Division Review

DIVISION A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

NO.29 SUMMER 2023

R E M I N I S C E N C E THE LAWSUIT: | WELCH

COMMENTARY CLASS NOTES | TICINETO CLOUGH IN DEFENSE OF PSYCHOSIS | TERRY

FORUM: PSYCHOANALYSIS, R ACISM AND THE SOCIAL CAN WE “TREAT” RACISM? | BOTTICELLI COUNTER-HEGEMONIC PRACTICE | CARO HOLLANDER TELEPSYCHOANALYSIS | MERSON AN ODE TO AMBIVALENCE | BLOCH

MAUL, CURATOR

H A N D W R I T I N G

Official publication of Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division 39, American Psychological Association

GUEST EDITOR

Matthew Oyer EDITOR

Loren Dent

CONTENTS

SENIOR EDITORS

Steven David Axelrod, J. Todd Dean, William Fried, William MacGillivray, Marian Margulies, Bettina Mathes, Manya Steinkoler CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, Ricardo Ainslie, Christina Biedermann, Chris Bonovitz, Steven Botticelli, Ghislaine Boulanger, Patricia Gherovici, Peter Goldberg, Adrienne Harris, Elliott Jurist, Jane Kupersmidt, Paola Mieli, Donald Moss, Ronald Naso, Donna Orange, Robert Prince, Allan Schore, Robert Stolorow, Nina Thomas, Usha Tummala, Jamieson Webster, Lynne Zeavin

PHOTOGRAPHY 3

Tim Maul

Is handwriting analysis still a thing?

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Bryant Welch

The Lawsuit: Then, Now, and in the Future

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Anna Fishzon

FOUNDING EDITOR

David Lichtenstein

COMMENTARY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Curated by Tim Maul

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Patricia Ticineto Clough

Class Notes

16

Kendra Terry

In Defense of Psychosis

IMAGES EDITOR

Tim Maul

DESIGN BY

Hannah Alderfer, HHA design, NYC

FORUM: PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACISM AND THE SOCIAL 19

Steven Botticelli

Can We “Treat” Racism in our Clinical Practices?

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Nancy Caro Hollander

Psychoanalysis as Counter-hegemonic Practice

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Molly Merson

Finding Intimacy, the Unconscious, and Embodied Place

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Ofra Bloch

in the ‘Limbo-space’ of Telepsychoanalysis An Ode To Ambivalence: Reflections of a

Documentary Filmmaker

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Notes on Contributors

DIVISION | REVIEW a quarterly psychoanalytic forum published by the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, 2615 Amesbury Road, Winston-Salem, NC 27103.

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ISSN 2166-3653 2

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Binka Popov (circa 1969) was a high school acquaintance.

IS HANDWRITING ANALYSIS STILL A THING? Is handwriting analysis still a thing? Is ‘penmanship’ a ‘lost art’?

I have long marveled at the beautiful cursive script found in Civil War letters and diaries featured on Antiques Road Show and on Ken Burns’s series. Earlier this year my lawyer in drafting my will took copious notes on a legal pad exactly like the one I am writing on now.

I recently signed the modest document with a provided blue pen which made a authoritative scratchy noise, an appreciation both my lawyer and I shared. He offered me the pen which I accepted- he had tons. Later that day I performed with one finger an elongated double squiggle across a screen to purchase the pharmaceuticals and sleep aids that assist me in managing suburban life.

For my final issue as Image Editor for DIVISION/Review, I requested from new friends, old friends, and some in absentia to handwrite and photograph a brief statement, notation, or arrangement of words (sample?) on paper for publication online. My intention was to transform the page as art context into a tabular bulletin board or scrapbook. Most everyone invited contributed even if several printed texts managed to sneak in. In writing the short credits I realize that their total word count may be longer than the works themselves-very Conceptual Art. Thank you all. Special acknowledgement goes to Hannah Alderfer whose aesthetics, patience and nimble design skills guaranteed that every issue of DIVISION/Review projected its own unique character and was always thrilling to behold.

Tim Maul 05/27/23 Mac Adams us an important figure in Narrative and Installation Art whose last exhibition was at gb agency in Paris.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was a novelist, artist, occultist and gun aficionado.

Gina Maree De Naia is an artist and musician living in Seoul South Korea.

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Jean Dupuy (1925-2021 ) was an artist and anagrammatist whose collective projects predate recent art world ‘Relational Aesthetics’ manifestations.

Rachel Jackson is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn.

Sidney Peterson Lemon is starting fourth grade in upstate New York.

Michael Maul (1953-2020) was one of the first individuals to be designated ‘autistic’. He was an active member of the ARI Workshop in Stamford Connecticut.

Catherine Morris is a poet and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Liverpool Hope University. Her most recent collaboration was with Tim Maul on ‘AFTERMATH Words and Pictures Exchanged between 07/2020-03/2023’ Spring Publications Janet Passehl is an artist and curator of the Lewitt Foundation.

Charlie Perez-Tiatenchi (@mxtrxpxl) is an artist and worker from New York City.

Local Plumber (reasonable).

Binka Popov (circa 1969) was a high school acquaintance.

Megan Shaughnessy is a visual artist and children’s book illustrator living in Connecticut. Meganshaughnessy.com Unknown (Humanities Department, School of Visual Arts).

Christian Xatrec is an artist, curator and Vice President of the Emily Harvey Foundation.

SUMMER 2023

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The Lawsuit: Then, Now, and in the Future

Bryant WELCH

Megan Shaughnessy is a visual artist and children’s book illustrator living in Connecticut. Meganshaughnessy.com

To: Arnold Zelig Schneider with gratitude, admiration, and love on the occasion of his 77th birthday On March 1, 1985, psychologists Arnie Schneider, Helen Desmond, Tony Bernay, and I filed a class action antitrust lawsuit against the American psychoanalytic Association, (“The American”) and affiliated groups. The lawsuit contended that the defendants’ refusal to let psychologists train in their institutes or to let their teachers teach in non-American institutes constituted a restraint of trade in violation of the United States federal antitrust laws. The lawsuit also named the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) for its refusal to allow psychologist institutes IPA membership in North America.

Few now doubt the significant impact that the lawsuit has had on the psychoanalytic enterprise in America. In fact, the impact has been so profound that understandably many of the younger psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic aspirants are surprised to learn about the nature of the psychoanalytic world pre-1985 in which a career in psychoanalysis was impossible for most non-medical mental

health professionals. Thus, I particularly appreciate being asked to write this reflective memoir on the lawsuit.

I would be terribly remiss not to begin with a personal statement. I have said many times that for me, personally, the lawsuit has been the gift that keeps on giving. Friendships have been the most important part of my life, and lifelong friendships with Arnie Schneider and Helen Desmond are at the very core of the bounty that the lawsuit has given me personally. I would also be remiss not to mention Nathan Stockhamer, then the clinical director at the William Alanson White Institute, who more than anyone helped legitimatize my seemingly very radical idea of using litigation to overcome the restrictive policies of the medical-psychoanalytic establishment.

Nat passed away in 2019 at the age of 91.

I consider the thirty-five-year- long deeply personal relationship I had with this loving and urbane man to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. I also want to acknowledge Clifford Stromberg who was the attorney in the lawsuit and who graciously put up with my meddling in it. Unfortunately, Toni Bernay passed away several years ago. I remember Tony both for her elegance and her 4

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political sophistication. Equally moving for me, in this reminiscence are the memories of the hundreds of psychologists I spoke to in speeches or personal communications during that time.

But why did we need a lawsuit? The short answer was that both clinical psychology and social work were rapidly growing and assuming primary responsibility for psychotherapy in America. Thus, the restrictive policies that kept us from being able to get advanced training in psychoanalysis were a tragic bottleneck wasting the clear talent that these young mental health professionals could bring to bear on human suffering and on the evolution of psychoanalysis itself.

For years and years there was talk that the American was going to change its restrictive policies, but hopes were repeatedly dashed. In 1982 when such optimism had been particularly high, the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, Melvin Sabshin, addressed the governance of the American and cautioned the members to “stay close to their medical roots.”

The reports from that meeting indicated that Sabshin’s comments effectively killed any chance of reform.

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Sabshin’s comments were really part of a broader assault from organized medicine against psychologists and other non-medical groups to make sure that the looming cost containment movement in American healthcare beginning in the early 1980’s was felt less heavily by the medical groups themselves and more by other health care providers.

Within psychoanalysis there was, of course, a lengthy history to the issue of training non-MDs to practice psychoanalysis. Freud himself wrote a famous article in which he supported such training (Freud, S. 1959). But in America, psychoanalysis was largely the domain of organized medicine. This history has been ably described by Robert Wallerstein in his book The Question of Lay Analysis (Wallerstein, 1998).

At the time of the lawsuit Dr. Wallerstein was the President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Since I had sued the IPA as one of the defendants in the lawsuit, it was in that adversarial context Bob, and I met. Subsequently, during the pendency of the lawsuit we had two or three personal lengthy phone calls, and I believe both felt the other was dealing with the matter in good faith. Thus, twenty-five years later when I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, Bob and I became regular lunch companions. Poignantly during the last two years of Bob’s life after he lost his much beloved wife, Judith Wallerstein, I was close witness to this gracious man’s struggle with old age in which he devoted himself to his love for psychoanalysis and was lovingly cared for by his daughter, Amy, in whose arms he literally died at the age of 93.

Bob and I shared a love of psychoanalytic gossip and had many wonderful laughs at the foibles of the human mind especially as it functions in the chaos of organizational disagreement. We also loved comparing notes on the lawsuit as it played out in each of our eyes.

So, for those of you who are interested in a description of the history of the issue of lay analysis and the early stages of the lawsuit I can only say that as I read Bob’s depiction of the events that he and I lived through, even as adversaries, my admiration for this man’s attempt at an objective recording of historical events is enormous. There were certainly a few interpretations of events that I felt were incorrect, most notably settlement discussions, but I am sure I could never have approached Bob’s evenhandedness in so describing an adversarial process in which he had played such an important role. It was against this historical context described by Wallerstein in 1982 that I, along with many of my psychology contemporaries, wanted to obtain psychoanalytic training. But we were blocked by the restrictive policies of the American.

Here, I was uncannily suited by background to lead the lawsuit effort and have

been grateful to the lawsuit because it seemed to give some purpose to my early life uncertainties. Some unique facts about my background are particularly germane to the lawsuit. Briefly, I grew up with two very, very loving and very, very traumatized parents. My home was always within one or two heartbeats from exploding and, periodically, it did erupt. In the early years my mother was clearly devoted to me, and I feel extremely fortunate for the tenderness between us. My father was a remarkably farsighted city manager. He was initiating environmental programs in the communities where we lived as far back as 1949. He was deservedly respected for the incredible integrity and devotion with which he went about his responsibilities towards his community. His marriage to my mother was probably one of the most tumultuous relationships I have ever experienced. My father withdrew into work and tennis and my mother into alcoholism that just destroyed any semblance of family that did exist.

There were two effects on me that are especially relevant to the lawsuit. First, I had a remarkably close access to the workings of government from as far back as I can remember. The City Hall that most people are taught is something they could not fight, was a frequent sanctuary to me to get away from my parents’ fighting. I literally studied and escaped to City Hall, taking refuge in my father’s office. I always felt that the chief of police in our community was the equivalent of a benign uncle or grandfather. Years later I would feel very comfortable in courtrooms, legislative bodies, and even the White House.

I simply felt I had a right to be there, and I felt I understood lawyers, elected officials, and the government.

But the second effect of my earlier years was the horrific suffering I witnessed in both of my loving parents. It, of course, left me personally with feelings of deep insecurity that drove me towards compensatory achievements like getting into the best schools, but it also left me pining for repair both externally and internally. At first, I looked to social justice as a solution, planning a career in law and politics. I studied government at Harvard, worked on Capitol Hill for my Congressman, and was President of the Harvard Debate Council. Amidst these activities I did find time to be depressed and increasingly dissociated.

Doubling down on my early strategies, I decided the best treatment for all of this, was of course, to enter Harvard Law School.

My political and debate activity combined with my inner suffering had taken its toll on my grades in college and left me doubting my intellectual ability. I decided that in my first year of law school I would test myself in that arena, and I did well. This had the obvious effect of clarifying that my underlying 5

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fears and uncertainty were not amenable to intellectual solution. The problem was elsewhere. I could not work or “achieve” my way to feeling better.

It was by then 1970, the actual peak of “the Sixties”. I took a year off from law school, taught debate at Emerson College in Boston and for the first time went into psychotherapy. I had sought out therapy as an undergraduate at the Harvard Health Services with the primary complaint that I “could not feel anything.” I was discouraged from returning (at least as I remember it.) The other thing I did, that seems very significant to me now, is that I began to read in the new wave of Eastern/ spiritual growth authors, like Alan Watts. I went to a meditation retreat with Philip Kapleau, the first ordained American Zen priest trained in Japan and author of Three Pillars of Zen (Anchor, updated, 1989).

The image I had of Kapleau from those few days stayed with me through the decades as the most mature and disciplined of the older male role models I was seeking at the time.

At this stage of my life, I believe my assessment of Kapleau was correct, and I credit myself for preserving a deep sense of what he had achieved in his own mental/spiritual development. Today, Tibetan Buddhism feels like every bit, if not more, of a beneficial therapeutic factor in my life even than psychoanalysis. I was also heavily influenced as were many of many peers by RD Laiing’s work especially in The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience. The idea that “reality” was a politically negotiated thing profoundly shocked me much as did Roy Schafer’s article “The Psychoanalytic View of Reality.”

Suffice it to say, by this time, I was not turning into good corporate law material.

Clinical psychology was an obvious landing spot. I finished law school, taking as many courses as I could in psychology since I had no undergraduate major in it. As soon as I made that transition in the course work, the most striking change to me was that my relationships became much, much richer as I found people with more sensitivity and psychological mindedness. That change has been a cornerstone of my deep love for psychologists and mental health professionals throughout my adult life. There were three people who in different ways were profoundly helpful to me. On the Harvard Law faculty, Alan Stone and Larry Tribe, at a time I thought I was certainly insane for making the career change I did, were very supportive and Sherry Turkle, who as a graduate student TA in psychology at Harvard at the time, was extremely kind to me transitioning to the new world of psychology colleagues I was entering.

I went to the Ph.D. clinical psychology program at UNC Chapel Hill and simply poured myself into psychotherapy. I took on every training opportunity I could for clinical

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work and did the minimum I had to for the research part of my program. I was especially drawn to the object relations literature and read everything I could in the still new object relations field. Buddhism was ebbed out of my awareness by psychoanalysis.

But there I was blocked. And that became the rub that was to lead to the lawsuit.

The limitations on psychologists practicing in the late 1970’s went beyond the restrictions on psychoanalytic training. I opened a private practice for psychology in Chapel Hill, but we could not access insurance coverage like our competitors, the psychiatrists. Using my somewhat precocious experience in politics and grassroots organizing, I launched a rather ragamuffin group of psychologists and took our case to the North Carolina General Assembly to get what was then known as a “freedom of choice” bill, meaning that insureds were allowed to use their mental health insurance benefits with a psychologist if they so chose. I remember one of the psychologists at the time saying to me with both shock and gratitude that she had never been on a winning side before.

Psychologists’ income tripled overnight, and they were grateful. I was elected president of the state psychological association at the age of 31 and turned it into an effective lobbying force in the state, which it still is today.

These efforts came to the attention of the APA, and I was nominated for a spot on the ballot for the APA Board of Professional Affairs, the body most responsible for professional issues in the APA. I campaigned vigorously for the position against two more senior members of the APA and won. The upset nature of the election captured the attention of the APA political figures enabling me to move rapidly into the inner sanctum of the APA governance.

There were two things I wanted to accomplish. The first was the lawsuit to open up psychoanalytic training for psychologists.

The second was to create an effective advocacy office for psychology practitioners who I felt had been very poorly represented by the APA’s advocacy efforts that were largely in the service of academic and scientific issues. The second led to the APA Practice Directorate and a series of successful ventures for psychology, most dramatically recognition for psychology in Medicare.

