You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is our hope that reading this introduction and the articles that follow will evoke an experience of connectedness in the face of sociopolitical pressures and cultural currents that leave us feeling more and more disenfranchised and alone. It is important now more than ever that we reach out to one another to put words to experiences about what is happening in the world that is unjust and corrupt, especially as our faith in what we used to call reality is eroding through a near-constant attack on truth.
Peltz (2012) quoted the artist and essayist John Berger as saying that there is hope in the creation of a “small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order” (p. 279). Peltz goes on to say that this pocket of resistance is formed in the psychoanalytic relationship in its intention to uncover the truth of what is experienced for both participants, and what grows between them. We would like to add that the small pocket formed through the maintenance of integrity in the analytic dyad, though vital to the analytic project, is not enough. We need to grow and expand the shape of this pocket to include more of the ways we think about and interact with our professional and collegial peers, to create a psychoanalytic community of refuge in the face of oppression and the assault of misinformation. To share our truths with one another as an act of resistance and social responsibility, but also to take better care, to strengthen our feelings of connectedness as a salve for the ills facing us that leave us helpless and estranged from ourselves and from one another (Frommer, 2016).
The authors of the articles in this section challenge us to grapple with the place of psychoanalysis in the larger context of our culture and to consider a new set of psychoanalytic ethics for practice and beyond. Layton opens the discussion by making an appeal for a “psychoanalytic