Falling Out of the World—and the Longing for Home

The World is Broken: The Overturning of Space and Time

Today in our historical moment, something basic feels lost. Today our home in the world feels broken, surreal, unreal. We are baffled, fearful, angry, grieving, and so weary and so sorrowful. It’s as if we have fallen out of our world—the way the world should be—or it has fallen away from us.

Like a dream, the world I have always taken for granted now seems broken and strange, and I can’t seem to find my way back home. That yesterday world seems far away, unreal, uncanny. The uncanny has long interested me, and here’s one reason why: The uncanny for Freud (1919) is the Unheimlich. Literally, the German Unheimlichkeit means “not-at-homeness.” For Freud the uncanny heralds the return of the repressed, a sense of déjà vu—I’ve been here before, somewhere in time. And, as Freud quotes Schelling, the unheimlich is that which “ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light” (p. 224). This particularly interests me because Heidegger (1927) and the existential phenomenologists also used this same term to explore being-in-the-world. (In English, being-in-the-world is threaded through with hyphenation to indicate that being is always woven into and inextricable from the world in which it lives.)

The uncanny, this unsettling feeling of not-being-at-home in the world, sometimes reveals to us, often in an instance of recognition, an awareness of, a kind of sideways glance at, our everyday way of living. With its coming into view, we get a glimpse of our usual way of going about our lives: a world in time, accidental, a throw of the dice of existence. The wonder is that we can so easily take this world for granted, that it seems solid, a world that just is, and that we assume to be secure as we go about our everyday living. With uncanniness we sometimes have a heightened sense of fragility and transience. And so these two registers of heightened awareness—being-in-the-world and the return of the repressed—come together, as they must.

Both the existential and the intrapsychic entangle; the unconscious meets being-in-the-world and manifests on multiple levels as fragility and longing. Today, in our historical moment, we feel strangers lost in a strange land.

The Trauma of Catastrophe

Catastrophe defies assimilation into our sense of the way the world is supposed to be. Let me now define catastrophic trauma as world-disrupting trauma, something we cannot assimilate now—and maybe never (see Margulies 2018a). The unassimilable can be too much to bear—intolerable, disruptive, and fragmenting to our usual way of being, a too-muchness that leads to a sense of existential dislocation, groundlessness, even a sense of falling away from the world we have always taken for granted. The power of catastrophic trauma is that it compels assimilation even as it resists such assimilation. Trauma, in its unrelenting, unwanted destructive newness, locks on to our accustomed, familiar worldview and demands a revision. Rather than our assimilating profound trauma, trauma demands that we accommodate to it. Trauma, then, outstrips understanding even as, at the same time, it is a new kind of understanding. Trauma’s new meaning is, precisely, that our familiar, taken-for-granted world of meaning no longer holds. We walk on quicksand; trauma deconstructs the ground we stand on.

If being-in-the-world is hyphenated, so too are the dimensions of lived time. That is, past-present-future are always entangled with one another. (Past-present-future, like the words parent and child, are joined in meaning; they define and imply one another.) Trauma unfolds, after the fact—après coup (one of many translations of Nachträglich, suggesting deferred action, retranscription, afterwardsness [see Laplanche and Pontalis 1967]). The French phrase literally means “after the blow,” and that is why significant trauma is always post-traumatic: trauma unfolds forward, it mutates, it changes. Trauma, then, disrupts our usual experience of lived time; it disrupts backward and forward at the same time, unraveling both taken-for-granted past and taken-for-granted-future. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: institutions, accepted laws, and even monuments are now toppling. We see the struggle to retranscribe the story of our past, and the struggle to take hold of the future: past-present-future entangled.

Today we are thrust into our historical moment, shaken by pandemic. But plague is only part of the brokenness of the world. The pandemic reveals fault lines, already there, that seem to have been waiting for us all along. Let’s now expand Freud’s uncanny to the disavowed unconscious of a nation, the return of our repressed. With cellphones everywhere, we are now called to bear witness to murder—and to so much more. To recall Schelling: the uncanny is what “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” Our secrets are now in plain sight, and our world is breaking apart in foundational ways with tectonic movements and realignments that we barely understand. Our cities have literally been on fire. Many of us, many of our fellow citizens, have always lived in a world that felt broken, a world in which they were on the periphery. Now, we are all on fire—and the pandemic lit the fuse.

We are shaken, top to bottom, by a knee on the neck of a black man, who is crying out that he cannot breathe.

We are shaken by the sight of children taken from their parents at our borders, on our watch.

We are shaken by the relentless destruction of our environment; by the exponential increase of income inequality and the breaking of the social contract; by nuclear brinksmanship; by terrorism; by ingenious new weapons of unimaginable destruction.

We are shaken by our beat-up, broken-down democratic institutions; the madness and meanness of our leadership, the collapse of public discourse, and the social engineering of what counts as “truth.” Regarding that ironic term, “homeland security,” our very at-home-ness in the world is shaken: from the most far-reaching political dimensions, to our national definition, to our personal sense of security, to who we are, to what the United States—to what the world—means to each of us.

