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Kalen Wheeler Still-Evolving Thoughts on Transformative Justice and Community Psychoanalysis
Still-Evolving Thoughts on Transformative Justice and Community Psychoanalysis Kalen WHEELER
I approach the task of writing a piece on community psychoanalysis with more wonderings than conclusions. As someone who is new to psychoanalytic theory and practice, I struggle with insecurity about my ability to both leverage and challenge the field.
However, if we believe Freud’s assertion that we approach every psychoanalytic encounter with novelty, perhaps it is exactly this discomfort, uncertainty, and skepticism that primes me to write about community psychoanalysis—a term that is buzzing through our spaces but lacking in shared definition.
What is community psychoanalysis? Do those of us who claim to want to figure it out have a shared interest in radical structural transformation on a societal level, as we do on the psychic level? If so, what is our theory of societal change and where do we expect psychoanalysis to fit into that? What does psychoanalysis have to offer? How might psychoanalysis, as we know it, need to be disrupted? If we interrogate how some of the core elements that qualify psychoanalysis might or might not translate to a community setting, at what point of disruption does psychoanalysis become unrecognizable to itself?
What I have to offer in the conversation about community psychoanalysis is my background in a different framework: transformative justice.1 A movement originally developed2 in opposition to the carceral state’s punitive and inequitable response to lawbreaking, transformative justice aims to (re) imagine how we might bring justice in ways that lead to healing and societal change or “justice that transforms the root cause of injustice” (Brown, 2017, p.133). Transformative justice values the transparency, radical honesty, and accountability that disrupt hierarchies and power differentials that are often designated through roles, especially in institutional settings. As such, throughout this essay, I attempt to write vulnerably and in a way that is unworked, to enact what I wonder transformative justice might offer community psychoanalysis, wherein we all become analyst and analysand.
From School Counselor to Psychotherapist
Before beginning my clinical mental health counseling internship year at a psychoanalytically oriented practice, I was a school counselor. Although the core academic requirements for an MSEd in School Counseling and one in Mental Health Counseling are identical, the nature of the role is entirely different, especially in the environments I chose to practice each. My first job as a school counselor was in the Bronx, New York. At that time, I was involved in a citywide political group that organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, mostly by supporting schools to engage with transformative justice theory and practice. In schools, transformative justice aims to create (and, ideally, to constantly interrogate and reiterate) systems to build strong community foundations, as well as to respond to harm in ways that emphasize repair over punishment. Relatedly, the theory of change that I adopted, not only for disrupting racist, capitalist, sexist, queerphobic, and ableist oppressive systems, but also for imagining and actualizing alternatives—is based on what Adrienne Marie Brown (2017) calls an emergent strategy “for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively
1. The term transformative justice is often used interchangeably with restorative justice. The critique of the latter is that it assumes there is something worth restoring, so I choose to use transformative justice. 2. Although the term to describe the movement developed in the 1970s, the practices used in transformative justice have long standing histories in many indigenous cultures (BoyesWatson & Pranis, 2015). small interactions” (p.2). Brown (2017) uses the scientific concept of fractals, which are “infinitely complex patterns that are selfsimilar across different scales’’ (p.51) to argue that only if we adopt a transformative justice paradigm on the interpersonal, institutional, and community level will those patterns eventually come to fruition on the macrostructural level. This involves a commitment to radical honesty, transparency, interdependence, reparation, and political action, as well as a disruption of roles and hierarchy. In my position as a school counselor, this paradigm was by no means easy to actualize, but
it was in alignment with what I understood the frame of a school counselor to be. My students saw me in a variety of roles—in my office, in the classroom, out at recess, at political actions, at the corner store, at their prom, etc. Moreover, they saw me in circles, a core practice of transformative justice, where we all shared stories, memories, feelings, and conflicts in a way that disrupted typical power dynamics between adults and young people in a school building (Boyes-Watson & Pranis, 2015). Through transformative justice and emergent strategy, I aspired to be a part of a fractal that might be a microcosm for something greater.