I should probably say just a bit about my own psychoanalysis here. Overall, I did something like two thousand hours of psychoanalysis with four different analysts, all of whom, to this day, I like very much. The analyses were extremely helpful in the work I undertook. Both of the objectives I had in going to the APA to work were grandiose. I don’t think I was ever afraid of failing, although I certainly knew we could. But the sheer weight of the grandiosity was something

else. One day on the couch, I associated to a barn-like structure still under construction and held up by a few beams. When I continued on, my analyst at the time, Charles Keith of Duke, stopped me and said he noticed I seemed to have run away from the association to the barn-like structure. When I returned to it, what emerged was the wish to use my political skills to build a national advocacy structure for psychology, something that with some luck and my political skills, I was certainly in a position to do. To the best of my knowledge the structure that did come from that uncovering by Dr. Keith, the Practice Directorate of the APA, led to the explosion of victories for psychology in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the unprecedented expansion of psychotherapy and psychological care that resulted. It was a profound personal liberation that I do believe made me a much more effective advocate. I was especially proud of the work I did for gay rights during this period, something I could not have done had analysis not freed me to trust my own judgement that Socarides’ (1989), work, for example, did not explain the gay men I was working with in therapy at the time. It seemed to me psychoanalytic theory was being used to rationalize a social prejudice.

The actual lawsuit really began when I met Stockhamer at an APA Convention in 1983.

We met for a lunch that lasted for five hours.

The discussion continued and only gathered steam after that meeting. I outlined my plan for the lawsuit and, I am quite sure, Nat was carefully assessing me. It was Nat more than anyone who convinced the small group of psychologists mostly in New York, who had been able to get psychoanalytic training and who had just formed Division 39 in the APA, that I was a stable person with a good idea. (For decades after I would taunt and tease him how badly I had fooled him on the former.)

There were several things that needed to be done if the lawsuit was to become a reality.

I had to check my reasoning about my legal theory to make sure it was correct. We had to find an attorney to actually take the case.

We had to find plaintiffs who were representative of the class of psychologists we were saying were the victims of the anti-trust violations. (Thus, the phrase “class action.”) To establish a class action suit, we had to secure broad support in the field for the effort. Had there been any significant opposition from within psychology we would have a very hard time having the class certified and the lawsuit would have lost all its power to make the medical analysts change their actual policies.

Then, of course, there was the matter of money for attorney fees, court costs, and travel.

Here my earlier background with the law was especially helpful. I did know anti-trust law a bit, but I also knew that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing in launching a 6

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venture of this nature. Fortunately, I knew some very bright people who really quite familiar with the legal areas. I could simply call a few dozen of the friends I had made along what felt to me to be a strange professional odyssey, off of whom to bounce my thinking. It was extraordinarily helpful. Most were Harvard or Yale Law School graduates and a large percentage of them had made the law review at these prestigious law schools. Joel Perwin had been my college debate partner and later served as the staff director for the Senate Judiciary committee. He introduced me to Clifford Stromberg who was a remarkably quick study in understanding the legal argument I was proposing. Stockhamer and I met with Cliff in DC one wintery day, and we knew we had found our legal representation.

With a respected law firm behind us, we now had to build support within the psychology community. Stockhamer was the clinical director of the William Alanson White Institute and was widely respected in New York. He convinced the still new Division of Psychoanalysis to put the issue on the Board Agenda and for several such meetings we discussed the matter. There was a highly diverse group of people on the Board all of whom, understandably, wanted their own concerns addressed. In retrospect I admire these people greatly. The law was foreign to their way of thinking, and I was a thirty-five-year-old from North Carolina.

At the same time, the people most affected by the proposal, young psychologists awaiting training were scattered in urban areas around the country. Thus, I spent several months traveling to speak with groups of varying size about the lawsuit, explaining why it could work and what the steps were.

I think it is fair to say the lawsuit captured people’s imagination and these forays were a wonderful tonic for me. The connections I made were to some of the kindest and brightest young professionals anywhere.

And we shared a very similar passion and hopefulness for psychoanalysis. While I did the speaking, Stockhamer was almost always there, meeting me at the airports, going to the presentations, and offering staunch support. I especially remember presentations in Boston at the “EtherDome” (the building in which the efficacy of ether as a general anesthetic was first demonstrated) and the Harvard Faculty Club, in San Diego at the Hotel Coronado, in Chicago on one day when the windchill factor hit 78 degrees below zero, and at countless state associations, division meetings, and other psychological forums. Robert Pear of the New York Times wrote an article about the lawsuit, and it hit the mass media.

As the word of the proposed lawsuit spread, people responded to our need for psychologists to come forward and serve as

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“class representatives.” They would serve as representative of the experience psychologists were having under the restrictive policies of APsA. I had known Toni Bernay from the APA governance and she and I were both obvious choices as class representatives. But Arnie Schneider and Helen Desmond were not psychology politicos. Instead, they were the very best that psychology had to offer in terms of psychoanalytic skill and caregiving qualities. One of the more comical aspects of the lawsuit from my perspective was that within a very few years of its settlement, Helen was elected president of her institute. For Arnie, it was different. Arnie was at Menninger’s and after the lawsuit was filed several members of the psychology leadership at Menninger’s shunned him, a

clinical psychology community for the lawsuit. There was just a small matter of money to be resolved. When Wallerstein and I met decades after the lawsuit, he told me that the American had heard that I had been given a million dollars by the APA to fund the lawsuit. This was one of those apocryphal stories that emerge from the fog of war. APA contributed nothing to the lawsuit.

Of course, I was aware of the financial issue from the beginning. I knew it could be “expensive,” even thinking the price tag might go as high as fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars. Undaunted, I reasoned we could surely find fifty to seventy-five people who cared enough about the issue to donate a thousand dollars to it and the cost would not be a problem. Also, it should be noted

The lawyers believed in the case, and we simply fought on.

We filed the lawsuit on March 1, 1985, in the Southern District of New York. We drew a very good judge, Jack Weinstein, who was well respected in legal and anti-trust circles. The defendants filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit arguing that this was a matter of academic freedom and not financial motivation. Fortunately, by this time, we had an enormous amount of information culled from the APsA’s own documents in which they talked about the “unwanted economic competition” that would result were they to let other qualified mental health professionals be trained in the field of psychoanalysis.

Judge Weinstein, in his opinion, rejecting the defendants’ argument that this was

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development that to this day is hard for me to accept. Despite this, Arnie went on to train at the Freudian Society in DC and had a very successful practice in the Tampa area. He has been one of my most trusted friends now for over forty years. Helen has now retired from a distinguished psychoanalytic career and has devoted herself to a long-neglected talent as a painter in Los Angeles.

We now had the legal analysis, the attorneys, the plaintiffs, and strong support in the

that the Division 39 Board voted to tax its membership $15 apiece for a couple of years to raise several thousand dollars towards lawsuit expenses.

I was a little off in my estimate. By the time the lawsuit settled in 1988, we had spent over six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Stromberg never billed us and seemed as committed to the matter as we were.

Fortunately, rumors swirled that we were very well-heeled, and money was never a problem.

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about academic freedom, said that the plaintiffs had already shown “more than a hint of economic motive” on the part of the defendants. With those words we knew our lawsuit would become a matter of grave concern to the defendants. If they were motivated by economic considerations as their own documents said, they were in violation of the antitrust laws.

Throughout this time each side was taking depositions of key witnesses on the other

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side. I waited outside the room for Arnie Schneider to finish his deposition and will always remember Arnie coming out shaking his head as if he had water in his ears from swimming. He was quite stunned for a few days but, fortunately, bounced back rather quickly.

Of greater significance for the progression of the lawsuit, was that some of the officials of the American Psychoanalytic openly admitted that economic motivations played a role in the deliberations about whether to open training. Homer Curtis, then the chair of the

Probably the most dramatic event during my seven days of deposition occurred in the last day, when I was being questioned by the attorney for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Mark Bunim. During his questioning, Bunim suggested that because the plaintiffs were contending, we were qualified to be psychoanalytic candidates that we would be obliged to certify our mental health by entitling the defendants to access our personal psychoanalytic records. The room fell silent at the suggestion. However, I was well aware

day in court. The remaining question was whether the court would “certify the class,” that is, say that we really were representing the large class of mental health professionals who had been similarly aggrieved by the policies of the defendants. This would make the defendants liable for the vast economic damages that the entire class had suffered. If that happened the chances of the American changing its policies, which is what we were after, were much greater. Stromberg wrote a strong brief explaining why we were repre-

Catherine Morris is a poet and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Liverpool Hope University.

American’s Board of Professional Issues was especially honest about this in his deposition.

Our case grew stronger.

There is no question but that the process of a deposition is unpleasant, to say the least.

Personally, I was deposed for seven days on three different occasions. Depositions are not places where deponents can win their case.

They can lose it, however. During the first three days the American was represented by a prominent New York attorney, Lew Kaplan, who later went on to become a federal judge in New York. He was in the news most recently for presiding over Donald Trump’s civil rape case. Kaplan was quite aggressive, challenging, and generally unpleasant to deal with. I do remember later telling Stockhamer that my association to the deposition experience was like being told I had to go into a room with a giant wet gorilla. My job was to hold on to the gorilla without being thrown off for three days, and, if I could do so, I would win.

I did not come out of the encounter with Kaplan feeling terribly victorious or effective.

But neither did I lose. Eventually the American changed attorneys and hired Joel Klein whom I had known slightly at Harvard Law School where he was highly respected. Joel went on to become the chancellor of the New York City school system and played other high-profile roles in the legal community after the lawsuit.

that in addition to the legal dimensions of the lawsuit there was also a public relations dimension. I was quite opportunistically cognizant that Bunim’s transparent attempt to threaten this exposure would backfire with many members of the American and would only heighten support for the plaintiffs. The words were no sooner out of Bunim’s mouth than I turned to the stenographer to make sure that she had the assertions on the written transcript of the deposition. She assured me she had.

Fred Pine was sitting in the waiting room and was scheduled to do the next deposition.

When he heard about the Bunim statements he was appalled as were many members of the American. When the American wrote to their members to explain the matter, then-president Richard Simons said we had accused Joel Klein of making the comments.

He quoted something Klein did say about the matter but that was different from Bunim’s statement and was not nearly so offensive.

This only further complicated the situation and when it was clarified that we had correctly identified Bunim as the culprit, trust in the American by its members was further eroded.

At this point the lawsuit was reaching a critical issue. With Judge Weinstein’s earlier ruling that we had shown economic motive on the part of the American it was clear that the four plaintiffs would probably have our 8

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sentative of this larger class, and we awaited Joel Klein’s reply.

I was stunned when I got it. Klein argued that the American did not discriminate against other mental health professionals and in fact had been training them all along. He cited numbers drawn from just the previous year in which the American had been admitting non physician mental health professionals on a widescale basis. Almost forty percent of them were psychologists and social workers. This was, of course, two years after we had filed the lawsuit and was completely at odds with the historical reality of the American’s refusal to train psychologists. For about thirty minutes I was incensed at the audacity I attributed to the brief and its historical revisionism.

I sat at my desk in my office at the APA building and, as I cooled off, I suddenly realized that this was a golden opportunity I had not been anticipating. All along the American had asserted it would never surrender its right to set its own training standards. This was in effect a face-saving way out in which the American could maintain their principles. I called Stromberg and said that if the American claimed they were already training us to the tune of almost forty percent of their candidates, that all they had to do was commit not to back off from that policy and we could have the framework for

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a settlement. They had been denying that they ever restricted their teachers, so they would simply have to sign a binding agreement to that effect. Based on my discussions with Wallerstein, I knew the members of the International Psychoanalytic Association would gladly drop their exclusion of psychologist institutes in America. Thus, the three prongs of the restraints we were objecting to would be resolved. Psychologists and social workers could either train in the American Institutes, or we would have enough people so trained as potential teachers that they could set up their own institutes. In psychology, there was a mix of opinions on which way would be preferable, and I myself was uncertain about it.

We spoke with Joel Klein, and I think it fair to say both sides felt it was an opening to a possible resolution. There was of course the financial issue. We had asked for damages and legal fees. However, the reality was we were never concerned with the damages and in fact had promised several psychologists with close ties to the American that we were not seeking to cripple the American financially. We quickly agreed in principle that the American would pay our legal fees which totaled about $650,000 at the time, and we would forego damages. I was, of course, also aware that this would greatly appeal to the American’s insurance carrier who could then be expected to add pressure to the American to settle the matter. The international quickly agreed to the structure of the proposal and agreed that they would admit psychology institutes to the IPA. The only glitch was the American’s abhorrence of the idea that they should agree to any “quota” in their settlement. And, of course, their assertion that they were training nearly forty percent non-physician candidates was essential to the substance of the settlement.

So, we went back and forth to come up with language that could resolve their concern but also alleviate our concern that they would simply back off from their representations in the brief. We arrived at some language that I think did satisfy both concerns which was that the American would not “back off ” from their-then professed training of nonMD mental health professionals. Here too, it seemed to me at the time that if we could get a significant number of people trained so that we could set up qualified institutes of our own with credibly trained psychoanalysts, it really didn’t matter what the American did after a few years. Of course, as it turned out the American is now heavily integrated with psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family counselors.

An unexpected problem for me came up in relation to the International Psychoanalytic Association. Wallerstein ‘s term of office was up, and he was replaced by Joseph Sandler

of the Hampstead Clinic. I had read several articles by Sandler and was impressed by the eloquence and sensitivity they seemed to reflect. When I met him in person to discuss implementing the lawsuit settlement, I did not find him that way. Stockhamer, Jay Kwawer of the William Alanson White and I spent a day or two trying to iron out these difficulties with Sandler and officers from the IPA in some of the more acrimonious meetings of the entire lawsuit era.

But with the main issue of training now resolved, I was becoming preoccupied with psychology’s Medicare campaign in the late 80s, the CAPP V Rank hospital practice lawsuit in California, and the impending push for National Health insurance that was taking shape at that time. As a result, Helen Desmond and Arnie Schneider took over the interactions with the International. While today I think those problems are largely resolved they did not get resolved without a great deal of inconvenience and organizational stress for the psychology institutes in their application process to the IPA. What effect has the lawsuit had?

It is hard to believe it has now been thirty-five years since the settlement of the lawsuit. What did it all mean? Whatever our foibles, there is no question it was also a genuinely idealistic initiative. In 2003 the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted an issue to the lawsuit. In the lead article, Richard Simons who had been the president of the American at the time of the lawsuit, opened with the following: “On March 1,1985 an event occurred that would change the American forever.” I do not think anyone could disagree with this statement.

At the most obvious level, the psychoanalytic enterprise in America in all aspects is now heavily driven by psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family therapists. But I also believe this change, in turn, has come with other far more important changes.

For its adherents, psychoanalysis is Western culture’s deepest attempt to explore and understand the human mind. Most of us would quickly agree that the subject matter is complex and daunting. However, if we add to that recognition the fact that every mind we study is different from every other mind and, even more, that every mind we study is in a constant state of flux (including the one we ourselves use to study the patient’s unique and ever-changing mind,) the only thing we can really say with any certainty is that we truly know very, very little about what we are up against. With this recognition, to suggest that any one form of training in the human experience, even one as impressive as medical training, should be given sole access to participation in that enterprise is silly.

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And with such presumptuousness, can come an unfortunate arrogance. I would certainly not claim that the lawsuit has eradicated the seductive capacity of psychoanalysis to bestow a mantle of narcissistic superiority and omnipotence to those trained in it, be they physicians, psychologists, social workers, or marriage and family therapists. I also worry, as a result, that many, if not most of us, have been analyzed by someone who was trained in a culture of specialness and superiority.

Hopefully, as the field grows more diverse, however, both in terms of backgrounds and ideas, the complexity becomes so great as to challenge the spurious certainty of even the most narcissistic among us. As we open our awareness to issues of gender fluidity, gender equality, our bizarre attempts to differentiate ourselves based on our skin color, the psychological implications of social injustice, and so many more things that now are slowly gaining access to psychoanalytic inquiry, we must admit to our most profound ignorance. And with the recognition of that profound ignorance comes a humility and a more genuine ability to form a truly equal partnership with our patients. In so doing, hopefully, we will be able to transcend our rather unfortunate history of not tolerating differences of opinion within the field of psychoanalysis.

Substantively, in addition to the evolution of our understanding of social justice, I believe the integration of Eastern and Western thought is one of the most hopeful frontiers facing psychoanalysis. Freud’s use of free association, connecting one thought with another and exploring the unconscious processes that drive these connections has been extremely helpful to me personally, and I believe for most of us reading this paper. However, the Eastern contemplative tradition with its emphasis on the space between those thoughts provides a badly needed supplement to that process. It is in those spaces between the cognitive processes of free association where one connects with a vastness in which love, tranquility and an unending and inborn awe become manifest.

With the accessibility of those realizations, searching for meaning outside our own experience becomes tragic and neurotic striving.

We commit Adam’s original sin of leaving the Garden of Eden.

Again, I thank Bill Fried and the editors for granting me this forum and for the opportunity to reminisce about a wonderful period of my life.

.

REFERENCES Freud, S. (1959).The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,20():1-292 Kapleau, R. P. (2013). The three pillars of Zen. Anchor.

