Understanding, Democracy

In the inaugural issue of ROOM, my dear friend and colleague Elizabeth Evert published a piece that I found somewhat disturbing. Elizabeth brought thoughtful, critical attention to the historically negative and dismissive attitude psychoanalysis has held towards religion. Her plea for a more radical commitment to understanding and inclusion was heartfelt, and she is to be applauded for having raised these concerns at a time when challenges to such a view are to be expected. My response here does not concern Elizabeth directly but rather the direction that our current critical conversation appears to be taking as indicated by the appearance of her piece. The question I find myself preoccupied with is whether psychoanalysis is truly reducible to the project for a universal democratic understanding. Perhaps we are at a historical moment when an idealized version of the power of understanding needs to be criticized quite intensively, and perhaps psychoanalysis is in a position to perform that critique rather than submit to it.

“Democracy has always been suicidal, and if there is a to-come for it, it is only on the condition of thinking life otherwise, life and the force of life.”

Elizabeth's essay was organized around two quotes from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. The first articulates Freud's standard Enlightenment condemnation of religious belief as a form of superstitious delusion, while the second demonstrates that even in critiquing a religious perspective Freud could not at times avoid appropriating its vocabulary. The suggestion was that Freud's views, deriving as they did from the European climate of the 1920's and 30's, do not necessarily reflect what analysts might have to say about the location and power of the American religious project at the beginning of the 21^st century. There is a good deal of truth in this, and perhaps an account of the peculiar rise and fallof psychoanalysis in the context of 20^th century American consumer cul