Out of frustration with the operationalization of transformative justice, I moved to clinical psychotherapy, based on the
I am progressively more protective of a frame that keeps me private from my patients to make use of their fantasies of me…In fact, many of my patients have expressed to me—explicitly and implicitly—their desire to keep their fantasy of me…
observation that without tremendous healing on an individual level, besides the institutional level, a more robust societal change felt unattainable.3 However, when I began my clinical internship as a psychotherapist at an analytically oriented group practice, I was immediately struck by a feeling of disorientation. Suddenly, my overarching theory of societal change felt at odds with my role and the frame of psychoanalysis. How would the core values of transformative justice and emergent strategy translate to a frame that protects transference, often, though not always, at the expense of a certain kind of shared vulnerability and interdependence that I practiced as a school counselor? However, over time, through learning more about psychoanalysis in my training and supervision, I have come to believe in psychoanalysis’ liberational qualities over most other theories, and believe psychoanalysis has important elements to offer transformative justice.
I must admit that since practicing as a psychotherapist, I am progressively more protective of a frame that keeps me private from my patients to make use of their fantasies of me, in other words, of protecting the transference. In fact, many of my patients have expressed to me—explicitly and implicitly—their desire to keep their fantasy of me, so as to not bring in “the real” to the unique, analytic space where we can play with fantasy. In my own analytically oriented therapy, I too make use of knowing very little about my therapist, which allows us to explore the assumptions I make about him and our relationship in a way that feels significantly less complicated than if I interacted with him outside of our biweekly sessions. If my patients were to see me in the same variety of roles my students did, this sacred, symbolic “make-believe aspect of the psychoanalytic situation” (Loewald, 1980, as cited in Padrón, 2019) could be jeopardized.
In his discussion of Hans Loewald’s essay “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” Carlos Padrón (2019) writes that the freedom of fantasy “is not only a freedom from life’s constraints and exigencies. It is also freedom to see and experience oneself and one’s world in life-enhancing ways that enrich meaning,” which he argues is the political potentiality of psychoanalysis (p.196). This suggests that the maintenance of fantasy is necessary for change, at least within the individual psychoanalytic framework. This beckons me to ask: how can psychoanalysis access and make use of fantasy within a community setting that is more dynamically constituted by collective, interactive forces and
3. I recognize that in this essay I am simultaneously arguing for a departure from an individualistic psychic focus, while also admitting that I found a need for this while working in institutional settings. This question of the relationship between individual healing and collective healing is an unresolved throughline in my mind and this essay, and perhaps community psychoanalysis offers a bridge. less protected from actuality than an individual treatment?4 Or is this impossible, and is community psychoanalysis therefore just a matter of making this individual treatment accessible to more folks, while other frameworks are used for community organizing?