Schafer, R. (1970). The psychoanalytic vision of reality.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 51(3), 279–297.

Simons, R. C. (2003). The lawsuit revisited. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51, 247-271 Socarides, C. W. (1989). Homosexuality: Psychoanalytic Therapy.[1978]. Northvale (NJ): Jason Aronson.

Wallerstein, R. S. (1989). Lay analysis: Life inside the controversy. Analytic Press

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Class Notes

Patricia TICINETO CLOUGH

In 2020, as psychoanalytic institutes faced the challenges of a pandemic and anti-racist protest, mass violence and environmental crises, they responded in some cases by reconfiguring the curriculum for training candidates. Courses about the social were designed or if they existed became charged with taking up these challenges.1 It was at this time I was first invited to teach a course on the social. While I have been practicing as a psychoanalyst for the past 11 years, 7 in private practice, I was, for a much longer time, a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at CUNY. There, I taught undergraduate and graduate students in courses mostly focused on critical social theories influenced by psychoanalysis, including, feminist theories, queer theories, post-colonial theories, and critical media theories. My psychoanalytic colleagues imagined that this would make my teaching psychoanalytic candidates about the social a good fit. I wasn’t as sure.

Approaching teaching tensed between my academic experiences and psychoanalytic thinking and practice, I had questions both personal and institutional. Not only did I wonder what might be pedagogically unique about teaching a course about the social to candidates in psychoanalytic training. I also wondered what I might contribute, given my academic background, to what already was understood to be the social in the field of psychoanalysis. Embarked on this personal and institutional exploration has led me to the reflections I offer here about teaching psychoanalysis in cultural, political, and economic context, as well as about making the relationship of the psyche and the social the sole focus of a course especially in this period of social upheaval. The reflections address the questions raised for me as I began teaching in 2020 as well as draw on my impressions of candidates’ experience of my courses taught since then. I have fashioned a composite of experiences that focuses on ambivalence, anxiety, and confusion, as I perceived these arising in class discussions both for candidates and me. More generally my reflections are meant to contribute to a conversation in the field addressing psychoanalysts’ responses to the challenges presently posed by the volatile, unsettling, and, for many, devastating social, political, and economic environments in which we are living and in which candidates are being trained.

When in 2020, I began teaching candidates about the social, it was not only new to me; such courses were new additions to the curricula of some institutes as well. It was thought that the times made it necessary.

As analysts fled their offices and candidates their institutes to work with patients, teach-

Michael Maul (1953-2020) was one of the first individuals to be designated ‘autistic’.

ers, supervisors, and analysts—all remotely, the field of psychoanalysis was challenged by the ravages of the pandemic and a forced entanglement with newly experienced technological demands, at the same time it was confronted with systemic racism in the language of anti-Black racism and White privilege. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the fact of violence and death faced by populations marked differently by race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, indigeneity, ethnicity, nationality, age and ableness brought recognition and response from around the world pressuring psychoanalysts also to respond, to reflect and deliberate change.

Psychoanalysts already had become aware that “we” were not all enduring the pandemic equally and that there never have been equally shared effects of illness and environmental crises. There was a deepening sense of 10

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the failure of the State to distribute a measure of the social good across a national population. The growing divide in the electorate and the intensification of hatred toward immigrants and the undocumented among others made the aim of integrating different populations seem impossible to sustain, exacerbated by the ubiquity of social media and digital technologies and our dependency on them.

At psychoanalytic institutes, alongside efforts to respond to social issues, there arose challenges to the presumption of mutuality between patient and analyst, candidate and supervisor, teacher and candidate as bodies and spaces of working—the consulting rooms, the institutes for training, no longer could remain unmarked racially, ethnically, and more. There also was recognition that for some analysts, for the most part BIPOC analysts, this wasn’t anything new; for them, all this was already

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known and often as a life-time experience, albeit the newest occurrences of violence and violation no less profoundly troubling.

Even before I began teaching courses about the social, I had served on an institute’s diversity committee and the curriculum committee, as well as plan with another analyst a set of articles for discussion with candidates before their courses would begin in Fall 2020; this was meant to give space to reflect on the current moment. These and other events across many institutes brought me back to decades earlier when, in the early 21st century, I, as Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Graduate Center CUNY, was deeply involved in debates about introducing intersectionality and transnational or global studies into Women’s Studies. This meant rethinking theory, research methods, and pedagogy across curricula and programming, while addressing the changing condition of the State and governing institutions in the context of early 21st Century U.S. political, economic, and military dominance across the globe, all of which was making revision of Women’s Studies necessary.

In 2020, similar discussions began among analysts. Many zoom conferences, seminars and meetings were held and involved numbers of psychoanalysts eager to learn more and implement what they were learning at their various institutes. In those cases where this meant changing curricula, this usually became the work of curriculum committee members and their assignment of articles to various courses which were authored by psychoanalysts and broadly related to the intersection of the social and the psyche. Notable for me, however, was the way discussions among analysts contrasted with those in the academy. Discussions in the academy when aimed at changing curricula were carried on with students in mind but, for the most part, what was thought to be relevant for students, or what was felt they should know, was mostly the province of the faculty.

In discussions among analysts, while similarly giving curriculum committees, and/or faculty, the responsibly for what would be taught candidates, there also was a concern about, if not at times a resistance to the ways these articles might affect clinical work. Although differently conceived from various psychoanalytic perspectives, the relationship between patient and analyst usually is taken as the source of knowledge to be realized in the patients’ increased self-reflexivity and the alleviation of their symptoms. As often reiterated in discussions, knowledge has its meaning in its usefulness for the analyst’s treatment of patients—a matter of the clinical.

While I appreciated this emphasis on the patients, I also noticed that focusing on them too quickly could end discussions before further exploration of the challenges facing psychoanalytic training institutes and

psychoanalysis as an institution, challenges that also might take psychoanalysts beyond current thinking and practice to concerns already being raised in the field. I would come to understand more clearly that this move to the clinical would undermine what in theory was taken to be the extricable implication of the social and the psyche. This especially seemed the case when matters of the social taken up in analysts’ discussions focused on what was freshly understood as the systemic, the institutional, the environmental, and the technological. For me, these matters presented themselves as a challenge to teach what had not yet been thought about or thought enough about as matters of the social specifically in relationship to clinical practice.

Systemic racism for example certainly was seen in 2020 as a pressing social issue that analysts at first responded to as a structural matter in relationship to psychoanalytic institutes usually addressing the lack of diversity at levels of administration, as well as faculty, supervisors, analysts, and candidates.

What would become the hurried search for analysts who would add diversity to teaching and supervising not only further underscored the lack of diversity at institutes; but the focus on demographics often limited discussions, keeping them aways from relating diversity to the arrangements of power and authority organizing institutes. How to teach the social in terms of the systemic, the institutional, the technological and the environmental was not discussed and became a matter of curricula, adding articles to various courses that candidates would take during their years of training. Although adding articles to existing courses was a noteworthy undertaken, how a new course focused on the social was to be related to the added articles in existing courses was not considered. Much was left to the teachers who taught the articles that were now part of their course syllabi.

In many of these articles, matters of race, ethnicity, class, colonialism, and immigration already were the focus. Several articles drew on Frantz Fanon to address the protests at Charlottesville in 2017, and Donald Trump’s election as president and its aftermath (eg.

Frosh. 2013; Butler, 2019; Gonzalez, 2019; Hollander, 2017; Harris, 2019, 2019a; Layton, 2019). These articles among others were instructive of the ongoing concern with the social in the psychoanalytic field and many of them were assigned to various courses across institutes. Their authors often emphasized the way psychoanalysis can be made useful in addressing the social. (eg. Leary 2000; Gump 2000; White, 2002; Layton, 2004, 2006; Guralnik and Simeon, 2010; Stephens, 2014; Gaztambide, 2014; Holmes, 2016, Grand 2014, 2018), Although some articles did offer criticism of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic institutes, these criticisms more often 11

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were accompaniment to reported enactments between analyst and patient around traumatizing failures of recognition in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, immigration, race, or class.2 These articles usually were chosen as additions to syllabi, seemingly because of their inclusion of clinical applications that often described the resolution of enactments as both patient and analyst recognize the otherness of the other.

Although articles published before 2020 would take up some of the issues that would arise after 2020, Whiteness, immigration, and racism for example, at the time of their publication, these articles did not mobilize response across institutes; they indicated the need for change but did not demand it. In bold contrast were articles published after 2020 which did not focus on enactments between patient and analyst. Instead, the authors of these articles, more often practitioners of color and/ or immigrants, and those of diverse cultures, genders, and sexualities, focused on how racisms and/or the general lack of diversity had affected them during their development as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, during training, supervision and in their ongoing practices.3 The articles especially called into question the psychoanalytic understanding of development, its failure to understand different families than those of the often-universalized family of psychoanalytic theory with its insensitivity to cultural differences, the differences of these analysts and their patients—a more diverse population than most White analysts have been treating. Pointing to the limitations of psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as governing arrangements of institutes and training programs, the articles echoed the moral urgency and the political frustration of the protests occurring on the streets in many cities across the U.S. and elsewhere. They made change an imperative.

In the first syllabi I assembled for teaching about the social, I drew on these articles among others. I also added articles from authors outside the psychoanalytic field, often familiar to me as an academic. I hoped that I might encourage the candidates’ engagement with the issues being voiced inside and outside the psychoanalytic field, urging a reconsideration of the relationship of the psyche and the social. However, when teaching I found class discussions concerning. I wondered about the candidates; although I sensed some unease, I wasn’t exactly sure how candidates were feeling, thinking, imagining. I worried that the course might be too intellectual, without enough of a focus on case material. But, this didn’t seem altogether right or the actual source of unease arising in class discussions. What seemed more relevant was that the articles, in their offering criticisms of psychoanalysis and in the voice of those who felt aggrieved, left most candidates, even

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when in agreement with the criticisms, absent a certain way of feeling, the way an analyst might feel, when they feel they can be helpful to the patient.

Brought back to mind that starting very early in their training candidates bear responsibility for treating patients, assisting them in their psychic wellbeing, I became more sensitive to candidates’ need for support from their teachers, supervisors, and other candidates. Candidates seek assurance that they are becoming competent psychoanalysts and hopeful, if not anxious about their being evaluated as successfully progressing in their training. In the many articles about clinical work that candidates usually read what a competent analyst is, or even what a good enough one is, most often is presented as a matter of an analyst’s struggle in working with a patient and how the analyst eventually comes to engage the patient more productively and meaningfully, ‘deepening the analysis.’ The articles I chose for the course, although sometimes about the vicissitudes of treatments, more often were arguments for rethinking the relationship of the social and the psyche, accompanied by the authors’ revelations of being made invisible or silenced, shamed or excluded within the psychoanalytic field because of race, ethnicity, class, gender, or sexuality. While candidates often were inspired by these articles, especially for the personal address of their authors, they also felt disturbed, left uneasy about the implications for their clinical work.

Like the conversations occurring across institutes among psychoanalysts, the articles directed candidates to the demographics of identity, to individuals’ race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, or gender in the context of a publicly recognized oversized lack of diversity in the psychoanalytic field and institutes.

In class discussions, this often was at the heart of candidates’ uneasiness. Candidates were inclined to feel accused, shamed, and/or guilty as well as impotent in addressing the privilege of Whiteness and the lack of diversity in the field and in their institutes.4 Although most candidates arriving to my courses are White, as am I, it was not only White candidates who seemed to find class discussions personally challenging; more important was the challenge of the class composition of mostly white candidates with one, two or no candidates of color. For all candidates, the articles seemed to be directed as much at their identities as at their treatment of patients, asking them to address their privilege or their lack of it. In this sense, a course addressing the social for some felt like an imposition beyond the scope of training as a psychoanalyst; but for others, the course felt like a relief, addressing pertinent issues not usually addressed in other courses.5 Class discussions were layered over feelings about the differences of identities among can-

didates, and between candidates and teachers that at times would come uncomfortably, even angrily to the surface.

These feelings seemed to be intensified by the lack of integration of social matters throughout institute curriculums. Although instructors sometimes would teach an article relevant to the social, perhaps self-selected or suggested by a curriculum committee for their courses, they themselves often were not clear about how to integrate the material into the course and often did not do so. I surely have felt the weight of having to focus on the social when in other courses, the patients and analysts who are being discussed are drawn often from articles where the individual subject often is presented without an indication of the social, economic, cultural, or political contexts and where the subject matter is assumed to be simply a matter of being human.

For me, what is to be taken as essential to being human is the very question at the heart of a course about the social. This is because the question embeds another about the formation of the unconscious in relationship to the social world of the individual subject.

No doubt, a critical understanding of the human has been central to psychoanalysis from the start; in Freud’s proposal of the unconscious, as well as later psychoanalysts’ emphasis on a speaking, desiring subject divided against itself, psychoanalytic thought would complicate if not challenge the intentional human subject of the Enlightenment and modern Western thought.

This made psychoanalysis a ready reference for critical social theorists from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault for an understanding of nationalism and belonging, subjectivity, ideology, and civil society institutions of the state. Most candidates came to my course unaware of this rich background of critical social theorists’ engagement with psychoanalysis. Nor were most candidates familiar with a generation of psychoanalysts who drew on the critical social theories that throughout 1980s and 1990s were informed by Jacques Lacan’s critique of ego psychology and his emphasis on language as constitutive of subjectivity— cultural Marxism, post-colonial theory, critical race theory as well as queer theory and feminist theory, all part of a deconstruction of the Subject. These theories had appealed to psychoanalysts, not least for their proposed revision of the relationship of the psyche and the social. Especially in analysts’ rethinking gender and sexuality, the relationship of the psyche and the social was opened to a recognition of the profound impact of social discourse on the formation of the individual as human subject; the unconscious was understood to be shaped in relations of power.

However, there now was a more recent round of critical social theorizing which con12

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siders that the earlier understandings of subjectivation in the deconstruction of the Subject, while critical of the Enlightenment and Cartesian thinking, nonetheless offered what might best be understood as the apotheoses of the human in modern Western thought: subjects lacking what they endlessly search for and what cannot be found only refound in the displacement of endless deferment. In these critical social theories, the criticism of the human is inspired differently than the criticism inspired by the deconstruction of the Subject. The more recent critical theories are less focused on social discourse, and instead harken back to the historical, political and economic arrangements and governing practices undergirding modern Western thought that excluded peoples from the conception of the human in the interests of colonialism, patriarchy, racist speciesism, slavery, capitalism, and settler-colonization of indigenous lands accompanied by the violent denial of the lived reality of the more-than-human (See: Coole and Frost, 2010; Hörl, 2017; Jackson, 2020, Pugliese, 2020; Gentile 2021; Clough, 2021; Clough. et.al. 2023).

These critical social theories made a new demand on psychoanalysts to rethink psychoanalysis’ approach to what has been called the dehumanizing traumas of systemic racism, slavery and settler-colonialism, antisemitism, and violence to bodies, women’s bodies, trans bodies and nonbinary bodies by taking into account how dehumanization is constituted and supported in essentializing the individual human subject as the unmarked subject, not only denying the exclusions of modern Western thought and its undergirding governing practices and arrangements; but also refusing the agencies of the more-than-human: the environment, nonhuman animals, the planetary.6 All in all, in selecting the articles I did, I hoped to encourage candidates to recognize the history of psychoanalysis not only for its complicities with the violence of modern Western thought but also for its capacities to be critical of the current epistemologies and ontologies in which it is embedded and to which it contributes.

Although I did not assign articles authored by recent critical social theorists, in class discussions I often wished I had since these articles would have offered a more elaborated presentation of the political economic and historical conditions of the conception of the human in modern Western thought and the ongoing resistances to theses conditions that too easily are reduced to a focus on the demographics of identity. In the articles I assigned, this larger and critical sense of the human was only implied even while the articles did draw candidates’ attention to how a taken for granted understanding of the human subject can be deployed in institutional relationships between instructors, supervisors,

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analysts, and candidates, for example, when distinctions are made between psychoanalytic patients and non-psychoanalytic ones, or between concrete thinkers and reflective ones, or between clinical work and theoretical elaborations. Rethinking these often-invidiously applied comparisons in terms of the conception of the human and its historical conditions of racist-speciesism, patriarchy, colonization, slavery, and disparities of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality could very well produce conflict for candidates in relationship to their training, their clinical work, and its supervision where these distinctions often remain firmly in place.

Nonetheless, rethinking these comparisons was fast becoming part of discussions in psychoanalysis urging more weight be put on the social and material realities of patients as well as those of analysts in psychanalytic thinking and practice. For candidates, this raised the question as to whether there is a psychic or internal reality that is separate from a social and material reality. That is, whether it is the case that we are born not just to a mother or mothering one but rather into multiple environments that differently situate us socially in relationship to each other, a matter of the historical, political, and economic control of the distribution of life resources that is part of everyday life and perhaps inform the unconscious from the very start.

