The Fissure

We have lost the social contract of our democracy, and we have lost the psychological and political infrastructure required for compromise and policy-making.

There is a psychic fissure in America's exceedingly fragile democratic body politic. In the face of political tribalism and an awakened and reinvigorated far-right white nationalist movement in America, civil servants (nonelected career public servants) from the Departments of State, Defense, NSC, and elsewhere have come forward to testify truth to congressional power, attesting to the impeachable actions of the Trump administration—actions that depict a criminal and amoral public enterprise. These nonpartisan officials are bearing witness and speaking truth to power, regardless of whether siloed Republican representatives of the House and their counterparts in the Senate are willing to hear the critical testimony of federal bureaucrats.

If the great American experiment of democracy, which requires two functioning and mutually respectful political parties, is to survive and, eventually, arise from its shattered deathbed, these knowledgeable and seriously dedicated, apolitical government employees—who, by testifying, put themselves at great risk—may be our last hope. In fact, it might be their testimony and their commitment to personal integrity and democracy that ultimately protects the rest of us from tyranny and authoritarianism. In fact, these courageous, nonpartisan, nonelected public servants may signify the remnants of collective confidence in these otherwise dreadful, if not cynical, political times.

From my academic and psychoanalytic lens, I have for some time imagined contemporary psychoanalytic theory as a democratic, personal, and political enterprise (theory and practice), one that is deeply antiauthoritarian, notwithstanding a few controlling and misplaced dictatorial practitioners now and then. Consider for a moment the key psychoanalytic concept of free association, whi