On the Psychoanalytic Political: Discussion of Papers by Von Lieres and Kohan

ABSTRACT

This discussion of two related papers on political activism by Bettina von Lieres and Afarin Kohan focuses on the mechanism of transformation from psychic experience into political action. In both papers, the move to political action is seen as a consequence of collectivization, politics being understood as a function of groups, but a distinction is made between brute politics and the elaboration of the political as a psychoanalytic process. The original papers are seen as furthering the aims of social psychoanalysis and community psychoanalysis.

This article is referred to by:

Political Activation and Material Indignity

Collective Trauma and Political Activism: Learning from the Bereaved Families of Shot Down Ukrainian Airline Flight 752

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ While mainstream dyadic psychoanalysis has always attended to the sustainability of the treatment through matters of framing (the relationship between the frequency of sessions and the fee, for example), it has also tended to normalize the psychoanalytic setting (dyadic, in office, use of the couch, etc), and to reify it (“true” psychoanalysis must take place the normalized setting).

² To learn more about the CPT and the principles that animate it, see González & Peltz, 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco J. González

Francisco J. González, M.D., is Personal & Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst, and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), where he also helped found and serves as Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track. His writing has been the recipient of the Symonds Award, the Ralph E. Roughton Paper Award, and co-recipient of the JAPA Award for the Best Published Paper 2019. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, JAPA, and Parapraxis and was on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalysis. He practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.