Sleeping Dogs: Psychoanalysis and the Socio-Political

Abstract

Psychoanalysis deals with what unconsciously mediates our relationship to reality. Our “ordinary clinical terms” (Holmes, this issue) include the press of drives and its fantasy derivatives, the history of early attachment and object relations, lifetime and intergenerational legacies; these are the elements that we assume shape psychic reality. As a discipline we are less likely to interrogate the profound and ongoing ways in which we are spellbound by ideology and are less likely to address racism, homophobia, misogyny, and privilege as central. What I hope to address in this discussion is why considering the socio-political is actually quite complicated for psychoanalysis.

Notes

¹ As an offshoot example of activism, Holmes (this issue) mentions the research that emanated from Adorno’s concept of the Authoritarian personality, whereby psychoanalytic theory is employed to interpret and potentially change the course of political history. Adorno indeed originally saw in psychoanalysis the potential promise of a powerful critique of social coercion and exploitation; however, Adorno ultimately came to view it as a practice of conformism.

² To which we can add the more recent controversy around membership in Division 39 and the American Psychological Association’s stance on interrogation and torture.

³ During World War I the American government took a strong position supporting psychoanalysis’s treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder as a secondary response to childhood issues (Aron & Star, 2012).

⁴ In writing about it, Holmes is also performing a challenge to the larger scale institutionalized exclusion of women from the public discourse about the down and dirty masculine business of race (hooks, 1995).

⁵ It is interesting that it is the only paper in which Freud describes becoming depersonalized. Elsewhere I have theorized that dissociative mechanisms, and in particular depersonalization, express tensions between competing cultural injunctions and interpellations. In my work on dissociation I proposed that the very experience of being an intelligible human, and the counterparts of alienation, shame, and disconnection, all emanate from this primary socio-political or ideological register.

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Notes on contributors

Orna Guralnik

Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist /Psychoanalyst on Faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Stephen Mitchell Center, and is an Editor of the Psychoanalytic Dialogues Blog. She cofounded the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at Mt Sinai Medical School and publishes on the topics of dissociation, depersonalization, and culture. She is a graduate of the NYU Post Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. Recent publications include “The Dead Baby” (Psychoanalytic Dialogues) and “Zen & the Art of Making Babies” (Studies in Gender & Sexuality).