Abstract
Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis was released in 2019 as rising nationalism and polarization evolved in tandem with deep social pathologies evident in the escalating racism in police violence, anti-immigrant policies, and white supremacist terrorism. McAfee’s book was awarded the Courage to Dream Prize by the American Psychoanalytic Association, honoring “the book that best promotes the integration of the academic and clinical worlds of psychoanalysis.” The book is even more relevant now, as the disparity in Covid mortality and vaccination patterns highlights the nation’s political and racial fault lines. Though the triumph of nationalism in the U.S. may have been averted, the paranoia underlying the denial of the presidential election results by so many indicates that political sectarianism, barring significant systemic change, will likely continue gaining strength. A model for transformative systemic change is what McAfee lays out in her book.
It seems that as psychoanalyst citizens we can no longer insulate ourselves from the larger culture or look away from our participation in these systems. Our dependence on others to prevent the virus from spreading, and to be reliable sources of information while relying on our government to equitably and efficiently deliver vaccines, spotlights the reality of how interdependent we are. Attesting this interdependence, psychoanalytic scholarship and activism increasingly look to neighboring fields to see what we can learn, and what we have discounted and enabled. In similar fashion, fields such as critical theory have looked to psychoanalysis to understand human irrationality at times of crisis, as when much of Europe turned to fascism after World War I and now again, as the world turns to populism and other movements, putting the planet and its citizens in rising danger. “Cultural theory,” McAfee writes “has been more bent on diagnosis than remedy. Critical theory has been attuned more towards finding transcendent criteria. . . . It is time we start learning from each other. . . . A critical social theory informed by psychoanalysis, including the negativity that Freud identified, can focus on ‘the dynamic reworking of affect’ . . . which could make ‘social transformation possible’” (pp. 43–44).
McAfee, a professor of philosophy, directs the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Emory University. Her proficiency across disciplines is apparent in her ease in explaining dense material from areas that many of us are not well versed in, including critical social theory and democratic political theory. My impression is that her intended audience includes those, from any academic background, who seek to both understand and improve the current political culture of polarization. The vignettes she includes from her teaching experience give the reader a sense of being in expert hands as she succinctly summarizes and interweaves the works of philosophy stars like Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Cornelius Castoriadis. The depth of her understanding of psychoanalytic theory and practice is evident throughout much of the text as well, though at times she focuses on the surface differences of psychoanalytic “camps” to highlight her ideas.
The beginning and final chapters lay out McAfee’s thesis that nationalism and polarization ensue when large groups of people respond to political threats with regressive fantasies and defenses such as splitting and projection. Linking individual fantasies (and their attendant defenses) and development with political and social phenomena challenges the confines of psychoanalytic theory, and often calls for concepts like the “political unconscious,” a term McAfee employs. For example, she describes the authoritarianism underlying “Make America Great Again” as a revolt against neoliberalism that invokes an idealized earlier order that is projected into the future. This description combines ideas such as Salman Akhtar’s “someday” and “if only” fantasies of “pathological optimism and inordinate nostalgia” (1996) with Vamik Volkan’s work on chosen victories and traumas (2019) to conceive of ongoing sociopolitical stress, here neoliberalism, as a chosen trauma that is responded to with a nostalgic, fantasied large-group identification.
In McAfee’s elaboration of work by psychoanalysts like Volkan and Akhtar, she explicitly links early developmental experiences of self- and object differentiation with the social realm in her theorizing of how political others become idealized or demonized. She theorizes a “leaping away” from the loss of omnipotence in primary narcissism to the “arms” of large-group identification, seeing this as an “identification with an avatar of the social.” This she regards as containing the “originary truths of one’s own reality and identity” (p. 231), an intrapsychic identity that is socially constructed, what I see as the intersubjective place we are born into and the complex processes by which we take our place in our families and the larger community (Benser 2020).
McAfee integrates concepts from D. W. Winnicott’s final paper (1974), in which he describes the clinical phenomenon of a pronounced fear of breakdown sometimes evident at the outset of analysis, or at a later point over the course of treatment. Winnicott saw this fear, and other fears he called primitive agonies, as a manifestation of maturational difficulties that have occurred in the face of environmental failures. These failures of “holding” derail the maturation of the early ego’s omnipotence such that the ego cannot develop a well-differentiated sense of internal and external experience. He theorized that these agonies manifest later in life as ongoing fears of impending catastrophes. McAfee uses Ogden’s and Kristeva’s expansions of Winnicott’s views, while adding her own proposal that this primitive agony “is literally a longing and a dread of falling back into an unintegrated state, a boundaryless being without a body to own, an inability to engage with the world in any meaningful way” (p. 52).
