Affiliation vs. Alienation

ABSTRACT

Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking has been marked by a “social turn” – a shift in emphasis from internal and endogenous process to those that prioritize the social and political context in which psychological life is shaped. In this discussion of Rozmarin’s work, the concept of “belonging” is considered as a bridge between the individual and the community. The entities to which one belongs and the dynamics that underline the choices attendant to belonging are considered as constituents of both identity and unconscious processes. An individual’s unconscious is viewed as nested within the broader historical and social configurations of life and structured by these forces. Reference is made to the work of Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson as aides in understanding the power of the social to shape both identity formation and social affiliation. The dynamics of conflict between affiliation and alienation are considered as a constituent of contemporary movement toward authoritarian political structures.

This article is referred to by:

Belonging and Its Discontents

This article responds to:

Belonging on the Edge

First, a preface – I know that whatever may be said below, whatever words I choose, none can provide justice to the immediacy of the tragedy embodied in Eyal Rozmarin’s poignant rendition of his experience. Nor can I, in my distance from the despair and depravity of war, offer any wisdom or solace that can be a balm against the ever-more horrifying catastrophes.

So, forgive me first for joining via theory, and then turning to my own area of overwhelm – the potential tragic demise of American democracy – and understand that I choose not to speak of the Israeli/Hamas war out of respect for those that suffer its daily consequences.

On first reading, Rozmarin’s essay I am both deeply moved and intellectually stimulated in many ways – by his eloquent descriptions of the struggle to maintain humanistic values in the midst of the machinery of warfare; by his nuanced treatment of the vagaries of our conflicts toward and away from “belonging”; by his deft illumination of the challenges facing psychoanalysis; and most of all, by his allowing us to palpably deepen our appreciation of the struggles of inclusion/exclusion via his personal navigation through these forces in the midst of the crushing crucible of war.

Later on, in some degree of removal from the second half of the paper, and as I contemplated what this essay says about the purview and nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise, I was reminded by how Rozmarin’s work captured the long-standing divide in the social sciences between an emphasis on the individual versus considerations about the collective. Disciplines have long been organized around this divide – sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics all favoring the communal, while the medical sciences, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, historically embedded in the study of the individual. Certainly, this bifurcation has been the subject of vigorous critique and reconceptualization within each discipline. In our own field, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in emphasis on the “social turn” and on the interpellation of culture and historical forces on the psychological life of the individual (e.g., Guralnik & Simeon, 2010; Peltz, 2005). The movement toward a more unified theory of the relations between individual and culture brings with its multiple queries about the dialectical dynamics involved in the processes and structures of personal and group development;

In this light, and amongst the numerous vertices through which we can read Rozmarin, one is that his work engages with the “social” within psychoanalysis by offering the firmament of the concept of “belonging” as a bridge between the individual and the community. Moreover, he makes clear that the constituents of “belonging” – who and what we claim as ours, and who and what claims us as theirs – are the bedrock of identity. Yet the story does not end in the permissions and constrictions of identity as Rozmarin also interrogates the power of “unbelonging” to loosen the tentacles that wrap and constrict our sense of ourselves. In the end, he poses the possibilities of choice in the face of constraint and fluidity in lieu of fixities of identity – more to be said about this a bit later on.

Early on, Rozmarin writes about the dynamics of connecting with his analyst via long-distance telephone. The geographic area through which their conversation passes is in the neighborhood of the headquarters of the Israeli Defense Ministry, and as such, “We are meeting in the most personal, vulnerable territory that is psychoanalysis, but the government is present in the air between us, and its presence is literally breaking us up” (p. 3). This rich metaphor for the always present intrusion of the sociopolitical into what is assumed to be the privacy of the self and its intimate relations shortly leads to a major theoretical question: “…is reality a detriment to psychoanalysis?” (p. 4).

