COMMENTARIES
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
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SUMMER 2023
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
