Social Justice Activism as Interpretation in a Loewaldian World

Social Justice and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

To frame my discussion of the psychoanalytic dimensions of social justice activity, especially its interpretive elements, I propose that psychoanalytic ethics necessarily include a vision of social justice. A psychoanalytic ethic that excludes the pursuit of social justice is incomplete at best and severely compromised at worst, undermining its central purposes and aims on both ethical and psychoanalytic grounds. It is integral to ethical practice to be consistently ethical; one may not justify being a pickpocket because one does not steal while fulfilling one’s function as a bank manager. Similarly, we do not hold that the unconscious exists solely during an analytic hour, only that the conditions within an analytic hour are designed to allow unconscious processes to be intentionally foregrounded. The radical ubiquity of the unconscious is one of Freud’s most perturbing discoveries, and one we repeatedly defend against by establishing arbitrary limits on our consideration of unconscious process. Further, applying a psychoanalytic ethic only within our clinical life evades the full potential of a defining value enshrined in the tripartite model: the cultivation of ourselves as a psychoanalytic instrument finely tuned through ongoing analytic personal development. Such an instrument is versatile; it may be employed for the expression of more than one genre of music. A psychoanalytic ethic must thus address the parts of our human life that are sometimes imagined to be less relevant to our clinical work, including our life as sociopolitical subjects and citizens in a community. Adhering to such an integrated ethic necessarily includes diligent inquiry into the largely unconscious ways in which we generate, condone, or perpetuate social injustices, so that we may begin to comprehend ³ the meanings inherent in the resultant harm and conceive of appropriate responses. Within this perspective, we are not so much psychoanalytic clinicians striving to embody an ethical clinical sensibility; we are multifaceted psychoanalytic beings discovering, questioning, and living our human ethics.

The recent history of psychoanalytic scholarship has seen a deepening exploration of psychoanalytic ethics, focused primarily on questions of what constitutes the ethical landscape within the clinical relationship. In an incisive analysis of what has been termed the ethical turn, Botticelli (2023) posits defensive reasons for this interest, suggesting that the current focus on ethics reflects an insistence on goodness that quells an uneasy knowledge of our discipline’s complicity in a host of ethically questionable sociocultural, economic, and clinical practices and positions. These include the financial arrangements of our professional practices; a lack of accountability for institutionally delivered harm to LGBTQ people through theory and practice; and other highly problematic relationships with state, institutional, and personal power. In sum, Botticelli contends we are interested in psychoanalytic ethics because we understand ourselves to be unethical and neglectful of our location within social ethics; we comfort ourselves with a vision of careful ethical concern toward those who enter our offices.

I agree there are defensive motivations for the ethical turn, and that these have to do with our unsettling, struggling-to-emerge awareness that we in psychoanalysis are complicit with social oppression, within our clinical and pedagogical theory and practice, in our psychoanalytic institutions, and in our relationship with the larger societal surround. Our difficulty in apprehending this complicity is exacerbated by the defensive partitioning between the self and its surround, a challenge that has plagued psychoanalysis from the start. This division, which troubled Loewald enough for him to undo it entirely in his theorization (1951), ⁴ is active when we use a clinical psychoanalytic ethic to escape our mandate to attend to a social psychoanalytic ethic in the manner Botticelli notices. Nonetheless, the contemporary discussion of psychoanalytic ethics assists us in formulating a position of ethical psychoanalytic beingness that might constitute the basis for an ethic that claims social justice. To be clear, I am not proposing a new psychoanalytic ethic of social justice. I am asserting that all formulations of psychoanalytic ethics contain unelaborated implications about our ethical positioning vis-à-vis social injustice and justice.

