Cultural transition,negation and the Social Unconscious 1

Introduction—Good morning Berlin

First may I say how pleased I am to be here in Berlin! When I first travelled outside the boundaries of the UK in 1972, it was to Berlin that I came—the centre of 20th-century history; at least for Europeans.

I also want to say that whatever is made of the history of Germany and the popular association with Hitler and the Nazis, it is often forgotten how many Germans died in the struggle against fascism. The first concentration camp at Dachau was for the ideological enemies of Nazism—communists, socialists and trade unionists.

For me this is also the home of Rosa Luxemburg, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudi Dutschke. Bonhoeffer, for those who do not know, was a Christian Minister and pioneer of ‘liberation theology’ before the term was coined, who was jailed and eventually executed for his part in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler. Rudi Dutschke was the radical student leader who, having survived an assassination attempt in Germany was shamefully denied asylum in the UK by a British Labour government. And it was Rosa Luxemburg who memorably told Lenin that the only real freedom was the freedom to dissent. A freedom of which I am about to avail myself.

I want to begin with two remarks: the first about the personal and the political, the second about problems and solutions.

Not just politics

I have been asked to talk, ‘not just about politics’. This is an interesting request, because I never talk just about politics. I believe the personal is political. In the same way that Foulkes talked about the individual being permeated by the social, I believe the political gets inside us and shapes our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, our language and our actions, both individually and collectively and I always talk about this. But often the only bit of what I have said that gets remembered is the quote from Marx, or some other comments that can be safely bracketed off as ‘political’, so they can then be regarded as ‘not personal’ and nothing to do with the internal world. So I want to suggest that if anyone leaves here, thinking I have only talked about politics, you will have missed half the talk.

Cultural transition

The first concept is that of ‘cultural transition’. I thought of this originally as the process that refugees had to go through to leave one culture and join another. Then I realized it was a process they could never complete. It was more a kind of limbo they got stuck in. They could never fully become part of the host culture nor could they ever fully leave their original culture. But neither could they ever fully belong again to that original culture. They were in a permanent transitional state—always moving. A state that could be both alienating and creative. A state in which it is the alienation that can fuel creativity. Juan Tubert-Oklander (2016) has proposed comparing this to Bateson’s ‘trans-contextual syndrome’—a paradoxical state that can provoke creativity or schizophrenia (Bateson, 1969). It was while I was formulating this idea in relation to refugees that I realized it was also applicable to me. I grew up in a working class culture far removed from the middle-class professional culture of psychoanalysis/psychotherapy/group analysis. Becoming a group analyst alienated me from my culture of origin. Realizing what had happened made me further alienated from mainstream group analysis. So I too exist in a transitional state between the Hampstead (London) consulting room and the North of England/Midlands working class.

But this idea of a simple transition or transitional state between two cultures alone is misleading because we are not dealing just with difference but with hierarchy and with systems and patterns of domination and subordination. These are precisely the dynamics that I suspect determines how much a trans-contextual syndrome becomes a creative paradox or a destructive double bind. Here is the hierarchy of the underclass as explained to Ben Judah (2016) by a Nigerian immigrant working as a policeman in London:

I’m gonna level with you . . . Y’see in London you’ve always had the Africans at the bottom of the pile along with the West Indians. I don’t mean West Indians like who flew in yesterday from Jamaica but I mean second generation West Indians. They are the bottom too . . . Then you get some Afghans. Then the Eastern Europeans coming up. The East Europeans are above us Africans . . . because they are more acceptable. Because of the likeness of the race. There is a commonality in Europe of the ethnicity . . . you know? That’s the way it is. Then you get the Asians . . . Then you get the Irish. Then you get the white . . . And at the very top you get the rich . . . Where there is no race. (Judah, 2016: 52)

This takes us to two more concepts. The ‘social unconscious’ and ‘negation’.

Negation

Negation is a subtle form of racism (or group oppression). It is not like anti-semitism or the racism of hostility and hate that can be found in fascism, or in the deep south in the US. It is instead to be found in the different reactions to atrocities that occur in the ‘civilized’ world of the West, like, last year, Marseille or Paris, compared to us being almost oblivious to the daily atrocities in other parts of the world—Beirut, Bagdad, CAR, (that is Central African Republic for those who have never heard of it) Congo . . . etc. It is negation that my non-western colleagues (referred to above) experienced in the expectation that they would not be therapists but interpreters. It is negation of their experience that is expressed in my assumption of the white western identity of the therapist.