In raising this question, the articles challenged what, among candidates, already was recognized as the impact of the social on patients as well as on the relationship between analyst and patient —the all but canonical understanding of both psychoanalytic practice and the social since the shift from a one-person to a two-person treatment, drawing on the works of Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Thomas Ogden, Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris. The articles I assigned however asked whether the presumed sociality of the two-person treatment, or the interpersonal relationship of analyst and patient were enough to meet the current demand to “bring in the social.” This very phrase sounded again in the assigned articles and in discussions among psychoanalysts across institutes gave the sense of something still left outside of psychoanalysis, which the very specific demand for addressing Whiteness and various other relations of privilege came to stand for, while at the same time pressing for a reconsideration of what today is meant by the social generally.

In the years following 2020, the ongoing effort to bring the social into psychoanalytic theory and practice became more complicated as the management of the pandemic along with responses to the protests of anti-Black racism were revealing the intensifying subversive rage of an ultra-right that had captured the support of a large part of the pop-

ulations of the U.S. and of other parts of the world. By the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, taking up the social in class discussion seemed more challenging, not least for the forms of communication and knowledge production and circulation specific to the information infrastructure of the current configuration of State, governance, and capitalist economy.7 The digital media/technologies mediating nearly all our relationships seemed to be reinforcing an undoing of commonality or common ground, while corporations gained a more direct influence on individuals in a datafied environment of multiplying micro-publics. With fake news, the outright lies of politicians and experts, climate deniers and election refusers, along with the ordinary acquisition of knowledge and ways of communicating in using the internet, generative AI, and social media, the very meaning of meaning was put under revision, with the offer of new kinds of reality and models of truth.

Candidates if not the entire psychoanalytic community were facing a profound and yet unmetabolized change in communication and knowledge production and circulation. In my course, I hoped to engage candidates in a discussion about social mediation and the current informational infrastructure not only keeping in mind their entanglement with differences of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ableness and more, but also exploring their effect on thinking and practicing as psychoanalysts. In class discussions, candidates readily recognized the ubiquity of digital media/technologies which they experienced as something like a vast and ungraspable network in which everyone is entangled, an often concerning but taken-for-granted experience for them and many of their patients. It was noteworthy that these discussions brought with them language not so easily brought into other class discussions about the social: capitalism, surveillance, fascism, mass violence, compulsion, political correctness, censorship, and cultural flattening. Candidates expressed worry especially about children. Often drawing on experience of their children’s development, candidates felt that the impact of social media, usually operating without the consciousness of their users, was competing with, if not exceeding that of socializing institutions, such as the family, church, school, and the like.

However, as candidates turned to address working with their patients online, which for many is the only way they have worked with them, they seemed more curious about digital media/technologies than unsettled. While often expressing a strong desire to be in person with their cohorts, analysts, teachers, and supervisors, candidate’s experience of working with patients online did not raise as strong a desire. Perhaps, this is why class discussions about working remotely with patients seemed more lively, more spontaneous, filled with an13

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ecdotal accounts of what is going on working with patients. As most candidates were not able to formulate a case presentation fully around digital media/technologies, the anecdotal seems to be an appropriate genre to carry bits of experience about texting and emailing, as well as phone, Zoom or Facetime sessions in which patients might eat, smoke, answer iPhone calls, take note of Slack pings, bring candidates into beds, shower stalls, cars, or on walks, that is, into the patients’ lives by showing rather than only describing—all a matter of managing space and situation along with the ongoing and unsettling breaks in good transmission. Many candidates didn’t seem to find these behaviors too unsettling, or perhaps candidates were becoming less surprised by them. Some candidates have proposed that in their accommodating some of these behaviors, what otherwise might be referred to as breaks in the frame, there is an opening to a more intimate experience with their patients.8 It seemed to me that class discussions about digital media/technologies did not provoke discomfort for candidates as did the discussions that focused more on inclusions and exclusions in psychoanalytic theory and practice around issues of race, gender, class, sex, nationality, and ethnicity. This led me to wonder if it were possible for candidates to discuss digital media/technologies in ways that lack specificity, that the ubiquity of digital media/technologies meant that they were affecting us all the same, that we all were similarly situated in the current information infrastructure. In class, I would address how this was not the case, how, for example, the various deployments of digital media/technologies throughout the pandemic as well as in relationship to climate change, war and environmental disasters evidenced the disparities in the collection and circulation of data affecting different populations differently, often becoming a matter of life and death.

At the same time, I also wondered about the way candidates were using digital media/ technologies in their own lives, how their use was affecting their relating to their patients’ use of them. For one, there was an unarticulated but conveyed sense among candidates connecting digital media/technologies such as Instagram or TikTok and the becoming acceptable if not ordinary of genderfluidity, non-binarism, trans genders and more—all reshaping the sociality of online dating, messaging, and self- presentation. No doubt, gender and sexuality have always been central to psychoanalytic thinking and practice as has been debate about their meaning and their place in the development of the individual subject, such that taking up sexuality and gender in its various expressions was to be expected. Although still a heated topic for some psychoanalysts, the various expressions of gender and sexuality were less so for most candidates. Still,

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class discussions did seem to become more unsettled, when I suggested exploring how digital media/technologies including their use in surgeries may pressure a rethinking of the psyche-soma, the human and the more-thanhuman, organic and nonorganic life. All this brought us back to about the nature of the unconscious and working with patients with the aim of engaging their unconscious.

While not always addressing these questions directly, candidates and I often did so implicitly when we focused on their concerns about how the course was to be applied in working with patients and how might the course inform their progress as candidates in psychoanalytic training? It became clear in class discussions that candidates were being taught that regardless of varying psychoanalytic theories, doing psychoanalysis meant doing something more than therapy, more than social work; it meant that as psychoanalysts, candidates were supposed to secure a relationship with the patient that is supportive of transference and countertransference in an ongoing turn inward, following what often was presented as the privileged practice of dreamy reverie, co-created phantasy, listening, waiting, containing, contemplating, and wandering. For the most part, this meant that the analyst is to ‘follow the patient,’ interpreting less while attending more to the patient’s and analyst’s unconscious.

If bringing the social into sessions meant the analyst leading the way, candidates questioned whether this was in opposition to what they were being trained to do as analysts, having been oriented to a restraining use of the frame, albeit not to the point of what has been called abstinence. Although seeing patients remotely had made candidates aware of the inevitable fluidity or porousness of the frame, they nonetheless remained concerned to ‘follow the patient,’ to recognize the sociality of the relationship of patient and analyst without having to introduce matters that patients did not raise themselves, especially the matters taken up in the course articles about race, ethnicity, class nationality and more. There was a returning insistence that introducing these social matters should not interfere or override psychic life, which is taken to be essential to psychoanalysis. Even though these concerns differed among candidates given their race, ethnicity, class, or nationality, what was increasingly apparent was that candidates did not feel that their training in psychoanalytic theory and practice prepared them to engage with patients about these social matters unless they arise with the patient or as a rupture between patient and analyst. Candidates could imagine that there is a social unconscious, but how to practice as if there is, escaped them.

At the same time, I seemed to be inviting candidates to experiment with the frame, albeit inadvertently, given my apparent uncer-

tainty that there might not be another way to bring the social into the treatment. However, concerned about misleading candidates into practicing in ways that might contradict their training, also making them uncomfortable in working with their patients, I would come to expand the focus of the course by bringing in my own work with patients and making ample room for candidates to do the same.

The aim was to engage with those moments of a treatment that allowed us to explore how issues of the social were brought into the session when they were or more importantly how they could have been brought in by the analyst even when patients had not.

What evolved in our discussions of presentations of work with patients was the need for candidates as analysts to be open in conversation with patients to take on matters cast wide a field of what has been taken to be matters of the unconscious to be found in moving backward and forward to, or not moving too far away from the primal scenes of early childhood, in seeking to explore the workings of the drives or the enigmatic meanings of the (m) other and infant unconscious enclave. Doing otherwise would require the analyst’s intervention in conversation with patients, leading patients on, bringing into sessions for example issues of race or class or matters of the internet and digital media, matters of climate, and the disparate distribution of resources for life.

This also would require an expectation on the part of the candidates that the discussion of these matters when they seemed appropriate to explore with patients would also lead to unconscious processes, that is, if unconscious processes can be conceived to be informed by the social from the very start.

For me, this meant facing the challenge to rethink the fundaments of psychoanalytic theory while bringing its insights to bear in treating the social, albeit often having to extend the theory to the point of breaking with its un-reflected assumptions. In my efforts to take on this daunting task, I have been supported by other psychoanalysts who in their articles and presentations are taking up these issues. I also am aware of the need for more of us especially those of us who are responsible for candidates in psychoanalytic training to rethink psychoanalytic practice across the various differing psychoanalytic schools of thought. Candidates are being asked to do as much. They are being challenged to face the limitations of the field in the present and the past while speculating on its future potentialities, all, while they are newly meeting with patients as psychoanalysts. With a range of feelings and concerns, candidates nevertheless are taking up the challenge. They are giving psychoanalysis a future. *I want to thank Cornelia Barber for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

They were invaluable in my later drafts.

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REFERENCES Butler, D. 2019. “Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting.” Studies in Gender and Society. 20(3): 146-158.

Clough, P., Bib Calderaro, Iréne Hultman, Talha Issevenler, Sandra Moyano Ariza and Jason Neilsen. 2023. Mediating the Subject of Psychoanalysis: A Conversation on Bodies, Temporality, and Narrative, In Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology. Eds. David Goodman and Matthew Clemente. Routledge.

Clough. P.2016. Rethinking Race, Calculation, Quantification and Measure, Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 16(5): 435-441.

Clough, P. 2021. Critical Theory and Its Challenge to Psychoanalysis: Response to Katie Gentile’s ‘Kittens in the Clinical Space, Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies, Transcorporeal Being.’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 31(2), 151-159.

Clough, P. 2023. “What is the Social?“ Psychoanalytic Dialogues.” 2023. 33(2). 140-156.

Coole, D. and Frost, S. Eds. 2010. New Materialisms.

Durham: Duke University Press.

DiAngelo, R. 2006. My race didn’t trump my class: Using oppression to face privilege. Multicultural Perspectives, 8(1), 51–56.

Ferreira da Silva, D. 2017. 1 (life) ÷ 0 (black- ness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,”e-flux 79 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/ Frosh, S. 2013. “Psychoanalysis Colonialism Racism.”

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. 32(3).

Gaztambide, D. 2014. Melancolia bajo un palo de mango: A Review and Critique of Psychoanalysis in the Barrio.” Division 39 Review Gentile, K. (2021). Kittens in the Clinical Space, Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies, Transcorporeal Being. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 31(2),135-150.

Gonzalez, F. 2019. “Necessary Disruptions: A Discussion of Daniel Butler’s ‘Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting.’” Studies in Gender and Sexuality. 20(3): 159-164.

González, F. J. 2020. Trump cards and Klein Bottles: On the collective of the individual. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30(4), 383–398.

Grand, S. 2014. Skin memories: On race, love, and loss.

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 19, 232–249.

Grand, S. 2018. The other within: White shame, Native-American genocide. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 54(1), 84–102.

Gump, J. 2000. A white therapist, an African American Patient: Shame in the therapeutic dyad: Commentary of paper by Neil Altman. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10, 619–632.

Guralnik, O. and Daphne Simeon. 2010. Depersonalization: Standing in the Spaces Between Recognition and Interpellation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 20, 400–416.

Harris A. 2019. From ‘What’s American About American Psychoanalysis (2004)’ to ‘What’s American History and Politics Got to Do with the Emergence of the Relational Turn’ (2012) and on to the American Nightmare: 2017.’ Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 39(2), 138–145.

Harris, A. 2019a. The perverse pact: Racism and White privilege. American Imago, 76(3), 309–333.

Harris, A. (2021). The pandemic in America: A crisis for democracy. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 41(6), 363-377.

Hartman, S. 2011. Reality 2.0: When loss is lost. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21, 468–482.

Hartman, S. 2019. Hashtag Mania or Misadventures in the #ultrapsychic. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 20(2), 84100. Hartman, S. 2020. Blinded by the White, A Discussion of ‘Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice.’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 30(3) Hollander, N. 2017. Who is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 27: 635-650.

Holmes, D. E. 2016. Culturally imposed trauma: The sleeping dog has awakened. Will psychoanalysis take heed?

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26(6), 641–654.

Hörl, E. Ed. 2017. General Ecology, The New Ecological Paradigm. London: Bloomsbury.

Jackson, Z. I. 2020. Becoming Human. New York University Press.

Knoblauch, S. (2020). “Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 30(3): 299-316.

Layton, L. 2004. A fork in the royal road: On “defining” the unconscious and its stakes for social theory. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. 9: 33-51.

Layton, L. 2006. Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

5, 237–269.

Layton, L. 2019. Toward a social psychoanalysis: Culture, character, and normative unconscious processes. Routledge.

Leary, K. 2000. Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4):639-653

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Local Plumber (reasonable).

Pugliese, J. 2020. Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Rozmarin, E. 2022. A Second Confusion of Tongues: Ferenczi, Laplanche, and the Trauma of Social Life, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 23:1, 40-47 Sheehi. L. 2020. The Reality Principle: Fanonian Undoing, Unlearning and Decentering: A Discussion of ‘Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice.’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30:325–330.

Sheehi, L. 2020a. Ed. Black, Indigenous, Women of Color Talk Back: Decentering Normative Psychoanalysis. Studies in Gender and Sexuality. 21(2).

Stephens, M. 2014. Skin acts: Race, psychoanalysis, and the black male performer. Duke University Press.

Stephens, M. 2020. Getting Next to Ourselves: The Interpersonal Dimensions of Double-Consciousness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56(2-3): 201-225.

Stephens, M. 2022. We Have Never Been White: Afropessimism, Black Rage, and What the Pandemic Helped Me Learn About Race (and Psychoanalysis). The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91:2, 319-347.

Tylim, I. and Adrienne Harris. Eds. 2017. Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

White, K. 2002. Surviving hating and being hated: some personal thoughts about racism from a psychoanalytic perspective. Contemporary Psychoanalysis. 38(3): 401–422.

ENDNOTES 1. In some cases, courses about the social were already in the curriculum before 2020 and had been developed in response to candidates’ request.

2. For a more recent and more subtle exploration of rupture between a White analyst and a Black patient see: Knoblauch 2020 with comments by Sheehi, 2020 and Hartman 2020.

3. There now are several such articles but most notable are an early selection of articles published in Studies of Gender and Sexuality under the guest editorship of Lara Sheehi (2020a).

4. For an important discussion of guilt and other feelings arising when facing the challenges to psychoanalysis of systemic racism and more, see: Stephens (2020).

5. In the recently published findings of the APA Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, it is noted that most faculty and candidates indicated that race and racism are neglected topics in institute curricula, but the impact of this is experienced far more by BIPOC candidates than white candidates and all candidates and BIPOC faculty more than white faculty. While, it has been my experience that courses dedicated to the social give candidates of color but other candidates as well the opportunity to speak to the issues of race and racism more directly, and for some, with relief, I can imagine what difference it might make if candidates of color made up more of the class composition and/or the course were taught by a faculty of color. Below I discuss candidates’ varying feelings about addressing the social in the practice of psychoanalysis, especially about raising issues of 15

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race and racism in sessions with patients when the patients have not. BIPOC candidates also have various feeling about this but reported that their patients often raised questions about race and racism.

6. In discussions among critical social theorists, there recognition of those who have been excluded from the very definition of human, while questioning whether their exclusion is rather an inclusion in humanism that serves to define the human. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for example, refers to the “plasticity” of Blackness in being ascribed to whatever inhumanity is necessary to define humanness (2020). As a result, there is a distancing from seeking inclusion altogether. Also see Michelle Stephens’ recent article in which she addresses these same issues around ‘human,’ race, and racism drawing on Afropessimism and other Black authors (2022; also see: Clough, 2016; Ferreira da Silva, 2017).

7. In my article titled, “What is the Social?”, I have argued that analysts who have taken up politics, culture or the social, pay little if any attention to specific media/technologies (see: Harris 2021; González, 2020; Rozmarin, 2022). Exceptions are Hartman, 2011, 2019. In “What is the Social?” I propose that mediation at the social-technological level informs what mediation can be at the interpersonal and intersubjective levels as well.

8. For an interesting discussion of the frame see, Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis (2017) edited by Issaac Tylim and Adrienne Harris.

