The Personal is Political is Psychoanalytic: Politics in the Consulting Room

Abstract

The political is understood as an essential, irreducible aspect of our self-representations and an undeniably consequential factor in our difficulties in living. It can thus no longer be considered taboo in psychoanalytic theory and practice. I examine challenges of working with political material, especially as treatment conducted during the highly partisan, embattled Trump Era may instantiate fierce complementarity or collusive concordance in the dyad. I argue that we can neither ameliorate patients’ suffering nor widen and deepen understanding of their lives if we don’t help them discover how their (and our) embeddedness in particular historical and sociopolitical webs of competing interests hold them (and us) in place. Psychoanalysis’s disavowal of sociopolitical impacts is historicized, and its gradual theoretical relegitimization is traced. The relational turn’s emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity, intersubjectivity, coconstruction, mutual recognition, and advances in cognizing social inequities offer theoretical scaffolding and strategies of engagement.

Keywords:

• countertransference
• partisanship
• politics
• relational theory
• sociocultural
• Trump.

Acknowledgments

I express my gratitude to the many analysts, most of whose work I discuss, who engaged with me on this topic. Lewis Aron, Michael Clifford, Jody Messler Davies, the late Muriel Dimen, April Feldman, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Eyal Rozmarin, Andrew Samuels, and Steven Tublin shared their enthusiasm, their wisdom, and in some cases their unpublished writing, elucidating many aspects of the material and enriching my appreciation for the complexity of the undertaking. In particular, Samuels initially alerted me to the rich vein of work done in this area, very much including his own. I wish to express appreciation as well to the patients with whom this material has come to life.

Notes

¹ Two notable countertrends lay in interpersonal psychoanalytic theorizing, beginning in the 1940s (e.g., Fromm, 1941; see also Hirsch, 2015; Stern, 2017), and the pioneering feminist work of the 1970s that began shaping a critique of patriarchal power structures in society and in psychoanalysis (e.g., Chodorow, 1978; Dinnerstein, 1976; see also Aron, 1996; Dimen, 1997). It should here be noted that it was the feminist movement that gave us the understanding that “the personal is political” (see Hanisch, 1969).

² Wachtel shares that the area of political discourse where he feels challenged and uncomfortable is in working with patients who are further left on the political spectrum than his own left-of-center politics, as they promote in him a sense of guilt for not himself leaning left enough (Altman et al., 2004, pp. 22–23).

³ Jacobs (Altman et al., 2004) and Tublin (2015) note that patients frequently sense their analysts’ discrepant political beliefs and consequently skirt the topic of politics altogether in order to avert awkwardness, difficulty, and/or potential clashes.

⁴ Early contributions were offered by Holmes (1992, 1999); Perez Foster (1992, 1993); Altman (1993, 1995); Leary (1995, 1997a, 1997b); Cushman (1995); and Perez Foster, Moskowitz, and Javier (1996), among others. In reading my way into this literature, I have been idiosyncratic, and thus I can’t make a claim to be comprehensive or authoritative. I offer apology to critical contributors I may have omitted.

⁵ The most recent Annual Spring Meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, entitled “The Times, They Are A-Changin,’ How About Us?” (2017), offered a heartening abundance of papers and panels exploring work on such sociopolitical hot topics as race and racism; ethnicity and xenophobia; war, gnocide, colonialism, and cultural trauma; misogyny; homophobia; transgender and cisgender; sexual boundary violations; and a good deal more. It made for an exciting, vibrant, powerful, painful, galvanizing, melancholic, and exceedingly stimulating immersion in current psychoanalytic thought, and feeling, in all these areas. I imagine the conference will generate a tsunami of new, creative, ever-deepening thinking about the intersection of psychoanalysis and the sociopolitical.

⁶ Graduate students and candidates of any race, culture, ethnicity, or other identity/demographic marker stand to benefit from bringing increased awareness and sensitivity to questions of difference in self and other in clinical work, yet the continued predominance of White clinicians in psychoanalysis, itself worthy of further discussion, seems particularly salient given the “cultural embeddedness of analytic propositions” (Leary, 1997c, p. 1011) that emerged from a European milieu and for the most part continue developing in this cultural context (see Perez Foster, 1993).

⁷ As before, this list reads as idiosyncratically mine and should not be construed as either complete or authoritative.

