Some Reflections on the New ‘New Normal’

Sitting down to write these words on Inauguration Day felt like the exact right thing to be doing. For this is another inaugural – of ROOM. Perhaps we can even consider it the IPTAR Alt-Inaugural. Of course, ROOM is meant to be the antithesis of the Alt political movement: the mission here is to carve out a collaborative thinking space in the face of what feels to many of us the emergence of the unthinkable, the unimaginable.

But even for those citizens who voted for he who, for the moment, shall not be named (with apologies to Voldemort), this is also the arrival of the unimaginable. For nearly half of the population, however stratified, the election of their man who spoke to the most base of impulses and paranoid anxieties with his promise of protection, served up with a side order of their stolen piece of the American pie, this is a day of unimaginable jubilation.

All manner of ignorant, deluded and nefarious intentions have been ascribed to the casting of such a vote. But as analysts, perhaps we can think of it as concreteness; an offloading of one's ego ideal in order to merge with an idealized, powerful figure, or maybe a profound failure of empathy, perhaps a retreat from the depressive position to the paranoid-schizoid, or of basic assumption thinking rooted in the earliest of anxieties. It does help to try to make some psychoanalytic sense of all this; but observing our reactions to the others' position has to be part of the puzzle. I find myself working hard to stay on that tract, to keep to this analytic highroad. To paraphrase Michele Obama, perhaps ‘When they go shallow, we must go deep’ – in the Psychoanalytic sense. But here too, we need to go not only deeper but broader than our dyadic analytic constructs – to the dynamics of field and systems theory, to the larger world and its impact on us, and our impact on it.

From this perspective, today feels like another pivotal day in the trajectory of our country: September 11, 2001. But there are crucial diffe