Relational Psychoanalysis as Political Resistance

Abstract

The intellectual movement known as the interpretative turn is used to develop an understanding of relational psychoanalysis as a way of preparing patients and practitioners to resist the dominant way of being and political structures of the current era. This interpretation is explored by discussing a newly emerging configuration of the self—the flattened, multiple self—and its connections to 1) the growing influence of neoliberal proceduralism, and 2) an increase in both political indifference and political fundamentalism in the general population. By providing a brief history of relational psychoanalysis that highlights its moral vision and political implications, and by drawing on film, television commercials, online gaming, and psychotherapy practices, it is argued that relational practice can oppose and offer an alternative to a neoliberal way of being, the political arrangements it serves, and the psychological attitudes that enable it. By explicitly recognizing some of the political meanings of relational practice it is hoped that practitioners will be helped to develop political practices within the clinical hour more directly than in the past.

Keywords:

• relational
• hermeneutics
• neoliberal
• dialogue
• proceduralism
• instrumentalism
• technicism

Acknowledgment

An earlier version of this article was presented at the symposium “Psychoanalysis and Social Theory,” Simon Fraser University, Institute for the Humanities, November 16, 2013.

Notes

¹ This is a continuing dilemma for political activism in psychology: How to shift from what Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch (1974, p. 10) called first-order change (from psychological change located in the individual, the dyad, or the family) to second-order change (to larger systemic, foundational change located in the political arrangements of a society)? Over the last 100 years, several schools of psychology, such as Reichian body work, interactionism in social psychology, radical psychiatry, and humanistic psychology have all failed to articulate and live out real-life solutions to that enormous problem. And of course some forms of ego psychology, object relations theory, and cognitive psychology were from their beginnings uninterested or functioned to directly oppose the connection between therapy and political activism (see Buss, 1979; Sampson, 1981). Could relational psychoanalysis, by drawing on the interpretative turn's emphasis on history, critique, and moral discourse, be able to find a way?

² Relational analysts such as Bromberg (1993, 1996, 1998), Davies (1998), Davies and Frawley (1994), and Stern (2010) write about multiplicity and accord the concept of multiple self states an important place in their work. However, these writers are not valorizing the kind of flatness prevalent in contemporary pop culture. Psychoanalytic multiplicity reflects the hermeneutic belief that there is more than one truth in a text or an issue, and in that way it opposes fundamentalism and reinforces egalitarianism. Psychoanalytic multiplicity also supports the idea that individuals are constituted by various desires, values, ideals, commitments, cultural traditions, and emotional patterns. Thus, multiplicity opposes the belief that humans can and should be reduced to one unified unproblematic self. In this way, the concept opposes the unitary singular Victorian self; it valorizes conflict, variation, and difference. Of course, relational theories, like all theories, have their good and problematic aspects. Clinicians need to be mindful of the pitfalls as well as the advantages of multiplicity and be vigilant in historically situating therapeutic theory and guarding against uncritically accepting all aspects of any theory. See also “Is Multiplicity Reflection or Resistance?” in this article.

³ See Levenson (2006) for his concerns that this strategy obscures their meaningful differences.

⁴ I do not mean to suggest that relational theory either naturally leads to a left-oriented politics, or that a left-oriented politics inevitably leads to a relational orientation. Certainly there are relational psychoanalysts whose politics are not oriented to the left. Likewise, there have been writers who have attempted an integration of psychoanalysis and Marxism but would not be considered relationalists (e.g., Erich Fromm, Norman O. Brown, Russell Jacoby, Joel Kovel, Herbert Marcuse). These writers have generated a number of ideas such as the importance of psychological freedom; a rejection of normalizing therapies through a privileging of the id; and the description of and opposition to consumer capitalism's creation of a “repressive desublimation,” but none of these concepts were understood as being expressed through relational practices.

⁵ That is, the belief that others exist to be used in order to achieve one's personal ends and that technical advancements are the best means to that end.

⁶ The story line is reminiscent of the 1990 film Dances With Wolves (Costner, 1990), also drawn from the genre of the American frontier and the European encounter with the Plains Indian tribes. But in that encounter, we see a transformation in the deep self of a Victorian man. In Avatar, the hero's deep self does not seem to exist and therefore cannot be transformed. Instead, the change is accomplished primarily by transporting him into another identity: an avatar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip Cushman

Philip Cushman, Ph.D., teaches in the Psy.D. program, Antioch University Seattle, Seattle, Washington, and is in private practice on Vashon Island, Washington. He is the author of Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Addison-Wesley, 1995) and various articles on psychotherapy and history.