Several discussions of psychoanalytic ethics rest on a maternal framework. The matricial space (Chetrit-Vatine 2014) of the therapeutic endeavor highlights the centrality of emotionally meaningful, responsible caregiving. The importance of open futures and receptive listening is emphasized within this maternal vein (Corpt 2017, 2018), and prioritization of others’ suffering is counseled (Goodman and Severson 2016). Wilson (2020) writes of an ethic of warm hospitality that includes “innkeeping,” with metaphorical and material elements that require close attentiveness to the status of both the clinician’s and the patient’s desire, and their dynamic interaction. Adding dimensionality to maternal frames, he formulates the immense ethical dilemmas posed by the stranger within the clinician, rife with unconscious desire, engaging with the alterity of the patient—a situating that has implications for the many injustices that result from the use of another to meet one’s hidden wishes, including the dangers of “colonizing” one’s analysand (p. 69). Orange (2014) makes a bridge from an ethic of individual concern and responsibility to a call to expand the capacity to live for others in social concern and service (2021b), with recent works discussing racism (2021a), climate justice (2022a), and the intersectional social trauma of the Covid pandemic (2022b) in terms of radical ethics. She explicitly addresses social justice in relation to a psychoanalytic ethic, as do Benjamin (2021); González (2020a), who discusses individual and collective suffering within an ethic of place, or material settings and positioning; and Layton (2019), who writes of the need to cultivate an ethic of disillusionment to counter psychosocial unconscious processes of disavowal and unquestioned adaptation to contemporary racial and economic injustice.

Saketopoulou (2022, p. 1100) uniquely extends concepts of openness by describing psychoanalytic ethics in terms of surprise, highlighting the importance of “fostering nondominating relationships with the results of our patient’s own self-theorizings” and experimentation, which may surprise both partners in an analytic engagement. Here is an ethical sensibility that hints at social activism not from a sense of “doing good,” a motivation that may elicit well-founded concern about irenic evasion of underlying conflict, but of novel discovery through personally grounded social experimentation, an inherently conflictual process. Social justice activists typically surprise themselves and the larger society with their creative actions, which further nondominance from institutional structures, and individual freedom to experiment with innovative attempts to flourish within a wider range of societal positions, chosen and unchosen. Student activists who undertook the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, were engaged in a quest to improve their society through a quiet interpretation of an unjust society, based in an ethic of dignity and inherent worth (Drozeck 2019), as well as an open future that could include equal treatment from their social surround: “We, too, should be able to sit at a lunch counter, be served, and eat alongside others.” More hidden is the fact that these activists were also engaging in interpretive action (Ogden 1994) informed by emergent self-theorization and experimentation of personal possibilities that previously had seemed inconceivable within their social context, with surprising results that launched both these individuals and their social surround into unprecedented experiences.

Some theorists have emphasized the centrality of mourning the deaths and suffering that are the result of social injustice, presenting a sort of ethic of grief for the harm we inflict on each other, psychoanalytically grounded in Freudian formulations of mourning. This may occur in a process of extending full “grieveability” to those whose lives and deaths are marginalized and devalued (Butler 2003, 2020). Practices such as the annual Homeless Persons Memorial Vigil held by the City and County of San Francisco and the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, which includes soil collection ceremonies at sites of previously unacknowledged racially motivated murders, aim to orchestrate such a process of rehumanization via facilitated grieving of disavowed losses. A more complete accountability to each other for the unconsciously shaped realities we create is an integral part of what may occur through social activism, intrinsically an important form of mourning (Moglen 2005, 2006, 2007). Orange (2014) locates Loewald in this tradition, discussing the ethical process of learning to live responsibly as grounded in mourning. Identifying, witnessing, and mourning losses related to injustice may thus be considered integral to a psychoanalytic ethical landscape that prepares itself to receive seeds of new social growth.