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In Defense of Psychosis

Kendra TERRY

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was a novelist, artist, occultist and gun aficionado.

It was Bedlam all over again. Foucault’s pendulum had swung too far and, again, we failed to evolve.

The first thing you notice when you walk into a psychiatric inpatient unit are the patients loitering by the door, pacing back and forth, like broken wind-up G.I. Joe figurines.

Once fighting, now relegated to the circular motion of group therapy, Saran-wrapped sandwiches, and vital signs in perpetuity. A door locked to all those without a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in their back pocket, abridged and boorish. A door with signs like “ELOPEMENT DANGER!” and “XXX.” You walk in farther and you see nurses trailing patients, patients like kids all over again, infantile, stripped of their freedom, needing to be watched over, tended to, told NO, shown how to live.

When we think of “madness,” we are thinking of psychosis. In psychosis, we see a breakdown between subject and object; internal events are projected onto the outside, interpreted as if they belong to an external entity, whether it be to God, the government,

or the rotation of the world itself. What if, however, the psychotic individual’s sense of what is real were not reduced, cavalierly, to psychopathology? What if the seeming loss of contact with an external reality so characteristic of psychosis in fact put them in contact with the subtle, the vital, the real?

...

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson (1986) talks about edges. It is at the edge of oneself where one finds romantic love, desire, eros. “Eros is an issue of boundaries. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive…. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general” (Carson, p.

30). What Carson evokes specifically here is an act of reaching, of going beyond the boundary of the self. We reach from the known towards the unknown, from ourselves towards our lover, from the actual towards the possible, and “beauty spins and the mind moves” (Carson p. xi).

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In psychosis, what we find is a similar edge. Psychosis pushes up against the edge at which “the soul parts on itself in desire [and] is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses” (Carson, p. 7). The psychotic individual reaches across the in-between space where breath breaches the boundary that separates internal from external, self from other, and temporarily exists in the space where metaphor conjoins the two in hallucination. An edge that marks the periphery of a standard of normal. An edge that, if they cross, they enter into a sort of parallax of consciousness. A revolt against the skin that surrounds them, the intersubjectivity that engages them, the self that binds them. The edges of a razor just as sharp and just as fragile. But what if there were an in-between space that were like the swimming pool of a synapse, in which the individual in psychosis could float between the action and reaction of its correspondence?

And what if it were an edge upon which, if they could temper it, they could find the very edge of themselves?

To some, psychosis may appear as neuronal firings gone awry, random and loose, or

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perhaps proof of an inferior gene pool, upon closer look, the delusion has a function. It is meaningful. “Properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination” (Carson, p. 63).

In psychosis, this reaching of the imagination stretches too thin. The mind loses its footing in the symbolic order and the psychotic delusion reaches to fill in the gaps that were once occupied by our fundamental significations, by the order of gestures, rituals, and more generally, the agreed upon languages of society. In its place, fantasy creeps in.

...

The holler of a stranger orchestrates the patient’s every movement. Doctors on the loudspeaker ring in as if speaking to them and them alone. A stop sign renders them catatonic. There becomes meaning in every sound, every sight. The meaning, they become drunk off it, in a network of associations that creates a different sense of order, the associations ever bloated as the unconscious stretches into infinite sets. The movement from sanity to madness demarcates the edges of the mind, outlines the faculties that define its very difference. Delusions are systems of meaning connecting all of their nodes. It is here, as Carson describes, that we become alive.

Anderson (1938), Landis (1964), and Custance (1952) detail the patients’ experience as follows.

One patient writes: I seem to merge with everything.

[There is] an intense consciousness of power and absolute ecstasy…. A terrific consciousness of power in surges, like the sea coming against you…. I feel calm as well. Things appear more real, as if you were just becoming alive and had never lived before (p. 290).

And another patient: The sense of being intimately in tune with the ultimate stuff of the universe can become so overwhelming that those affected naturally proclaim themselves to be Jesus Christ, or Almighty God, or whatever deity they have been taught to look on as the source of all power…. It seems to me as though all truth, all the secrets of the Universe were being revealed, as though I had some clue, some Open-Sesame to creation (p. 287-88).

Other thinkers have conceptualized psychosis in ways that diverge from mainstream psychiatric views, from anti-psychiatry movements that gained popularity in the

1960s, to post-Lacanian thinkers and contemporary ideas of “ordinary psychosis,” to narrative autofiction writers on their personal, first-hand experiences of psychosis. This is to say that not everyone in the profession believes psychosis is neurological misfiring.

Psychotherapists and researchers from Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harold Searles, Harry Stack Sullivan and Wilfred Bion, R. D. Laing, Bertram Karon, and Christopher Bollas, offer a more varied understanding of the psychotic spectrum disorders. They talk about hallucinations and delusions as being interpretable in the way dreams are interpreted; that what comes up for an individual in psychosis is valid as an experience and not reducible to mere symptoms of mental illness; that what patients of psychosis need is to be offered a space in a safe environment to explore the experience as a process of self-discovery and an alternative to being treated with medication; that madness needs to be normalized; and that break-down can be generative, inviting the potential to be reconstructed, ultimately leading to break-through.

...

We see the origins of psychosis as described in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of unintegration, a time before the child discerns a self that is separate from her mother, when the child does not mind the difference between being whole or being in bits. There is not yet the sense of a unified self, but rather the infant exists as inputs of discontinuous sensory perception and outputs of behavior all the same. Psychosis is a regression back to this pre-symbolic phase when there is no I separate from not I. The infant and the mother communicate at the edge of language, with their bodies, in mutual attunement: the child cries and milk appears, in symbiosis, as if by its own act of creation. There is no separation.

Margaret Mahler talks about psychosis similarly as a return to a state of symbiotic relatedness, wherein during the early years of the child’s life she lives in mutually inhabited space in relation to the mother. In Mahler’s theory of schizophrenia, something “goes wrong” during this stage such that the child does not achieve separation individuation.

This lack of mastery results in a confusion of self and other. The edges blur. There is no boundary, no periphery, no inside distinct from outside. The self is not separate from its surroundings. The child lies in the crib, vulnerable, powerless, at the mercy of its own existence, at once volatile and free. But for the adult, they are no longer allowed to play in the space of the imagination. For the adult, fantasy becomes dangerous.

With a loss of this ego boundary, when hallucination occurs in psychosis, the internal world is projected, experienced as if originat17

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ing from the external environment. There is a perception of literal bodies or voices, moving, speaking, but these figures are a mere reflection of the psychotic experience of one’s own internal state. The patient “merge[s] with everything,” becoming “in tune with the ultimate stuff of the universe” (ibid) as if the doors of perception open and what is undeniably true is revealed at last. Gaining the ability to speak, to explicate, the real tugs at the mind of the psychotic, while the symbolic stirs our ability to ascribe meaning. In its characteristic return to a pre-symbolic state, hallucination is a psychotic interpretation of the symbolic to be that of the real.

Michael Eigen (1986) describes Winnicott’s unintegration as “a ‘purer’ state. The subject dips into creative formlessness…. Unintegration refers to the chaos of experiencing before it congeals into psychic formations” (p.

334). Stripped of the schemas that define the self-concept, the individual in the midst of the psychotic state experiences a sort of unification with the external world, inside of creative formlessness, not able to find their way out.

Without the sense of I, a boundary is lost between self and not self. Carson describes the experience of Eros similarly: “Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded” (Carson, p. 7). In primary process, the dreamlike, fantastical, and often unconscious thinking of the child, the world is experienced in the way Buddhists describe phenomena simply as such. The stance is “not one” and “not two,” negating the dualism that divides the whole into parts; where judgment is suspended, and experience of the world is as such, just as it is. Here, the brain is in a state of network hyperconnectivity, parts of itself communicating with other parts it didn’t even know existed.

...

But let’s return finally to where Carson begins, in her preface to Eros the Bittersweet, where she retells Kafka’s The Top. In the original story, a philosopher hurries after children in an effort to steal their “top spins” (p. 1).

Carson says of the philosopher that if only he could catch the impertinent spinning of their tops, of the playfulness of youth, of the vertigo of love, the fragility of beauty, he would be able to stay there, spinning, forever: The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent (p. xi).

But what if we could pause in this spinning, of eros, take a breath, immediately at

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the edge between sanity and madness. Perhaps somewhere along this flight, there is a glimpse of something that is true, at the edge of what is possible. We come to the edge of perception, the edge of conversation, the edge of logic, and the edge of memory. We revel in Carson’s “edges of sounds, letters, words, emotions, events in time, selves” (p. 51). At each point, the disturbance comes closer into focus. As we traverse from one side to the other, we trace a map of the place, defining its topography. It is at the edges that we find the definition of the shape itself. We don’t know the shape of the Earth until we are in outer space; only upon the collapse of the mind, do we become aware of its constituents.

Psychosis is often defined as a thought disorder and perhaps it is just this simple. Our minds open corridors of thought within us.

And it is when we travel to the edges of these corridors that we discover what the mind is capable of. But it is also where we find its limit, the point at which it starts to break down.

Here, it is no longer the stuff of thought; we are confronted with word salad, a loss of reality testing, at times dangerous misconceptions about the world around us. Here, we cross over from thought order to thought dis-order.

It is a tempering of this edge, a coming to know it, that allows us to find ourselves propped up on it. The closer we get, the more familiar it becomes. And at the peak of tempering there is a sort of taming.

We must trace this transgression as if breath, moving between two spaces and ask, “What is breath? For the ancient Greeks, breath is consciousness, breath is perception, breath is emotion…. Breath is everywhere. There are no edges. The breath of desire is eros…

As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them connect in one triangle momentarily.

The connection is eros” (p. 48-49; 62). The breath passes through us, seamlessly between inside and outside, just like Mahler’s infant, or the psychiatric institute’s psychotic. Breath is eros, reaching across this edge. When edge becomes breath, in this triangle between sanity, madness, and our known, momentary identity, we find our self at the edge of our self. We find our self the moment at which it begins to turn into something else. Here, the real and the ideal come into focus.

...

At first, we notice the streets around us, the people, our favorite neighborhoods, start to become unfamiliar. Our surroundings fade into a distant background, apartment buildings losing their edges, street crossings losing their edges, horizons losing their edges, the signposts, they’re close to us, begin to light up like actors on a stage, demanding our attention. A man in a red suit signals to us, the

apocalypse is coming, and we think, “This!

This is what we’ve known all along! This is what we’ve been waiting for.” Time becomes circular, nonlinear, symmetrical. Lacan’s three registers fold in on themselves and the Symbolic is misinterpreted as the Real and the Imaginary disintegrates with the sense of I, myself; William James’ narrator in the stream of consciousness drops out and there is no longer the sense of this is me. Metaphor collapses and the word becomes the thing itself.

The internal is interpreted as external, metaphor is interpreted as the literal. And the structure that is an arrangement of these fundamental dimensions of psychical subjectivity in which each of them and everything they contain exist only in relation to the others.

This three-dimensional plane turns inward and the three-dimensional figure collapses into a single point, back to its original primary state, absent of a frame of reference, in relation to nothing but itself, surrounded by edges on all sides. We tip over Carson’s edge and move to where the thunderstorms are coming and like Ingmar Bergman’s Karin as “I walk through the wall, you see? I think it’s God who will reveal himself to us,” catching a glimpse of Lacan’s Real through a glass no longer darkly. It is the obvious that remains invisible, until we shout. It is the grotesque in Flannery O’Conner’s prose. It is the limit of our perception.

A dog turns to look at us, a bird flies overhead, a siren passes, grazing our elbow, we hold our breath, and before we know it everyone and every thing pivots toward us, each pair of eyes closing in on us, moving closer, they look, uncanny, and our skin feels permeable, breath all around, as they continue to come closer, and closer, folding in on us, we at the very center of the spinning of the entire world, and at last, the curtain falls and the bricks of the buildings, the way they are stacked, the flashing of the streetlights, and the movement of the crowds they dictate, the blinking of these passers-by, and the way the sun is positioned in the sky, falling discretely on each and every one of these objects, and in this soft gaze, just as such, we notice the light entering our retinas, and the shapes it is carved into deep inside our heads, the shapes whose edges of which mark the edges of the cognitive machinery itself, and we begin to know that indeed we are coming to see it all as if for the very first time.

Can we not feel the periphery of this experience alongside our own fragility, at the very rotation that precedes our escape velocity, just as gravity begins to give way to weightlessness, as our stomachs turn, when we think for a second too long about how we, smaller than dust, are forever falling through an open sky, amidst a great darkness thicker than Vantablack spread out across the ocean floor, circling the sun, while we circle our own 18

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axis, while it circles the Milky Way, and indeed everything from the solar systems to the planets to Odysseus’s travels to the hands of clocks all the way down to the electron circling its own nucleus, all of it, is moving is circles? Or when we think about Kafka’s bug, being sucked into the imagination of our own metamorphosis, with our mouths shuttering up and our larynxes going soft, confined to a mutable self, sinking further and further away, unable to utter a single word until we’ve lost any sort of contact with the external world like a small child who has lost the grip of his mother’s hand looking up to find himself alone in Times Square? Or when we wonder about Hume’s cause and effect and know that even with the finest instrument, we cannot prove that smoke means fire because such a conjunction rests merely on the belief in infinitesimal mechanisms sitting between one matter of fact and the next, but that these are in fact imaginary? Or when we meditate on Kant’s mathematical sublime until our bodies seem to evaporate into thin air? Or when we repeat the word escalator a hundred times until it loses all meaning and we are left with a suspicious doubt that everything we speak is based on a fundamental promise of emptiness? Or when we reflect on the fleshy, offpink organ floating inside our heads and we know this is all we are, neurons firing, nothing more than a bunch of fancy organisms that seem to be somewhat conscious that we are, in fact, alive?

Psychosis is the attempt to find a solution to the unsolvable problem of our existence. Of the mind and of the self, of the imaginary, of the symbolic, and of the real.

It sits out at the farther edges where things get strange, strange when the limits of our perception get mixed up and truth becomes a proxy for God. It is a manifestation of the general structure that underlies the culturally-constructed normal. In all of our diagnosis and fear of the unknown, fear of the unexplained, we must learn to tolerate the uncertainty of this madness. It is time to transgress the pendulum’s swing back to Bedlam, time to progress to the next rotation. Here, the disorder is not simply a disorder, dangerous and cataclysmic, but it is also an entryway into indescribable experience, a kind of logic that cannot be put into words, an insight and a discovery of the structures of the mind itself.

The question then becomes, how do we find the edges of ourselves? Where is it that we go when we go past this edge? And finally, how do we get to the edge and back?

.

REFERENCES Carson, A. (1986). Eros the bittersweet: an essay. Princeton University Press.

Custance, J. (1952). Wisdom, madness, and folly: The philosophy of a lunatic. Pellegrini & Cudahy Eigen, M. (2018). The psychotic core. Routledge.

Landis, C. (1964). Varieties of psychopathological experience. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Can We “Treat” Racism in our Clinical Practices?

In a recent talk, Steve Portugues (2021) called on white psychoanalysts “to learn how to explore race and treat racism within ourselves and our patients and to do so with compassion for the racist in us all.” He urged that analysts set aside a false idea of neutrality in the interest of identifying oppressive ideologies that distort our and our patients lives, presumably in order to demystify and expunge them.

Portugues’s call is in the spirit of a growing turn in psychoanalytic practice to attend to the social dimension of our patients’ lives and is given more urgency following the murder of George Floyd and burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. Racism hurts us all, dividing Black from white, keeping us from joining in common interest, and in this way contributes to the largest context of whatever problems in living our patients present to us.

Racism is at once an omnipresent feature of our social world, and an easy thing for many white people to ignore. I admire the intention behind Portugues’s project, as well as its ambition. As Beverly Burch (2020) notes, white people’s privileged ability to avoid dealing with race leaves us ill-prepared to talk about it; Portugues seems up for the challenge.

The idea that we might use the clinical space to explore and perhaps challenge racism raises many conceptual and technical questions. For instance, outside of the rare circumstance in which a patient seeks therapy to address their racism, how to raise the issue when it doesn’t arise quote-unquote “organically.” Do we wait for some relevant context to bring it up, and what does it mean, to us and the patient, if we deviate from our usual practice of following the patient to raise it ourselves.

The idea that in our clinical work we might set about “treating” racism—by which I take Portugues to mean identifying racist attitudes with the aim of changing them— needs to be subject to psychoanalytic scrutiny.

My reservations about this undertaking break down roughly into three areas: The question of motive; the role of the analyst’s authority; and the effect of such an undertaking on the dynamics of the therapy process and the analytic couple. I’ll consider how these factors might pertain in a white-on-white therapy dyad, the configuration in which the issue of racism is perhaps least likely to come up explicitly.

