Neutrality Is Not Neutral

Psychoanalytic discourse on the concept of neutrality is long-standing and controversial. In current times, neutrality is an evolved concept that garners some respect, but is also held suspect to the extent that it is rooted in a positivist framework for science requiring psychoanalysis to exclude extraneous factors such as the analyst’s subjectivities and external reality. To become optimally neutral within this framework, analysts are required to cure themselves of extraneous factors in their own analyses. Freud’s investment in the positivist approach, including the analyst’s being neutral, was intended to curb the analyst’s overambitious emotional stake in the patient’s progress (Freud 1915). Apropos the analyst’s subjectivities, the field of psychoanalysis has made a vast shift toward their recognition and engagement in psychoanalytic thinking and practice. On the issue of the place of external reality as a necessary focus of the analyst’s neutrality, a signature contribution was made by Anna Freud, who viewed neutrality as an attitude of equipoised interest in all agencies of the patient’s mind, as well as in the patient’s external reality. So in modern psychoanalytic thinking, neutrality is not neutral as would have been required by a positivist view of science. The positivistic notions requiring a sterilely neutral analyst are considered antiquated, and in some instances harmful, with the potential to produce undue and unanalyzable regression in patients (Levy and Inderbitzen 1992).

I found it necessary to prepare this essay because of one way in which I have experienced a regressive shift toward the antiquated demand that the analyst be neutral. Specifically, I have frequently been exhorted to be more neutral in my work with patients regarding their interest and focus, and my own, on conflictual and potentially oppressive aspects of external reality regarding race, and on how these external realities may have become internalized. This challenge came to light for me in a pointed way during a discussion with esteemed analytic colleagues with whom I have engaged in lively debate over several decades. We were discussing my paper, “Our Country ’Tis of We and Them: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Our Fractured American Identity” (Holmes 2019). My thesis is that racism and other oppressions come into play in the fracture between our nobler and baser selves, and this fracture is a structural weakness in our culture and our psyches that dates to our country’s founding documents. This claim was met with the following response: “That’s your agenda: you’re not being neutral; you are imposing your own values; you’re not staying in the proper neutral position to show respect and restraint for your patients’ mental lives.” I was taken aback. This challenge to my analytic attitude was repeatted when I proposed a psychoanalytic definition of “American identity” as a fragile structure in our minds in which our nobler and our baser aspects are in constant tension with each other. In that paper I stated further that as psychoanalysts we fall short of accomplishing our analytic goals when we come under the sway of our baser tendencies that lead us to fall silent, to not hear, and so not intervene to help our patients free themselves from all bondage. In “all bondage” I included encumbrances they experience directly in the communities in which they live (pp. 363–364). It was specifically when I stated that education and training in psychoanalysis should require attention to American identity issues, including racism, that I was told that I was not being neutral, that I was pursuing my own agenda.

In retrospect, I think that this critique of my stance was itself a harking back to an outdated and discredited notion of the neutral analyst. A more contemporary view calls for the analyst to preserve and concentrate the patient’s motivation to endure the treatment, and to do so by being persistently open to all of what is in, and what shapes, the patient’s mental life. How can the psychoanalyst accomplish that goal without including in his or her analytic attitude all that may course through the patient’s mind, including cultural factors that live in the patient?

When psychoanalysts diminish cultural factors, “other” them, and even try to shame those who insist on including them as centrally important, as I felt happened in my interactions with my colleagues, they commit a white lie against neutrality by regressively reclaiming its misguided early meanings in which subjectivities and external realities were considered to spoil proper analysis and so should be excluded. On factors that are more familiar and comfortable in psychoanalysis (e.g., oedipal conflict), no one questions the analyst’s neutrality when the analyst maintains a persistent openness to them. Nor do we need to justify that curricula include the possible oedipal contribution to our patients’ psychic lives. They always do, though with varying emphases. If it were excluded all together from psychoanalytic training, thinking, and practice, would we decry recommendations, even the requirement, for such inclusion? Hardly.

Whether we are talking about factors in psychoanalysis that are accepted, even privileged, or those that are shunned, the point here is not to assume the psychical weight that any factor has in the patient’s life, but rather to show openness to all factors that may impact our patients’ lives. For me, that is the best application of the neutrality concept.

I want now to consider how psychoanalysis as a discipline commits lies of commission and omission with respect to neutrality. Apropos a lie of commission: when the discipline itself marginalizes cultural factors and their dysfunctions, such as racism, by being persistently skeptical about them as psychoanalytic, by making them lesser considerations than our familiar topics of interest for education and training, the field lies about our neutrality. In eschewing such factors, and heralding their exclusion as neutral, we lie about neutrality as it has evolved in our field. Rather, we confirm the stereotypes about what it means to be neutral: that is, that we are being inappropriately nonreactive, unemotional, and disengaged. Perhaps it is of some value to recognize that the first white lie about neutrality was Freud’s. His guidance about neutrality was based on the notion that privations preserve motivation for treatment, and yet he often indulged his patients. Perhaps that contradiction in the original consideration of neutrality put it on shaky grounds. Like my notion of American identity, Freud’s notion of neutrality had its nobler and its contradictory aspects.

