A Glorious Time to Live:

Psychoanalysts tend to think of the unconscious as material existing outside realm of consciousness. The unconscious material exists in consciousness but in a disguised way, and that what makes it unconscious. We are supposed to be trained to decipher those disguises and restore the material to its original state. Treating a patient requires discovering the disguise and revealing it to the patient, so he could do with it what he wishes. Social groups do something similar with their matters, i.e., disguising their willingness or unwillingness to change; similar but not the same. We are presently living a period of history where change is not limited to one aspect of our life or one place in the world. There is a mass of processes of social change going on everywhere with different degrees of urgency. Yet, there is something unique about that world awakening.  

The world is going through major changes that are different from equally drastic changes that happened before. Before, every step forward taken by humanity involved resistance, which we can see around us again in different degrees of intensity. Social resistance to change in the past manifested itself in to changes resulted in more need for changing the changes that happened. The German reaction to the Versailles surrender created changes that needed changes in a second war. War was always the most used measure for resisting change or paying for the change in advance. The equivalent to that in psychotherapy is named resistance, which made change in most of the times a war with the therapist as an enemy.

The current changes are different because they are mostly done in conditions of peace or done peacefully (with the exception of the changes in the Islamic world). Living in north America, watching the changes that are happening in the US lately, and knowing few things about its impact on other parts of the world (middle east for instance) urge me to mark some features that could be of interest to analysts regarding social disguising of intentions and meanings (social unconsciousness).

 The current happenings in the US are both political and social changes that will soon be in history books and be read about only in books. It is a privilege to be close by and witness that change. To witness the change is better than anything written about it. The change in the US will ‘eventually’ have a remarkable effect on the world. They are political changes but they are more of a change in the nature of the American nation itself; an important nation that had a central place in the events of at least the last century. It is also a nation which has shown obstinate rejection to change in the past and blind adulation of its forefathers, consequently of itself. The significance of the recent changes in the US are not a simple process of maturation; they are creating a different perspective for a past that was hastily judged to create a great deal of distortions of the meaning of events. Americans changes  will definitely have an impact on a wide range of the world when they reach their Zenith.  Just as a start to put all that in perspective: A nation that-few decades ago- would not elect the better candidate for president just because he was Catholic is now open to elect a Jewish Socialist; that was when few months ago the word socialism and few other terms were anti American and taboos .

Changes of such nature and extent have to be put in a context; any context- but not to be looked at just as incomprehensible unusual turn of events. Fredrick Engels, after an extensive and very intelligent analysis of the course history usually takes in its progress, stipulated that History evolves in a dialectical spiral. Small events happen in what seems a casual way and reactions to the whims of some political characters or local events. They accumulate (unconsciously to the individuals) leading to the day when a deciding event or events that relate in a clear way to the innocuous events that happened casually before. Then, and suddenly, the society takes note of that deciding event and it becomes a historical moment; i.e., a historical thesis. The historical thesis creates its antithesis and both initiate a sweeping historical change. Minor and individual events, relating to racial discrimination, kept happening (the multiple events that took place in the US from the times of eliminating school segregations to the wave of open objections to police brutality with blacks) till 9\11 happened and the whole narcissistic edifice collapsed: ‘we are not what we always thought that we are’. Then, suddenly BOOM, the election of a black president.

The election of a black president was not the only available reaction to the American nation in its struggle against racial discrimination, but it was the antithesis that proved to be essential for other changes to continue advancing and not die sooner than it should. The US changed radically when Obama was elected: no more prefabricated ideas of the supposedly right president for ‘us’, maybe no prefabricated ideas about ‘our’ social life as whole as well. Following the election of a black president a wave of breaking old taboos became a national obsession. The idea of the white peoples’ entitlement over the blacks, or the entitlement of some groups over the rights of their opposites (poor, uneducated, homosexuals, woman, etc.) was a national game. However, to appreciate social change properly it has to be put in the context of what was to be changed. In that case, the context that made electing a black president significant was declaring the readiness to give up sacred and very old dear and sacred elements of life that were gripping the nation’s. Those fixed notions were a core of a sense of moral superiority. It meant that some unquestioned sacred beliefs and convictions are now merely debatable 

The Americans looked back at their past, and the present, and possibly the future, especially after the 9\11 drama, and became aware of a tendency to create pervasive unquestionable and blind senses of righteousness. It took more time for the American to become aware that they are not entitled to run the world according to their own sense of what is right and what is wrong. It was also a shock to realize that there are other and better ways of doing things than their own. Americans are open now to “not despise’ what is not American. It was difficult to come to acknowledge that some blacks could be better than an American white. The most important aspect in those changes is how the Americans basic ideological sense of being is founded on those same principles they believed that they have followed all the time. The whole world was also waking up to its bundles of prejudices. The way Nelson Mandela was received in Great Britain was far different from how Ghandi was received eighty years before.

What we can see in the US is an obvious (not yet fully sincere) trend to be just a part of the world, not only its leader. It goes without saying that the impact of that kind of change is so new and unfamiliar to the three generation living now in the US and the rest of the world to appreciate its future effect. The impact of change in the US on the Western world and the rest of it is very significant because it has already made great progress in eliminating dictatorship in the world. There is something ironic in this phenomenon. Dictators of the past suspended the constitutions of their countries to rule without opposition; they did not break the law. In the US the present elected president is trying to “constutionalize” dictatorship.

Analysts should study social phenomena psychoanalytically and not use psychoanalysis to explain social phneomena.