On the Liberational Aspects of Psychoanalysis
Looking back, I used to hold strong, but shallow and misinformed, views of psychoanalysis as an inherently oppressive theory and methodology. This was mostly due to the reputation Freud holds in the postcolonialist, feminist, anti-racist, and leftist spaces I was a part of, which viewed him as a perverse, misogynistic, anti-Black, non-scientific theorist and clinician, who hid behind concepts like neutrality to, as Daniel Gaztambide (2020) suggests, disavow his own complicated subjectivity. Although I still believe Freud must be interrogated within a contextualized understanding of his positionality at that his-
torically specific time (Gaztambide, 2020), I have also come to deeply appreciate Freud’s understanding of the unconscious as the access point for liberation, which is perhaps why so many politically left thinkers and writers, such as Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, were historically attracted to psychoanalysis (Gaztambide, 2020). As Carlos Padrón (2019) writes, from its inception, psychoanalysis was “a scene of radical otherness within the entrails of the normal—call this consciousness, status quo, ideology” in that Freud was writing from the marginalized position of a Jewish man in anti-Semitic
Europe. Because of psychoanalytic theory’s intention to act from a position that “assumes no point of normalcy” (Padrón, 2019), it invites us to interrogate and dissect everything, orienting us “toward uncommon sense,” and therefore rethinking that which we have passively come to accept as normal, including societal structures of inequity (Jacoby, 1975). Russell Jacoby writes:
If Freud was “conservative” in his immediate disregard of society, his concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society; he unearthed the objective roots of the private subject—its social content. (Jacoby, 1975)
In arguing that social structures are objective, Jacoby offers how they become subjective through what is understood as “common sense” or “second nature,” an “accumulated and sedimented history… so long unliberated—history so long monotonously oppressive—that it congeals” (1975). States of being that theories like Existentialism might consider inherently “human” are uncovered as symptoms or manifestations of a repressive society (Jacoby, 1975). Relatedly, while simultaneously uplifting and problematizing Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, Fanon (1952) writes that the collective unconscious is not made up of inherited cerebral matter born through the nuclear family, but instead acts as “the repository of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group,” transmitted intergenerationally outside of individual consciousness (p.161). However, as I said previously, if the unconscious is also the site of “uncommon sense” (Jacoby, 1975) or what I call an access point for liberation, then it carries potentiality, which “can interrupt, problematize, and re-work the political narratives that are at the base of the status quo, consciousness, and ideology” (Padrón, 2019). Perhaps we might think of the unconscious as a constant site of struggle between repression and subversion. Herein lies the liberational potential of psychoanalysis, as I understand it.
On the Constraints of Psychoanalysis in Community Settings
But then what is community psychoanalysis? How do we make the collective unconscious conscious? How do we leverage the political potentiality of the unconscious in a community setting? As I asked previously, is it simply a quantitative change that makes the consultation room accessible to more
folks? Or does it involve a serious qualitative disruption of the frame that allows us, or perhaps more accurately forces us, to relinquish control as the analytic therapist and engage in the collaborative dissection of the status quo, including that of psychoanalysis itself and the roles of analyst and analysand? Moreover, if we expand from the consultation room to the institution, community, society as the container for the psychoanalytic encounter, and we consider the possibility of how transference operates within this expanded container, at what point might the symbolic element of the transference threaten to obscure the structural and material reality that constitutes the encounter and perpetuates inequality?
One historical reference point for this question of transference and the roles of therapist and patient is within the institutional psychotherapy movement. Led by Francois Tosquelles, it began in Saint Alban Psychiatric Hospital in post-war France, in response to the inhumane treatment of institutionalized patients with serious mental illness (Robcis, 2016). The guiding claim behind institutional psychotherapy was that the institution itself was sick and had to heal before it could be of service to the patients who inhabited it (Robcis, 2016). To this end, Saint Alban adopted a unique model that involved multi-stakeholder, democratic structures for decision-making, programming, beautification, and other communitybased efforts that were populated by patients, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, facilities, and other staff alike (Robcis, 2016). This disrupted the typical dynamics of power and patient-practitioner boundaries in a way that expanded notions of transference from the interpersonal to the institutional level (Robcis, 2016). At another psychiatric hospital, La Borde, also known for its endeavors in institutional psychotherapy, Félix Guattari challenged the notion of transference altogether, developing a theory of transversality in its place (Goffey, 2016). Guattari believed that transference was an inherently oppressive construct that the institutional setting exposed for its reliance on a hierarchy that perpetuated inequality (Goffey, 2016). Unlike transference, which, within the frame of the analyst and analysand in the consultation room, often assigns one person as analyzer and the other as analyzable, transversality relied on everyone in the institution being “susceptible to an openness to alterity” (Goffey, 2016). Guattari wrote:
A fixed transference, a rigid mechanism, like the relationship of nurses and patients with the doctor, an obligatory, predetermined, ‘territorialised’ transference onto a particular role or stereotype, is worse than a resistance to analysis: it is a way of interiorizing bourgeois repression by the repetitive, archaic, and artificial re-emergence of the phenomena of caste, with all the spell-binding and reactionary group phantasies they bring in their train. (Guattari, 1972, as cited in Goffey, 2016)
By radically disrupting the hierarchical modes of interaction common within institutional settings (and reflective of hierarchical structures beyond the institution), transversality aimed to shift the subjective and relational experiences of the institution in a way that would “facilitate precisely the kind of movement vis-à-vis the unconscious that the transference is thought to accomplish” (Goffey, 2016). In changing the “modeling clay” of analysis from the stuff of the oneto-one encounter in the consultation room towards the “institutional matter that is generated through the entangling of workshops, meetings, everyday life in the dining rooms, cultural life, sports, games,” transversality
“generates possibilities of affective opening” for the collective (Goffey, 2016). Although one might argue that contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved from the fixed, rigid transference Guattari describes to one that is more dynamic, it seems to me that transference often continues to be discussed and practiced in a way that obfuscates the actuality of the power differentials that may exist between therapist and patient, based in the structural and material realm, and hides behind notions of fantasy, based in the symbolic realm.