In its seeming opposition between lived experience and its representations, the question begs for explication. In part, it speaks to the classical analytic doctrine that the task of psychoanalysis is to uncover the unconscious and timeless influence of archaic experiences, feelings, and thoughts that color our perceptions of reality. The aim of such an inquiry is that, in the end, subjective distortions are diminished and the patient can better respond to the current reality from a more “objective” position. To facilitate this project Freud, early on, made the radical suggestion that the patient suspends the intrusion of reality into an on-going analysis by limiting making changes in the structures of one’s life during psychoanalysis. While realities of need and desire quickly led to the abandonment of this plea for abstinence, classic Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis has continued in its proclivity to view concerns with reality as obscuring the emergence of phantasy and, in particular, its manifestation in the transference; phantasy was the medium offering access to the unconscious and its exploration. For Freud, and even more so for Klein, unconscious phantasy was a product of biologically sourced and endogenously located drives that colored perception of reality through projection. Reality could then be considered as an equivalent of the manifest content of a dream – one which draped an obscuring screen over secreted wishes and fears.

A brief example: Early in my career, a child of Holocaust survivors reported a dream in which she was endlessly chased by Nazis. I brought this to my supervisor who stated: “You know who the Nazis are don’t you?” I looked dumbfounded by the question and so he answered his own query stating that “the ‘Nazis’ are her father and the chase was her projected Oedipal longings.” I was startled and annoyed at his parochial interpretation and denial of the hauntings and ghostly transmission of traumatic reality. – A similar scenario was enacted by the classic Freudian psychoanalyst Charles Brenner (2003) in his discussion of Ilany Kogan’s (2003) paper describing the conflicts faced by an adolescent patient who was a “replacement child” for a sister killed by the Nazi’s. Kogan described the girl’s struggles to escape from the mother’s guilt and abandonment of her when she reached the same age as when the sister died. In response to Kogan, Brenner wrote: “I do not think it is possible to separate the effects of being a replacement child – Holocaust or no Holocaust – from the effects of other individual and ubiquitous influences on childhood conflict” (p. 773). “Holocaust or no Holocaust” – in other words, always and foremost, the Oedipus and its repressed dynamics.

I have no doubt that such a formulation would be anathema to most of us, as it would be for Rozmarin, for its absolute neglect of the impact of traumatic lived experience in favor of belief in the fundamental structuring of the unconscious by the elemental drives of sex and aggression. In an earlier paper, Rozmarin questions this blind allegiance to the internal world of drive related conflict; he wrote that “… psychoanalysis – with few exceptions, at least until recently – has had great difficulty considering its obvious embeddedness in given social, historical, and political orders. The social is so glaringly absent in most psychoanalytic thought as to suggest that it is repressed. We might say that the social is the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis” (2017, p. 459).

It is intriguing to ask why this has been the case, (particularly so in the classic psychoanalytic traditions in the United States and England). The neglect of the social is even more striking when we recall that Freud (1921), in his often neglected treatise “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” wrote that: “In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, is in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well” (p. 69).

Perhaps, as has been detailed by Kurlioff (2010), the traumatic realities faced by psychoanalysts in Europe and emigres to the US in the post World War II environment eventuated in taking refuge in the safe haven provided by a solely personal unconscious consisting of disavowed aspects of the conflicts between the individual and society.

This retreat into the singular privacy of the self is challenged in Rozmarin’s current essay when he writes that: “Some of us have come to believe that the notion of a separate inside is a delusion, that when you go all the way in … You find the social-historical-ideological narratives that hold the subject in place and give him meaning …” (p. 4). Implied, yet left unelaborated, is that the structures of unconscious content and processes are themselves social and cultural. As we continue to explore the “social turn” in psychoanalysis, we encounter the query raised by Clough (2023) as she theorized the manner by which the social is mediated by economic, political, and technological forces and becomes part of our psyche; she asked: “More in question has been the location of the social” (p. 140).

A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective may begin with the basic belief that the social is not only a constituent of an individuals’ unconscious array of meaning, but also that the social creates and resides in the multiple webs of relations in which we all partake. There exists within psychoanalytic theory a rich body of thought, (even if neglected by the classical mainstream), that an individual’s unconscious is always nested within the broader historical and social configurations of life (i.e., dyadic, group, organizational, ethnic, racial, national structures) and that these surrounds each constitutes their own unconscious structures (e.g., the social unconscious (Hopper, 2003), the relational unconscious (Gerson, 2004), the concept of “Vinculo” Bernardi and De León De Bernardi (2012). These theories of a socially constructed and shared unconscious provide a conceptual mooring for delving into the depths of both individual and cultural phenomena and how the social collective is intertwined with individual subjectivity (Gonzalez, 2020). A recent contribution by Bako and Zaka (2023) captured this interplay between the individual and the social, and between external and internal realities; they write “… when we discuss the unconscious, indivisible community of me and we, we conceive of a relational field in the broad sense, or an intersubjective Third in the broad sense. To this intersubjective field we ascribe an unconscious containing and transforming capacity, including the ability to dream a non-individual, intersubjective reality known as the we reality. Thus the we reality in our interpretation is not a real material reality, but a constructed psychic reality” (p. 311).

