I believe that most American psychoanalytic institutes tend to encourage private practice as part of their pedagogical and organizational structure. It is an implicit or explicit expectation of candidates as their training is modeled by the way most experienced analysts work. This emphasis on the private parallels what elsewhere I have called a privatized model of subjectivity and of psychic suffering having its source mostly on intra-psychic dynamics. This reality dissociates clinical practice from the constitutive social dimension of its process, from the ways in which social injustices are at the core of psychic pain, and from the immersion of the psychoanalyst into community work. The social undercurrent of psychoanalysis gets split-off from its institutions. In its theoretical understanding, it becomes a matter of only academic discussion, while its practical sphere is outsourced to other professions such as social work,Footnote1 or to candidates who work at the institute’s low fee clinical center for meager wages that end up propelling them directly to private practice after graduation.
Klein said that a splitting of the object cannot happen without a splitting of the ego. In ostracizing the social from its institutional walls, ones that cannot be separated from the guardians of whiteness, scientism, heteronormativity, and social class, a part of the original psychoanalytic soul became inaccessible; a soul represented, for example, by Freud’s free clinics and the intellectual but also clinical experiments in social transformation of analysts such as Fenichel or Reich who tried to integrate psychoanalysis and Marxism. A great part of American institutional psychoanalysis lost touch with an essential part of its original vitality, much in the same way that a self loses its aliveness when it splits and dissociates.
This resulted in stunting the American psychoanalytic voice within the public sphere and the politico- historical challenges and injustices of the world. The appearance of a book such as Elizabeth Danto’s Freud’s Free Clinics becomes so essential but also so surprising within American psychoanalysis because the splitting-off of the social produced in the former a dissociation from its progressive history, its origins in Red Vienna and how it evolved into a sustained engagement of psychoanalysis with questions of social justice in places like South America and what the IPA used to symptomatically call “the rest of the world.”
Today, liberal voices from within the psychoanalytic establishment have manically rushed to try and heal such split. They talk about a social turn in psychoanalysis completely disregarding the history I just mentioned, that there was such a thing called Freudo-Marxism intimately connected to Critical Theory; that versions of psychoanalysis in the U.S., which centered intersubjective processes, appeared in part in response to the scientist a-social and a-political ideals of ego psychology; and that analytically informed social workers who were not accepted in analytic institutions stayed faithful to psychoanalysis as a form of social praxis.
So now diversity committees, commissions, classes, etc. are launched. Such initiatives are put in the hands of those social others traditionally excluded from analytic institutions on account of their identity. In parallel, the responsibility of teaching what a community psychoanalytic practice could mean is handed over to other outcasts, those who venture outside private practice and work in community spaces with all the precarity (financial, institutional, legal, emotional, etc.) that this entails (this last outsourcing of the social is based on a class-based hierarchical structure that places private on top of public). There is the hope that these others and their lived experience might be integrated within the institution.
My question is that if in this process (and this is a hypothesis) we are not in the presence of another iteration of the splitting-off of the social, perhaps a form of enacting it, which occurs together with these social others: you deal with the social, you digest it to us while we continue with our “scientific” discussions within the safe havens of our institutes and private practices. Or: bring us news from outside the walls of the kingdom. It is as if these others were now forced to represent the social that was split off in the first place. There are elements of tokenization here, but I am also talking about a form of unjust division of labor which includes by segregating (be part of us in being different from us) and that assumes that the existence of some forms of labor can be separated from their social conditions, while others can’t. I am not saying that analytic institutions should not listen to what Black or queer analysts or candidates have to say about their experience as Black or queer people. I am also not saying that analytic institutions should not learn the lessons of community psychotherapists. What I am saying is that these others should not be the only ones to carry the psychological burden of representing the social for American psychoanalysis nor the only ones to come up with the ways in which it is to be integrated into a social psychoanalysis within what Freud ironically called Dollaria.
A last thought. Maybe integration is over-idealized. It might in fact betray the experience of those who have been traditionally excluded. In Klein there is a certain idea of wholeness that is achieved in the depressive position when integration of the split is achieved. I ask myself: whose wholeness are we talking about when it comes to healing the splitting-off of the social and of the others in psychoanalytic institutions? Isn’t the idea of what is whole always evaluated from a hegemonic position? Maybe there should be more focus on what Winnicott calls un-integration related to play, open processes, and perhaps even creative forms of rupture.
Notes
1 The idea of private psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, outsourcing to Social Work the work of changing the social conditions of psychic suffering is taken from conversations with clinical social worker Darragh Sheehan and from her unpublished text: “Glittering Generalities and Pop-Leftist Psychotherapyspeak.”