In a foundational work, Kite (2016) describes the ethical in psychoanalysis as something that is unconsciously lived, object-related, and deeply personal, concluding that it involves “taking responsibility for our largely unconscious impact on patients, and theirs on us” (p. 1161). In his delimitation of psychoanalytic knowledge in terms of its ethics, Scarfone (2017) states that central to psychoanalytic ethics is the requirement to allow both spoken and unspoken communications not merely to inform, but to touch and elicit responses within us that support an “analytic process,” grounded in a particular form of receptive availability (p. 395). Like Kite, Scarfone highlights the necessity of allowing oneself to be impacted by another, or “subjected to an experience.” A sadly repeating personal ethical failure of this nature is when I walk past people who are unhoused and clearly suffering, heavily blunting the ways I might be impacted by them, ⁵ on my way to a place where I ostensibly engage in ethically sound psychoanalytic work. However much I imagine I may compartmentalize aspects of my psyche, and perhaps must, I am inescapably compromised in my psychoanalytic function when I do so. I conduct myself in a manner that can be construed only as psychoanalytically unethical. ⁶

I read all the above formulations of psychoanalytic ethics as an ethical call for psychoanalysts to take broad responsibility for the consequences—internal and external, individual and social—of our unconsciously motivated human activity, heeding Loewald’s advice (1978) to “own up to our own history . . . [and] be responsible for our unconscious” as a mark of maturity (p. 21). This responsibility includes, per Saketopoulou’s ethic of surprise, accountability for the stultifying impact of conserving mechanisms that reinforce existing oppressive psychic and material arrangements. As I have noted, psychoanalytic ethics are human ethics, and apply to the unconscious domains of all human activity. Because psychoanalytic ethics are conversant with unconscious processes, our ethical inquiry is often an indirect undertaking that may be understood only in retrospect. Psychoanalysis frequently considers the ethics of choices that have been made in the past, which are illumined through deferred action and the insight borne of retrospection (Ackerman 2020). For Loewald, this sort of “past-work” in the present is what creates the future, transforming the haunting presences of ethical failures into the antecedents of generative potential. Thus, the societal injustices of the past, which reverberate in the now, are the lightless soil that incubates, in hidden and partly unknowable ways, a seed’s prenascent verdure, which is not yet apparent. The centrality of the unconscious in psychoanalytic ethics requires comfort with the fact that the knowledge informing our ethics is perpetually incomplete, coming from indirect sources, and revealed in disquieting fits and starts. It also suggests that social justice movements are derived from deep unconscious stirrings within individuals and groups, comprising crucial, spontaneously emergent communications on both conscious and unconscious levels.

Social Justice Activism as Psychoanalytic Art

Before turning to the matter of interpretation, I will comment on Loewald’s evocative piece, “Psychoanalysis as an Art and the Fantasy Character of the Psychoanalytic Situation” (1975) and its relevance to social justice activists and their work. Developing themes from his well-known exploration of therapeutic action (1960), “Psychoanalysis as an Art” is a paper devoted to the creative heart of psychoanalysis, using a variety of artistic metaphors to explain Loewald’s sweeping view of the analytic project. In his elucidation of analytic process, he describes a movement from logically controlled narrative into “a force field of re-enactment,” revealed through “language action” and “symbolic action,” occurring in the temporal mélange that is the transferential field (1975, p. 366). He underscores that this work of fantasy and action is informed by the unconscious and is of essential importance in shaping reality and the future. Loewald says about the fantasies shaped by the past that they are “far from being unreal and therefore to be discarded” (p. 398). Here we may include fantasies shaped by the past that lend their charge to contemporary injustices. Rather than relinquishing these recovered memories and fantasies, Loewald advocates that they be employed, “revived and made available for development and change . . . in actual living” (p. 368; emphasis added).

Loewald is initiating us into an important truth: psychoanalysis is meant to change our lives. While many of us endorse this view and have been fortunate enough to experience it ourselves, we may yet vastly underestimate the scope of this potential change. In my reading of Loewald, widespread social change in the direction of social justice is an expectable outcome of the psychoanalytic process he professes. Social change is accomplished through meaningful action grounded in the time-bending wisdom of unconscious workings, and informed by the integrating, truth-seeking (Loewald 1970) force of Eros—a fitting description of the work of social justice activists, who use their truth-telling love in combination with a keen receptivity to the unconsciously inflected dimensions of the historical moment in order to create needed social “development and change . . . in actual living.” That the progress occurs in the direction of social justice is because the development is in the direction of improved well-being through differentiated integration in both the individual and the group. Inner well-being reduces the necessity for the malignant projections and other rigidified defensive processes that undergird injustice. Greater justice within the group supports individual well-being.