⁸ The Frankfurt School was an affiliation of European neo-Marxist dissident philosophers, cultural critics, and social psychologists and theorists who produced left-wing social critique of modern capitalism beginning in the prewar period, utilizing critical theory and philosophical discourse, with aspirations for a more progressive social order (Finlayson, 2005; see also Harris, 2009, 2011; Layton, 2004b, 2005b).

⁹ A major exception was Fromm, who fled Nazi Europe for New York City, where he continued to bring political and psychosocial awareness to his psychoanalytic thinking at the William Alanson White Institute (see Hirsch, 2015; Philipson, 2017).

¹⁰ Many young conservatives were moved to join the armed forces or intelligence community; right-leaning citizens enthusiastically supported Bush’s promotion of aggression, security, and suspicion over civil liberties and a more considered bilateralism. Those on the left started expressing horror and resistance, if somewhat belatedly, to the violation of American values seen in this shift and in Bush/Cheney’s reliance on false claims to justify war; their use of torture in Iraq, black sites overseas and Guantanamo; and the neocons’ arrogant claims to nation-building, which went so disastrously wrong in Iraq.

¹¹ Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway’s infelicitous coining of this phrase became an instant classic in the first months of Trump’s administration.

¹² Benjamin takes up this issue in the context of explicating “a sort of fundamental psychodynamic of the opposition between Right and Left,” along what she calls “the guilt/shame axis” (Altman et al., 2004, p. 14). She posits that “it’s probably more difficult for people who assume our liberal position to actually get in touch with the fears and anxieties that drive the right-wing position. … It’s so easy for us to be moralistic even in our psychoanalytic positioning about that viewpoint” (pp. 14–15). See also the pioneering work of cognitive linguist Lakoff (2002; georgelakoff.com) for insights into the different mind-sets that inform right and left ideologies.

¹³ Davies (personal communication, 2017) notes how rarely our contemporary analytic literature considers, or even acknowledges, how few of our treatments are conducted three or more times per week, at least among the noncandidate/nonanalyst population. If analysts and analytic therapists are actually treating the majority of their patients just once, maybe twice weekly, as is the case for me, how does this impact the theory we rely on and the clinical work we actually do? The ways that current American economic, worklife, and health insurance realities mediate treatment is yet another sociopolitical force we contend with but insufficiently discuss.

¹⁴ The Suffolk Institute of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Long Island, NY; The William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY; and The Social Justice and Human Rights series at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, respectively.

¹⁵ The Goldwater Rule, named for 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, is the informal name given to Section 7.3 of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) code of ethics, which in 1973 declared it unethical for psychiatrists to offer professional opinions or confer diagnoses on public figures they have not personally evaluated nor on whose behalf they have not been granted proper authorization to make such statements (Carey, 2016; Oquendo, 2016). “Simply put,” APA President Maria Oquendo (2016) stated, “breaking the Goldwater Rule is irresponsible, potentially stigmatizing, and definitely unethical.”

¹⁶ A colleague pointed out that the Goldwater Rule applies to no other professional associations except the APA. Therefore, it technically binds psychiatrists only, and not psychoanalysts, psychologists, or other mental health professionals who might wish to speak publicly to the dangers they see in a candidate’s unfitness for office. This conclusion is disputed, however; Susan McDaniel (2016), past president of the APA, stated during her term that the ethics of the Goldwater Rule apply to psychologists as well. See Pierre (2016) for an examination of the debate. Moreover, as Trump’s calamitous presidency has lurched forward, a rising chorus of mental health professionals has begun trumpeting the “duty to warn” the nation of their disturbed president’s capacity for harm as superceding allegiance to the Goldwater Rule. Others have argued that Trump’s mental imbalance is grounds for impeachment under the 25th Amendment, whose Section IV allows the vice president, cabinet, and Congress to remove the president from office if she or he is declared “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

¹⁷ C. White (2017) imagines that our current Democrat–Republican split might yet construct a third around class.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matt Aibel

Matt Aibel, LCSW, is immediate past Associate Director of Continuing Education at National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) where he received his analytic training and remains active. He is published in Psychoanalytic Psychology and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. His paper “Being Railroaded” was nominated for a Gradiva Award and received NIP’s Educators Award. Matt has moderated presentations (NIP) and webinars (IARPP) in addition to presenting at multiple colloquia and conferences. He practices in Manhattan and on Long Island.