At first glance, psychoanalysis and grassroots politics would appear to be opposite in all characteristics. Psychoanalysis is a very private matter, subject to the strictest confidentiality, and deals with the deepest human concerns, one person at a time. Politics, on the other hand, is a very public matter, addressing overtly public concerns, whole communities at a time.
As I trace the origins of my psychoanalytic approach to politics, it becomes clear that it stemmed from biases and capacities developed during a tour of duty at a pioneering Army treatment prison at Fort Knox, Ky., during World War II. There we succeeded in treating psychopathic youth through analytic group therapy and restructuring of their daily life. We learned to characterize the group process as “from gripe to group.” After the war, I was involved in using group treatment and training programs in a prison, hospital, clinic, and halfway house. For both sets of experience (wartime and post-war), August Aichorn's Wayward Youth and Freud's social theories in group psychology, combined with the sociology of the day, were of great help. Psychoanalytic training followed those formative professional experiences.
My careers in psychoanalysis and politics began simultaneously. My thesis concerning analytic politics is based on a perspective that human beings and their groups are alike in their essential functioning. In this schema, transference would still be a central phenomenon. What is added is that transference could be evoked with professions other than psychoanalysis in accordance with their field of concern. Thus a psychoanalytic approach to politics would deal with developmental arrests and their by-products, alienation and perversion. Conflict would be resolved, as in psychoanalysis, by collaborative action toward change of situation and self. That change, involving emancipation from ties to the past, has been the hallmark of psychoanalysis. In progressive political efforts we strive for an analogous emancipation.
I was active politically from the first in fundraising and grassroots volunteerism, drawn into the fray when President Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater, then again during the rise of Nixon. Along the way, I intervened in the politically relevant conflicts of the faculties of both the Washington and San Diego Psychoanalytic Institutes and Societies. There we held politically relevant workshops to resolve differences.
I began overt political activity in my third decade as a psychoanalyst. I had reached an impasse over teaching methodology at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute, which I had helped form. This largely involved my “extended practice” and other theoretical differences. I turned from teaching at the institute to grassroots political activity.
I came to observe that the dynamics of political groups differ from the dynamics of patients in treatment settings principally in degree and form of alienation. That problem is compounded by the dire politics of segregation and confinement. Closer examination has brought to light the “prison” that each makes for himself or herself: patients through their illnesses, political colleagues through their narcissism.
Alienation was a large factor in the political equation in San Diego. This became apparent as I began to host monthly breakfast meetings for Democratic Club presidents to discuss leadership of grassroots political organizations. Through the development of “positive transference” to me as a consultant, the members moved from “gripe” to “group,” in a manner similar to those at Fort Knox. Those presidents of local political clubs worked their way through the achievement of trusting regression and the emergence of formerly impossible-to-reach problem areas, replete with transference phenomena proper. The meetings moved from chronic contention and the alienation that leads to impasse and “burnout” to cordial, even loving, collaboration.
That success led to a county-wide workshop, bringing together members of the political structure (clubs, central committee, assembly district committees, candidates, incumbents, and caucuses). The workshop gave each participant feedback regarding the pertinence of his or her message and performance. Again, the group phenomena resembled those of the psychoanalytic therapeutic alliance of my private practice.
This, in turn, led to a general awareness of group relations in the political process. We established an ongoing training program for candidates and other personnel that utilized the small group dynamics and analytic counseling I had developed in my clinical practice. My success in these endeavors led to a call to candidacy, first for a community college board position and then for a congressional seat. I was narrowly defeated in the former and declined to accept the latter.
In summary, success has been measured in enhanced capacity in both careers — psychoanalyst and politician — and in a perceptible strengthening of the democratic process at the local level, political and psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis has much to offer politics through its attention to the grassroots of human existence, in the individual and in his group. It also offers what it has learned about evoking transferences from the past that obviate our ability to live in the present and be open to creative development. Conversely, political science can aid psychoanalysis in its organizational functioning, down to the grassroots of its training and treatment procedures.
Joseph Abrahams, M.D., currently of San Luis Obispo, Calif., is largely retired, and is engaged in assessing a half-century's practice of psychoanalysis extended to encompass study of the severe disorders, in which forensics and the group approach figure prominently.