Loewald’s description of the intensely creative interplay between analyst and analysand may also provide a template for the mutually informing creative relationship between a social justice activist and their social surround. In his stirring comparison of the progression of a fruitful analytic hour to the “progression of a work of art, a poem, a musical composition, a painting, at a propitious moment or period during the artist’s work,” he describes a “directional tension” between “the artist’s imagination and the inherent force of his medium” (1975, p. 369). “Directional tension” is undoubtedly in the direction of development and positive change for Loewald, actualized through individuals using ingenuity and distinctive, newly arising inner capabilities to act upon their external surroundings (changes “in actual living”), with the external surround responding in kind. The “inherent force of the medium” is an ambiguous phrase. “Force” may be read as the latent power held within an artistic medium—one’s poetry, song, or activism. It may be read also as a reference to the inherent resistance that an artistic medium might present to being shaped by the artist’s imagination, the hard surface of marble against chisel. Both describe the forceful meeting of the imaginal and the material.

Loewald writes,

In the mutual interaction of the good analytic hour, patient and analyst—each in his own way and on his own mental level—become both artist and medium for each other. For the analyst as artist his medium is the patient in his psychic life; for the patient as artist the analyst becomes his medium. But as living human media they have their own creative capabilities, so that they are both creators themselves. In this complex interaction, patient and analyst—at least during some short but crucial periods—may together create that imaginary life which can have a lasting influence on the patient’s subsequent actual life history [p. 369].

In marking people as “living human media” as well as artists, the psyche and its social surround are conceived of as art, artistry, and art materials in dynamic, holographic, and unceasingly generative subterranean communication. The tension—the potential for change—between activist and society lives within the gap that arises between the limitations and creative potential of the respective constellations of art, artistry, and art materials currently active within the activist and within the social structures the activist seeks to change. Loewald’s pithy statement “for the patient as artist the analyst becomes his medium” is worthy of extended consideration, suggesting a use of the object that far exceeds a Winnicottian one in its unlimited dimensionality and inventive potential. Interpretation that arrives in such a milieu does not claim to know—it is an artistic gesture, a splash of paint upon a shared canvas. In a leap that beckons, I venture to adapt Loewald’s words as follows:

In the mutual interaction of effective social justice activism, the society and the activist—each in their own way and their own level of activity—become both artist and medium for each other. For the society as artist the medium is the activist in specific psychic and social conditions; for the activist as artist the society becomes the medium. But as living human media both activist and society have their own creative capabilities, so that they are both creators themselves. In this complex interaction, activist and society—at least during some short but crucial periods—may together create that imaginary life that can have a lasting influence on the society’s subsequent actual life history, and thus the life of the individual.

The Social Justice Interpretation

Loewald (1979) states that the most important interpretations are ones that rightfully gratify our profound desires for understanding and articulate our “deepest needs and highest wishes” (p. 166). When operating on this level, interpretations work over the course of a lifetime, having created needed passageways within an individual and between an individual and the environment, over which novel transits may occur at any time, bearing unexpected gifts. Lasting channels between islands are created, providing free, mutually enriching mingling between areas in which specialized functioning takes place: a model for the relationship between individuals and the society they inhabit. The felicitous phrase “deepest needs and highest wishes” speaks to an important polarity that is linked by interpretation in Loewald’s view. Interpretation allows for reciprocal communication in which our most foundational, primal psychic needs—for nurturance, safety, well-being, dignity, witnessing, and gratification—are paired with our “highest wishes”—for creativity, self-actualization, efficacy, generosity, truth, ethics, and justice for ourselves and others. Our deepest needs and highest wishes come together for us to create social justice, which creates the possibility of our deepest needs and highest wishes coming together. These intertwined roots, sustained by unconscious groundwater, are key to the fruit of Loewaldian interpretation, in terms of its spirit, qualities, and nourishment.

