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As a caution against the illusion of absolute ‘objectivity’ Panksepp and Watt note that ‘“… all sustained cognition is affectively directed and motivated, often invisibly in a way that promotes the illusion of cognitive autonomy from emotion”’ (Panksepp & Watt 2003). On the face of it analysts, with their analyses and analytic understanding, should be better equipped to think than most if, as Bion describes, thinking depends upon the capacity to both bear
and to use the emotional turmoil that it entails. In the absence of this capacity, omniscience takes the place of learning from experience and is accompanied by a lack of ‘discrimination between true and false, a dictatorial affirmation that one thing is morally right and the other wrong’ (Bion 1967/1987).
Sadly the history of analysis demonstrates how far we have fallen short of this aspiration to both feel and to think and in particular to think about feeling. This book by the Spanish psychoanalyst Manuela Utrilla Robles is a rare and honourable, systematic attempt to understand in detail some of the processes that can distort the analytic project and its ostensible commitment to psychological and emotional development, the toleration and valuing of separateness and difference and to truth and integrity rather than defensive illusion and dissembling.
Defining fanaticism she considers it to have five particular characteristics: dogmatism; lack of a critical spirit; ‘Manichaeism’ - by which she means the kind of dualism in which no subtleties, nuances or differences may be allowed; hatred of difference and finally eagerness to impose one's own beliefs. Even without her vivid descriptions of analytical institutional manifestations of these I suspect that there will be few analysts who cannot quite quickly bring to mind their own examples, from their experience of their colleagues and their organisations and perhaps even of themselves. Despite this, I was surprised to note my shock at some of her descriptions of fana