At the June 2020 APsaA online meeting, the third panel in the “Psychoanalysis in a Broken World Series” was moderated by Jane Kite, training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
The panelists, Past President Prudy Gourguechon, President Bill Glover, President-Elect Kerry Sulkowicz, and Program Chair Don Moss, grappled with three questions.
Jane Kite introduced the topic:
Against a societal backdrop that has laid bare the disavowed history of systemic racial injustice in this country, and in the shadow of death, the panels in this series have invited new insight, new energy, and new depth of feeling. They have created the possibility for us of a different experience of being an analyst.
We are at an inflection point as a field. Who are we as psychoanalysts at this historical moment? What are the questions we need to ask, and more importantly, what are the actions we need to take? Can we pivot from what has been a nearly exclusive focus on psychic reality to material reality and back again?
We are, manifestly, a notoriously conservative and largely white organization legitimately proud of our intellectual heritage, and legitimately confused about how and where to turn next. Personal pain and personal curiosity have been, for most of us, the engine driving our careers as analysts. We are part of what now reveals itself as a broken world. How do we reliably bridge the deeply personal and the powerfully social?
What is the place for psychoanalysts outside the consulting room, especially in the context of the contemporary moment? What is the nature of the tension between those working inside the consulting room and outside the consulting room, and how does this impact our training?
Prudy Gourguechon: Psychoanalysis has always had a place outside the consulting room. Freud, Abraham, Aichorn, Erikson, and in our era Lord John Alderdice, Sverre Varvin, Sally Weintrobe, Jorge Bruce, Dorothy Holmes, Gil Kliman, Harold Kudler, Stuart Twemlow, Henri Parens, to name just a few, have made enormous contributions, using psychoanalytic concepts to explain and facilitate change regarding social and cultural problems.
Despite this persisting and proud legacy, only a small minority of analysts are engaged in non-clinical psychoanalytic work. And our training programs have almost exclusively ignored training in applying psychoanalytic knowledge outside the consulting room. Not all analysts are suited to this work or interested in it.
I believe there are five distinct cohorts of analysts:
Those who want to do good clinical work inside their offices and really don't experience the excitement or
potential for psychoanalytic work outside the consulting room.
Eloquent theorists.
Researchers—a vital minority.
Interdisciplinary academics.
Traveling analysts who pack our psychoanalytic understanding in a metaphorical backpack and take it on the road, talking to whatever segment of the public will listen to psychoanalytic explanations.
We naturally select.
Regarding training, we must make sure that those trainees who have the interest and talent to be travelling analysts are exposed to the work of its best practitioners and taught the theory and technique that underlies it. The theory and technique behind extra-clinical work needs to be better elaborated and articulated by traveling analysts so it can be taught to future generations.
Don Moss: I first came to psychoanalysis as a theory of possibility, of what humans might be, a theory of liberation, working with groups who were looking to become what they could only imagine but had not yet seen. Standard clinical training focuses on psychopathology, on “cure,” diminishing or eliminating psychic impediments. I was disappointed in my training where the dimension of possibility had little or no place.
My own work outside the consulting room has meant a scholarly and theoretical focus on homophobia, misogyny, and racism — first conceptualizing them as symptomatic structures and then imagining relations free of them. My paper, “Like Drives, Culture Exerts a Demand on the Mind for Work” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2010) provides theoretical grounding to contain the tension between working inside and outside the consulting room. We can understand the human in its full surround rather than the interiorized subject responding primarily to its demanding interior.
Kerry Sulkowicz: “The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one.” That was Freud, in The Question of Lay Analysis, nearly a hundred years ago. The future is now.
While most psychoanalysts do, and will, practice clinically, I think we need to raise other forms of analysis to the same level. That means we need to teach them, support them, and value them accordingly. Working in non-traditional settings forces us to learn to speak plainly and elevates our standing in the modern world. This accrues to the benefit of those who choose to focus exclusively on clinical work by raising public awareness of psychoanalysis as something of inestimable social relevance and brings more patients to the doors-real or virtual-of psychoanalysts.
Every field of human endeavor, from the arts to education to politics to economics, can benefit from collaboration with a psychoanalyst. However, the analyst must not take an arrogant, know-it-all position that I would characterize as “pathological certainty,” and instead adopt an attitude of curiosity and humility.
Simply put, psychoanalysts need to get out more. We can do a lot of good for the world if we also work at a larger than dyadic scale.
Conscious and unconscious bias in us as individuals and in psychoanalysis as a field has shown itself in an outsized diversity problem involving race and class. Has any real progress been made? What are the obstacles standing in the way of our becoming a more diverse, anti-racist community and a socially relevant field?
Bill Glover: The word “obstacle” implies something that can be removed, something defined, concrete. Racism is much more diffuse, pervasive, embedded in our habitus, in our psyches. Complicity is obscured by denial, disavowal. Have we made progress? Not nearly enough. We need to go deeper, work harder. But we've taken some steps.
At a panel on racism at the February 2018 meeting, we sat at tables and shared thoughts and reflections. I recalled and shared something I had remembered but never spoken about – a contemptuous and grossly racist comment my grandfather made when I was 10 or 11. I felt guilt, shame, and worry—how would I be seen by my peers? But the larger issue was how could I deal with this family secret. How could I reconcile my love for my grandfather with his blatant racism? Kept hidden, such conflicts lead to disavowal, secrecy, complicity.
