Richard Ruth, PhD
Psychoanalysis and Society: Can Psychoanalysis Help to Understand Modern Conflicts?
Historically and conceptually, it is difficult to imagine politics before Freud. His discovery that unconscious, conflictual, and lawful mental representations underlie, and differ from, external expressions is necessary to political analysis. But how to understand the pathways by which the personal comes to affect the social and political? The title of this session offers an intriguing clue – “modern conflicts” can be read in a clinical, or a sociopolitical, context.
A patient came to see me several years ago. Like me, he was Argentine. He had been raped while in political detention, and from this had acquired AIDS. After his diagnosis, he decided to come to the United States. He was concerned that, as his health declined, he would be vulnerable, and that, had he stayed in Argentina, he might have inadvertently exposed, and endangered, his political connections and associations. To avoid this, he chose to die far from home. To his thinking, psychoanalysis was his only way to survive with integrity. He wanted to explore his experiences, their determinants and resonances, with space and fullness, and with an analytic listener. It was a courageous act, from which much understanding unfolded.
Perhaps it is not often framed this way, but one of Freud’s contributions was that private stories in some circumstances demand to become part of public discourse. Discourse then shapes thinking, and, from there, behavior – not in the linear pathway of stimulus and response, but in the more intricate process through which the unconscious becomes known and considered, and illuminates choice.
Courage becomes transformative, and meaning emerges, when ideas find expression in grounded action. But action can feel elusive in psychoanalysis, which insists on reflective space, the controversial stance of abstinence, a particular kind of diffuse attention and elongated time. Perhaps psychoanalytic thinking, especially on the sociopolitical level, and psychoanalytic practice, are best considered as kinds of crucibles, or incubators, in which the action of meaning-making takes place.
When Freud discussed his views on homosexuality, his text had a remarkably open weave. On one level, he was taking a welcome position; on another, he was modeling engagement with thinking about a charged topic, thoughtfully, carefully, deeply, and unflinchingly. He did not form a political movement; if he engaged in advocacy, perhaps it was the kind of curious analytic advocacy in which we are engaged here today. Was his writing transformative? I believe it was.
I got married last month, in Toronto, to my male partner – some 70 years after Freud’s Letter to an American Mother. It was a joyous occasion, resonating deeply with what we analysts call “the good hour.” But the good hour comes only after painstaking work, and working through. It can take analytic ideas a long time to develop, and to exert their full power.
I felt very close to Freud, that day in Toronto, and I give him credit for initiating what I came to experience as both culmination and beginning. Had Freud lived into our time, I suspect his radical curiosity, profound commitment to scientific discovery, and insistence that the job of theory is to point the way toward transformative practice would have led him to take great pleasure in our incremental social and political advances. And to look at us critically, in his stern way, when we imagined our society might settle for anything less.
Freud left us with open questions: How are personal and social conflict, and personal and social change, the same and different? Is analytic theory culture bound, or class bound? Do analytic methods, or only analytic ideas, deserve to enter the social and political realms? He also left us a method to help answer our questions. It is a remarkable legacy that has transformed the world, and, in its evolution and action, is fully alive.