The Return of the Repressed:

Sometimes, in the practice of psychoanalysis, analysts face a sudden resurgence of some old symptoms or psychical conditions that have no clear link with what is going on in the ongoing analysis. This is usually a return of repressed material that did not have been worked out or worked through by the patient and was just severed from the rest of his active psychical life. This phenomenon is usually common in the revival of old phobia, ticks, or unverbalized sates of the mind. It also could become a distracting mechanism from continuing the ongoing psychoanalysis. Rightly, those unexpected changes in the course of an analysis are called a return of the repressed, because they come back in the state that they were previously repressed. Something similar could sometimes happens in a society. A social phenomenon that is not given the full chance to materialize, comes back with venom and gets actualized…a social ‘return of the repressed’. WWII is a good example of a return of the incomplete resolution of the social pressures in Europe that caused WWI (dispelling the local empires).     

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The reaction to the events of the last few weeks in the USA regarding police treatment of blacks is still quite alive and keeps going on. It proves that it is something more than just a reactive upset. However, there are some features in the continuation of criticizing and condemning police brutality that makes one worries. It looks like the unified stand of the Americans is going either nowhere (back to the legislative corridors), or to the waste basket of the partially understood. Whatever is concluded about the white race reaction or the black race reaction does not answer two questions: does the latest events of police brutality toward blacks suggest a new trend or it is just a coincidence that a few things happened in a short span of time stirring up a sudden flare up? The demonstrations that happened lately and engulphed the whole of the USA and many other societies and nationalities in the world were made, in most cases, of more whites than blacks. The question is: are those demonstrations manifesting a change in the white population or in the black or both? If for convenience we will say it is a change in both races we will be missing that each race has to change something different from the other, i.e., the answer is not simply ‘in both’.

The answer to the first question is that what is happening lately is not local; it is universal, and is not limited just to police brutality in the USA but about social inequalities wherever it existed in the world. Brits in Trafalgar Square were seeing what happened in the USA in regard to that killed black guy as the American version of their version of social segregations and inequalities (which Irked million who voted to stay in the EU). The late change is universal and not limited to abuse of power by the police but related to the abuse, neglect, and the failure of the current systems of governing in the world in regard to the pressing demands of the majorities everywhere.  It is a new view of globalization.

The answer to the second question is that the change that is taking over the world lately is a global change; universal, even with its specificity in certain aspects is still of interconnected issues not just commonalities and parallelisms. The change affects the whole human races directly and indirectly. However, each race or ethnic group seems to contribute to that change in its own social and international condition.

The change in the blacks of the USA is turning the previously shy request for equality into demanding corrections in the circumstances of persecution that go back few hundreds of years.  Blacks are changing their sense of helplessness into a sense of entitlement. Whites, individually, without any doubt in my mind, are fair, law loving and abiding by nature, and quite honest, which is not at all the picture they give as a race or a distinct ethnic entity. Therefore, they seem lately (few decades) to be changing their sense of refinement, goodness and morality into some tangible, actual, and credible things to show that they too are joining the ‘other’ races in changing. Whites have to change their sense of entitlement into a sense of deserving and convince blacks of that. In other terms, despite the different forms of inequalities and consequently in the demands for change, the human races are reacting collectively and reciprocally to the crisis of late. If we do not accept that there are new relationships developing between the conflicting adversaries in the world, we will stand helpless in front of the returning of the repressed between those ethnicities (in India, Myanmar, North China, etc.). The best we could do, without identifying the changes in the old antagonisms, is to come to a partial understanding of the present ‘historical’ moment.

The conflicting adversaries of the past are able now to verbalise their own needs and aspirations better, thus, are becoming more amenable to accepingt solutions.

The WWII and Dissipation of Illusions:

The present sudden and great change in in racial interactions is a return of a significant repressed period of time in recent history.  After WWII there was a great movement of rebelling against foreign occupations in the colonies and the empires. The cry was loud for the liberation of the oppressed and the enslaved everywhere, breaking up the empires and creating new independent countries and nations. This movement was supported by European thinkers and was reflected in the democratic elections in Europe and European style elections everywhere. This  gave the conservative blocks ‘bleeding noses’. This movement was initiated and supported by the leftists in both the liberated countries and in the previously dominating countries. The end of the WWII came with the hope to end the old world of colonization and slavery too. Yet, soon after the “end of the war” the two previous allies against fascism, Western Europe and the Soviet Union, became the new version of the human races’, as if the compulsive need for an enemy to feel secure and superior (paradox!!) was stronger than any hope for peace. The glorious movement of liberation, abolition of exploiting the defeated, equalities, democracy, and ‘racelessness’ was ‘repressed’ very quickly and very cruelly. Repressing the budding aspirations was done by both main powers and with the same paradoxical BS. In the West it was to fight the dictatorial communist system. This was done by creating dictatorships all over the newly won parts of the world (even old democracies). In the East the communist regimes oppressed its people to ‘protect it from the false ideologies of the capitalists and colonialists. 