Rozmarin captured the multiplicities and complexities of our unconscious lives with the words of the Oscar winner “everything, everywhere, all at once.” I find echoes of this sentiment in this description of drama by the playwright Arthur Miller (1958; as quoted in Levinson, 1978):

… society is inside of man, and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish. (p. 39)

This interpenetration of the social and the individual creates a “psycho-social register” that manifests most directly via the identificatory categories into which we are born. Rozmarin illuminates the powerful forces inherent in group identification as the medium through which the social surround constitutes structural elements of the self. We are made up by our attachments to the categorical groupings that define peoples – religion, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference, economics. By attaching and identifying we come to belong and in the belonging we come to construct ourselves. He writes that our identifications and attachments (however ambivalently and insecurely held) become “… the threads that combine into what we feel as our place in the world, as our very self-hoods” (p. 5).

At this juncture questions arise for me about the multiple meanings we can ascribe to the concept of “belonging.” On the surface there is “belonging” as a signifier of the group of which one is a member. It is in this regard that we consider both the state and actions of “belonging” as creators and constituents of identity; as Eyal states: “… belonging is identity. Belonging is the foundation of who I am” (p. 5). I believe that we may also think of “belonging” as a force that describes an inner propensity, as a universal “drive.” A drive that informs the observation that humans are social beings. As such, it is not only the actual entities to which one belongs that defines the person; it is, in addition, the dynamics resulting from conflicts between the wish to belong and the rejection of belonging (to “unbelong”) that is, I believe, an essence of the psychology that Rozmarin is contending with.

For each of us there is a map of the categories and groupings to which we belong, just like there is a map of nations. Yet what provides a deep understanding of the individual, just as what defines the earth, is not the map pasted upon it, but the underlying tectonic forces that give shape to what manifests in any demarcation. Another way to imagine this is that while the religion, race, or nation to which we belong may define us as individuals, it is the need to create, and to destroy, these groupings that define us as a species. Herein, in this juxtaposition of the two meanings of “belonging,” we can find the conflicts of identification vs. individuation.

Rozmarin has described this conflict between allegiance to the communal vs. pursuit of personal prerogatives as struggles between the safety of belonging versus the freedom “un-belonging.” Each state is filled with its own contradictions, (e.g., security vs. restriction in belonging; novelty vs. isolation in unbelonging); and each state is often unstable in terms of the temporality and cohesiveness of the group and the adhesiveness of our attachments to the group. Change, contradiction, and crises threaten our identities and leave us in danger of immersion in an inchoate world that offers scant protection from assaults from within and without. Having explicated living in the flux and frictions of identity, Rozmarin writes: “Yet, as we linger on the threshold, I am finding who I am. I realize how much I am willing to expend in order to retain a sense of belonging, how much I need to choose, to sometimes un-belong to feel a sense of freedom, and how fundamental it is for me to understand myself this way” (p. 9).

Rozmarin concludes this first pre-10/7/23 section with “I think we need to realize how important this is for everyone, and experiment with a notion of psychoanalysis that begins there” (p. 9). His call for attention to the power of affiliation and how it radiates throughout an individual’s sense of self is a welcome voice that I believe has echoes in many psychoanalytic quarters. Witness the recent significant attention to both conceptual and clinical aspects of identity – thinking that may indicate that contemporary debates concerning fixity vs. fluidity of identity are finding a resonant voice in the psychoanalytic community (e.g., Gonzalez, 2024; Lemma, 2023; Paul, 2023; Rustin, 2023). This attention to identity and group identification may also signal a welcome re-visiting and receptivity to the ground-breaking socially informed work of Fromm (1941) and Erikson (1950/1983).

Each of these radical psychoanalytic theorists achieved popular and academic renown even while being relatively sidelined by the American psychoanalytic establishment of the times. Perhaps, their vision will help us navigate the reconfigured psychoanalysis that Rozmarin is promoting. At this moment, when we are threatened by authoritarian movements throughout the world, I find that Fromm’s (1941) treatise “Escape From Freedom” is an apt guide into the psychology of those who choose to belong to entities that demand total subjugation of the self to the communal – even at the expense of individual life and liberty.

