Student Activism as Interpretation

AS I WRITE, student activists across the United States are protesting our collective complicity in the rampant human rights abuses underway in Gaza, including mass starvation and the confirmed death of nearly eight thousand children, with thousands more likely lost and injured under the rubble.

These students—our students, who learn from observing us even if we do not directly teach them—are offering a multifaceted communication to us through their activism, a communication that is in deep engagement with unconscious domains. Because of its conversance with unconscious workings and psychoanalytic ethics, as well as its clear therapeutic action, this student activism may be considered a form of psychoanalytic interpretation, spontaneously emerging at a moment of need.

Social justice activism functions much like psychoanalytic interpretation does in clinical settings, creatively engendering introjection, catharsis, insight, identification, and working through. Student activists in the United States have been a source of solidarity and hope for Gazans. Refugees fleeing for their lives in Rafah have expressed gratitude for the activism on college campuses, speaking to support that has been both proffered and received. Leaders of protest movements serve as figures who may be identified with and taken in by others, and their action and speech provide opportunities for catharsis and insight. Importantly, activists offer themselves for these functions when the feeling of helplessness is at its zenith. Their activism holds out the possibility of change in the face of overwhelming circumstances that cause us anguish, as the assault on humanity in Gaza does for many global citizens.

Intensely negative perceptions of the student activists have emerged, reflecting a type of transference I have termed the negative social transference, directed toward marginalized groups (student activists) from the dominant social surround (campus administrators, monied interests, and governme