You Have The Right To Remain Silent, Or Do You Have The Obligation To Speak?

Abstract

This discussion makes two comments to extend Philip Cushman’s prophetic challenge to the “psy” disciplines’ participation in, and acceptance of, the Bush torture program. It makes a link to a long and shameful history of silence and complicity in psychoanalysis. Second, it advocates reading history as an ethical project parallel to the learning of developmental history in psychoanalytically inspired psychotherapies. What we do not remember and work through, we will surely repeat. Cushman forces us to remember and work through.

Keywords:

• colonization
• Cushman
• legal
• silent
• slavery
• torture

Notes

¹ Here is the long version: “Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 82-83 (1770) in: Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, p. 146 (Liberty Fund ed. 1999)” (Colman, 2016).

² Here I distinguish “states” from parts, with Onno van der Hart and others who expertly and compassionately teach us to treat those sufferers from extreme violence who live in parts not even remembered by other parts.

³ I have discussed this problem at length elsewhere and noted that Bromberg seems recently to be reversing course toward a more integrated sense of self (Orange, 2018). It is also true that some proponents of this type of postmodern theory involve themselves in ethical critique and political activism.

⁴ I am not claiming here that we possess a substantialized or reified thing called “a self” (see critiques by Stolorow, 2015) but rather that the phenomenological and ethical sense of more or less integrated selfhood, responsible for actions, attitudes, and bystanding, needs theorizing in psychoanalysis if we are to escape our ethical fog (Orange, 2013).

⁵ Cushman formulates our STEM aspiration problem perfectly when he writes, “When psychology claims a scientistic warrant, it is in the unenviable position of trying to determine good ways for humans to live by using a method that claims it has bracketed off all ideas about good ways to live” (p. 321).