Radioactive Identifications and the American Election: An Introduction

Since the early 1990s, Yolanda Gampel has been doing important theoretical and clinical work in situations of social and political violence and has written now a number of influential essays

developing a term she names “radioactive identifications.” Whether we think of the unspeakable and unrepresentable effects of local or social trauma, we must see the disruption of so much functioning in these moments and in particular in the clinical setting. As the world macro and micro shakes and shudders, or as someone has written, the social glue melts, the frame and working assumptions of our work are all put into question, or free fall, or turmoil, or all at once.

I use the term “radioactive identification” or “radioactive nucleus” (Gampel, 1993, 1996a) to refer to phenomena that are comprised of unapproachable, nonrepresentable remnants of the memories of social violence that remain “radioactive,” … These radioactive elements lie scattered about—hidden in images, nightmares, and symptoms—through which, however, they are detectable. (Gampel, 1998, pp. 343–368)

For a number of analysts and for their patients, the events around the election of Donald Trump as president were utterly uniquely destabilizing. This unsettling and disruptive experience was certainly not the same for everyone. But indifference or business as usual came to seem the most troubling symptom of all. The level of social fear, of hatreds and fear of the hatred of others, of shame, of feeling lost in time and space, were all in different analytic pairs, in different ways and degrees a fact of analytic life for some period. Analysts reported experiences of sudden confessions and worries about badness in some patients. Material appeared in the aftermath of the election results that surprised both patient and analyst. Fragile patients seem particularly vulnerable. Almost no one on either side of the couch was invulnerable.

I come to feel that Gampel’s terms and her understanding of these kinds of situations