When I think about community psychoanalysis within the sociopolitical context of the community where I, a white woman, currently practice in Brooklyn— once Lenapehoking, or the Land of the Lenape, then a historically Black, working class neighborhood—the need for an “openness to alterity” and relinquishment of role on the part of the white analyst seems especially relevant, as it is impossible to disentangle the power held by the position of analyst from the power held by the position of white settler, colonizer, and gentrifier.5 In her writing on cross-racial analysis, Lara Sheehi (2020) discusses the ideological misattunements of psychoanalysis, brought about by a white innocence that hides in the symbolic. When the colonizer occupies the position of analyst and the colonized occupies the position of patient, enactments are not ghosts of the past, but current realities, “catapulting the white analyst into the real” (L. Sheehi, 2020). Writing in the context of occupied Palestine, Stephen Sheehi (2018) discusses the harm (re)produced by nonviolent dialogue initiatives between Palestinians and Israelis that “aim to naturalize ‘coexistence’ without genuine restorative justice” that alters the material reality of the occupation (p.356). Although there is a uniqueness to the Palestinian context that I do not want to conflate with American racial dynamics in an oversimplified way, I believe in the US context, it is also only alongside genuine transformative justice, wherein systems of oppression are disrupted and material reparations actualized, that a community psychoanalysis can act in integrity. For without it, does community psychoanalysis not become another form of normalization, the antithesis of the core of psychoanalysis?
Transformative Justice and Community Psychoanalysis
It seems that the framework of transformative justice, not only as a dialogic practice but as a political practice that aims to redress systems of oppression and dispossession, might have something to offer the concept of community psychoanalysis. Similar to Guattari’s transversality, transformative justice frameworks rely on non-hierarchical approaches to personal, institutional, and societal change as the means and the end. In the same way that the transformational power of a patient’s transference to their therapist occurs when the patient experiences a relational dynamic that does not perfectly map onto their repetition compulsion, but is something anew, might transformative justice act on an institutional level so that a person or group of people might experience the institution anew, in a way transformed? And could this lead to psychic, institutional, and eventually societal restructuring?
Maria Hantzopoulos (2015) writes about the New York City high school Humanities Prep’s Fairness Committee, which
5. As I write this, I am aware that by suggesting these questions have to be interrogated to define and discern community psychoanalysis, it perhaps demonstrates the ways I continue to carry the white fantasy that structural power dynamics are somehow less palpable in the consultation room than “out in the community.” As if the consultation room exists outside of the community.
is a structure to which any member of the community can bring any other member of the community to discuss a concern about how the former acted in a way that was misaligned with the collaboratively iterated and reiterated values of the school (e.g., mutual respect, cooperation, empathy) and to repair the rupture. This means that a student can bring their principal to the Fairness Committee, a concept that challenges long-held power structures of the institution. The Fairness Committee is tasked with entering the space without a preconceived outcome in mind, asking lots of open-ended questions, and listening deeply to every person involved (Hantzopoulos, 2015), which are also values of psychoanalysis. Eventually, the Committee works to arrive at a consensus about what needs to take place in order to “restore” what was broken. An important point to mention here is that members of the Fairness Committee can equally be brought to the Fairness Committee, so there is no fixed role, and again, everyone is susceptible to the process. I believe Guattari might argue that the experience for all stakeholders involved in this encounter would indeed “generate possibilities of affective opening” by virtue of its radical difference in terms of non-hierarchical, dynamic roles and its departure from traditionally punitive responses to community harm.