Clinicians who conceive of their work in terms of activism often understand themselves as at the nexus of self, other, and society—another iteration of art, artistry, and art medium in lively assemblage. In an unflinching reflection upon her work with survivors of human rights abuse, including those who have endured torture, Leanh Nguyen (2012) outlines the inner work, the clinical work, and the social work she does, exploring the paradox of attuning to people whose trauma has created a “hole of absolute silence” within their psyches while providing the language of expert testimony for asylum seekers (p. 314). She summarizes the form of psychoanalytic activism she practices:

The activism lies in the commitment to stay with the unspoken and to metabolize the unbearable so that I can retell the story of the trauma in a tolerable, recognizable, and useable form. . . . I do not divulge that my psychoanalytic agenda is to make them [government authorities] absorb the patient’s psychological reality; nor do I explicate that the actual impact of my psychoanalytic testimony is to convert them into a certain way of apprehending and languaging human life. . . . my political activism consists of forcing the public to acknowledge that my patient has a life worth living—that there is a human life—and thus worth honoring and saving [p. 314].

Nguyen is embedded in a society that includes many forms of human rights abuse and then perversely uses certain institutions to regulate offers of safety, requiring survivors and their mental health providers to prove the extent of the trauma in the most bureaucratic manner possible. ⁷ But Nguyen wishes to go further; she has a “covert agenda” of rehumanization, a restoration of dimensionality outside of tragic victim or heroic survivor. She accomplishes this in part by “smuggling in” (p. 310) personal details about the people she is treating in addition to providing evidence about the devastation they have survived, gleanings she discovers through her strenuous efforts to contact the places of vitality within those for whom “remaining alive . . . is the terrible task of those who have died” because of what has been done to them by other people (p. 308). She includes in her legal testimony the fact that she found one person, brutalized and without formal education, reading Tolstoy in the waiting room; that another finds pleasure from using her savings to buy a round of drinks for others; that someone else survived war only to be overwhelmed by crushing loneliness in her new land, especially when eating alone in a cafeteria. Perceiving within the society the potential for a greater benevolence than it currently exhibits, Nguyen helps materialize it by offering a deep interpretation to government institutions, an interpretation about the moral imperative of witnessing (Boulanger 2012), conveyed through direct demonstration. In delivering this interpretation in hearing after hearing through what she terms her psychoanalytic activism, Nguyen gradually changes her society, expanding our sense of whose lives matter and compelling our collective attention toward the most refined forms of human resilience.

The society, per Loewald, changes her as well. Loewald (1984) instructs us that psychoanalytic knowledge rests on reciprocity between various domains of psychic life; the use of clinical psychoanalysis to draw conclusions about the outside world; and “actual life observations” to dynamically inform our psychoanalytic work (p. 170). Witnessing the extreme conditions Nguyen’s patients have survived brings with it existential questions, about why and how life is worth living; about what makes one human. Nguyen, who does not disclose to her patients her personal experience as a refugee, credits the “ethics and poetics” of psychoanalysis with helping her find her inner answers, which she then uses to inform her psychoanalytic activism. Nguyen writes of the ways her patients’ lives lead her to the “remembering and returning . . . to an unfinished and unclaimed past” (p. 315) of her own. While Nguyen crafts detailed narratives about her patients to present to the courts, she tells us she cannot bear to tell her analyst the Vietnamese names of her own relatives. The introspection prompted by her patients and the elements of sociopolitical life they bring to her powerfully transform Nguyen, culminating in the discovery of her own family’s previously unspoken history of torture. Interpretation is based in the clinician’s self-understanding, which is at least in part generated by and “reactivated in the act of interpretation” (Loewald 1979, p. 165), a process folded in upon itself. Gradual understanding of self, other, and social surround through this form of interpretation is constitutive of a psychoanalytic self and a psychoanalytic relationship in a psychoanalytic world, psychoanalytic in recognition of the unconscious sparks pervading the firework-filled sky of human psychic activity. Such a construction is like a mobile; when one part is touched, all parts move in response.