Those historical details are likely of little interest to most but I mention them to highlight that for some, going around facts is a way of blocking change and  and any area of progress. This phenomenon shows something intrinsic in the return of the repressed. After WWII, repression of the glorious movement of social justice used paradoxical logic as the means to impose repression: set up dictatorships to ward off the threatening dictatorships of the enemy. Giving the communist parties the authority to decide what is anti-fascism was fascistic in itself. The present uprise in response to racial discrimination is threatened by anti-white racism-ironically- initiated by somewhites in different contexts.      

The New and Present is the Return of the Old Repressed. 

Avoiding facts to avoid the necessities of change resulted in creating in Europe four identities that replace the old racial identities. The world is now made up of Europe, China, Russia the USA. Somehow, or naturally, racial discrimination came back from repression in slightly different intensities in those four universal entities. The most entity that has problems with the new era is the united states. Europe has some problems with the immigrating Africans (previously slaves and then the responsibility of the occupiers). China has ‘some’ problems with parts of it that were detached from it by the European and she disclaiming them now as part of it.

The communist party in Russia was smart when it did not stand against the emancipation of the satellite Soviets and is satisfied by being the old nation and country of Russia. The problem is with USA.

The Americans are struggling (sometimes painfully) with their new identity or place in the world. After the victory of the WWII the USA was the only country that came out of it as the “greatest”, the “strongest” ….etc., Gradually the rest of the world recovered from its stupidity and the three other entities caught up and became equal to the USA and surpassed it in certain eras. The struggle to maintain the status of the leader of the world was clearly failed. American Blacks caught up with the whites in many aspects and excelled in some others.

The three changes seem to have happened in the USA lately in regard to racial discrimination:

Blacks have taken good care of themselves and proved that they are as capable and qualified as any other race. Proportionately, they seem to have caught up with the whites in the number of distinguished citizens (the most competent president in the last fifty years! was black).

 More whites have accepted the fact that blacks have proven without doubt their equality to other races. History to them has become more pain and shame than pride and prejudice.

A social gap opened between the whites in the North and industrialised America and the South.

The repressed of the north got integrated with the worked-out sentiments about Our America, while the repressed returned (in desperation) as is in the south and some other pickets of old pride. I can see many white Americans would not accept my view of the return of the repressed in the south of the USA. I would remind them of Donald trump: he is supposed bring back the greatness of the USA. Let us also think of the police in south that after murdering a black citizen and the uprise in the country as a reaction that murder go back and does the same thing twice within a week with two new blacks.

  

Psychoanalysis and Academia

Resistance to Change

It is uncanny that this part of the posting I meant to dedicate to change in psychoanalysis, but has to be interrupted to keep our attention devoted to a more significant and ‘amazing’ change that is sweeping the whole world. I do not know anything that immensely great has ever happened before at any time in written. Because history can only be understood retrospectively the world-change regarding race issues might take few decades to be properly interpreted [not a Trumpian sexagenarian]. Psychoanalysis could step aside for now and for as long as we need to set up afoot the complex process of interpreting this remarkable transformation in human awareness and evolution.

                    

I will only outline now and here the framework of my ideas about change in psychoanalysis, so if some analyst in the future find the required space in time and interest to revisit that issue, he will possibly find in them relevant starting points.

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I finished the last part of this posting by emphasizing that when we think of hope for change, and of accepting that psychoanalysis could move to academia, we should keep in mind the natural resistance to change, and the conflict of interest of senior analysts in that regard. They are supposed to lead the movement to ‘academize’ psychoanalysis but sch a change will also change their role and status of seniority in psychoanalysis. Change in psychoanalysis is not a matter of accepting or rejecting something new. Change in psychoanalysis is a complex personal matter that touches different layers of personal affinities which should be considered- at a first stage. Those problems need to be resolved before offering any concrete steps to make the change to make psychoanalysis an academic subject.

Change is the fabric of exitance; both the existence of animate and inanimate objects alike. The difference is that animate subjects like to believe that they can interfere with their inevitable change. The higher the subject in the hierarchy of evolution the stronger is that belief. What is more problematic, especially with humans, is that we create inanimate and some animate objects, therefore we do not deal only with our own changes but also with the changes of what we create.