Although I never worked at a school with a Fairness Committee, I did start a Peer Mediation Club—another transformative justice practice—in the middle school I worked at in the Bronx. Every semester, I would train a group of students in deep listening, information-gathering, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills. When a conflict would arise within the school community, I would supervise these students as they helped their peers repair their relationships after rupture. There were multiple levels through which peer mediation disrupted the hierarchical norms of the institution. Similar to Humanities Prep’s Fairness Committee model, the idea was that anyone in our school community could bring anyone else to a mediation. Mediations between students and teachers6 were amazing to witness, as the newness of the disrupted hierarchy caused both student and teacher to listen and respond to one another in ways that impacted them as individuals, in relation to one another, and in relation to the institution. Another way peer mediation disrupted the hierarchical norms and expectations was through the allowing of students who were labeled “at-risk,” “disturbed,” “defiant,” to become mediators. Unsurprisingly, these students were generally the best mediators on
6. Mediation is dependent on all parties agreeing to the process. Therefore, in actuality, only a handful of teachers were open to participation. Adult resistance to these processes is beyond the scope of this essay but is unsurprising and likely related to the analyst’s grip on the current frame. the team. I believe the trust and faith placed on them through the institutional structure of Peer Mediation Club gave them permission to access deep wisdom, empathy, and tenderness that the labels they usually carried overshadowed and repressed. Moreover, for the students in the conflict, there was something transformative about being helped by students normally labeled “helpless.” I like to believe the ripple effects of these practices continue to affect those who participated. A fractal, perhaps.
Within the past decade, transformative justice practices have been co-opted by the state, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, and even corporate consultants to a concerning degree. As mentioned above, there is a way in which these practices—such as community-building, teaching tolerance, and mediation—can have an insidious effect; when they are bewedded to mainstream liberal politics and divorced from a commitment to real material and structural change, they can actually help to maintain the status quo and to deflate radical social movements. This needs to be consistently monitored and interrogated. Part of what I believe psychoanalysis can offer transformative justice models, as I have seen them practiced, is the release of the idolized expectation that individuals and institutions can ever be fully transparent or integrous, as that assumes full consciousness (Padrón, 2019) and will lead to disillusionment when unachieved. For the institution to be open to alterity requires an ongoing admission of imperfection and not-knowing, as without this, transformative justice practices can become another congealed perpetuator of the status quo. However, given that there is some frustration at the lack of tangible practices that have operationalized the ideas of institutional psychotherapy, I hope these vignettes illustrate the potential of how transformative justice could be used by community psychoanalysis as part of an emergent strategy towards structural and material change.
Afterthoughts
I keep coming back to this idea that in a community psychoanalysis, we are all the analyst and analysand, navigating transferences that are informed by both fantasy and actuality. However, without the frame of the consultation room, I continue to grapple with what is lost if fantasy is conquered by actuality and no one is responsible for protecting the liberational aspects of it. When is actuality so pervasive and oppressive that we cannot collectively use the “freedom of fantasy” to imagine and manifest an alternative, if that is indeed the goal of community psychoanalysis? Again, maybe the goal is instead to make “the cure” of a more traditional analysis accessible to more folks, while other frameworks are used for institutional, community, and societal healing, justice, and reparation. But I am more excited by the possibility of how community psychoanalysis, perhaps with the help of transformative justice, can become a fractal for the large-scale redistribution of power and justice. z
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