What do I mean by lies of omission when considering psychoanalysis, culture, and neutrality? Culture is politically powerful and is implicated in psychic life, particularly in, but not limited to, trauma. The failure to see this fact about culture through a psychoanalytic lens on the grounds that to do so is not neutral is a white lie. Take white lie in this context to mean the persistent perpetration of an antiquated view of what it means to be neutral to try to erase important psychoanalytic facts about culture by a psychoanalytic discipline that is overwhelmingly white. This dismissiveness does great harm to psychoanalysis. Gentile (2013) says this very convincingly in an example of how the white lie can play itself out clinically:

Women’s experiences of men’s violence typically remain abject—beyond

signification, trapped in the embodied relational space. As Vasialys [Gentile’s patient] told me, she did not have a verbal language to describe what had happened. But this lack of verbal capacity was not only based in a complex biophysical and psychological response to trauma, it was because the symbolic itself is a political and cultural structure that does not allow for the containment, acknowledgement, or recognition of such experiences.

. . . These experiences [remain] trapped within the body . . . [and] are those also . . . most often deemed illegitimate or unbelievable. . . . Cultural forms of meaning making themselves can reinforce dissociative processes [pp. 460–461].

The proposition by psychoanalysis that a focus on, or a demand for a focus on, cultural factors is nonneutral is an imposition by the discipline of a lie that reduces cultural factors in the interest of privileging the psychoanalytic “value” of focusing on traditional biophysical and psychological factors. As Gentile put it in discussing a traumatized person of color, “survivors are positioned to be more dependent upon ready-made, commodified forms of culturally created sentiment within which to create and contain experience” (p. 461). In these quotes, I think Gentile’s reference to culture, including psychoanalytic culture, is a reference to the proscriptive elements of psychoanalysis that make no, or too little, room for the violence-making and silencing aspects of culture.

I will conclude with a cultural vignette that I think illustrates the need for a more open and inclusive notion of neutrality. This is the case of the white woman in Central Park who called the police on a Black male bird-watcher when he asked her to put her dog on a leash in accord with the city ordinance. She became enraged. In calling the police, she falsely reported that an African American man was threatening her and her dog. What caused her to become enraged? Why did she call the police? Why did she identify the allegedly threatening man as African American? What was the threat? There are numerous ways to understand what unfolded, but I proffer to you that any valid notion of neutrality would have to include a consideration of cultural dynamics. Here is how I do so: What is symbolized or symbolizable for a white woman to be asked by a Black man to put something she possesses on a leash? I propose that this request was discombobulating for the white woman because in the power dynamics of white culture she is the one who gives orders, not Blacks, and certainly, not Blacks to whites. It flipped for her the white culture’s order of things in which Blacks as property are constrained and leashed. Her dog should certainly be allowed to be more free, even if violating the city’s laws, than a Black man. Also, whites are free to do as they wish. Further, the bird-watcher’s request was experienced as the othered, devalued one exerting authority that she as a white woman could not recognize or accept coming from a Black man. This was an unacceptable scenario for her in which she became flooded with anxiety, losing perspective and capacity for symbolization. She was traumatized.

It is important to note that the dog walker’s traumatized response to the bird-watcher was only the manifest content of her trauma. I proffer that her chronic infection with racism is the underlying source of her trauma, in that racism is an essentially weakening set of practices, including for its perpetrators. Othering and institutional racism are clung to because of the racist person’s or racist institution’s underlying weakness, a fracture that goes back to our founding principles that said that all men are created equal, while at the same time denying the full humanity of Blacks and women. As a white woman living in our culture, most likely she would be identified with white privilege, but also as a woman in a misogynist culture in which a woman’s place is second (Janeway 1971). So there may have been multiple layers to her coming apart. For example, it may have been unsettling for her to be put in her place by a man, and even more so, for it to have been by a Black man.

What does a reasonable notion of psychoanalytic neutrality call for in the above vignette? Due to the incident in the park, Ms. Cooper lost her job, lost face, and temporarily had to surrender her dog because in her agitation about leashing she appeared to be strangling rather than controlling the animal. A few days after the incident and its significant consequences, she was interviewed. “I am not a racist,” she said; “I did not intend to hurt that man in any way.” What if the interview and that statement occurred in any one of our offices? What would the properly neutral response be in terms of how to conceptualize what she said, and how would we intervene? My own view is that her statement represents a dissociative process and disavowal, and that our general cultural power dynamics and those of psychoanalysis would tend to collude with her statement, and to leave it unconceptualized or incompletely conceptualized in the interest of a misguided notion of neutrality. To be truly neutral—persistently open, respectfully curious—we would need to recognize the possibility that her “I am not a racist” was a negation, if not something deeper and more primal such as a dissociated and disavowed aspect of herself. To recognize such a possibility is not to insert or impose our values nonneutrally. Rather, it allows for and expresses our awareness that properly neutral psychoanalytic witnessing requires inclusion of all possible contributors to one’s psychic life. The analyst maintains appropriate neutrality by determining, not assuming, the correct psychical weights of all meaningful contributions to the patient’s mental life over the course of the treatment. My fantasy about this “case,” if approached with optimal neutrality, is that the Coopers would recognize each other’s humanity hinted at in the fact that each had the surname “Cooper”: the white dog walker was Ms. Cooper, and the Black birdwatcher was Mr. Cooper, unrelated and unrelatable in the Central Park incident. If the imagined analyst, with proper neutrality, could analyze Ms. Cooper’s remark, “I am not a racist; I did not intend to hurt that man in any way,” she may come to recognize, as Harry Stack Sullivan once said, that she and Mr. Cooper are more simply human than otherwise.