Understanding, Charlottesville

For the previous issue of ROOM, I contributed a piece that argued against the idealization of tolerance, diversity and understanding that I see so many in the psychoanalytic community currently engaged in. I'm aware that some readers, including some who attended the public conversation between Elizabeth and me at IPTAR in June, thought I was arguing against tolerance, diversity and understanding as such. Of course this was not the case. What I had actually argued was that there is nothing intrinsically virtuous about these ideals, and that the sophistication of an analytic approach lies in being able to discern when they facilitate integration, and when they embolden the symptomatically divisive status quo. When President Trump, following the events in Charlottesville this summer, made statements that there were some “very fine people” among the torch-bearing white nationalists who demonstrated, and that those who demonstrated and those who protested shared equal responsibility for the murder of Heather Heyer, he expressed exactly that position I had argued against. The notion that all gestures of defiance and refusal are inherently based on an inability to understand or to “see the Other” belongs to an effort to deny all genuinely political reflection. At the heart of such reflection is the fact that there are no attempts at inclusion that do not generate some form of exclusion. It seems to me that both our political fate

as a people and our professional fate as analysts today turn on whether we can witness and assume responsibility for this fact.

Many of those on the right imagine that they demonstrate intellectual prowess in arguing that, by insistently denouncing hateful speech, those on the left express hypocritically their own intolerance and tendency towards fascism. Unfortunately, to the liberal mindset this charge tends to be confounding and therefore effective. Political debate in America has become so insipid that we seem