Abstract
Psychoanalysis is for challenging––disrupting––our most passionately held beliefs and unconsciously taken positions for the purposes of greater freedom to think, choose, and converse with ourselves and others. As analysts we intervene in ways we hope further these aims. We traffic in the most human of domains––our private worlds of desire, aspiration, and fantasy, of trauma, pain, and regret. We are especially alert to moments of impasse––resistance––in ourselves and in those with whom we work as we strive for something closer to truth––the unthought or the unthinkable. We know that once thinkable and perhaps thought, our bulwark of resistance has yielded ever so slightly. New engagements become possible, and what we once struggled to see we can now confront with less fear and greater clarity.
Another way to answer the question “What is psychoanalysis for?” is: to make a difference. The difference we wish to make is at the level of being, at the level of the very existence of the human person. Every once in a while a former patient will say “Analysis saved my life.” It happens; of this there is no question. Through psychoanalysis it is possible to make a difference at the level of being.
Psychoanalytic writing ought to make a difference in this same sense––that is, intervene in a productively disruptive way, and thereby possibly change lives. Those of us who read the literature and contribute to it know that much of the time analytic writing does not have these effects. Often analytic writing, including that found in JAPA, adds a little something to our understanding of this or that theoretical or clinical issue, in the fashion of normal science in the Kuhnian sense. This kind of writing is familiar and reassuring, as it essentially reinforces the status quo ante, common opinion, doxa. Further, it reinforces our collective identity as psychoanalysts, in that we recognize ourselves in at least some of what we read.
Yet we know that the reinforcing of identity––the strengthening of the ego––often cuts both ways, as strength can become rigidity, and identity can be shot through with reassuring ideology. If we keep in mind the question “What is psychoanalysis for?” we can see that the familiar is our adversary, the usual is suspect, and the easily received ought to be interrogated. So when I say that psychoanalytic writing ought to make a difference, I mean that the best of this kind of writing lays it on the line––is willing, against all odds, to sacrifice anything like received wisdom in the hope that something new and illuminating can emerge. In the end, we are talking about writing as a kind of sacrifice: an involving of oneself in the tragic, in loss, in a wager that something that cannot be anticipated in advance is gained, comes into view, perhaps for the first time.
Among the usual and familiar is the claim that psychoanalysis is the study of the unconscious, by which is meant the individual psyche. And that the proper purview of analytic inquiry is clinical work, that the legitimate space of the analytic encounter is person to person. As if the individual psyche were not itself saturated in the social and did not take many of its features from what is outside it––from the polis, broadly speaking, by way of the symbolically structured relations into which we are born and live, and to which we contribute.
Here are some quotations from JAPA 69/2, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism: I say that to date, as psychoanalysts, we have made one big mess in our long-standing collective tendency to create whiteout conditions and cover-ups/wite-outs in the treatment of whiteness––in our conceptualizations, teaching, supervision, and consulting rooms. (Dorothy Holmes, “‘I Don’t Have a Racist Bone in My Body’: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on What Is Lost and Not Mourned in Our Culture’s Persistent Racism,” p. 241). The construct of Black Rage as a mobilizing adaptive defense is a missing link in psychoanalytic theory conceptualizing the psychic functioning and resilience of oppressed people whose dignity is constantly assaulted (Beverly Stoute, “Black Rage: The Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression,” p. 276). Racist beliefs must be considered very serious symptoms. Clinicians must be educated about this. Individual racism will certainly not be ameliorated by assuming that if other problems are resolved, racist beliefs will disappear. Rather, the complex psychodynamics of murderous racism, or really racism itself, demand the kind of prolonged attention psychoanalytic therapy should always entail (Alan Bass, “Murderous Racism as Normal Psychosis: The Case of Dylann Roof,” p. 311). The unconscious awareness that the n-word evokes violence, bigotry, and subjugation in their most extreme degrees is strongly evinced in the alacrity of the defensive maneuverings that appear in the wake of its appearance in psychoanalytic gatherings. (Jyoti Rao, “Observations on Use of the N-Word in Psychoanalytic Conferences,” pp. 325–326). Psychoanalysts are too often uninterested and not cognizant of developments in the humanities and social sciences. Here we have two cases––the flawed comparison of slaves with Holocaust victims and the laying bare of the [Journal of American History’s] peer review process––in which a sister discipline opened itself to a scrupulous scholarly exploration of its practitioners’ subjective self-exposure of latent unconscious racism (Peter Loewenberg, “The Historian’s Self-Reflection and American Racism,” p. 352). Parasitic Whiteness generates a state of constantly erotized excitement, a drift toward frenzy. Fix, control, and arouse; want, hate, and terrorize. Whiteness resides at this always volatile edge, in a state of permanent skirmish, always taking on the never obliterated resistances of its nonwhite objects (Donald Moss, “On Having Whiteness,” p. 358). As I reflected on [Moss’s] paper, I was anxious, and I expected to be, because in my experience claims that sociocultural phenomena have psychoanalytic meanings and clinical applications are often discredited and those making them are considered nonpsychoanalytic. . . . Race may be regarded in the consulting room as fantasy, but it is also a gruesome historical and present social reality in which Blacks are mercilessly killed by whites who feel entitled to do so (Dorothy Holmes, “Challenges and Opportunities in Becoming One’s Own Self: Commentary on Moss,” p. 374).
This is writing that makes a difference at both individual and collective levels. These authors felt an ethical call, and they laid it on the line in trying to convey, psychoanalytically, how psychoanalysis can illuminate the foundational stain on our nation’s collective psyche, and assist us in confronting it. These writings evoke various degrees of discomfort and anxiety and are meant to do so.
When JAPA’s associate editors, Book Review editors, and I met in Boston to discuss which papers from Volume 69 (2021) we ought to consider for JAPA Prizes (New Author and Best Paper awards), we had a robust, ninety-minute discussion. The New Author Prize was an easy decision: John Dall’Aglio’s set of three interlocking papers, “Sex and Prediction Error, Parts 1–3” (JAPA 69/4, pp. 693–765)––in which, for the first time, an author has put together key findings from neuropsychoanalysis and Lacanian theory––established a new standard for creative work at the level of psychoanalytic metapsychology. But the Best Paper Prize presented a challenge. After spirited debate and discussion about a variety of outstanding papers, we decided, unanimously, to award the JAPA Prize to the six authors who contributed to JAPA 69/2, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism. These authors, whose voices ring out in the quotations above, accomplished something collectively that cannot be reduced to individual achievement: together, their excellent work has already had––and we hope will continue to have––an enduring impact on American psychoanalysis. Finally, we want to acknowledge Peter Goldberg with a Special Mention for his enlightening and beautifully written review essay, “Eating Your Cake and Having It,” on Winnicott’s Collected Works, Volume 6 (JAPA 69/4, pp. 789–806).