Expanding on the temporality of Winnicott’s view that early agonies manifest as a fear of something yet to occur and using Freud’s ideas of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), McAfee proposes that maintaining a “shattering” of linear time is needed to understand the links between the individual and the social. She describes the socially constructed “originary truth” of one’s birth as being reinforced by ongoing cycles of “fear of breakdown”: “I loop back and hold on even tighter to my past, denying its contingency and insisting on its truth” (p. 231). A fear of breakdown of one’s basic socially constructed identity thus fuels cycles of increasing need to believe in a “realness” of social identity to cling to, and a reification of one’s large-group identity. McAfee describes another dimension of deferred action associated with early environmental failure—a perception that one’s large-group identity has a timeless future, is “natural,” eternal, or absolute, thus serving to defend against the felt insecurity of a socially constructed or contingent large-group identity. This adds the forward-looking dimension to the fantasy undergirding the “Make America Great Again” phenomenon, a glorious, god-given future made possible by racial and national purification and the demonization/exclusion of “unnatural” Americans, with the backward-looking view a call to return to an earlier, idealized order.
McAfee addresses the difficult issue of conceiving of individual developmental issues and defense mechanisms as underlying social pathologies. “There is nothing,” she writes, natural about our social identifications: they are contingently created, but acknowledging their contingency threatens the phantasy of the social order. So maintaining large-group identity involves its own form of fear of breakdown. . . . Primitive agonies affect collectivities, but instead of showing up primarily as a fear of loss of the unit self, there is a fear of the unit collective, which in turn affects the self-understanding of the unit self [pp. 59–60].
McAfee’s construction avoids theoretical contradictions by viewing issues related to social connection and status as secondary to a primary motivation to negotiate separation from the object, which paradoxically can be done only through identification with others. She differentiates her views from those of relational psychoanalysis, “baby watchers,” and contemporary normative critical theory by rejecting the idea that we have an instinct, or motivation, to be social. She places herself with Freud, André Green, and her reading of Winnicott in seeing the infant as having a primary narcissism that experiences the other as a reality to be contended with, but is not driven to attach itself to. Nonetheless, she sees identity as constructed through relational engagement, and products of the unconscious as having a relational basis, saying there is “no separate social psyche but also no individual identity” (pp. 56–57). McAfee thus negates differences between large-group identifications and individual identifications. With that premise, she then correlates individual defenses/pathologies with collective pathologies. These theoretical leaps that apply individual psychoanalytic concepts to groups are attempts to fill theoretical vacuums at the intersection of the individual and the social. “The names of the defenses that arise against these collective primitive agonies are familiar: anarchism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, nationalism, nativism, fundamentalism, even neoliberalism, along with sexism, ableism, and racism. I suggest that these are all in one way or another levied against collective primitive agonies of a fear of breakdown that has already occurred but was not experienced” (p. 60).
The trouble McAfee finds “with both Habermas’s and [Axel] Honneth’s accounts [is] that they are looking for a normative but nonmetaphysical foothold for critical theory when psychoanalysis is just not going to oblige” (p. 12). In this I read her as acknowledging the seeming incompatibility of drive theory with theories of a social or political unconscious—as well as an allusion to the psychoanalytic conviction that culture will inevitably seek to repress awareness of infantile sexuality. To inform these concerns, I look to the work of Jean Laplanche and others such as René Kaës, who offer psychoanalytic “footholds” that expand our theory of the unconscious without dissociating the sexual sphere.
The bulk of the book is devoted to defining and critiquing various aspects of democratic theory and practice, while defining politics clearly and simply as “the practice of deciding what to do when there is no objective truth of the matter.” She applies political and psychoanalytic theories to formulate six sound “democratic practices” that she believes can lead to social transformation: “(1) Reimagining politics as public practice, including seeing how what publics do throughout the public sphere affects how the overall political system operates. (2) Having a self-understanding as citizens who work with others in their communities to engage in politics broadly understood, that is, as political agents who collectively constitute political institutions and policies and act as such with others in their communities. (3) Identifying and thematizing problems, consciousness raising, setting the agenda. (4) Deliberating with others and working through difficult choices to develop public will. (5) Harnessing public will to identify and commit civic resources, using public judgments and energy that communities and citizens have created to bring about change. (6) Learning from the past, questioning radically, and judging anew” (p. 9).
These practices aim to empower individuals to authorize themselves as political agents who can then move away from seeing government as a detached source of power. McAfee’s hope is that having more people see themselves as having political agency will lead to increasing participation in political activities. She sees these democratic practices as iterative rather than linear, with the goal of engaging public will to generate creative solutions and “buy-in” to implement the newly imagined approaches. In other words, she envisions collective power becoming more cohesive as more voices participate and are recognized.