Those who do not claim a psychoanalytic identity or think of their activist work in psychoanalytic terms still use the psychoanalytic function inherent within us to secure gains in social justice through intentional actions that are unintentionally—or unconsciously intentionally—interpretive. In a large and effective direct action, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) shut down the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a day in October 1988, presenting demands to expedite needed drugs and alter clinical trial processes to help those with AIDS (Crimp 2011). ACT UP and the aspect of society represented by the FDA are related in a model described by Loewald (1981) as rooted in early development and implicitly indexed by interpretation that targets points of incompatibility between accepted elements—the status quo—and what is emergent. An effective Loewaldian interpretation midwifes the future by stirring the past and the present; the self in communication with itself and the social environment; primary and secondary process; and infusing this soup with a fragrant potentiality that is lovingly kept in mind, the basis of all social justice activity.

These features are evidenced in the process of activist action, here shutting down the government agency failing to meet its mandate to provide urgently needed medical care to a marginalized community; shutting down the ongoing injury to make way for reflection. The qualities of Loewaldian interpretation are also abundantly present in the content of activist speech. The famous oration “Why We Fight,” given by the activist Vito Russo ⁸ at the FDA demonstration, is immediately recognizable as an interpretation delivered from an activist to his social surround. It is delivered at a moment of “directional tension” generated at the interface between the imagination of those who have AIDS and the “inherent force” of their society, which is shot through with prejudicial hostility and active neglect. In Loewald’s view, the threat to the self is not reality, but the loss of integration with reality, a disruption of the libidinal ties between inner and outer worlds (Loewald 1951). Nowhere is such a threat more pronounced than when a powerful part of social reality is standing by and watching you and your community die, hatefully blaming those who are ill. Yet Russo and his fellow activists heroically bring Eros to bear on the ties between themselves and the government that is failing them. Russo redoubles the libidinal bonds between himself and his world with a resolve to represent his subjectivity on his own terms, insisting on the possibility of a new responsiveness.

Like Nguyen, Russo is engaged in an activist project of conveying to government organizations the full extent of the harm under way, as Nguyen says, retelling the trauma in a form that government functionaries can absorb and use. While Nguyen tells of the tortures her patients have withstood and the glints of life that remain within them, Russo describes in haunting terms the nightmare of utter nonrecognition in the face of a war zone visible to only some:

Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes, you look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices. It isn’t happening to them. They’re walking the streets as though we weren’t living through some sort of nightmare. And only you can hear the screams of the people who are dying and their cries for help. No one else seems to be noticing [Russo 1988].

Russo’s activist interpretation clarifies the source of the trouble, its mechanism and location. In doing so, he clarifies the relation between himself and his distress, a feature of many effective psychoanalytic interpretations. After declaring that he is “not dying,” he lists what is killing him. Starting a series of sentences with the phrase “if I’m dying of anything,” he says that he is dying of homophobia, racism, indifference, politicians, the sensationalizing and objectifying quality of media coverage, and other factors located in the social surround. The social devils are given their proper names to begin their exorcism ⁹ through transformational activism. The skillfulness of this multilayered interpretation might make a psychoanalyst pause with admiration of a talented activist colleague practicing an art form recognizable as their own.

The Therapeutic Action of Social Justice Interpretation

If social justice activism is to be considered a psychoanalytic interpretation, it must perform some therapeutic action. Therapeutic action, like social justice activism, operates within a dynamic system of change and its vagaries. Any theory of therapeutic action requires a template for a process of mind; how that process is subverted in order to actualize change; and how such a change is resisted (Friedman 2007). Jaffe (2021) outlines six definitional concepts of psychoanalytic therapeutic action based in Freud: direct support; introjection; catharsis; insight; identification; and working through. I will discuss Russo’s activist speech in relation to these domains, with an emphasis on a model of working through that occurs in two phases.