In the first place, let’s hold in mind all we’ve been learning about the systemic nature of racism, that is, how racism in our era operates largely “behind our backs,” an aspect of ideology, rather than as a result of the actions of individual racists. Attacking structural racism takes the committed work of conscious antiracists, as well as smaller actions on the

Steven BOTTICELLI

Janet Passehl is an artist and curator of the Lewitt Foundation.

part of everyone. But thinking about racism in its systemic aspects should cause us to approach with modesty the scope of what it will be possible to achieve in addressing racism on the individual level.

Thinking psychoanalytically, we can’t assume our motives are transparent to us. We may believe we’re aiming to uncover underlying racist ideologies in the service of the patient’s and society’s enhanced well-being, but there could be more to it. Do we identify and explore and perhaps challenge the patient, as a way of managing our anxiety and discomfort at listening to racist speech? To attempt to relieve our own guilt about racism? Jane Calflisch (2020) has written of the unbearable burden of guilt white people may experience about historical and current racism given the magnitude of injury inflicted on Black people over centuries, injuries so great that in her words reparation may well be felt to be impossible. We may want to be seen as and experience ourselves as good for addressing racism with a patient, or to reassure ourselves that we are free of, or in the process of freeing ourselves, of the contamination of racism.

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Might our intention to treat racism be a way of managing our disappointment at the ordinary results of our clinical work? Lynne Layton (2006) has written that too often our work only seems to produce “happier, healthier versions of narcissism” (p. 107); those of us with a developed political consciousness might wish to achieve something more.

While the impulse to make our clinical work politically relevant is understandable, might we thereby inflate it with more significance than it can really bear?

Then there’s the matter of the analyst’s authority. As analysts, we are not innocent of power. We analyze, but also participate in, power. If we are to set about analyzing power, including the social conditions and psychological operations that perpetuate racism in our patients and ourselves, we need to consider the sources and effects of the power that inheres in our professional roles. It’s easy as solo practitioners sitting in our private offices to feel that we encounter our patients simply one individual to another, but in fact we operate as representatives of an entire mental health industrial complex that depends for its

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functioning on a complex system of referring entities, insurance companies and professional and governmental bodies that condition the terms of our practice. These forces must certainly shape our personal politics in ways we are not fully aware of, but that are in the room with us, influencing our relationship to and feelings about power. And this is only to gesture at the power differential between analyst and patient, the democratizing thrust of recent developments in psychoanalysis notwithstanding. Can we conceive of the patient who would have the gumption to tell their analyst who raises the topic of racism, I don’t feel like talking about this.

Irwin Hoffman (1996) writes of the intimate and ironic authority of the analyst, the numinous power we retain as mentor-like figures capable of exerting a special form of influence on our patients, even in these postmodern days when most forms of authority have been discredited. Is the promulgation of antiracism (implicit in an exploration of racism) an appropriate use of our analytic authority? I don’t think this problem is much alleviated by a position that allows that the analyst’s racism is also open for consideration.

Regarding ideology, what makes us think we’re in a privileged position to identify and critique it? How do we avoid occupying the position of the one who knows, itself a piece of mystification that our field has slowly been emerging from. Let’s recall also the critique of psychoanalysis as a regulatory practice. However modestly approached, an analyst-initiated inquiry into racism cannot but suggest antiracism as an implicit value, perhaps replacing heterosexuality, Oedipality and other regulatory ideals that have held sway over the history of psychoanalysis. As Jessica Benjamin (1997) reminds us, that history has shown how oppressive ideals that when recognized as such may give rise to counter-ideals, which can become just as excluding, punitive, encouraging of conformity and intolerant of difference as the original ones—perhaps even if the ideal is as laudatory as antiracism.

Any psychoanalytic therapy balances a dialectic between the real world and its anxieties and the anxieties of the symbolic or intrapsychic world. An analytic approach that aims to take on racism needs to be careful to not come down too hard on the side of “reality,” and be mindful of the risk of losing the “as if ” quality of the analytic experience. For all of us, patients and therapists alike, the world is too much with us. We need to preserve a space for reverie, refuge, retreat, to be able to regard race and racism as ugly facts about the world as well as fantasy and phantasm. I think for example of Joel Kovel’s discussion in his book White Racism (1970) of the role that images and ideas about race can play as a vehicle for representing the abject and deni-

grated, obviously related to yet still separable from “real world” referents.

Consider too the boundless transitiveness of unconscious life, the ubiquity of displacement, the principle of multiple function (Waelder, 2007). In therapy we can’t assume racist speech is only, or necessarily at all, an expression of racism. I think of a heterosexual white male patient who would sometimes in sessions with me make disparaging remarks about Black coworkers. Whatever the content of this man’s ideas about Black people, I sensed that these remarks were primarily intended as jabs at the presumed sensibility of his therapist. At some point this man had come to know that I was gay; I wondered how much his racist remarks might be displaced expressions of homophobia. Before I took the op-

For the analyst aiming to challenge ideological distortions, why stop at racism?

What about sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia? For the analyst so oriented, what is the fate of freely hovering attention? And for their patient, of free association—once they tune in to their analyst’s attention to such matters. In a climate where people are sensitized to the unacceptability of racism, the analyst’s attention to the matter risks stimulating shame and perhaps concealment, or perhaps defensive idealization of the analyst who unlike the patient seems to be free of racist attitudes. Such a patient might be moved to take up a complementary role in the hope of being reflected back to themselves in a similarly idealized fashion (cf.

Calflisch, 2020).

Unknown (Humanities Department, School of Visual Arts).

portunity to explore this possibility with him, he asked me directly what I felt when he made denigrating comments about Black people. I told him, directly, that I was offended by them, and he stopped making them.

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In a recent article the white analyst Beverly Burch (2021) presented an example of how she addressed a white patient’s and her own racism, not out of programmatic intent on her part but rather as a spontaneous

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ism was intrusive, rather than facilitative, of the therapeutic process. Retrospectively she understood her repeating her patient’s comment about her daughter as an enactment, an unconscious expression of the conflict between the wish to disown her own white privilege and her identification with the patient’s sense of superiority and entitlement she also enjoyed as a white person. All of this having been set in motion without any conscious agenda on Burch’s part, she was left to observe what followed: “Then I watched this enactment give direction to the subsequent therapy” (2021, p.36). The reader is left with the sense that patient and analyst were each left productively unsettled by their encounter with their own racism.

I find Burch’s work here exemplary of how at its best a therapeutic process that includes a consideration of race might be engaged, precisely because she did not set out to do so, the absence of programmatic intent on her part. I think one risk of inviting discussions of racism in our practices when this does not emerge within a naturally unfolding process led by the patient is that it may permit for the therapist an “I gave at the office” mentality regarding fighting racism, when perhaps the most important thing those of us who are white can do about racism is to stay uncomfortable about it. Here I think of the early political Freudians (cf. Jacoby, 1983), who conducted their work with patients along the classical lines they themselves were helping to develop, while keeping their political activities quite separate. Following their example, and simply put, I think our efforts to fight racism are best engaged outside of our therapy offices, as we have been called to do by the BLM movement. As Ibram X. Kendi (2019) argues in How to Be an Antiracist, our lives present us with many opportunities to act to oppose racism. Let’s take them.

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Sidney Peterson Lemon is starting fourth grade in upstate New York.

expression of her own subjectivity—which may be no more or less than what the exploration of racism in the clinical situation can ever be. That is, the analyst may believe they are talking about racism as a thing out in the world, but all that’s for sure is that the patient will understand that racism is something this analyst cares about.

In Burch’s case she found herself repeating the comment her patient had made complaining about her daughter’s rejection from an elite college, “probably because she was white.” This not quite intentional underlining of the patient’s racially tinged remark unsettled each of them, causing the patient to feel chagrined and prompting Burch to ponder what had moved her to speak. Upon reflection, Burch’s speech act helped cue her to the significance of her patient’s racial entitlement

as a prop to her shaky self-esteem, as it also moved her to consider her conflicted feelings about her own racial entitlement.

This patient had dated men of color, which provided one entry point in the treatment for an explicit consideration of race and its meanings. As the therapy unfolded Burch was moved to reflect on her countertransference experience of devaluation at her patient’s hands. She noticed her shifting identification and disidentification with her patient’s sense of privilege, and was led to consider how whiteness—hers and the patient’s—functioned as rationalizations for their capacity to hurt each other and other people. Selective parts of these reflections became part of the clinical conversation.

Burch grappled with the question of when her introduction of content that directly addressed the political dimension of rac21

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REFERENCES Benjamin, J. (1997) Psychoanalysis as a Vocation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 7:781-802.

Burch, B. (2021) Engaging the Whitewashed Countertransference: Race Unexpectedly Appears for Therapy. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 31:28-37.

Caflisch, J. (2020) “When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible”: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 30:578-594.

Hoffman, I. Z. (1996) The Intimate and Ironic Authority of The Psychoanalyst’s Presence. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65:102-136.

Jacoby, R. (1983), The repression of psychoanalysis : Otto Fenichel and the political Freudians. New York: Basic Books.

Kendi, I.X. (2019), How to be an Antiracist. New York: One World.

Kovel, J. (1970), White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Pantheon Books.

Layton, L. (2006), Attacks on linking: The unconscious pull to dissociate individuals from their social context. In Layton, L., Hollander, N., Gutwill, S. (Eds) Psychoanalysis, class and politics : encounters in the clinical setting. New York: Routledge. Pp. 107-117.

Portugues, S. (2021), Neutrality as a White Lie. Paper presentation at the 2021 National Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, February 10.

Waelder, R. (2007) The Principle of Multiple Function: Observations on Over-Determination. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76:75-92.

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Psychoanalysis as Counter-hegemonic Practice

Nancy CARO HOLLANDER

Presented at APsA, September 2021 Roundtable: Ideology and Psychoanalysis We are living in a period of great upheaval. The psychological significance of multiple social crises is increasingly the subject of psychoanalytic research and a focus in clinical practice. As we consider how social structures and ideologies are core components of mental life and sources of mental suffering, a social psychoanalysis challenges ideological tradition within our profession. I want to begin my comments today with a brief clinical vignette to show the tenacity of the psychoanalytic politics of neutrality, which I believe sabotages our ability to engage patients in exploring how we are implicated subjects in the reproduction of asymmetrical relations of power, based on class, race and gender and sexuality.

Some years ago, Liza, a cis-gender White social worker in her late-thirties, then six months pregnant, came to our session still upset about her experiences the previous evening at a good friend’s birthday party.

Liza had grown up with this group of women, having shared the privileges of an upper middle-class life. While these women had all married wealthy men and were stay-at-home moms, Liza had a history of failed relationships and a lower middle-class lifestyle resulting from her employment at a financially strapped community mental health agency.

Her feminist politics and social conscience had been undermined by her envy of her privileged female cohort and what she saw as her personal inadequacies. These states of mind had constrained for a time her ability to act on her wish to have a child. After several years of treatment, however, Liza had decided to become a single mom by choice. In this session, she bitterly complained that after an exhausting day’s work she been obliged to stop at a market on her way to her friend’s party to purchase a needed last-minute item.

As I listened, I realized that she had crossed the much-publicized picket line of militant grocery workers, the majority of whom were Black and Latinx women on strike for a livable wage and health care benefits. Given Liza’s social conscience, I was dismayed at her having crossed the line and shocked that she did not comment on it, especially since the strikers’ demands paralleled her own discontent with her employer’s anti-labor policies.

I said nothing, fearing that if I did, I would be breaking the psychoanalytic prohibition against imposing my own concerns on my patient, especially when her attention was directed elsewhere on her regret about not having a partner with whom she could share the excitement of her pregnancy and anticipated parenthood.

Mac Adams us an important figure in Narrative and Installation Art whose last exhibition was at gb agency in Paris.

I’ll return to this vignette in a moment, but I want to point out that my reluctance to speak represented an ideological psychoanalytic enactment, one stemming from the neutrality principle that in this case foreclosed our exploration of our respective and overlapping identifications and social locations related to race and class. From my perspective, this moment represents the limits of psychoanalysis when its goal is construed as helping patients achieve increased efficacy and gratification in their personal lives with little consideration for their – or our-- status as implicated subjects in a class-stratified and racialized social order. I suggest that this is a significant ideological problem, especially when the analytic pair is white and middle class. It also signifies the impossibility of operating outside the state of implication. What I hope to show is that neutrality is an illusion, that what we say and don’t say, what we do and don’t do, always communicates something that for the patient is permeated with psychosocial meaning.

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Ideology has been theorized historically from a number of perspectives, but I want to mention several theories I find useful for our discussion today. Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci conceptualized ideology as a component of hegemony and postulated that the ruling classes govern by securing consent from those they subjugate through the latter’s internalization of the dominant social symbols that permeate civil society. These symbols are transmitted through social (state) apparatuses, including the family, religious groups, the legal professions, civic organizations, the media and so forth, all of which generate an allegiance to the predominant social institutions. Within each ideological apparatus, Gramsci argued, intellectuals – like us—articulate and transmit the discourses of hegemony. He emphasized that hegemony is composed of a variety of ideologies in contestation with one another, just as together they serve to solidify the existing system. He saw ideology as not just a system of ideas but a lived, habitual social practice that encompasses the unformulated dimen-

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sions of social experience, which I argue frame and lend meaning to unconscious processes (Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971). Gramsci’s ideas were the basis of French Lacanian philosopher Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of the paradoxical feature of our integration into culture, which he called interpellation.

He argued that we are hailed by ideological apparatuses that, while providing the necessary process by which we are constituted as subjects, do so by imposing a socially constructed pre-existing identity through which we become intelligible to ourselves (Althusser, 1994). Unlike Althusser’s depiction of interpellation as eternal, Gramsci was focused on our capacity to resist and challenge it. He posited that people’s inchoate recognition of the contradiction between their real-life experiences and hegemonic ideology could, with the help of socially conscious intellectuals, mature into counter-hegemonic ideologies and political movements that challenge the oppressive hierarchical social relations in capitalism.

We might think of psychoanalysis as one component of an ideological state apparatus,

which Foucault called the psi professions that have, from his perspective, facilitated adaptation to neoliberal capitalist values of individual responsibility, self-reliance, self-discipline and competitiveness as strategies for personal success. In capitalism, Foucault asserted, the psi professions’ ideological function is to develop patients’ capacities to adapt to neoliberal ideology and social structures rather than to provide opportunities to understand and contest the systemic sources of class, gender and racialized inequality (Foucault, 1977; also see Hook, 2007). Recent scholarship analyses how psychoanalytic theory and clinical principles have historically been shaped by Eurocentrism originating in Freud’s convictions of the superiority of Western cultural institutions and values. Moreover, psychoanalysis was born amidst 19th century European colonialism, and Freud adopted its racialized discourse in his conceptualization of the unconscious, still evident in our theories of “primitive states of mind” and in concepts like regression, pre-Oedipal dynamics and analyzability (Brickman, 2003). Concepts like

these reflect an unacknowledged association between early mental states and non-European cultures, including black and brown psyches and bodies. Primitivity in Freud’s theorizing was also aligned with femininity, referred to as the dark continent. This orientation has been challenged by subsequent generations of critical psychoanalysts in light of their understanding of social oppression and in response to social movements, including feminism, gay rights, the recognition of multiple genders and sexualities, and most recently, the Black Lives Matter movement for racial equality. Some psychoanalysts have turned to critical social theory to contextualize in the specificities of history and culture their interpretations of the dynamics of individual and group fantasies, affects and defenses (see Aibel, 2018). Most recently, psychoanalytic research has examined how we in the U.S. emerge as subjects within a settler colonial society that since its origins has been characterized by racialized capitalism within which the dominant classes have used White supremacy to undermine multiracial uni-

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ty and struggles for social equity (Dadlani, 2020; Kita, 2019). This rich literature has not yet been integrated as core components of didactic training programs in psychoanalytic institutes, nor does it inform enough supervision of candidates’ clinical work. Thus, the bifurcation between psychoanalytic-informed social theory and clinical practice too often remains unchallenged.

Moreover, while White supremacy and racism in our profession have become a preoccupation of many colleagues, the ideology of class has yet to attract serious curricular attention within our institutes (Ryan, 2017). I suggest this lacuna is linked to the privatized nature of our profession within capitalism, in which we have traditionally functioned as entrepreneurs selling a service to consumers.

Our own class identities and location, our incomes and lifestyles, have been based in part on our upper and middle-class patients’ abilities to pay our fees, leaving access to psychoanalytic treatment for those with limited resources dependent on practitioners’ personal ethical commitments to provide reduced fees.