McAfee believes that the “radical questioning” of held beliefs in order to imagine new possibilities requires mourning the loss of idealized fantasies that defend against the loss of omnipotence. She extrapolates working through in psychoanalysis to the public arena, where she proposes that democratic practices can be used to work through sociopolitical losses to move us beyond the fear of breakdown and melancholia to a depressive position: “deeply democratic practices can move people away from a paranoid-schizoid politics to a more deliberative one that makes room for the work of mourning . . .” (p. 214). The theoretical leap from the metapsychology of an individual to a group is now expanded from clinical applications of the individual in psychoanalysis to a group democratic process. The issue of how the public can develop the will, or motivation, to self-authorize, participate in public forums, and implement creative solutions is not clearly addressed. Perhaps the massive loss of loved ones from the pandemic will motivate people to turn to public forums to process and witness each other’s grief.
McAfee writes that there is a “rich kind of education that makes citizenship thinkable” (p. 117). Her cogent proposals do provide a kind of potential space for increased self-agency that may well help readers become more thoughtful and participatory citizens. However, education alone does not generally heal developmental deficits such as Winnicott’s fear of breakdown. McAfee references Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914) in a few chapters, and describes Ogden’s analytic third (1994) as the process in analytic treatment that allows for working through, and a resolution, of repeating. The reader can infer that McAfee envisions democratic texts and processes serving as the “analytic third” for citizens, with citizens in community meetings aligning to the “third” of democratic principles through the steps she proposes. A fundamental difference in psychoanalysis is the presence of the analytic frame, with an acknowledged asymmetrical therapeutic relationship that provides a secure base from which to establish an analytic third. In this “safe and free” space, early agonies can be processed within an analytic relationship and ultimately resolved through a mourning process. Individuals coming together for political reasons with different ideologies who freely associate and freely express their concerns are neither motivated nor authorized to witness each other’s pain or to accept projections, so a “safe” therapeutic space is not established. Just as guilt and mourning must be tolerated in the depressive position to allow for repair of relational ruptures in psychotherapy, a reconciliation process is needed when social divisions have led to significant inequities. The kinds of group process that McAfee describes could be part of a robust education in civics early in life, perhaps in middle school or high school, with a lay group leader mediating idealizations and demonizations.
McAfee has an overarching belief in the relative benefit of horizontal power structures over vertical structures; here is how she views our current environment: “While pockets of horizontal power have flourished, the dominant one of vertical power—where elites rule and the masses go along or drop out—has remained firmly in place” (pp. 82–83). How the many different subjectivities raised in McAfee’s work are lived in this political environment can be linked using ideas from group dynamics, as Francisco González (2020) lays out in a relational psychoanalytic journal: “Groups are the psychoanalytic entity specifically comprised of the tensile relationship between individuals and the social, and as such might constitute the elemental conceptual building blocks for an understanding of the social in psychic terms” (p. 425).
René Kaës (2016), a French psychoanalyst who has conducted extensive psychoanalytic therapy and research in group settings, theorizes that there are “several centres of psychic reality, that not just one, but several topographies of the unconscious exist, that the unconscious works according to interfering economies and dynamics, and that the subject is both singular and plural” (p. 192). He sees groups as having three spaces of psychic reality: the singular subject in the group, the “intersubjective links” contracted between subjects when they meet with others in the group, and a third space of “the ensemble” that the subjects develop and of which they are part, because they shape and are shaped by it. These three spaces have counterparts in an individual’s unconscious, so that different environments elicit different unconscious “group” object relations. These internalized group relations undergird new external group formations: “a group is formed from the moment that a psychic group organiser (an internal group) is mobilised in several subjects and produces an association by resonance or opposition: an archaic phantasy, a body imago, or an identification network that begins to function and brings together all the participants” (p. 185).
Thus, internalized group object relations can contain early products of the unconscious and mobilize the formation of new external groups “by resonance or opposition.” Understanding what of the unconscious is transversal, in other words, what goes across in group settings, is important to consider in the groups we help constitute. This is also theorized by psychoanalysts looking at the transgenerational transmission of trauma in groups and in couples (Harris 2011). These concepts can serve to bridge the radical alterity of the unconscious with normative theories of social inequality, and the perpetuation of social pathologies in peer groups.
Psychoanalysts, as well as other professionals, have internalized group experiences around race, class, and politics that affect here-and-now professional activities with ongoing “transversal” effects on peers. A primary focus on early development and large-group identity that minimizes unconscious transversal group dynamics can lead us to perpetuate group identifications coalesced around negating power dynamics, maintaining them in lacunae such that we “psychologize away” social inequality.
At this inflection point in our history, McAfee’s book can help us in thinking about “who we are now” (Volkan 2019) as citizens and members of organized psychoanalysis, and how we can participate more constructively in our various roles. I have attempted to enact her practice of “radical questioning” to further a process she views as best undertaken in an iterative fashion. I wholeheartedly agree that further iteration is called for at this particularly pressing time and join McAfee in her faith that participating in groups with more attention to unconscious processes can help us reconstitute our democracy.