Transformation and Resistance in the Community of Psychoanalysis

Does psychoanalysis seek or resist transformation? I've begun my analytic training at a time when a global pandemic and uprisings make abject social inequality an irrefutable truth, shining a light on often disavowed power structures that maintain disparities across lines of marginalization. In other words, I seek the answer to this question of transformation as it becomes clearer that transformation is mandatory. Psychoanalysis is often characterized by deep, life-changing work that doesn't flinch in the face of truth, but how deep does this commitment go? After all, our field is mired, too, in these power structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, transphobia, and the like; they thread through psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis threads itself through them. We're all insidiously affected. Is there something at the roots of our profession that could help us bend our own arc towards justice, or does what lies at our roots keep us mired?

But of course, we know that transformation can be sought and resisted at the same time, that we can reach for it with one hand even while the other handcuffs us in place and throws out the key. This ambivalence is at the crux of our work with patients. Our field, since its inception, has been complex and human in the same way.

In his 2015 article exploring intersections between psychoanalysis and liberation theology, “A Preferential Option for the Repressed: Psychoanalysis Through the Eyes of Liberation Theology,” Daniel Gaztambide discusses how psychoanalysis lends itself to understanding human acts of Othering. Welcoming the other is part of our heritage. I am moved by the picture of a community so indelibly marked by the traumas of Otherization—being Jewish in Europe in the early 20th century—and the clear understanding of what it means to be cast to the margins and projected upon with horrific deadly consequences. It is from this social location that the initial conceptualization of the unconscious—the other within ourselves—could arise. The founding community of psychoanalysis asked something new and subversive of individuals: to let back in the repressed other of their minds. Perhaps they also asked something new of society, something that would be transformative: to rehumanize the oppressed and reclaim our projections cast onto the other. Transformation then, is at our roots.

When Freud was 11 or 12 years old, he was walking with his father Jacob, who told him a story of a walk of his own youth. Jacob was wearing a new fur cap, and a Christian man approached and knocked his cap off. “Jew, off the sidewalk!” he shouted. Sigmund asked his father how he had responded. His father answered that he had stepped off the sidewalk and picked up his cap. Sigmund saw this as a disappointing submission to the more powerful man. He was ashamed of his father.

In part, Freud told this story—and many psychoanalysts retell it—as an illustration of Oedipal conflicts. He and other early analysts sketched conceptualizations of the world to make sense of experiences of aggression and competition, and we pick up these threads of theory in our understanding of Freud's biographical story. But our cultural conversation of this anecdote too often leaves out an analysis of power and oppression, ignoring the cultural, historical, and group context. This assault by a Christian man and submission by Jacob bring clearly into view the hierarchical ladder of power. When we discuss the story, we acknowledge that an act of discrimination happened, but we often fail to examine the ladder. Our focus is trained on the conflict we imagine between Otherized Sigmund and his Otherized father, but what would it look like to see and reckon with the conflict the oppressor brings to bear on the oppressed?

The narrow focus prevailed. This resistance to transformation at our roots affects how psychoanalysis is practiced today. Our work is, of course, stationed resolutely in the intrapsychic, but our various psychoanalytic theories too often fail to conceptualize the greater sociocultural picture, let alone understand how it is mirrored in individual minds and interpersonal relationships. As I increasingly bring up the sociocultural with my patients, it becomes clear that to avoid it is to miss something crucial. Discussions of whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, rape culture, and cultures of exploitation have led the therapeutic endeavor into richer, more intense, intuitive, and fruitful realms. It opens things up. Yet entering this space sometimes feels like groping in the dark, especially as I begin training and find these areas so unilluminated by psychoanalytic thinking.

Anton Hart, in his various writings and presentations, proposes analysts start aiming for radical openness in which we loosen our grip on the implicit idea that we meet with our patients to impart wisdom, understanding, or perspective. Rather, we endeavor to open ourselves up to our patients' minds and ways of thinking. Critically, he makes clear that we achieve radical openness not only by being open to novel ideas but by going into the encounters ready to lose old ideas. He asks: What are we willing to relinquish in order to gain something new?

Similarly, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn proposed in his 1970 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that scientific progress is characterized by infrequent but necessary revolutions: When enough anomalies have built up, a community abandons the

old paradigm it has been trying to fit them into in favor of a new one. One of the key characteristics of this paradigm shift is that the two ways of thinking are incommensurable. One cannot look one way at the world without foreclosing another point of view. This is familiar to many psychoanalysts. Much cannot survive a good analysis—marriages, careers, and certainly ways of making sense of the world. It follows that we, as a community, might have to give something up to better fathom and fit into our current context, and to reach for a new horizon. What is it that we are taking for granted, and what might we gain when we let it fall away?

More psychoanalysts are hearing the calls for transformation. We expand what it means to be “analyzable,” focus on recruiting more racially representative and gender-diverse candidate classes, and incorporate ideas of difference into the curricula of our training institutes. We become adept at recognizing troublesome anomalies in what we take for granted—like a rigid gender binary, American exceptionalism, and the violence of stateled poverty and punishment—and try to warp and stretch the notions of the old paradigm in the hopes of making them benign. It leaves me wondering whether we could develop a way of thinking that wouldn't engender the anomalies in the first place—but I am starting to feel that this would require a great deal of relinquishing, a relinquishing of things that feel very important.

Much cannot survive a good analysis—marriages, careers, and certainly ways of making sense of the world. It follows that we, as a community, might have to give something up to better fathom and fit into our current context, and to reach for a new horizon.

I chose to include Freud's biographical anecdote because it enriched my thoughts. Yet I can't help but wonder how limiting my own preoccupation with our founder might be. How far can we stretch the old paradigm? I'm not sure what Freud would think of my ideas, though I've surely ascribed a great deal to him that are projections, which is the way of paradigm warping. But I am confident that it shouldn't matter so much what he might think. Angela Davis reminds us that, “radical simply means grasping things at the roots.” At the roots of psychoanalysis, you can find, dialectically seated, a radical search for humanistic transformation alongside incredible resistances to change. Given what it takes to see things differently, I wonder whether the coexistence of these resistances and inclinations toward change means that the inclinations toward change can't bear fruit. If we'd like to grow something different in the garden of psychoanalysis, I think we'd better dig up some roots.