This relationship between psychoanalysis and its middle-class patient population has too often been ideologically justified by claims that the poor and people of color are burdened by so many daily pressures and problems that they do not have the free attention for a self-reflective engagement, requiring instead symptom-focused short-term cognitive behavioral treatments instead (see Gherovici and Christian, 2019). Moreover, our own privileged class location as professionals, (regardless of our class origins), may contribute to a reluctance to address class when considering transference/countertransference treatment dynamics. Perhaps most salient, when both analyst and patient are White and middle class, ideologies of race and class can be comfortably invisible—dissociated—as legitimate objects of psychoanalytic inquiry.

Let’s return to the clinical vignette I began with. Recall that I chose to say nothing when my politically progressive White upper middle-class but downwardly mobile patient, Liza, described having crossed a picket line of striking Black and Latinx working-class women. I believe that my decision to remain silent was an anxious reaction to my transgressive wishes to contest the ideology of psychoanalytic neutrality, the very principle I believe represents the transmission of hegemony in the clinical setting. Liza had crossed the workers’ picket line, and I had not dared to cross the ideological neutrality line. However, if I had called attention to Liza’s having said nothing about what it felt like to cross the picket line, many themes that had emerged previously in the treatment could have been reexamined, lending additional insight into Liza’s conflicts about her history and current life. Not only would familial pathology have

been analyzed, but social pathology as well.

For example, Liza’s childhood conflicts had revolved around her overweight and histrionic mother, experienced and depicted as endlessly greedy by her father, whose preferential love for Liza had been contingent on her ability even as a child to control her own appetites and to practice self-constraint in many areas. This oedipal configuration, in which my patient had been her father’s favorite because, unlike her mother, she could inhibit her own clamorous impulses, undermined her ability to identify with the raucous female picketers, whom she experienced as greedy -- for more wages, more health care, more recognition and more support from the public. In fact, we would later learn that my silence had been a communication, one that Liza had translated as approval of her disidentification with the assertive, demanding picketers. Thus, my silence had constituted an intervention that was anything but neutral. So, we lost a possible exchange that might have potentiated her ability, in fantasy if not in action, to combat one instance of her chronic feelings of isolation through an identification with a group of people collectively fighting for the very things she had longed for: a livable wage and quality health care. And we lost the opportunity to explore my conflicts between my White middle-class positionality and my leftist politics.

In subsequent sessions that followed the birth of her baby, Liza and I took up the issue of what crossing the workers’ picket line represented. We came to see that it involved not only unresolved familial childhood traumas, but her internalization of neoliberal ideology as well. In other words, she acted exclusively based on individual self-interest rather than in solidarity with others to challenge this society’s asymmetrical class and racialized power relations.

Moreover, we came to understand how Liza’s denigrating feelings toward the poor and people of color learned in her youth through parents, schools, friendships and the media persisted despite her progressive political views acquired as an adult. In this context, her insensitivity to the striking women workers represented a dissociative process that enabled her to assert her difference from rather than her similarity to their class and racialized plight.

Together Liza and I evolved an understanding of some of the ideologically infused meanings of her having crossed the picket line that had been previously eclipsed from our mutual inquiry. In the process of revisiting this issue, we both came to see more profoundly how ubiquitous racist and prejudiced beliefs and fantasies are, embedded in our minds in ways often unknown to us. Racism is created by the interface between external societal structures intra-psychic mechanisms, both acting together to shape and mobilize each 24

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other. Indeed, conscious and unconscious racist fantasies often organize our relations to one another through encounters with difference and the unknown Other. As we explored these themes stimulated by this clinical encounter, Liza came to resignify the striking women, now not only as the victims of poverty and exploitation, but as protagonists of their own lives who were assertively fighting against the social forces -their corporate bosses - responsible for their precarious conditions. And I, her analyst, learned about my own dissociated anxieties that in part had motivated my decision to obey the psychoanalytic neutrality rule. My conscious political alliance with the strikers and my participation in the solidarity movement supporting their strike had provoked my anger at Liza’s action. I became conscious of how in my countertransferential enactment, at least in part, my affectively infused critical attitude toward Liza represented a projection of my own disavowed fear of identifying with the desperate plight of socially denigrated, impoverished and disenfranchised working-class people of color. Ultimately, as two white cisgender middle-class women, both Liza and I were able to employ the psychoanalytic process to become more conscious of the psychological impoverishment imposed by identification with, rather than interrogation of, the hegemony of class and racial oppression.

I have used a single incident in a yearslong complex psychoanalytic treatment to highlight my perspective on an important theme emerging within contemporary psychoanalytic theory and praxis on how to understand and treat the social in the psyche. I have attempted to illustrate with this clinical example the ubiquity of ideology in psychoanalysis, first in its function as interpellation and then in its potential as a counter-hegemonic engagement.

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REFERENCES Aibel, M. (2018). The Personal is Political is Psychoanalytic: Politics in the Consulting Room. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 15 (1), 64-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/15518 06X.2018.1396130 Althusser, L. (1994). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) in Žižek, S. (ed) Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.

Brickman, C. (2003). Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia Univ Press.

Dadlani, M. B. (2020). Queer Use of Psychoanalytic Theory as a Path to Decolonization: A Narrative Analysis of Kleinian Object Relations. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 21(2), 119-126. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2020.17 60027 Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Gherovici, P. and Christian, C. (2019)(eds). Psychoanalysis in the Barrios. New York: Routledge.

Hoare, Q. & Nowell Smith, G. (Eds) (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. New York: Palgrave.

Kita, B. (2019). They hate me now but where was everyone when I needed them? Mass incarceration, projective identification, and social work praxis. Social Work, 26(1), 25-49. DOI: 10.1080/15228878.2019.1584118 Ryan, J. (2017). Class in Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality. Oxford: Routledge.

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Finding Intimacy, the Unconscious, and Embodied Place in the ‘Limbo-space’ of Telepsychoanalysis Molly MERSON

Rachel Jackson is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn.

Like many psychoanalysts, since 2020 my sessions have been facilitated by some kind of telephone or video media. Unlike many psychoanalysts, I have remained using telepsychoanalysis as my primary medium for facilitating the work, using both telephone and video to mediate sessions. The observable reason for the change from in-person-mediated psychoanalysis to telepsychoanalysis was part of a collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has been, and continues to be, deadly and devastating. Fortunately, many of my patients and I had the privilege to work from home or some other place. I have remained utilizing this technological medium because this format continues to work for me and my patients, and I have been able to experience the multitude of profound ways the unconscious works through whichever medium is available to it.

While navigating and enduring the intensity of a pandemic, I grapple with how to live with integrity and accountability to environmental, social, and cultural transformations. I engage such questions in my clinical and personal life daily: How might we practice

in such a way that addresses and dismantles white supremacy, climate catastrophe, the rise of fascism, wealth disparity, economic apartheid, and the anti-Blackness and anti-life of the carceral state? Can psychoanalysis support the queering, the world-building, and imagination that is required for creating new metaphors and resourcing new ways of living1?

Telepsychoanalysis is not an omnipotent cure for our catastrophes— in fact, the energy expenditure and mineral extractive practices used to power the Internet and devices are extensions of extractive colonialism, and devastate communities and climate— but telepsychoanalysis may be a way for us to keep talking and keep imagining while also shifting our relationship to our assumptions, including assumptions around movement, location, and what I call placefulness, or being connected to place. Through my embodied experience of telepsychoanalysis, I am coming to recognize that even if my patients and I are not in the same immediate body-to-body location, this 1 . See O’Brien & Abdelhadi (2022) Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 25

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embodied sense of place has not left us. As Anzaldúa (1987) says, “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back” (p. 21).

Interestingly, through telepsychoanalysis, place becomes an even more visible and nameable element of our work. Patients, clinicians, and students are visibly accompanied by our places: we may see backgrounds change, hear the sounds of one’s location, and watch the light shift in the environment.

Some even write our pronouns or the name of the traditional and ancestral Indigenous stewards of the unceded lands next to their own name on Zoom. The ongoing decolonial practice of naming pre-settler landscapes, culture, people, and ontologies is part of refusing the cultural seduction of denial of the oft-forgotten catastrophes of our time. Each time I name that I live and work on the unceded homelands of the Coast Miwok, Lisjan Ohlone, Patwin and Suisun people2, I hold myself accountable to a practice that roots myself into place by uprooting whitewashed cultural norms and reckoning with my set2 . Look up the names of the Indigenous stewards of your place here: https://native-land.ca/

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tler-colonial heritage and its violent relational implications. This accountability practice reminds me of how to be in right relationship with place and its human and more-thanhuman constituents. When I feel in right relationship with place, I can be in right relationship with work, love, and the emergent experience of unconscious phenomena.

It feels important how place shows up in a treatment. Even when we are not in the same place, we still share something of each others’ place. Telepsychoanalysis invites disruption, connection, rage, love, and a place where affective turbulence comes alive; where deadness is real, where emergence is possible. The walls may look different, the seat may shift, and our backgrounds may change the more we talk and the more unfolds. Is this what no memory or desire (Bion, 1967) looks like, when the background changes from session to session?

I find telepsychoanalysis requires a focused attunement and evenly-hovering-attention (Freud, 1912) to the dynamism of the setting.

This practice feels like an emergence of new and queer ways of being in communication with unconscious phenomena.

Not without some uncanny timing, Hannah Zeavin completed the final draft of “The Distance Cure” (2021) just before the pandemic took hold. Highlighting the history of teletherapy, Zeavin takes us through Freud’s letter-mediated (and father-mediated) analysis of Little Hans; the use of radio by anti-colonial movements including Fanon in Algeria and by Winnicott as he offers parenting advice for the British masses; the heyday of call-in advice shows; documentation and critique of the rise of so-called Artificial Intelligence therapy; and reminds us of the origins and necessity of suicide hotlines and warm chat lines. Zeavin invites psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts to contend with questions such as, hasn’t psychoanalysis and psychotherapy always been mediated? Is technology going to “take us over” and exploit us in a kind of repetition compulsion of disavowed colonialism? Can technology-mediated psychotherapy be useful, transformative, and real?

Perhaps, to queerly use Sara Ahmed’s Queer Use (2019): if our environments are shaped by us and we them, then might technology be defined by the way in which we use the technologies available to us, and the ways we allow ourselves to be used by them?

Zeavin’s book emerged at the right time for me, as I have been navigating creatively queer considerations of “What is psychoanalysis?” in the psychoanalytic community. Normativity, and thus belonging, in psychoanalysis is often framed as what the stance of a psychoanalyst “should” be rather than the how of psychoanalysis and its praxis as emergently idiosyncratic to the dyad. Specifically, while I resonate with the desire for a grounded experience of being

body-to-body in session, I don’t agree with my colleagues’ sentiments of telepsyhcoanalysis being a lesser model. Instead, while I do agree that teleanalysis is not generative for every dyad or constellation, I believe our field may too easily rely on the sensory input we are accustomed to for information about and in experience of the unconscious. Here, as in other areas of my life, I have had to learn how to find myself in-between.

The “distance” work of telepsychoanalysis is also challenging my own adherence to culturally specific and normative notions of such things as, what is located as “inside” and “outside”; what the experience of “private” and “public” feels like to different people; how the analytic frame is assembled; and what gets imbued, projected, repressed, or denied in the enactments of private life in public spaces. I am now playing with theories of public spaces, private psychic space, privatized space, and what is communicable or not by meeting in person, or by phone, or video— or by dream, poem, or happenstance on the street. In addition, I wonder, why has psychoanalysis thus far only taken up the question of technology as mediated by digital life? What about other technologies, such as the technology of relationships between beings and spaces and the nooscape (Chayne, 2018-present)? Micha Rahder describes nooscape as an ecology of knowledges, the ways in which “our practices of knowing are built with the rest of the living [and nonliving] earth…[nooscape] is an activity we undertake with the world around us.” (Chayne, 2018-present) I wonder, what other media or technology, including epistemologies and ontologies, may be available to us that may invite emergent aspects of psychic life and redirect or foreclose others? How does a seed know the conditions in which to sprout and when to stay underground, in potential space (Winnicott, 1971) (Kimmerer 2013)? How do we know when to make an interpretation and when to stay with silence? How might we as psychoanalysts, if we learn how to listen in new ways, know what to try next?

Speaking of the underground, Harney & Moten (2013) describe “The Undercommons” as a fugitive phenomenon in antagonism to institutions that unsettles the normative plantation autocracy. An uncomfortable yet profoundly possible (non)space of transformation, this is an ethic and not a concrete location, is part of a movable frame, an ontology rather than a static ideology. In aiming to work among and from this undercommons with my patients whom I meet via telepsychoanalysis, I come to feel rooted. It evokes images of mycelium networks which communicate between each other and on behalf of plants and other rooted beings across the entire planet. Here, I evoke Deleuze & 26

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Guattari’s (1988) notion of rhizomatic relations, but with more of a queer, Star Trek: Discovery3 sensibility.

With my patients who participate in telephone-mediated psychoanalysis, I suspect we may be working on the same things we might be working on in in-person mediated psychoanalysis. But I have no way of knowing whether it would be different. I know I feel differently now than I did when I spent hours in the office. For some, my cartographed and Google-mapped office may be the place, the location, of transformation, of wonder, and of connection. For some, and I notice for me, place becomes mutable and specific in its own way. Via placefulness, wherein we call up our own singular and specific places and locations, psychic and otherwise, many of my patients and I seem to have found more capacity for closeness that is more tender, less intellectual, and more willing to open their intimate private internal life to us both, and to learn other ways of demarcating the edges and boundaries of places they do not wish to go.

Not all folks find this medium and technology and distance to be generative or useful. Some find it harsh, cold, unyielding, and the aloneness too terrifying. Most of my patients stayed in my practice during the transition, some increased frequency, but a few patients left; feeling concerned about surveillance, a sense of disembodiment, lack of control, and needing the reason of my office to interact with the world, and having lost that, we seemed to lose a sense of meaning in the work. I have never seen the faces of some of my patients; one I just recently saw their face for the first time in almost two years, mediated by video, which was quite thrilling for me, mostly because the patient finally asked for something for themself, but also, it was just nice to see them.

Case material Here I share with you something about how technology and distance can mediate and facilitate intimacy using one particular clinical experience. With previous years of working together with this patient around loss, attachment and annihilation anxieties closely related to making decisions that dissent from others’ opinions, therapy over the phone has enabled an opportunity to experience an enactment of what we over the years called “the drop,” in the form of a dropped call.

There are many clinical moments I’ve tracked lately where technology or the various media I’ve used hasn’t worked properly; and many interpretations have been made about what it means to not hear someone, hear parts, see parts, freeze, and so on. This 3 . Star Trek: Discovery is one of the more recent iterations of the Star Trek franchise, wherein a collaborative group of scientists have developed a way of transporting between galaxies using the mycelium network.

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Christian Xatrec is an artist, curator and Vice President of the Emily Harvey Foundation.

particular patient could not tolerate having sessions by phone at first. Notions of movement of place as I described earlier were too intolerable and too evocative of unpredictability and disaster. Telephone mediated therapy was a non-starter at first, because it was too distant, too separate, too disorienting. When the pandemic started, we stopped treatment for a while, but they eventually returned, as they were considering making a large geographic move.

A few months into our resumed telephone mediated work, I asked them how the phone sessions were feeling. They said that the phone felt good. They reflected that something about how in-person work felt too close, and that the phone put up a barrier that helped them engage more deeply and honestly because it mitigated some of the overwhelming physical sensations of anxiety. They still felt the apartness, which held some tinge of loneliness for them; but, by our ongoing collaborative acknowledgement of us not sharing a physical space together, they were becoming more aware of how we build and hold a psychic space together. This was something they thought about often just before our sessions.

I reflected, “we are creating a different kind of waiting room, and a different kind of office, that seems to require something different of both of us.”

They agreed, noting that this psychic collaboration was helping them feel connected without feeling overwhelmed. They were reminded that they used to think they had to see me in person in order to keep me in mind, otherwise they would try to erase me from memory by forgetting me. As they spoke, I

wondered if this was another way, they attempted to live life by refusing loss, as though forgetting could be a way to mitigate the pain of not having someone with you any longer.

Though in my reverie, I listened as they said, “There is a limbo to this. Something that feels good and interesting. It’s the right mode for what I am working on.”

My reverie continues: The limbo is no longer dead. It is alive, between us. I say, “Closeness and togetherness without being physically together. That does sound like what you are working on.”

As our sessions continue over the months, we continue talking about our usual themes: Feeling dropped, annihilated, the rug pulled out from underneath. Sometimes this was named directly, sometimes implied, but for the first three months of our telephone mediated therapy, the call dropped at exactly the same time each session. The drop became a predictable yet anticipated part of our sessions, and each time it happened, I called right back. At first, I did not ask questions, so that it could be alive with us and not so tightly analyzed. At some point, I interpreted this dropped call gently as “the drop” manifesting.

