Living History: Responsibility and Blindness in the Therapeutic Process

ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysis underscores that history isn’t as distant as it may feel. Even so, it’s difficult to recognize how our ancestral history, the history that precedes our birth, influences our subjectivity. This paper explores the difficulty of recognizing and owning the implications of our throwness into particular socio-political and cultural contexts, especially the ways that larger history is embedded within our identities. To illustrate this difficulty, the author considers the ways that her sociopolitical history, including her family’s history of land ownership in California, intersected with her patient’s history, an immigrant from Mexico. She considers the ways that their broader socio-cultural histories influenced the understanding that they reached during her patient’s therapy. Owning our history, she concludes, entails continually reflecting on the complex historical currents that influenced our lives, confronting our inconsistencies and contradictions, refinding ourselves in that more complex story, and supporting our patients in doing the same.

KEYWORDS:

• Hermeneutics
• immigration
• pathological Accommodation
• assimilation
• sociopolitical history
• context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Braceros were to be hired only in cases of documented labor shortages and were not to be used as strikebreakers. But again, these rules were often ignored. Consequently, by the mid-1950s, farm wages dropped, partly as a result of the braceros and undocumented laborers who lacked full rights in American society. In 1965 the United Farm Workers (UFW) was established under the leadership of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to address these injustices. The UFW contributed to a new era of social justice reform in the United States. Although my family had mostly sold their farms by the time I was born, my parents and grandparents had strong (primarily negative) opinions about these reforms. The UFW and Cesar Chavez were the subjects of many family dinner table discussions when I was a young child.

² The neoliberal agenda eventually led to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 when Rosa was 20 years old. Despite current discussions in the US about NAFTA’S impact on the US economy, most economists agree that the agreement prioritized the United States’ interests over Mexico’s. The middle-income jobs that were to support the Mexican economy never really materialized. Wages remained static, and exports are concentrated in just a few industries. Relatively few Mexicans have actually benefitted from the agreement.

³ When the plan was implemented, it included mass media campaigns that promoted individualism and consumerism and categorized people as “‘losers’ or ‘winners’ based on (their) personal wealth and power” (Laurell, 2015, p. 247).