The Events in Tucson

When we mentioned that we were writing something about what psychoanalysts had to offer in relation to the events in Tucson, our well-informed, non-analyst friend said, “What events?” This brought home to us the continuing centrality of Freud's revolutionary discovery of the operation of defenses. The news cycle has “moved on.” This reinforces denial, repression, and splitting affect from ideas, all among the earliest defenses Freud described. As psychoanalysts, we know that change does not occur unless people have the courage and strength to put aside their defenses and engage with reality.

Three Mistaken Assumptions About Adolescence

If we engage with reality there are several denied truths that we can assert. The first is to counter the prevailing cultural and frequent psychoanalytic idea that adolescence is normally a time of intense turmoil, akin to mental illness. This idea encourages people to rationalize pathological behavior as expectable in adolescence. The accused perpetrator of the Tucson shootings behaved very strangely for years before the events. No one is served by normalizing pathology and waiting for it to be outgrown.

The second mistaken idea is that the goal of adolescence is separation from parents and other adults. This leaves young people potentially floundering, turning only to peer culture and isolated from reality corrections to magical, omnipotent ideas. There is no other stage of life in our culture when important people accept being completely excluded, depriving the adolescent of the wisdom of others. “Get off my back!” and “it's none of your business” are accepted as “natural” for adolescents, rather than as signals of trouble and distress. As analysts, we can offer the alternative formulation that the goal of adolescence is transformation of the relationship to others and to the self.

Every postmortem account of terrible events of violence perpetrated by individuals includes a list of presaging activities or speeches that should have been taken more seriously.

This leads into a third mistaken belief—that everything an adolescent says or does has to be kept secret. Analysts and non-analysts have all generally confused privacy and secrecy, with sometimes terrible results in both clinical and non-clinical realms. Privacy is a given of mental life, a fact and a right to be respected. It is a developmental achievement for small children when they realize they have a private mental life, that their thoughts belong to them alone. Knowing that no one can read their minds creates the possibility of the pleasure of sharing oneself with others.

Psychoanalysts have always emphasized the distinction between thoughts and actions. When five-year-old Hans stood up to his father's moralizing and insisted that thinking is not the same as doing, Freud exclaimed in a footnote, “Well done, little Hans! I could wish for no better understanding of psychoanalysis from any grownup” . The distinctions between wishes and actions, between pretend and real, between magic and effective action, between grandiosity and ambition, between omnipotence and competence, are fundamental assumptions and contributions of psychoanalysis.

Thoughts are private; actions are public. It is not a breach of privacy or confidentiality to tell an adolescent that his action plan or actions cannot be kept secret. He or a responsible adult, whether a parent, therapist, college counselor, or teacher, has the duty to seek assistance to forestall dangerous behavior. Every postmortem account of terrible events of violence perpetrated by individuals includes a list of presaging activities or speeches that should have been taken more seriously. Their possible significance should not have been denied or minimized. People of any age should be held responsible for their activities and what they say.

Public Education by Psychoanalysts

As psychoanalysts conversant with the operation of defenses and the interference they can pose to competent functioning, our organization is well positioned to both educate the public and offer alternatives. The American Psychoanalytic Association has recently joined many other professional organizations in making a definitive statement against corporal punishment. In that statement APsaA described the dynamic and defensive roots of the impulse to overpower and intimidate children, the futility and destructiveness of doing so, and suggested a more realistic and humane set of solutions.

It may now be time for us to stand up for sweeping gun controls in our society. Immediate responses to the murders and assassination attempts in Tucson included huge increases in gun sales, hoarding of the multiple ammunition clips used by the accused killer, and higher attendance at Glock stands at gun shows. We have a duty to puncture the omnipotent defensive delusion that having a gun keeps you safe and we should foster more effective and realistic social controls.

Psychoanalysis has always been a general theory of development, both normal and pathological. We are equipped by our training to diagnose and treat pathology in children and adults. We also know what is needed for normal, optimal development. Interdisciplinary research with developmentalists in allied fields offers understanding of important distinctions, for instance, between assertion and aggression, which operate in distinctly separate parts of the brain. Society needs these ideas to support the everyday work of raising children who are equipped to meet life's challenges and frustrations with strength, assertion, and creative problem solving, rather than violent, magical eruptions of destructive action, as we saw yet again in the Tucson shootings.

As analysts, we can provide parents and teachers with tools for better understanding of building inner strength, what we have called “emotional muscle.” Rather than medicating children into submission, we can enlist them as partners in their own growth from birth through adolescence into a shared, responsible adulthood.