I have in mind the lure of affiliation to those who are alienated and for whom “belonging” is an antidote to personal and social feelings of failure and abandonment. I have in mind the lure of Donald Trump. The alienated individual is separated from an essential aspect of human life and cannot inhabit that space in a comfortable and growth enhancing manner. Resentments against being unwanted, ennui and boredom resulting from feeling no common purpose, and rage from feeling abandoned and deprived of privilege eventuate in a sense of immense vulnerability of the self – a personal fragility that renders the alienated susceptible to promises of restoration of belief and power. The route to such change is via belonging to a group organized under the leadership of a powerful figure who addresses their sense of betrayal and deprivation and offers himself as a salvation. Fromm (1941) described the magnetic lure of a group or leader in this scenario as providing “An escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; And it’s also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self” (p. 140).

The devil’s pact can be framed as the leader, in return for absolute fealty, promising the alienated to give voice to their resentments and to provide targets for their rage. As Trump infamously said: “In 2016 I declared I am your voice, today I add I am your warrior, I am your justice and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution, I am your retribution (CPAC 3/4/2023).” His words poignantly illustrate the horrifying dynamic by which authoritarian leaders capture the minds, souls, and bodies, of the aggrieved and alienated. Bion (1961) well understood the power of the leader who is able to mobilize fear in the service of his/her power; he wrote: “In my experience most groups, not only patient groups, find a substitute that satisfies them very well. It is usually a man or woman with marked paranoid trends; perhaps if the presence of an enemy is not immediately obvious to the group, the next best thing is for the group to choose a leader to whom it is” (p. 67). Fear drives us toward the illusionary safety of all consuming power – be it an individual’s narcissistic illusions of not needing an other, or a group’s delusions of destroying the other. Is there a way out?

As Rozmarin has made evident, the need to belong is our essential human attribute, and that this need bedevils our existence, propelling us toward and away from the claims of others into whom we are born. The dynamics of affiliation vs. alienation animate and haunt our identity and our existence. If only there was a way out – and perhaps this is what Rozmarin yearns for in his concluding statement: “We need a more self-fluid, trans-subjective, post-identity, way to organize our lives as human creatures.”

As I read this plea and proclamation, I was reminded of Robert Lifton’s (1993) work on the “Protean Self” wherein he wrote: “We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of the past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the ‘protean self,’ after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms.”

Rozmarin’s hope for an existence that is not constrained by polarized thinking, one that can tolerate ambivalence and contradiction while remaining resolute in the wish to accept and understand divergence of experience and opinion found a resonant sensibility in the work of the Mexican author Gloria Anzaldua. To me, her words also embody a life affirming psychoanalytic ethic that abjures destructive impulse and aims at creation, it is an ethic of Eros.

The battles between Eros and Thanatos that informed much of Freud’s latter concerns are writ large in our contemporary life. We are at an abyss and perhaps the destructiveness we witness may move us away from the demise – if not out of love, then away from the horrors of hate. As I came to an end of this discussion, I came across a poem that spoke of the desperate need to transcend the enmities of difference; it never claims to be explicitly about the war between Israel and Hamas … and yet …. here are the concluding lines:

“We need a new kind of bridge, not one that

brings these irreconcilable

peoples together but that reminds

them every day into what emptiness

they both can fall. And there is no

end to that fall, not now or for

all of history to come. Perhaps

the madness will make them

create the kind of bridge that has

never been built before. Not a bridge

of peace, but of a terror for a world

in which peace can never be (p.10).”

Okri (2024)

Excerpt from “Void”, originally published in The New York Review of Books, 2024. Copyright © 2024 Ben Okri. Used with permission.

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Sam Gerson

Sam Gerson, Ph.D., is a founder and Past-President of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) where he is a Training and Supervising Analyst. Dr. Gerson is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an Editor for the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. His publications have focused on contemporary issues in clinical process; relational approaches to conceptualizing and working with hysteric, narcissistic and masochistic phenomena; and on the transgenerational aftermath of massive trauma. He has received the “Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of Genocide and the Holocaust” from the International Psychoanalytic Association for “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2009).