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From the beginning of this roundtable, I viewed the Pandemic as an opportunity for change. It exposed what I always implicitly knew: poverty, income inequality and racism cause daily trauma for the poor, working class, people of color, those of a different ethnicity, etc. Following the 2016 election, my office was filled with anxiety and fear expressed by my patients; I shared their anxieties and fears. It seemed disjunctive to reduce/soothe patient fears, interpret and give them a different relational experience in the consulting room and then send them out into an unsafe and precarious world. Thus, it became vitally important to me to consider what I and the field of psychoanalysis might offer to the social/cultural/political systems in which we live to impact the context in which we all live.
Throughout our Roundtable, I was an advocate for considering how we as individuals and as a collective of psychoanalysts might approach the inequities revealed by the Pandemic. When I first proposed this in my second posting, the idea didn’t seem to gain much traction. As time went on in our discussion, the idea of using our formidable knowledge and skills outside as well as inside the consulting room was more pointedly engaged. Both are required for substantive change to address the numerous injustices so dramatically revealed through the Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.
Although many of us are involved in societal change through personal activism, these efforts do not seem to be fully accepted as a valid component of mainstream psychoanalysis. In that spirit, I want to end this reflection by returning to Freud and our beginnings. The ideas expressed below all come from Daniel Gaztambide’s, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Liberation Psychology. The book synthesizes the work of various eminent historians of psychoanalysis. It speaks to me; I hope it will interest you. Gaztambide describes Freud and Ferenczi, along with others (Bettelheim, Wilhe