Negation is what enabled the US to slaughter between two and four million people in Vietnam in the late 1960s early 1970s, many of them described as ‘collateral damage’. It is what leaves us with such an imprecise estimate of how many deaths there were. What is a couple of million Vietnamese either way?

It is negation that enables the US and UK to slaughter around 100,000 Iraqi civilians in the course of an invasion supposedly to liberate Iraq. It is what enables us to talk about a ‘refugee crisis’ when a relatively small part of the refugee problem that ‘third world’ countries have struggled with for decades starts to make itself known at the doors of Europe. Make no mistake, in contemporary ‘Newspeak’, a ‘refugee crisis’ is one that inconveniences Europeans, not one that that puts impossible strains on already relatively poor countries.

The ‘Black lives matter’ campaigns in the US and UK are precisely a challenge to a state of affairs where black men can be shot dead by police or die in police custody, and it is not treated very seriously—just another sort of ‘collateral damage’ that’s just an accidental consequence of the law enforcement we are all supposed to value and support in a supposedly ‘civilized’ society.

Until only very recently it was well known that any black trainee psychotherapist in London who tried to discuss her/his experience of everyday racism in her/his training analysis could expect have it interpreted as a displacement of some other problem. Analysts seemed completely unable to conceptualize the possibility that racism might be part of ‘reality’ with which they were unacquainted, or indeed part of the social unconscious of the psychoanalytic community in which they participated.

In the very early days of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (MFFCVT—late 1980s) we all, clients and staff, shared the same kitchen which was also the waiting area. In those days we therapists tended to see ourselves as co-participants with our clients in a political struggle against torture and oppression. Our founding director, Helen Bamber, would refer not to ‘our clients’ but to ‘our people’. When we moved to a different building there were enough rooms to set one aside as a staff room and another as a clients’ waiting room and that is what was done. So already, better facilities and a ‘professional’ approach were driving a potential wedge into the therapeutic matrix.

Then there was the question as to where the interpreters were to wait? The interpreters were often from the same refugee community as the clients and would sometimes arrive with them at the Foundation. They would wait with them in the shared kitchen/waiting room. But now there were two waiting rooms. The obvious thing to do was to let the interpreters choose which room they used. But what actually developed was a debate as to whether the interpreters should be able to use the staff room. In the course of the debate, it was said that the interpreters were ‘somewhere between the clients and the staff’. They were of course, in their role, sitting between the clinicians and the clients translating from one language to another. But there was a sense that what was also being said was that they were in between staff and clients in a hierarchy of status, importance and entitlement. At the top, white, western, middle-class professionals. Next, mostly darker skinned ‘third world’ people, from the client community but of a higher status than the clients, because they were facilitating the therapy rather than ‘receiving’ it. Thus the professional identity of the interpreters and their status as colleagues and members of the staff team was negated and they were turned into supplicants asking for a place in the staff room to which they were not automatically entitled.

So how do we as group analysts deal with the ‘Other’?

At our last symposium in Lisbon I gave a paper about ‘marginalization’ in group analysis: a paper about how we routinely deal with ‘otherness’. I proposed that it is precisely group analysis’s preoccupation with inclusiveness that is its Achilles heel. Because we want so much to include everybody, we create a fantasy that we are far more inclusive than we are, and we press everyone to believe in it and collude with it. The message to outsiders, to those who are different in terms of colour, class or culture is this: You are welcome! You are very welcome. Provided that you become like us. If you act like a white middle-class professional, we shall agree to ignore the fact that you are black. But do not start talking about slavery, or racism, or colonialism, or god forbid, ‘Black Power’. If you act like a white middle-class professional we shall either ignore your working class roots, or we shall congratulate you on your upward social mobility and assume you are as pleased to have joined the middle-class as we are to have you with us. But do not start saying you are proud to be from the working class, or worse, that you still are working class and that you feel alienated in the mainstream discourse of group analysis. Do not please demand a dialogue that makes us feel guilty about our privileges and our unconscious assumptions, or makes us envious of your capacity to see and experience the world in a way that we cannot, and places our limited perspective in parentheses. Do not demand that we acknowledge the limitations of our perspective and that it is determined by our social position, or even worse, by our class based ideology.