Psychoanalysts have changed and continue to change. The subjects of psychotherapy and of psychoanalytic thinking in general also have changed and continue to change. How can we deal with these interacting changes? Could we accept that moving psychoanalysis from the influence of the model of the IPA to the influence of academia is not to save its practice from vanishing, but because psychoanalysis “naturally” has changed? Recognizing and accepting that we are not- right now- doing the right things by our discipline requires tolerating a narcissistic injury, and that we moving to remedy the situation and not to remedy our pride. I am not using the term “narcissism” in the banal meaning self-aggrandizement, but narcissism as an issue of the duality of the subject and his image (imagined). Can we deal with a new duality regarding self perception in an academic role!

Changing from the IPA Model of Learning and Training:

The model of training and learning of the IPA is based on transmitting knowledge and expertise from generation to generation through the direct contact between teacher and student. This was the favoured method of learning in the different trades before schools and teaching institutions existed and universities prevailed.  Academic learning and training, which is the foundation of professionalism, is based on having the required body of knowledge available independently of the teacher. The material to learn is not the professors’ creation but the amalgam of knowledge that was accumulated and scrutinized over many years and experiences. Medicine in Harvard is the same medicine that a student in Barcelona will learn. Even demonstrating the practice of the material in those two academic centres may differ, but mostly in the colour of the gowns the student wears in the examination room. In our present IPA institutes (or an equivalent) there is no means to compare ad match the content and quality of training. The separation of the material from the professor’s idiosyncrasies and the student’s vulnerability to those idiosyncrasies is the basis of academic teachings.  The changes to psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis require us to bring the academic modality to psychoanalysis not just fitting psychoanalysis in an academic department and hope for the best

Four major questions popup in that regard:   

 Where would psychoanalysis fit in academia?

As a component of the academic system who will be responsible for building and maintaining its syllabus?

What will be the orientation of the syllabus be: Humanities or psychotherapy?

How are we going to help in establishing psychoanalysis as an academic entity?  As an academic entity psychoanalysis will require a good dose of “scholarly” work, which there are very few of us who could deliver. Put as a question: Are we going to continue teaching the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality or are we going to show in scholarly way how Freud (and other thinkers) develop their intuitions into a comprehensive discovery?   

These are some things we should think well about. Approaching the subject with academicians requires attention to some issues we might not be aware of. One, which is of evident significance, is: are we moving psychoanalysis as it is now to academia or are we going to accept changing present psychoanalysis into an academic subject to be part of a larger filed of knowledge. No academic institution would accept to house the IPA model of training and learning of psychoanalysis as it stands now. The reason is that academic learning is something the student has to acquire not to emulate.

What I am stipulating here is not difficulties or obstacle in the way of moving psychoanalysis to academia; they are the issue that we should work out with the help of the academics to fix. If our problem is to improve that standers of psychotherapy so patients start coming back for therapy, we could do that without psychoanalysis. There are great programs in European universities for psychotherapy, But if we want to improve ‘psychoanalysis’ we should think of moving it to academia to become part of the human sciences.

Psychoanalysis and Academia*

A Glimpse of Hope, but Just a Glimpse

It seems that it became obvious to psychoanalysts in North America that tinkering with the present state of affairs in psychoanalysis is not going the stop its deteriorating condition. Only lately, there seem to be an awakening interest in linking or looking for ways to relate psychoanalysis to academia. There is some hope there, but just a glimpse of hope. The reason for my guarded hope is two-fold:

A.   For the last two decade or maybe a little more (actually since 1995) it was clear to everyone in the practice of psychoanalysis, including the governing body of the IPA, that psychoanalysis is becoming an endangered specie. In 2000 I published a book on the crisis concentrating on putting together a comprehensive picture of the fundamentals of the core theory of psychoanalysis, and cautioning for the demise of psychoanalysis if we let go of the basics of its doctrine. The book did miserably for over ten years, and it is now close to being out of print. So mush about the book but there has been sort of an awakening to the fact that the crisis is real. Yet, all the attention in North America is about the deteriorating state of the practice of psychoanalysis and there no mentioning of the state of psychoanalysis itself. I will come to that later.   

I was witnessing the deterioration in North America, at the same time getting wind of the European’s attention to Academia-not only as escape hatch from a sinking ship-but as a new conception of psychoanalysis. In North America there were several desperate and serious attempts at reviving the “practice” of psychoanalysis which all came back either with failure or suggestions of changing psychoanalysis itself. Desperation is eventually leading to a glimpse of flexibility and hope that analytic circles are considering academia a proper and possible consideration; a last resort not an actual solution.

