From the Consulting Room to Social Critique: Commentary on Papers by Neil Altman and Rachael Peltz

Neil Altman and Rachael Peltz suggest the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas drawn from the object relations tradition to understanding contemporary American social life. They see the denial of suffering and the projection of hostility in an increasingly individualistic culture as a “manic defense.” While sympathetic to this critique, this commentary raises questions about it. It argues that the object relations perspective is only one of several versions of psychoanalytic thinking. Psychoanalysis is neither value free nor committed to one set of values, but is rather a plural discourse within which moral and social differences can be explored. The paper suggests three ways for advancing the critical program set out by the authors. It recommends that clinical work be used as a valuable source of evidence of the consequences of social organization for personal lives, that arguments based on case descriptions of individual experience can be effective forms of public communication, and that the value of the “containment model” presented by Altman and Peltz needs to be demonstrated in practice as well as in theory, through psychoanalytic work both in and beyond the consulting room.