I found Jonathan Lear's article, “Gettysburg Mourning,” very helpful (Critical Inquiry, 2018). In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln mourned the Union war dead but not the rebels, who were buried outside the cemetery. Lincoln links the Confederate dead to Polyneices, the disgraced brother of Antigone in Sophocles' play. Antigone defied an order against honoring Polyneices, the traitor, whose body had been left to rot. Lear describes the Southern Antigones, sisterhoods of Southern women who formed memorial associations to bury their dead and build memorials and, in doing so, celebrate them. They romanticized the “Lost Cause” of the confederacy, nostalgic for a society that never existed, its foundation on slavery hidden by denial, disavowal, and revisionist history.
Lear leads us to ponder the psychic retreats of white people – “What about our losses? What about our poverty? They are pushing us aside!” These protests represent white melancholia, psyches stuck in racist bastions, rather than mourning and reconciling. Lear points to the need to mourn the dead without honoring their cause, “…in order that our Nation might live.”
Don Moss: Psychoanalysis' problem with race began in our formation. Freud persistently refers to civilization as “white” and “Christian” and consistently refers to
nonwhite peoples as primitive, infantile. We linked unthinkingly with the racist premise that Europe embodied civilization while non-industrialized cultures embodied “primitivity.”
Racism not only confers “privilege” on white people, it also afflicts white people, depriving them of relationships with and connections to a wide swath of the world's peoples while also afflicting them with the internalized violence they have visited upon those peoples.
Kerry Sulkowicz: There are some things we're born with that we can change. There are other things we're born with that we can't change, like our race or our inheritance of trauma. My parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland who emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Their experience—most of their family members were murdered and they themselves were emotionally damaged—profoundly shaped me as I was growing up in very segregated Dallas, Texas. I feel strongly that our country has not come close to dealing with its own history of crimes against humanity and genocide. The transgenerational transmission of trauma is a subject we analysts know something about.
Has any real progress been made in the field of psychoanalysis with our diversity problem involving race and class? Not much, not nearly enough. We need to keep having the hard conversations about racism that we've just begun to have. We need to tell our personal stories and listen carefully to others. We need to look in the mirror and make sure we don't have policies and procedures that inadvertently (i.e., unconsciously) contribute to our lack of diversity. We need to actively recruit more people of color as candidates and members. We need to make sure we're warmly welcoming potential students of psychoanalysis, of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, or of academic disciplines that are informed by psychoanalysis. Our numbers need to reflect the society in which we live and work. Right now, they don't.
And we white analysts need to do a lot of this work ourselves, without unduly burdening our Black colleagues. It's one thing to seek their advice and guidance, but it's wrong to ask them to do the work for us.
Do we have an obligation to act, as individual analysts and as an organization, in pandemic times or other times of crisis? If so, what are the meanings and possible roles for psychoanalytic activism?
Bill Glover: One contribution we can make to the current climate is to bring our psychoanalytic attitude and setting to activism – understanding the importance of and creating spaces to think, recognize, and examine.
An example of this kind of work is going on in San Francisco —in a program called “Reflective spaces, Material places.”
Prudy Gourguechon: We have the potential to act, both as individuals and an association. What can we do to enhance this potential for psychoanalytic activism until it builds into an internal force that compels action?
Understand that people are hungry for in-depth understanding of the uncertainties and confusion they face.
Appreciate the power of psychoanalytic concepts to explain social and cultural issues.
Grow the potential through training for candidates and graduates and support for those who dare to leave their office.
Don Moss: We know there is no such thing as “not acting.” This question raises the more fundamental one of “what is neutrality” not only during pandemics or other times of crisis, but always. Actually, there is no cultural/historical moment which is not, for billions of people, a time of crisis.
The issue here is whether activism and neutrality are in contradiction. Silence is action. Not acting is action. Our patients live in the world and have transferences to it, no less than living in the consulting room with transferences to it. To actively interpret that world and the transferences evoked is a psychoanalytic/interpretive act.
The race issue resembles the ones we face regarding white peoples' relation to the objects of nature— a posture of limitless dominion: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Kerry Sulkowicz: Do we have an obligation to act, as individual analysts and as an organization, in times of crisis? Yes, we do. Psychoanalysts don't often talk about “values,” and I'm not entirely sure why. Psychoanalytic activism is founded on psychoanalytic values.
What do I mean by “psychoanalytic values”? One of our primary values is truth (especially emotional, historical, and developmental truth). We value listening without passing judgment, and tolerating painful emotions. We value complexity and an appreciation of conflict. We value language and expressiveness. We value the idea that we're all products of our biology and our early environment and of our accumulated life experiences. We believe that with understanding and self-awareness, and with personal truth and reconciliation, we can change. And we value fundamental human equality.
If you think about our values, they sound like the makings of an activist. Our work is radical, whether with individual patients or with larger groups. Psychoanalysis stands for freedom – emotional and otherwise.
Finally, I think we American analysts need to be part of a global, not only an American, psychoanalytic movement. We in APsaA need to take a hard look at, and ultimately abandon, what has become an American exceptionalism that, as the history books tell us, never ends well.