In becoming allied with the more scientific psychiatric establishment, classical psychoanalysis in the United States distanced itself from the problems of society; and, more specifically, from those of the poor and working class, many of whom were people of color.  This detachment from the socio-political world was paralleled by the proverbial silent analyst, a supposed blank screen that reflects to the patient their interpsychic life, with no reference to society or culture. The analyst is conceived as neutral in the way a biologist objectively studies photosynthesis. 

Over time psychoanalysts deepened their understanding that they were not only observers but also participants in the therapeutic relationship. Although this was a step forward in problematizing classical neutrality, I believe that this position provides no substantial understanding of how a sick world, such as the one we live in plagued by human-produced and natural catastrophes, produces sick individuals. 

We daily see the dramatic impact of such catastrophes in the minds and bodies of the patients we see. This historical reality –the fact that the world is broken and that, because of this, there is an increasing incapacity in many people to experience hope and meaning—seems to have become unveiled to some psychoanalysts sadly for the first time only lately. This has forced some to rethink their social role within and outside the consulting room. Desmond Tutu’s phrase comes to mind: “If you 

are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Does the exhortation to not be politically neutral in times of injustice imply a demand to analysts to not be neutral within the therapeutic space? What would this clinically look like if we also want to respect the other’s autonomy and agency by not telling them how to live their lives nor forcefully expanding their consciousness? 

For Hans Loewald there is a relationship between play and history. It is through play, and the enactment of a play, that the person’s unconscious history comes to light. He says: “It is the scope of psychoanalysis to consider human nature in the fullness of the individual's concrete existence and covering the full range of human potentialities, with special attention given for a variety of reasons to its historicity.” According to Loewald, historicity is laden with “beliefs, biases, distortions, and interpretations on the part of the generations.” Personal and collective histories are transmitted in a similar way within the “playing ground” (Winnicott) that is the psychoanalytic process. 

In this sense the former is not only a mirror of the world but also a part of it. It does not occur in a historical or socio-political vacuum. The difference between the analyst and the analysand in terms of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, for example, will be a carrier of personal meanings, but it also defines a historical and socio-political reality in which they are both immersed and that affects everything from the frame to the two subjectivities in process. This includes power dynamics that take place at the most basic levels of subjectivity, the body, and social interactions within the therapeutic space. It is a reality that is unavoidably enacted in the psychoanalytic process in unconscious ways that require attention. This remains the unthought of many analysts who are too anxious to talk about it because it might undermine their power as “doctors”, or their position as the ones who are supposed to know (Lacan); their power.

The transference-countertransference matrix, for example, is not only the repetition of personal history; it is also the repetition of collective, intergenerational histories. As Narendra Keval says: “transference, rightly deemed the pinnacle of working analytically, also concerns the repetition of history -not only early infantile relations but ideologies that underpin the dynamics of race relations in the here and now, re-enacted from one generation to the next. One of the most

challenging tasks in our profession is to understand the complexities of how infantile and ideological pasts link up in the unconscious.” In this sense, the psychoanalytic process deals with both individual and societal issues; alienation is one. Interpretations should not only be about personal intra-psychic dynamics but also about ideological ones. Ideology is, too, a clinical phenomenon (Fenichel, Reich, Fanon, Marcusse). 

In the aforementioned, I have tried to articulate the socio-political and clinical context in which our group will operate through clinical presentations. The hope is that our presentations will explore the clinical implications that arise when we think of our work as therapists within such context. 

As such, our broader questions will be:

1. - How can we clinically think about the personal and the collective together, as relation?

2. -Why is it important that the clinical process help the analysand become conscious of the structure of their individual suffering, but also of its relationship with the structure of the world that produces such suffering? Why is this therapeutic? What would “therapeutic” mean in this expanded sense that includes the social and the political? Perhaps something that leads to a burden to bear?

The facilitator will provide readings and didactic sessions related to issues and questions that arise in the group.