Russo’s “Why We Fight,” only one among countless interpretations delivered within a single collective action by ACT UP, swiftly fulfills the first five of Jaffe’s therapeutic actions. His words are directly supportive and provide empathic company to all who are suffering, directly or indirectly, stabilizing a distressed system of individuals within a larger social context that is persecutory, neglectful, and otherwise failing. He offers himself as an introject with qualities of vitality, efficacy, courage, honesty, and hope, an object his listeners may identify with and internalize, and later use in novel ways. In addition, his speech performs an important cathartic function, putting words to pent-up feelings of anguish, grief, powerlessness, sorrow, moral injury, and rage, and allowing new possibilities to emerge from the collective mourning accomplished through this release. Insights are offered through moments in the speech’s content and process that allow its hearers to gain greater self-awareness about their internal experience, especially aspects that may have been repressed or disavowed to cope with the ongoing traumatic injury of the AIDS epidemic in its most fulminant phase. Russo speaks as a subject within the eye of the traumatic storm who demonstrates his intactness and capacity to think. This personal achievement, a form of analytic self-knowledge, forms the basis of the effectiveness of his social justice interpretation in granting insight that is supportive, is useable for identification and introjection, and allows catharsis.

In Loewald’s formulation, working through revives possibilities for “restorative re-creation,” not an undoing of the past but a redoing or reordering of it (Lear 1996, p. 689). The social justice interpretation Russo delivers undertakes working through in two phases, internal and external. It begins with the divestiture from the projections placed onto Russo by the cultural surround. As a gay man with AIDS, Russo cannot sufficiently mobilize the internal processes that might lead to his activism as long as he is dominated by the toxic projections and melancholic identifications he is burdened with, the oppressive intrapsychic consequences of the stunted creativity, prejudice, and sadism in his social surround. ¹⁰ To put it differently, he must work through any identifications with the transference he receives from the dominant social surround—the negative social transference—in order to freely explore new self-concepts and engage in authentic self-discovery. Early in “Why We Fight,” Russo asserts that he is speaking out “as a person with AIDS who is not dying.” That is, he affirms that he is alive, is using his aliveness, and is doing all he can to stay alive: an explicit rejection of the projection of “a helpless victim,” passively resigned to death and unable to launch a protest. His inner working through in this regard allows him to facilitate such an intrapsychic process in others, most directly through introjection and identification. The success of this internal work allows him to conjure from the imaginal realms a potential future that transcends the bleak present. Russo’s invocation of this future through his interpretive activist speech exerts a powerful therapeutic action in a manner I imagine Loewald might have appreciated:

Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes—when that day has come and gone, there’ll be people alive on this earth—gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and, in some cases, gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free.

The second part of the working through occurs via the psychological work accomplished within the social surround as a result of the activism interpretation, which clears the way for material changes that were impossible in the psychic economy between ACT UP and the federal government that preceded the collective action. The FDA shutdown resulted in a dramatic change over the following year: the FDA showed receptivity to activists for the first time, bringing in patient advocates as collaborators and taking their contributions seriously (Crimp 2011). This working through ushered in lasting changes that continue to benefit people with serious illnesses; ACT UP is considered a model for effective social justice activism based on these and other successes (Bronski 2011; Schulman 2021). It is likely that these equality-promoting results came about not merely because the FDA was interested in avoiding another shutdown, but because the interpretation delivered by the activism was mutative, recalling to the FDA its own ethics, purpose, and future potential. The negative social transference from the FDA onto people with AIDS was engaged in a working through that allowed for a partial historicization of systemic disrespect and the establishment of previously unconsidered collaboration with patients newly understood as deserving citizens and community experts. The sudden recognition of hitherto overlooked qualities in others is what Loewald (1960) refers to as the new discovery of objects (contrasted with the discovery of new objects), a process that results from interpretation that opens old unused trails, leading to new vantage points.Importantly, although Russo and his fellow activists engaged in conscious protest, and the FDA responded with conscious policy changes, both ACT UP’s protest and the FDA’s responses were vivified with creative contact with unconscious life. The scholar activist Bronski (2011, p. 298) refers to ACT UP itself as a “form of art,” crediting this artistry with individual and social reimagination: Loewald’s re-creation via working through within the art of psychoanalysis. Without flourishing sea life in the liminal tidal pool of conscious and unconscious realms, the actions of both ACT UP and the FDA would have been ineffective, devoid of the potency of meaning that led to stable positive change and a more palpable sense of authentic justice. ¹¹

