The Dehiscence of Psychoanalysis and Politics

In a February session of the 1943 meetings of the British Psychoanalytic Society, during the so-called controversial discussions, Winnicott famously stood up and remarked, “I should like to point out that there is an air raid going on” (Grosskurth, 1986, p. 321). The intervention was recounted by Margaret Little and not included in the society’s formal record. The session in question was dedicated to a debate on Susan Isaacs’s paper “The Nature and Function of Phantasy.” Winnicott’s remark has often been read as the voice of the reality principle breaking through the cloistered hum of analytic deliberation—a rebuke to those who, caught up in theoretical dispute, continued to play their fiddles as the world burned around them.

And yet, this interpretation, though not untrue, remains insufficient. His polite but pointed reminder of the bombs outside did not merely interrupt the ritual of psychoanalytic debate; it also drew attention to its uncanny proximity to the traumatic real of the Blitz. After all, the evening’s disagreements centered on the nature of the object, the dialectic of inside and outside, the drives and their psychic representatives.

We titled this conference to center the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Much like the Freud-Klein debates, the undecidability of whether psychoanalysis and politics converge—or even touch—is the frame for this conference. Perhaps psychoanalysis relates to politics like Zeno’s paradox: it approaches it but never quite reaches its object.

In naming this conference, we borrowed Lacan’s formula of fantasy, written to denote the relationship between the subject of the unconscious and the object. Fantasy functions as a frame for desire, how the subject locates itself vis-à-vis the object, insofar as it is lost. But fantasy is also a screen that veils the traumatic. The symbol between the two terms indicates the enigmatic status of their relationship. How the subject and object of fantasy relate is left open to differing scenarios: a child is being beaten.

We placed the terms psychoanalysis and politics together in this way to keep open the question of their relation, and also to wonder together whether, in the face of its own fading away and division, psychoanalysis takes politics as its object in a fantastic scene. This is not to say that politics or psychoanalysis are mere dreams in one’s head. Far from it—political life shows just how potent and libidinally invested fantasies are: the natural family, purity of heritage, the self-interested worker, the excitable and inhuman slave, the metaphysics of blood and soil, the ontology of genital difference.

Returning to Winnicott’s intervention, we see how psychoanalysis can serve repression and denial through its own discourse: a bunch of analysts can chit-chat about the concept of the object while bombs drop. In taking politics as its object, psychoanalysis risks doing something similar: theorizing political life using its theoretical precepts. Love and hate, paranoia and projective identification, desire, identification, doer/done to, mutuality, and so on. Our communities can diagnose political crises while replicating those very crises within. Often, the most repressive moments occur when the analytic community hastily borrows concepts such as free association to espouse liberal-democratic dialogue.

This conference is a risk for some more than others.

We desperately wish that our participants, chorus members, and you in the audience will politely or impolitely point out the ongoing air raid.