to healing. Creating schisms doesn't help anyone. Honoring the imaginings of a single psyche does.
Inner life is a particular form of art, usually fashioned out of pain. Each person's unhappiness is different and varies from any others. If we can move beyond ideologies, including a temptation to interpret through the lens of theory (oedipal, libidinal, superego, or the like), we can find that story, that person's story, playing out on the canvas of the transference. It is uniquely special to follow each patient's narrative, their fantasies and dreams, distinctive use of words, linking these to early history. Creating a language together for the effects of that history, what our patients have “made of it” in symptoms and the compulsion to repeat, is a poetry of understanding and change.
As Dr. Richards says, this “searching quality” (p. 391) is one of the things that defines psychoanalysis and is an act of imagination (p. 394). Can we search to modify our theories about how the mind works, collaborating with our patients in the ways that they correct us in understanding what, why, and how they suffer? This is how we help them get free of the ideologies they believe they must adhere to (under many different psychic threats). To do this, we must be curious, open, with a capacity to change course in every session—to follow our patients. If we are stuck in ideologies ourselves, we can't.
I think it is not the unscientific that turns the lay public, our potential patients, away from psychoanalysis. It's the fear of having another ideology imposed on them, being “indoctrinated” into psychoanalysis as a religion, having to fit into our views. As Dr. Richards wisely says (p. 403): “If we want to be careful, responsible, and responsive analysts, we must
turn a skeptical eye upon our own ideas as well as those of others.” Our patients need space to be as creative as we do, in our own personal and artful protests against the oligarchies of theory. They must be able to dissent, use their voices, not merely go along with interpretations. Again, as Dr. Richards says, we cannot demand agreement to our versions of psychoanalytic givens. There are none.
An openness to creating every psychoanalytic relationship anew, knowing our relationship with, and understanding of, every patient must be different because they are different, is where ideological dogma ends and the art of helping our patients create their own life begins. “The artist's … inner perception that his internal world is shattered … leads to the necessity … to recreate something that is felt to be a whole new world … a world of its own.” (Segal, 1991, p. 86). The same is true for our patients.
Perhaps this is the “art” we participate in, in a psychoanalytic process. What's important, I think, is finding the threads of unconscious phantasy (Segal, 1973), the early activity of a baby's mind—only understandable in connection to details of a personal history. In this sense, part of psychoanalysis as art, is the fostering of a container for imagining and remembering “backwards.” Because, as Dr. Richards elaborates: “there is more to transference and transference neurosis than fantasy. There is also history and narrative. There is psychic reality and reality reality. And, of course, narrative truth and historical truth … what is objective and what is subjective” (p. 396).
To follow these Ariadne threads, our psychoanalytic art frees our patients from the prison of ideologies (in the mind or the world); prisons that restrict, deter, punish, and prevent imagining. Maybe the artistic function psychoanalysis serves in this liberation, is to honor the dreaming of a real independent Self forward—keeping that newly forming Self safe, and not alone, on the journey. “Psychoanalysis is less a medicine than an act of creation, an incessant shaping, re-texturing, fine-tuning of affective attitudes” (Eigen, 2007, p. 12). Attention to imaginings is a link to feelings. Feelings bring us to our Self.
Michael Eigen (2007) beat me to it. I wish I'd thought of the title for a book, Feeling Matters. I've been thinking about it for a long time, working
with patients living in the numb hiding places of childhood trauma. Dr. Richards says it too (p. 392): “Affect is at play as much as reason. Exact science is neutral. Psychoanalysis is not.” Psychoanalysis creates a container for feelings that frighten. We have to find and hold those feelings. “In therapy one risks what is too much for another, too much for oneself. One risks what no one can take or may ever be able to take. That enters the room and is shared, whether or not anyone can take it” (Eigen, 2007, p. 140). Because of this, feelings attached to traumatic memories are dead. Unearthing them safely is vital for healing.
As Dr. Richards says in describing psychoanalysis: “its tool is the relationship between two human beings” (p. 392). One we, as psychoanalysts can offer, if we've freed our own feelings from their prisons of theory, ideology, neutrality, or thinking we know what is “right.” The child-still-living in our adult patients needs its place in the psychic arms of an analyst who is present, capable of participating and entering into their pain; letting them know that it's not too much to ask. We have to stand it, the feelings and the terror.
How else can we help our patients leave the confines of their own trauma-laden ideologies, those which come in many forms, the like of: “it's dangerous to feel, feelings will take me over and I'll be all alone.” “Run away, close the door, it's better to stay in my hiding place.” “If I need someone, I will destroy them.” “If I feel for anyone at all, I will be crushed.” In Freud's discovery of the death instinct, we know more than any other psychological discipline how hard it is to change and what we all have against it.
So, let's free our work from the trap of impersonal words. Let's withstand our own pulls to turn away, hide within theory, create so-called neutrality—which is better known as emotional distance. No relationship can be made without feeling. Let's move into those darkest places, connect where our patients are suffering, become a gentle guide out of their misguided fear-induced ideologies, and let them know they're not alone. If this is our work (and it is), maybe someday soon the lay public will find a way to hear us.