They burst into tears. “Yes…. It is the drop.

That’s what it is. But you call right back… you call right back, and we go on together.”

After that, the call never dropped again.

While I remain amazed by the way in which unconscious processes use what is available to them to communicate, I’m reminded: Isn’t this exactly what we are doing when we offer this kind of treatment, distance or otherwise? In Zeavin’s language, this “distanced intimacy” (p. 18) offers an umbilical 27

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cord of going-on-being, like the headphones that connect us to the devices and the devices to each other, which allows space for the unconscious to emerge. Zeavin argues, “distance is not the opposite of presence; absence is” (Ibid.). This practice highlights that the distance between us can invite both patient and analyst into limbo-space, to experience the lack between us, the disconnect that’s already always there, and the loneliness inherent in never really knowing the other’s mind. It also offers us a chance to experience our desire for connection and longing and hopefulness for something that may always be just distant and just close enough.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to Lara Sheehi and Deborah Kim for your feedback on earlier iterations of this piece.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use?: On the uses of use. Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza.

Bion, W. R. (1967). Notes on memory and desire. Classics in psychoanalytic technique, 259-260.

Chayne, K. (Host). (2022, June 21). Micha Rahder: Thinking through the ecology of knowledges (ep361) [Audio podcast episode]. In Green Dreamer. https://greendreamer. com/podcast/micha-rahder-an-ecology-of-knowledges Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Freud, S. (1912). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 12:109-120 Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study.

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed editions.

O’Brien, M. E., & Abdelhadi, E. (2022). Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072. New York: Common Notions.

Winnicott DW. (1971). Playing and Reality,17:1-25 Zeavin, H. (2021). The distance cure: a history of teletherapy.

MIT Press.

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An Ode to Ambivalence: Reflections of a Documentary Filmmaker

Ofra BLOCH In the beginning there was a sea of endless blue in my mother’s eyes, and I drowned in it. When she would shut her eyes hoping for an afternoon nap, I would gently pull her eyelashes and separate her lids so that the blue would reappear, and I could continue to be. On rainy days she would suggest that we leave our umbrellas at home and take a walk between the drops, so we wouldn’t get wet.

She was a magician and I believed everything she said. The biggest gift a parent can give her child is the permission to go. She never did and when she developed an illness that impaired her cognition, I felt I didn’t have the right to go on with the act of living without her. This is how I landed in analysis and embarked on the long struggle of differentiating.

I often wondered about what prevented my mother from allowing me to fly the nest.

Probably her mothering was influenced by the loss of her own mother at the age of two, along with the experience years later of being told by a stranger that the woman she called mom was actually her stepmom. It wasn’t just a case of her becoming the mother she thought she needed to be for me. It was more about what she lacked and about what I needed to be for her.

The seven years it took to make my documentary Afterward allowed me the opportunity to radically listen to those I was raised to regard as an other - the Germans and the Palestinians. In my encounters, I experienced being in the role of both victim and victimizer and was forced to face my own implication in the Occupation, even after living for 40 years in the diaspora. However, it was the reactions to my film in the last four years, since its completion, that made me think of my mother’s experience and its impact on me through a different lens.

When I discuss the reactions to my documentary, I don’t focus on the people who liked the film or those who didn’t. I focus instead on a distinct group of people who would ordinarily be drawn to the topic of the documentary but who refused to watch it as if “on principle.” This group of individuals isn’t confined to one nationality, gender, religion or race. I have wondered for some time about what it is that unified them. It seems to me that the common denominator was their difficulty in handling ambivalence.

Afterward is all about ambivalence. The film points to a future—an “afterward”—that attempts, without polemics or false equivalencies, to live with the truths of history in order to make sense of the present. Without being able to tolerate conflicting feelings, to hold more than one emotion at a time, or to live with uncertainties, confusion and hesitation, there is no space in which to invite the other to begin a dialogue.

What is it about the experience of feeling ambivalent that makes it into an unbearable endeavor?

The poet Adrienne Rich described the suffering of ambivalence as “the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.” (Rich 1976). While the opinion columnist Anna Quindlen wrote, “We don’t do ambivalence well in America.

We do courage for our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French.

Certainty is American.” (Quindlen, 2010). I felt a wave of fresh air when I read this quote from the writer Erica Jong, “Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.”

Growing up, my mother didn’t experience being on the mind of her mother, or any other for that matter. During her childhood no one took an interest in her internal life or showed the capacity to understand her feelings and wishes, and it was left to me to repair her eroded epistemic trust. Being deprived of ongoing mentalization likely shaped her attachment style and impaired her capacity to be alone. When she had a daughter, it was as if she discovered her own essence or perhaps got to have an identity beyond being an orphan. She needed me in order to have meaning and identity, and I in return, felt as if we were one. We shared a world of radical dependency, in which we belonged to each other. Absent was the sense of having a secure base to which I could return if I dared to individuate and explore the world. In the confines of such a straitjacket, there was no space for me to experience her contemplation of me, without which I couldn’t differentiate from her, and therefore was never able to internalize her.

The unconscious rigid structure that was formed between my mother and me was an example of our instinctual need for belonging. The process of becoming a defined group is similarly based on a particular bond among group members who share identity or adhere to similar beliefs and social structures.

However, when a group is characterized by a total enmeshment with a strict definition of their belief system, it can generate feelings of insecurity and anxiety within the group.

The group then reacts by establishing strictly delineated, external boundaries in order to protect itself from being exposed to the outside world. This rigidity can lead to the development of a false world where there is a space for only one truth and a profound fear of the germ of any other truths. It consists of ‘good-us’ and ‘bad-them’ and people, ideas and actions aren’t judged on their own merit, but whether they represent them or us. The 28

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absence of any other perspectives furthers isolation, so working through and using mentalization to transform and change become impossible.

Recently, a German member of a non-governmental peace organization arranged a virtual screening of Afterward. The organization trains German, Palestinian, and Israeli young adults to work together to promote peace by providing them with opportunities for encounters. The hope is that by experiencing mutual understanding, respect and acceptance, they will become agents of peace in their respective societies. The audience that attended consisted of Germans, two Israelis and no Palestinians. Most of the Israelis and all the Palestinian members refused to attend the screening and the discussion that followed. I assume that their entangled traumatic past orients them to react with anxiety, avoidance and dissociation in response to exposures to particular triggers.

This avoidance occurs despite the fact that the members of this organization had committed themselves to dialogue with each other and they have been listening to each other for many years.

A similar experience occurred when Afterward was screened at Solidarity – Tel Aviv Human Rights Film Festival. Some of my friends who identify with both extremes of the political map in Israel mysteriously declined invitations to attend. Though they differ in their political viewpoints, they were united in their fear of being presented with a personal documentary that doesn’t take sides, that isn’t pro-or-against, but rather attempts to navigate the labyrinth of conflicting emotions when faced with reality on the ground.

However, I can clearly remember times when I didn’t take on the effort to understand the other, when I too the felt comfort in belonging to a cohesive group that firmly believed that their truth was the only just one, and how the goal of holding many perspectives was difficult for me as well.

There is a moment in Afterward in which I can be seen walking in the Old City of Jerusalem as Muslims were thronging the narrow streets towards the Al Aqsa Mosque for the Friday prayer. The Friday before we filmed that scene, an Israeli Jew walking the same path was knifed. I vividly remember asking the Palestinian assistant producer to speak to me in English, feeling some trepidation about being identified as an Israeli Jew if we conversed in Hebrew. A moment before, I felt appalled and enraged by the presence of so many armed soldiers, and at the same time I caught myself thinking that I did not want to die and that perhaps it was a good thing that the soldiers were there to protect me. I

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Jean Dupuy (1925-2021 ) was an artist and anagrammatist whose collective projects predate recent art world ‘Relational Aesthetics’ manifestations.

felt ashamed for worrying about my own personal safety.

On another occasion, I strolled by the walls of Aida, a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem, which were covered by life-sized stenciled images of people who are thought of

as murderous terrorists by Israeli Jews and as freedom fighter and martyrs by Palestinians.

I believe in non-violent resistance and oppose the view that the liberation of the oppressed requires shedding the blood of the oppressor. Therefore, it wasn’t easy to connect with 29

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the part of me that could imagine the level of desperation of the people behind those images. I found myself able to envisage how people who live under occupation and experience ongoing humiliation and violence without any change in sight could end up picking

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up arms. But at the same time, I was also in touch with the part of me that felt a strong sense of fear and terror, along with an intense rage at the Palestinians for killing my people.

It was then and there that I could see with clarity that both reactions to those experiences were legitimate, and one did not cancel out the other. As challenging as it was for me at that moment, I found myself able to live with my own ambivalence.

I discovered a quote by the psychoanalyst Otto Rank that spoke directly to my newly acquired way of thinking. Otto Rank didn’t ignore the challenge of living with ambivalence, but he regarded it as an essential component of meaning in life: “For the only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life”. (Nisenholz, 2011).

The road for both individuals and groups towards making good use of ambivalence weaves through the thorny fields of mentalization. It is the ability to mentalize an other and vice versa, the experiences of having an other imagine your own thoughts, feelings and perspective, which provides us the space to mourn our original symbiotic state. It helps us move out of the pulls of cohesive identity, which serves as a narcissistic shield from the other, be it humans, or inanimate ideas. In this protected narcissism, we split the world between all-good and all-bad. When individuals and groups adhere to one truth as if it were one-size-fits-all, they feel threatened by revelation of other truths or discussions about nuances of experiences and memories. They are more likely to apply measures that keep them safe in their extreme position, such as self-censorship and avoidance of exposure to ideas that challenge their own.

One could argue that the group of people who formed such a strong opinion about Afterward without even watching it was actually expressing its own state of epistemic mistrust. Mistrust can prevent them from being able to mentalize an other who expresses ideas that stray away from their core beliefs and ideologies. When a group is locked in such a stance, its members might inadvertently become attached to the status quo, and experience change and transformation as loss and defeat, and thus hinder any possibility for constructive dialogue.

Afterward premiered in DOC NYC of 2018 and was screened in twelve film festivals in the US, at the UN Correspondents Association, and to theatrical audiences in New York, Los Angeles, and a few other cities, receiving excellent reviews. In addition, it won awards for its social impact.

After COVID-19 interfered with our plans, Afterward joined the virtual world. There were numerous virtual screenings in various communities, including psychoanalytic institutes, and the film can be seen on several streaming platforms around the world. It now has a life of its own.

My dream was for Afterward to be shown in New York, Berlin, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. Unfortunately, my dream came true only in the case of New York. Palestinian individuals thanked me after screenings with teary eyes and expressed a wish to screen it in their communities, yet I never heard back from any of them. Palestinian film festivals that considered screening Afterward informed me that it wasn’t pro-Palestinian enough. The Jewish response was even less enthusiastic. Some were distressed because the film wasn’t pro-Israeli enough. Others were upset because the film failed to denounce Zionism, and still others felt enraged believing that I was comparing the Nakba to the Holocaust, an act regarded as blasphemy in certain circles that cling to exclusiveness and have no space for the suffering of others. Only the San Francisco International Jewish Film Festival dared to screen it. The three main film festivals in Israel rejected Afterward though they definitely don’t shy away from screening films deemed pro-Palestinian. Afterward finally had one screening in Solidarity, a human rights festival in Tel Aviv. Attempts to screen Afterward in film festivals in Germany had the same fate, but recently the film was picked by a German streaming company that is showing it in six European countries.

Given the praise the film received for its artistic merit, I believe that the main hurdle we faced in circulating Afterward was that it did not take sides. I was not interested in taking sides and the team that helped me make the documentary supported this perspective. The film didn’t aim to convince or change minds, but it did advocate for wrestling with ambivalence and for listening to the other as a step that could lead to dialogue.

Yet Afterward did indicate that in encounters between Israelis and Palestinians, the role of ‘first listeners’ ought to be taken by the Israelis. I believe that only after the oppressed get to share their pain and suffering with those who have oppressed them and feel truly heard, can they be inclined to find space in their hearts to listen to the experiences of past victims turned present-day victimizers.

In his book, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology (2019), Gaztambide writes about the fallout of political trauma, which isolates minds and results in mistrust and vigilance, leading to the creation of a rigid cognitive-emotional stance that interferes with the ability of the individual and the group to 30

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take in new information. He states that when individuals, communities, or political systems fail to provide mentalizing spaces, this instigates the crumbling of epistemic trust, preventing any working through of the trauma.

Gaztambide speaks of how a humanizing dialogue can create a sense of agentic self and provide us with an experience of receiving subjectivity and reflection from an other, so we are able to mentalize and trust the other as well.

Epilogue: The blue of my mother’s eyes, and the maternal containment it represented, created a world of ultimate interdependence and an illusion of an eternal and exclusive belonging. After my mother died, I turned to psychoanalysis to understand that illusion. In the course of my long analysis, the therapeutic dyad went through various configurations of maternal transference and countertransference. I learned to understand myself, my inner life, and my experiences in a deeper way, while also gaining the ability to see the (m) other as a separate and complex agent.

I believe that it was during the experience of my analysis that I developed my ability to tolerate having different feelings concurrently and holding them in tension. The making of Afterward was both a reflection of that ability and a creative endeavor that helped me to explore the importance of tolerating ambivalence for intergroup dynamics and my own internal conflicts. I view the process of strengthening my ability to handle ambivalence as an ongoing challenge that is critical to my closeness with others.

Forty-two years ago, I moved 5,694 miles away from my mother and immigrated to the United States. I never consciously viewed my immigration to another continent as an effort to lead a separate life from my mother, but I am certain that the distance was an attempt to lovingly differentiate. It is only of late that I realized that physical distance isn’t a magical tool in that effort. During a period in the last year when I seriously considered terminating my treatment with my analyst of 30 years, it dawned on me that perhaps in order to fully differentiate, there is no need to run away. On the contrary, I needed to stick around and weather the difficulties of the relationship and achieve separateness and a reciprocal regard in the context of the mutual gaze.

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REFERENCES Erica Jong Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: https://www.brainyquote. com/quotes/erica_jong_137089 Gaztambide, D. J., (2019) A people’s history of psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Lexington Books.

Nisenholz, B., (2011) Sigmund says: And other psychotherapists’ quotes. iUniverse.

Quindlen, A., (2010) Thinking out loud: The personal, the political, the public, and the private. Ballantine Books.

Rich, A., (1976) Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. Norton.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ofra Bloch, LCSW is a New York City based psychoanalyst and clinical social worker who has been making documentary shorts since 2008 and directed her first feature in 2018. Her specialty is trauma and how victims deal with those who have committed crimes against them. As a member of the group Doctors of the World she traveled to interview torture victims and write affidavits for them.She received her degree from Columbia University in New York in 2001.

Steven Botticelli, Ph.D.is an assistant adjunct professor in the NYU Postdoctoral Program. He teaches the class “Psychoanalysis and Politics” through the Independent track, for which he currently serves as track cochair. He is a contributing editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and The Division/ Review, and a supervisor for the City College program in clinical psychology. Steve writes in the areas of politics and sexuality, and practices in Greenwich Village.

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ph.D. is professor emerita of sociology and women studies, CUNY. Among her publications are Autoaffection (2000), The Affective Turn (2007) and most recently The User Unconscious (2018).

She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and faculty and supervisor at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapies, where she is a member of the Training Committee and the Curriculum Committee.

Nancy Caro Hollander, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita at California State University, faculty and member of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and is in clinical practice in Los Angeles, California. She is the co-author of Psychoanalysis, Class, and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Routledge, 2006).

Molly Merson, MFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in the Bay Area, CA, (Ohlone, Coast Miwok, Patwin).

They hold an MA in Social Clinical Psychology from New College of California, a degree that placed an emphasis on the ways in which constructs of race, power, gender, socio-economics, and sociopolitical environments impact individual and community identity, well-being, and health. Molly is also a candidate in psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.

Kendra Terry, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University in New York. Her training has also included recent placements at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her research—primarily theoretical—focuses on the various nodes of connection between literature and psychoanalysis. In particular, she is interested in the use of both verbal and nonverbal language in therapeutic discourse, the role of the poetic function in psychoanalysis, and the joint pursuit of psychotherapy and art as residing in a Socratic attempt to know thy self and a detailed exploration of the human condition as underlying both disciplines.

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Bryant Welch, JD, Ph.D. received a B.A in government from Harvard College, a J.D from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of North Carolina. He is also a research associate graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Welch lived in Washington D.C. for over seventeen years and served as a chief spokesperson for organized psychology at the American Psychological Association.