Chapter 13. The Claustrum and Politics

It seems useless and self-deceptive to pretend that one can carry on an activity at which others also labour without participating in the communal aspect, for there is always a community. And since there is a community there are problems of organization and communication where the borderland between friendly and hostile, communication and action, governing and ruling, opposing and sabotaging becomes obscure. In everything I have written some attention has been paid to the institutional aspect of psycho-analysis in order to clarify to some extent the organizational position from which I am intruding my thoughts into the atmosphere. It is, naturally, an area in which I am essentially ignorant, but I can comfort myself with the belief that so are others, even alleged experts. So if I am an embarrassment to my friends once again by making a fool of myself, I remember Leonard Woolf's story about Hippolytes standing on his head on the wedding banquet table because he was too happy to care if he made a fool of himself. After all, in the area of politics, who has showed himself more of a fool than Plato?

A discussion of the implications of this imaginative conjecture of the claustrum for communal life follows directly from the investigation of its operation in adolescence. Most of us were still at this stage of life when we became involved in psycho-analysis. It tends to persevere at least until the responsibility for children and full responsibility for patients settles upon one. For this reason, the format by which I have investigated adolescence is valid here again: those who are able to participate in the joyous experimentation with independence from analyst, training committees and enforced supervision, and the others. The Oblomovians keep their heads down and need not detain us here, but all the other subcategories of claustrum dwellers find representation, in psycho-analysis as in any organization; and perhaps, if I am right about the ubiquity of this aspect of person