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Alexander Stein has written what amounts to an urgent manifesto for psychoanalysts who write, particularly those who write (and, I would add, speak) to the public, exhorting us to use our psychoanalytic gifts, such as they are, for the public good. As psychoanalysts, we traffic in ambiguity and uncertainty, what the Romantic poet John Keats famously described as “negative capability,” the state in which one is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
While psychoanalysts have not claimed, or at least should not claim, to have cornered the market in understanding the complexity of our inner lives, our training and experience do lend themselves to making sense of what otherwise seems irrational, contradictory and confusing. Whether we are trying to plumb the depths of the patients we treat, the leaders we advise, the larger social and organizational structures to which we consult, or merely ourselves, our perspective is an important one. This also true for trying to help the general public understand and cope with what is going on in the world around us.
Regardless of one’s particular psychoanalytic school of thought, there are a few things I think we can safely say are common and fundamental to the psychoanalytic perspective: the idea that a large part of our mental activity operates outside of conscious awareness; the idea that our minds and personalities are a product of accumulated life experience starting at birth, along with biology, culture and other factors; the idea that our childhoods are the crucible in which we are irrevocably formed; and the idea that we are constantly playing out—repeating—the dynamics of our most ingrained, early relationships in the present. How useful to know this, and to have the tools to be able to discern it.
Dr. Stein is, in my view, essentially arguing that we not only have something useful to contribute to the public discourse, but that we should have a sense o