Freud and the 21st-Century Political

Why a conference on psychoanalysis and politics now?

In a way, it hardly makes sense to ask this question, since everyone is thinking about politics right now.

Obviously, the specifics of the current political moment are on our minds. But part of what we’re hoping to avoid here—and this bears on our central question about the relation between psychoanalysis and politics—is falling into a simple logic of application: that is, the logic by which we use psychoanalytic concepts to understand or think we understand politics.

Instead, we’re hoping to work with a logic of implication, which is also the logic of transference, to ask how psychoanalysis and politics are foundationally inter-implicated, and see what emerges both about the contemporary political moment and about the current state of psychoanalysis, as well as its history. To heed this inter-implication is also to heed the impossibility at the center of both psychoanalysis and politics, as two of Freud’s “impossible professions” (Freud, 1937) (the third is education, and all three of which are at stake in the training of psychoanalysts and the constitution of the psychoanalytic collective). In fact, it seems to me that analyzing, educating, and governing are impossible to Freud not as distinct vocations but because each is implied in the others and acts as the fissure within their functioning. We want to heed this fissure.

Later this afternoon, the panel on “The Politics of Self-Authorization” will address the thorny issue of psychoanalytic formation and collectivity. Lacan, for one, refers not to the training of analysts but to their “self-authorization,” in order to highlight the extent to which no governing body or set of ideologies or ideals can make one an analyst. And yet, something of the collective still plays a role in making someone an analyst; there is still a politics to self-authorization, a dialectic that must be charted between the subjective and the social in creating an analyst. Lacan famously has two mantras about self-authorization: that the analyst authorizes themselves alone, and that the analyst authorizes themselves “with some others” (Lacan, 2017). These two positions aren’t in contradiction. The first emphasizes the extent to which any analyst has to traverse a fantasy of authority and guarantee to find their own singular place from which to think and work; the second emphasizes the extent to which this process of defining one’s own radical singularity can only happen in some kind of chosen community. His paper “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (Lacan, 2007) can be read as a parable of this process: there is some moment of decision involved in becoming a psychoanalyst that requires a reading of one’s peers (and what it is to be a peer in this context is I think very much a question), not in the sense of identification or mimicry but according to some other logical principle. This is also the moment of a new act that is unjustified and unsupported by any regulation or graduation rite, which allows one to end one’s analysis.

So part of our question has been what forms of collective make possible the end of analysis—what kinds of community can take responsibility for a certain analytic function, such that one finds it possible to exit the analytic dyad—as well as what collectives can themselves be created by the end of one’s analysis. In this sense, we are interested in the effect an analysis has on the collective formations that one both finds oneself in and makes for oneself. I also, frankly, have been thinking about the Group for Independent Formation itself and our politics, and the extent to which this small group has been one of the main venues that has promoted my formation as an analyst. This is maybe obvious, but this conference is, among other things, part and parcel of the self-authorizations of its organizers, born of a specific moment in our various formations as they are bound up in the formations of other political collectives, the national and global scene among them—as much as it aims to promote, in concert, the ongoing and never-finished self-authorizations of its participants.

There is, further, the matter of the politics of psychoanalytic institutes and the contested question of the role that they play in the creation of analysts, a role which is by no means self-evident. It bears mentioning here that, in a paper delivered in 1962, Siegfried Bernfeld pointed out (Bernfeld, 1962) that the steps toward institutionalization that the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society took in 1923 (primarily, the regulation of would-be analysts’ personal analyses and the setting up of other procedures for the nomination of analysts that are broadly adhered to in many psychoanalytic societies today) took place on the heels of Freud’s cancer diagnosis, from which no one thought he would recover; Mustapha Safouan thus claims (Safouan, 2000) that the institutionalization of psychoanalysis was a piece of acting out of the myth of the primal horde, the close brush with death of the father of psychoanalysis provoking a fraternal pact, replete with rules and regulations, so that no one should take his place. Psychoanalysis was thus institutionalized to ensure that it would be impossible to become an analyst. It bears mentioning as well that in his “1967 Proposition,” where he outlined the procedure of the Pass, Lacan claimed (Lacan, 2017) the concentration camps as the Real of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis—with its own various conflicts over identity—in the twentieth century; as Chris pointed out to me yesterday, the “Logical Time” paper (Lacan, 2007), written in 1945, was, among other things, a question about how to think about group psychology under fascism and what this has to do with becoming an analyst. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis can’t be distinguished from the histories of both psychic and political fascism. This is something we really have to grapple with right now.