Several years ago in the late 1990s, a student I knew wanted to write her clinical paper on racism. This was treated as a probable manifestation of some specific problem she had. A piece of psychopathology rather than a piece of highly relevant research, and a commendable choice. A group analyst should not be politically committed. (S)he should only be committed to a position of studied neutrality and supposed indifference to class or colour, engaging only with ‘reality’ and studying it ‘scientifically’.

Some 10 years later, Farhad Dalal was asked at an Institute of Group Analysis (London) meeting he had spoken at, if he thought there was institutional racism in the Institute. He said ‘Yes, definitely.’ What was staggering was not that he said it but that no-one seemed unduly surprised or bothered. The remark sank like a stone. Perhaps because we have already got an equal opportunities policy: A strong piece of paper we can hide behind that protects us from having to ask or answer any really difficult questions.

Then there is the difference between men and women, that I am not going to try to go into here at any length. I will only say that I have often been amused by the way western therapists talk about the patriarchy and sexism of third world cultures as if the UK is some sort of feminist paradise or liberated zone. As one African client once said to me, ‘You know Dick, in my country it is not like here, where women are almost equal to men.’ Two patriarchies with one shot!

As some of you will know, I have often raised the issue of the absence of beer at group analysis events in London. The response is usually to avoid the general issue, and to provide me with my own personal supply at whatever event it is. So it becomes my personal issue. But lots of other people (middle-class people) at these functions would drink a beer or two if it was available. The reality is that it is a more far reaching issue of class and culture. It is not a simple question of whether the middle-classes only drink wine and the working classes only drink beer. It is a question of the symbolic representations involved. The presence of wine and the absence of beer is a cultural signifier. It is a statement that we are a wine-bar not a beer-hall, and that we are primarily the sort of people who frequent wine-bars and have wine-bar manners and tastes, rather than the rougher types that frequent public houses and beer halls. Unconsciously it gives a message to interlopers from the lower classes about how they are expected to behave, what values they are supposed to subscribe to, and how they have to be and feel if they want to join the club: the club of Group Analysis. It is there to represent the terms of inclusion and exclusion.

Similarly the price of our Gala Dinner, €90, which has been previously discussed on our email forum. The problem has been addressed by generous and commendable efforts to find ways to subsidise those who cannot afford it so that everyone can be included. But if you are included in a dinner you cannot afford without a subsidy, you are left with the feeling that you are there as a guest/visitor and not by right. You do not really belong. The €90 is not just an economic issue. It is a context marker, or as I have said before, a cultural signifier. It says, ‘We are a Society primarily composed of people who can afford €90 for a dinner. So, while we have generously let you in, you don’t quite belong just yet.’ Or perhaps more precisely,

You do belong because we like you and you’re a good fellow and you’ve done good work and we want to be inclusive, but at the same time we have our culture and our cultural norms to which we are very attached and we don’t want to change them, or to have them changed. So we want you to belong by accepting those norms and joining in with us, but not telling us you feel uncomfortable or alienated, unless of course you allow us to make you feel better, so we can all feel good together.

Thus the political is personalised, not because it makes it more negotiable or understandable, but because we feel safer in the realm of the personal than in the realm of the political. In the personal realm we can feel we know what we are doing, we can feel potent and useful. In the politico/cultural realm we feel a bit lost, a bit helpless, and even a bit guilty and ashamed.

Conclusion

These are provocative and conflictual issues I am raising here. They may well be unwelcome, and many here may wish to avoid them as far as possible in the time left in this symposium ² . But they will not go away. I have learned from my work with refugees that if we want to be helpful to those fleeing conflict, it helps if we can face our own conflicts within and between ourselves. We must also face the fact that we might not be so much better at resolving conflicts than those from whom the refugees have fled, much as we might wish we were, and indeed convince ourselves of it. Crossing boundaries involves not only boundaries of geography, nationality, culture, class, ‘race’ and gender, but addressing the boundaries in our individual and collective minds, and it is usually those boundaries that are the hardest to cross. Yet, we must come to see ourselves as part of the problems if we want to be part of their solution.