An interview in TAP (26/3) is an honor, and I am grateful for the appearance of mine. Jack Macgregor's questions were pointed and evocative, and I was able to say some things I believe ought to be said—except for one that was left incomplete.
Asked for my opinions about psychoanalytic politics, I answered that there were probably too many of them for my own good, but that I wanted to focus on something more general. I pointed out that the core of our theory and practice represents the only deep and coherent theory of mind that is sustained by an intellectual discipline. In that sense, we have no competitors.
But I somehow never got around to what I meant by an “intellectual discipline.” I mean a group made up of people who join together because they mostly share similar ideas and practices, and also wish to join forces in organizations that represent them practically and in terms of ideals. Preeminent functions of these organizations are educational, intellectual (meetings for exchanging and debating ideas; publication of books and journals; etc.), archival (maintaining “memory banks”), internal governance, and external relations with the world, including other intellectual disciplines.
It's too bad that the very word politics has acquired pejorative meanings. Any organization capable of doing anything has both internal and external political processes. The politics may be “good” or “bad”; it is up to the members of the discipline to determine what standards apply and how to maintain them. Otherwise the entity amounts to little that is coherent—like those medieval universities that lost all administrative functions to some students who ruled by intimidation.
I believe that the American Psychoanalytic Association has represented the psychoanalytic discipline very well. It has not been authoritarian but has had the “good authority” that psychoanalysts have delegated to it. At this point in our history we need to strengthen The American, not weaken it. I fear a tendency among some of our members to undermine it—unintentionally, at least on a conscious level—by advocating a spurious egalitarianism that opposes any national authority whatever. History has abundantly shown that course to be disastrous. A mob or a mere interest organization may seem to be “free” temporarily. But we need an organization that, while not authoritarian, has the strength to represent us materially and idealistically and so preserve our long-term freedom and our future.
Vann Spruiell, M.D.
New Orleans, LA