B.    All the replacement theories of the classical theory proved to be theoretical soap bubbles, and they burst one after the other without catching the attention of analysts or patients. The call to consider academic learning and training as the venue to take is not, anymore, blasphemous. Nevertheless, it only meant taking our failing psychoanalysis to academia to get resuscitated. If we want to change the situation, we should bring academia to psychoanalysis not the other way around. Academia is not school building, budgets, resources, etc., Academia is a way of thinking, an attitude regarding knowledge that could help in improving the practice of that knowledge.  Despite the exitance of some psychoanalytic institutions that are affiliates of reputable universities in the USA, psychoanalysis-even in those institution- avoid declaring themselves as purely academic, because ‘we’ use the term in its popular meaning of theoretical, idealistic not practical (practice).  Possibly, the main obstacle in the way a proper link between psychoanalytic learning and training and academia in North America is matter of reputation: real psychoanalysis is the one you can get in the purely IPA institutes, which allows being elected to its membership.

 In Europe, psychoanalysis is already well entrenched in academia. Presently, there are academic institutions all over Europe that either opened themselves to psychoanalytic education with attached training in psychotherapy, or offer post graduate degrees in psychoanalytic research, or both. However, the existence of universities (in Europe) specialised in psychoanalytic teachings, or noteworthy departments of psychoanalysis in other major universities, reveal ‘points’ of debate that have to be addresses sooner than later.

The people who advocated and established the presence of psychoanalysis in academia are psychoanalysts who got their training (status as analysts) in the IPA system of training institutes. They are also the main professors in those academic institutes. This fact creates the first point of confusion: What is the difference between learning and training in the IPA system and in what takes place in Academia? Do we have to have two systems if the faculty is mainly the same? If there is a difference why do we create it or not try to eliminate? Why make the change, maintain it, and apologize for continuing it?

The Advantages of Academic Training:

In any way we try to compare the two systems we will notice that the time dedicated to getting an academic degree in is psychoanalysis, even just at the master’s level, is much more than what is offered in the IPA institutes for a full period of training. The syllabus in the academic departments of psychoanalytic studies are -at least- well defined and constitute a curriculum that could be judged in terms of quality and fulfillment of objectives. The system of the seminars in the IPA institutes lacks clarity, cohesiveness, compatibility with what was delivered by another faculty or in a similar institute. Teaching in institutes is more or less dependant on the faculty’s theoretical bend and interest in the subject he presents to the class.  The academic faculty teaching psychoanalysis has to cover the subject in a systematic way and make sure that all its aspects of the syllabus are covered are delivered in manner that allows other faculty know what the student has been informed about. Quality and measures of assessing that quality exist firmly and clearly in academia, while they are not adhered to as a tradition in the IPA institutes.

This point of confusion leads to another more drastic in importance. The programs of psychoanalysis in those universities are recognized and accredited by the university, which bestows its credibility on its educational system as whole. This is the rule in all respectable professions, particularly the ones that deal with citizens.  It is the rule that is seriously followed in clinical psychology, psychiatry and clinical social work. A system of that nature gives the academic degree in psychoanalysis the status of a professional certificate, and the credential of that program comes from an accreditation of the university.  The graduates from the IPA institutes have no professional credentials except the ones they acquired in their academic specialization as professionals.  This point highlights the issue of professional credibility which training in IPA institutes does not guarantee. Rightly so; there is no unified measure of learning, training, assessing and evaluating the curricula in that system of training except the opinion of the training analysts (no wonder that the relationship with the faculty in the IPA institutes is always coloured by personal factors).

Everything related to deferring learning and training in psychoanalysis to academia shows the big advantages of doing that. Yet, even analysts who support the academic model are obviously not taking the sensible and necessary step of closing the IPA shop and expanding the academic shop. The reasons I heard about this dilemma ranges from nostalgia to the tradition to ‘ower’ independence that would be lost in academia. In addition the is fear of other human sciences absorbing psychoanalysis and making it merely a subspecialty in a larger domain. There is nothing to fear in that context except limiting the flexibility of improvising new schools of psychoanalysis haphazardly and irresponsibly.

Psychoanalysis-in academia- will get and take more time to learn and train, its syllabus will be organized and delivered in manner that eliminates the chancy ingeniousness of some faculty, and would finally adheres to the academic standers of quality. Psychoanalysis becomes a respectable profession instead of remaining a guild, as it is now.

However, resistance to change and the conflict of interest of the senior of analysts who are supposed to lead the movement to ‘academize’ psychoanalysis are issue to consider when we think of hope. This is another issue.

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*In a previous posting I was introducing the issue of structuralism in psychoanalysis as a neglected point of change that affected psychoanalysis since the nineteen thirties. It is a central issue in the humanities since, and specifically in the arguments with Lacanian psychoanalytic thought.That topic was unfamiliar with most North American psychoanalysts. However, I received an email from a colleague asking me if there is something wrong with me and if I needed some help.

This posting too contains some unfamiliar ideas about the topic of academia and psychoanalysis. I want to assure my colleagues from the beginning that I am OK and do not need  help regarding my mind.