Psychoanalytic Witnessing: Professional Obligation or Moral Imperative?

In this response to Leanh Nguyen's paper, I ask whether psychoanalytic witnessing is a professional obligation or a moral imperative. Describing the increasing number of psychodynamic clinicians who take their psychoanalytic knowledge out of the traditional setting and apply it to a variety of situations that call for an active commitment to social justice and human rights, of which Dr. Nguyen is a prime example, I argue that as clinicians we are morally obligated to bear witness when an external event has caused such a profound disruption in the other's sense of self (and frequently self in relation to other) that a witness is necessary to validate the extent of the psychic distress and, frequently, to testify publicly. I propose that extreme traumatization takes a different kind of therapeutic engagement, one that is beyond professional obligation; it is a moral imperative that requires us to use imagination when recognition is not enough. The whole question of moral witnessing in a psychoanalytic context turns on this act of imagination, on having the courage to join someone whose self has collapsed in the aftermath of interpersonal destructiveness and hatred.