This biphasic working through—first within the activist and activist community, then within the larger surround—is the mechanism by which the social justice interpretation addresses what I have termed here the negative social transference, highly operant in marginalization. The asylum seekers Leanh Nguyen represents, Vito Russo and his fellow ACT UP activists, the Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas, the labor organizer Dorothy Huerta, the Black trans activist Marsha Johnson, the Indigenous rights activist Beverly Longid, and the feminist education activist Malala Yousafzai all have in common the intensely distorted psychic content directed toward them as representatives of their groups by the larger society, which is often concretized as callous disregard, emotional and physical threats, and overt abuse and violence. Activists and others ¹² frequently “take” the negative social transference and differentiate from it in order to undertake interpretive working through. They must shoulder intensive internal psychological work in order to proceed with their activism, the interpretive elements of which in turn prompt psychological work within the dominant culture. This multilayered transformation allows for new meanings and recontextualization (Loewald 1981) of intrapsychic relationships to the group objects (González 2020b) that typically externalize as the prejudicial mistreatment of a class of people: social injustice. The working through of the negative social transference is an essential part of the therapeutic action of the social justice activism interpretation, which clears the way for conditions of greater equality to take hold internally and externally in a mutually reinforcing manner.

Resistance

As with any other form of psychoanalytic interpretation, social justice activism may elicit resistance. In “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” Freud (1926) presents numerous forms of resistance, all of which may operate unconsciously to thwart the efficacy of the social justice activism interpretation. These are the resistance represented by repression itself; transference resistance; resistance that results from attachment to secondary gain from the symptom; resistance from the id, which operates on repressed instincts; and resistance from the superego, which “opposes every move towards success” out of a need for punishment (p. 160). The dawning awareness of injustice and the new dimensions of empathy promoted by social justice activism may result in a swift re-repression, resulting in an inability to make lasting change even after unconsciously inspired activism has taken place. Transference resistance, related to repression resistance, presents formidable obstacles to mutative activism, especially when considered in relation to the negative social transference. Freud writes that transference resistance promotes a revivification of repression in the place of recollection in the transference, resulting in a static return to the previous relational arrangement rather than dynamic possibility. In the social sphere, this may manifest as an insistence that perceptions shaped by the negative social transference are based in reality and justify continued injustice: “They deserve less because they are inferior.”

The primary and secondary gains of social injustice are immense and overdetermined, having unconscious, conscious, affective, libidinal, socioeconomic, and political dimensions, differently configured for members of both dominant and marginalized groups. The resistance posed by gains derived from the illness of social injustice is sometimes summarized in social justice parlance as the unwillingness to relinquish the unearned advantages of social privilege. Id and superego resistances both represent other important sources of resistance to social justice activism, with the id presenting powerful forms of instinctual gratification tied to continued injustice, and the superego maintaining libidinal ties to suffering that return us to social unhappiness. Confronting injustice through the activism interpretation may make us painfully aware of our lost and damaged love for each other. Attempts to evade mourning these profound losses may also result in what I have elsewhere termed the anti-integrative impulse, which repels equality-promoting measures through a variety of defensive mechanisms (Rao 2022).

Friedman (2008), writing about Loewald, poses the question, “Why, then, was the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud so uncelebrated, his masterpiece refused by JAPA, his book until recently out of print, his name unknown in Europe, anathema even now to many in the U.S.?” (pp. 1108–1109). I believe these acts of repression must be considered a defensive shrinking back from the staggering implications of Loewald’s far-reaching psychoanalysis and the interpretations it gives us about ourselves, our world, and the role of psychoanalysis within it. Making use of his body of work, I have recognized in this piece that diverse forms of psychoanalytic activity exist in human life, and have established that a powerful form of mutative psychoanalytic interpretation is delivered through activism that promotes social justice. In drawing our attention to these dimensions of psychoanalysis, this paper itself may serve as an interpretation to our discipline, prompting us to recall our future.