What does it mean to Practice Psychoanalysis in a World on Fire?

We are waiting for this to be over: we are waiting for afterwards. Après-coup: this gift of psychoanalysis to how we understand ourselves, our past, our meanings, ourselves in time. That is, the unconscious reveals itself afterwards, which is how we apprehend, how we operationalize unconscious processes, over and through time. With a new apprehension of the significance of the past coming into view, après-coup is a grieving attempt to heal the past through new understanding.

We are strangers in a strange land falling into an uncanny future. We do not know the significance of events that are now unfolding. The ground is shifting—and for each of us in our own way—and we wonder when and where we will land. What will our historical moment mean for us a year from now? A decade from now? A century from now, how will our children’s children understand our moment? About the future, we are in the dark, waiting to find out who we have been—and who we might have been. The unconscious—indeed the unconscious of our world—is that which awaits us.

Because in lived time, past-present-future are always entangled, après-coup is not merely about retranscribing the significance of the past; it’s about longing for, as Loewald put it, this “something more” in each of us, an unrealized potential. It’s about healing the future—it’s about longing to come home to a world set right.

Waiting for Afterwards

Rather than expand the brief panel paper presented above, I decided to keep it intact within its unrepeatable moment, in the midst of its particular chaos, rawness, and uncertainty. Already things have changed. Here I’d like to offer further reflections. ¹

Witnessing: call and response: During this pandemic the fault lines of our society split wide open, and we were called to witness what was never really hidden and yet remained covered over and unacknowledged while in plain sight. Soul murder: we are all now witnesses called to take a stand and hold ourselves accountable. In “The Analyst’s Witnessing and Otherness,” Warren Poland (2000) stands alongside another, not in explanation, but alongside unbearable pain, beyond words. Poland turns to Emmanuel Lévinas (1987), who survived the Holocaust, lost family, and gained a terrible clarity about the unanswered call: at the heart of human existence surely there is a foundational ethic to witness and to answer the call of another. Ethics, then, is not an addendum to ontology; rather, just like time, it is woven into the basic fabric of human existence. What became clear to us during this pandemic reflects this a priori: we witness the call of another, a call primordial and resonating, alive in each us and calling for response. Our first virtual national meetings will long be remembered for the extraordinary, disturbing, and soul-searching plea about our own history of systemic racism put in front of us by Beverly Stoute (2020). We cannot go back to the way things were. We must change if we are to preserve our values, an aspiring to awareness and shared humanity. Alongside, we must listen.

Something more: To be human is to care about one’s future. And such caring about the future holds in awareness, often on the periphery, that to be human is also to know that one will die. “Being-toward” describes holding this immediate zone of the future on the background of the large arc of human existence (“being-toward-death” [Heidegger 1927]). Usually, mercifully, we are absorbed in our everyday living, immersed in the flow, and take for granted our at-homeness in the world. Synthesizing Heidegger’s insights with Freud’s and extending into the classical framework of his times, Hans Loewald (1960, 1972) refers to this vector of caring, this being-toward-the-future, as the “something more,” the not-yet toward which we aim, even when we know what the future will bring. With subtle elegance Loewald operationalized the dimensions of lived time into the psychoanalytic relationship, realizing that the transference itself crystallizes entangled time in all directions, past-present-future, and brings that nexus forward to analyst and patient, unconscious processes present in the here and now and also radiating backward and forward in their implications.

Further, working within the horizons of the interwoven past-present-future, the analyst is entrusted to hold unknown potentials. Implicitly then, Loewald’s synthesis foregrounds the something-more one might still aspire to become. ² The analyst lightly holds this possibility of possibilities as part of the analytic process, placeholding potential and growth—even and especially when the patient is not yet able to. Loewald’s synthesis underpins the therapeutic action of relationships, the evolving spiral of insight, awareness, and perspective. Now building on Loewald, who built on Heidegger and Freud, we can speak to the larger group processes of gathering perspectives as they unfold backward and forward into our collective cultural awareness, in front of us with such passion in the public discourse of our historical moment. The stakes are high as our fate unfolds in real time.

