34 minute read
Class Notes
from Division Review
by 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.[i] 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, teachers, 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 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 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 were accompaniment to reported enactments between analyst and patient around traumatizing failures of recognition in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, immigration, race, or class.[ii] 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.[iii] 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 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.[iv] 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.[v] Class discussions were layered over feelings about the differences of identities among candidates, 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 considers 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.[vi] 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, 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 psychoanalytic 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 populations 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.[vii] 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 anecdotal 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.[viii]
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, 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-than-human, 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 uncertainty 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.
Endnotes
[i] In some cases, courses about the social were already in the curriculum before 2020 and had been developed in response to candidates’ request.
[ii] 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.
[iii] 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).
[iv] For an important discussion of guilt and other feelings arising when facing the challenges to psychoanalysis of systemic racism and more, see: Stephens (2020).
[v] 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 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.
[vi] 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).
[vii] 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.
[viii] 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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