Psychoanalysis is thus itself a political development that emerged at a specific historical moment. As the global traumas of the 20th century are repeated today with particular insistence, it makes sense to ask what of these traumas is being refracted in the political landscape of contemporary psychoanalysis, or what Derrida calls “the interwoven histories of humanity and of psychoanalysis” (Derrida, 1991, p. 200). One can conceive neither of the subject nor of psychoanalysis other than in dialectic with the rest of the world, and it seems important to ask how this möbius strip by which the subjective, the psychoanalytic, and the political—or by which the consulting room, the conference hall, and the streets—twists in particular ways at particular historical moments.

This then is something to ask at a time in which the political contours of psychoanalysis as a field, as well as its relation to culture more broadly, is changing: in which psychoanalysis is once again being featured in the media (in the style section of the New York Times a couple of years ago, of all places), in which a certain cultural cachet is again, it seems, being turned in our direction (for reasons that bear interrogating), and also in which the makeup of the field is shifting in important ways, sometimes around practitioners’ very relationships to politics. We can’t ignore the generational conflicts that are getting played out in so many psychoanalytic institutions at the moment: conflicts that often have to do both with the more progressive politics of younger generations of analysts and with newer conceptions of the relation, or non-relation, between psychoanalysis and politics more broadly.

In this sense, we feel that we have to name the genocide in Palestine—to which we are devoting a panel—as a particular nodal point in psychoanalysis and politics today, and as one that is causing a remarkable amount of trouble in psychoanalytic institutions at the moment, not only as a specific problem but also as one that houses within it the very question of psychoanalysis’s relationship with politics. How many psychoanalytic institutes have banished political discussions on their listservs in the wake of postings about Palestine? This act of naming Palestine might be akin to Derrida’s act, in “Geopsychoanalysis…and the Rest of the World” (Derrida, 1991), of naming Latin America as not only “the name of a concept” but also the name “of a psychoanalytic concept.” As Derrida says, Argentina in the 1970s was the only area in the world where there is coexistence…between a strong psychoanalytic institution on the one hand and a society on the other…that engages in torture on a scale and of a kind far surpassing the crude traditional forms familiar everywhere. (Derrida, 1991, p. 228)

Thus, “we are obliged to acknowledge that this pattern—a dense psychoanalytic colonization and a strong psychoanalytic culture coupled with the highest possible intensity of modern military and police violence—is at once without equivalent and exemplary in character” (Derrida, 1991, p. 229). One might point out that the state of Israel is equally exemplary of the convergence of a psychoanalytic culture and massive human rights abuses—this, alongside the extent to which its existence is bound up in the same traumatic history as the institutional development of psychoanalysis around the globe, in diaspora from Europe. So it’s high time that Palestine be named a psychoanalytic problem as well; in this sense, in giving it a central place at this conference, we’re not so much cherry-picking one particular contemporary political issue among many, as hoping to zero in on the navel of psychoanalytic politics and psychoanalysis as a field: the navel being that which it is both impossible to speak and necessary to name.

Lastly, for those of us who are American analysts: we’re of course implicated in this navel in specific ways, having to do both with the development of psychoanalysis in America in the twentieth century and with our political circumstances today. We’ll inevitably have to do some thinking about the cultural role of free speech at the moment, both as a question of democracy and of the slip. One might point out that Trump provides plenty of the latter, along with other fodder for us: it’s not too hard for an analyst (or anyone really) to hear, for example, the marriage vows in his recent proposal about Gaza: “we will have Gaza. We will take it. We will hold it. We will cherish it.” Assuming that getting married for Trump is equivalent to a grab of the pussy, this latent content makes perfect sense. What can we say about this?