The public and political speech during our time of plague amplifies a deep and abiding anxiety already lurking in societal fault lines, adapted to personalize and spatialize its metaphors. The rhetoric of walls and borders concretizes the definition of home into something tangible and focused—as in the “beautiful wall” augmented by the militaristic mobilization of the department of “homeland security”—bringing this concreteness into the group “we,” simplifying who will be in and who left out. Plague fuels the urgency of defining home at a time of omnipresent, everywhere-yet-invisible threats of infection, justifying—as it has throughout history—surging xenophobia, killings, and mass quarantines, ghettoes, expulsions, and forced migrations in search of new homes. ³

Today directives and warnings abound that we must consider when traveling near or far. Many have fled cities, provoking threats of enforcement of state borders, with stay-away orders and the checking of license plates and passports across state lines: Travelers beware; we do not want you. Fears of home invasion are stoked, suburban homes a new rhetorical battleground; weapons sales are up. In prudent, everyday life, we now calculate zones of risk, operationalizing new conceptions of who is let into the circle of presence, and making judgments of how far to extend this circle: who will be in, and who needs to remain out. We have new language, as in, “safe pods,” extensions of home-ness operationalized through bodily safety—recalling Winnicott’s “no baby without a mother,” our first sheltering “pod.” This extends, too, to the denatured spaces of our virtual meetings with patients: We cannot now meet in person; are you safe?

Liminal time and space: Our everyday lives interrupted, we pause at the threshold between past and future. Consider this definition and ex-ample of “liminal” (the Free Dictionary, online): “Intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate: ‘While doctors operate, she hangs suspended in the liminal space between life and death.’” Much like hospitalized Covid patients hanging between life and death, we too are in a liminal state, suspended. Already the dead seem further away—“b.c.”: before Covid—caught now in their past, a different country, a different world; they had no idea of what was to come. In memory, they exist in a different time-space, and we wonder how a beloved mentor, friend, family member might have responded. The boundaries of the world we took for granted are rapidly receding into a faraway, conflicted nostalgia. As it should be—we now know too much about what once was hidden. Somewhere on the horizon awaits the unknown border of a new normalcy. Time seems to be unfolding in waves, with markers of safety only vaguely in view—herd immunity, universal testing, treatments, vaccines—arrivals that will release us from the grip of pandemic limbo existence. We are waiting. . .

This pandemic not only defines our times—books will be written—but already shapes our experience of time, which seems both strangely elastic and yet fixed, expanding and yet contracting in the same moment, days and weeks blurring, along with a constricting claustrophobia eased by a magical, expansive virtual reach into the ether, a rush, a “zoom.” We feel trapped between the weight of the past and the uncertainty ahead, waiting, waiting. When we do come off this lurching train of the pandemic, where will we disembark? What will our country look like? Who will we become?

What, too, of our sense of home within psychoanalysis? A new “widening scope” is coming forward, this time from a widening pool of clinicians challenging diversity, difference, and the clinical settings we are used to. Who will we psychoanalysts become?

The Future of Analysis: w(h)ither? A Psychoanalytic Home

Dislocating clinical-theoretical change is accelerating, sparked by the strange and severe limitations of psychoanalytic presence during the pandemic (as Gabbard describes up close in this volume), producing myriad experiments in “telehealth” and “framing” (Gonzalez, this volume), reaching into the lived worlds of our patients; opening our new eyes of virtual presence as we locate our patients in their homes. And new eyes call for a new psychoanalytic phenomenology, with new styles of narrative description. Contreras in this volume approaches this challenge through the surreal, hyper-real language of magical realism, aiming toward an elusive “real” so hard to describe. These sprouting analytic spaces necessitate rapid new guidelines for candidates’ progression toward graduation: the rules are changing, as they must—and we are catching up. New forms of the analytic space are already here—and will surely spark new clinical theories.

But accelerating change in psychoanalysis was well under way before the pandemic, in large part because students were clamoring for psychoanalysis to reflect their diversity and to deal with their everyday world and experience. The pandemic speeds us toward this future. A widening pool of applicants are knocking at our doors, expecting a psychoanalysis vital enough to match the potential they imagine for it—the “something more” of the psychoanalytic approach to understand the unconscious forces unleashed around and within us. They aspire to a psychoanalytic way of being, and they want us to take them in. Under the relentless financial pressures of departmental “productivity” and “evidence-based” treatment, their clamor has become more urgent because of the widespread shift away from engaged, time-intensive, and relationship-based dynamic approaches. With the industrialization of health care (see, e.g., Mukherjee 2020), time-monitored, assembly-line directives flatten lived, human time into clock time. A dystopian syllogism emerges: If Being is time (Heidegger), and time is money (industrialization), then being itself is now monetized. Condensing clinical time squeezes out the depth of human engagement and meaning—and leads to the now pervasive exhaustion of moral hazard. In a recent, pre-Covid survey (Summers 2020) 80 percent of over two thousand psychiatrists who responded reported burnout. Alienated and wanting something more, many students are looking beyond their training settings toward psychoanalytic institutes for a committed depth of understanding and connectedness. ⁴ They come looking for the ferment of community, this migration of students searching for a home within our sprawling community, in all its neighborhoods and schools of thought.

We’ve been here before in psychoanalysis, our field catching up to ambient social transformation, scrambling to pick up the pieces of our canon of knowledge within the dialectics of change and recalibration. Like the psychoanalytic process itself, working through the implications of these new cultural perspectives brings the possibility of clarity, nuance, and resonant depth. There is already a wave of change; there will be something more.