Psychoanalysis Loves the Political, Politics Hates Psychoanalysis

In his essay “Freud and the Political,” Mladen Dolar extracts a theory of the political from Freud’s writings on mass psychology, burning through the fog of concepts that have settled on the field of “psychoanalysis and politics” and introducing a usefully simple distinction (Dolar, 2009).

Politics is the construction of collectivities. It is therefore everywhere. Politics is the business of maintaining a collectivity, of reproducing its relations, of governing its knowledge and identity and rules, and of guarding against its dissolution.

The political refers to something else. It is the seam, the fissure, the crack that runs through all politics. It is the dislocation of the social tie, its immanent failure. The political is the fact and the effects of the impossibility of guaranteeing the reproduction of a group, of conclusively resolving its controversies, conflicts, and crises.

Yet the political is also the possibility and origin of politics. Every collectivity was founded in an act that broke with the ties and binds that preceded it, whose consequences could not be guaranteed in advance. Like psychoanalysis, the political is a rare thing.

All politics, therefore, tends to occult its origin in the real of the political, to repress the permanent virtuality of this gap in the speaking-being of the collective.

Now, Dolar places the analyst in a unique position between politics and the political. By not participating in the one, the analyst leaves a space for the other open.

It is as if psychoanalysis circumscribes a site, a locus of the political, without ever quite stepping into this site itself. It is as if it describes and dissects the space of the political without ever quite engaging in politics; it displays the stuff that politics is made of without making politics of it. (Dolar, 2009)

A psychoanalyst inhabits this atopia in politics to accompany someone else to the threshold of the political—and then? Does psychoanalysis stop there? Does Dolar have the last word?

Psychoanalysis displays the split between a subject’s statements and enunciations, between meaning and truth. This division segregates every individual from themselves. The analyst’s “surgical function” or “surgical technique,” as Serge Cottet calls it (2012, p. 125), seeks this split and keeps it open, separating the ego from the symptom, segregating the “I” and the object. Psychoanalysis exacerbates the subject’s fundamental diremption by the political.

Psychoanalysis is also a practice of anamnesis, of remembering traumas and repressed memories, through which the gaps of history and the censored that structures a self are unveiled. Psychoanalytic anamnesis counteracts amnesia and is therefore contrary to the founding act of all fraternal politics, amnesty. Amnesty: the forgetting of original violence, of the crimes and murders of brothers formerly at war, whether with their fathers or with each other.

Psychoanalysis promises no such clemency: it defends the irresolution of desire as the untranscendable dilemma of coexistence, and directs its cure along a course of action different from fascism, fraternity, or fratricide.

Remember that the “cure” is originally a philosophical concept, not a medical one. For the Greek Stoics, the cure is the art of caring for the self: cura sui (Dunker, 2011, pp. 93–104). It is about practicing and enunciating a way of life that lives in fidelity to a subject’s desire, to the truth of the contradictions of their relationships to themselves and to others in the polis, the city. This cure is a condition for the caring for others, which is at stake in the three impossible vocations of democracy: governing, teaching, and healing. Caring for others is the art of both psychoanalysis and politics.

Apocalypse is a Greek term, too. It refers to a revelation, to the unveiling of a new knowledge. Like the spirit of our age, the psychoanalytic cure is an apocalyptic experience. A new savoir emerges through the shattering and re-mending of a subject’s way of life. Each analysand must take that step “too far,” to take the responsibility for the effects of their acts in the social link: to go beyond both psychoanalysis and politics.

If psychoanalysis loves the political in each subject, we know why power abhors psychoanalysis.

This month, the 388 Clinic for the Treatment of Young Adult Psychotics was violently closed by the health bureaucracy of the province of Quebec. This residential clinic and community center inhabits a two-story Victorian home in downtown Quebec City, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (Vanderwees, 2019). The analysts, psychiatrists, social workers, artists, community members, and service users who work at the 388 reinvented Freudian theory and practice by listening to psychosis, by incorporating a savoir that medical knowledge has never wanted to know anything about.

The 388 was founded in 1982 in a step “too far,” in an act that created an unprecedented space for psychoanalysis in the social link. It is there that subjects in extreme states can invent a cure for themselves with the help of a few others. Sustaining that space over the past four decades required plenty of politics: lobbying policymakers, appealing to municipal authorities, collaborating with local artists, liaising with employers, working with hospitals, and involving the families and friends of patients.

This year, the state of Quebec got tired of politics and resorted to force.

At the 388, psychosis is understood as a response to a fundamental experience of human existence: the defect in the symbolic Other, the flaw or failure in any social group—in our words, we might say that the psychotic has had a radical experience of the political. Unlike the neurotic who represses the political by constructing a fantasy that casts the Other as lacking, the psychotic confronts the political directly, with the letters of their body. When this encounter becomes too much, a delusional interpretation is constructed that gives the political an imaginary face, a name, a terrifying consistency. In Quebec, the cure consists of transforming the truth of this delusion into a savoir, of turning the loneliness and anguish of this experience into a subjective stance in the social world, of constructing an idiosyncratic way of living with the political.

The loss of the 388 is a defeat for the Freudian cause, it is a setback for the democracy of cures, and it is an impoverishment of the diversity of human experience. And it is a reminder that psychoanalysts must (because they already do) practice psychoanalysis and politics simultaneously, however disjunctive their synthesis.

I will leave you with this testimony from one of the users of the 388:

The Center is the laboratory of our social life. The relationships that we manage to establish here, whether it is with the intervenant, with the other patients, with the psychiatrist, all of these relationships are a laboratory. One acquires things in this laboratory that, afterward, it is possible to realize within the larger collective. (Cantin, 2009, p. 300)