Psychoanalysis and Social Events (USA).

The psychoanalysts’ contributions to evaluating and understanding social phenomena is not a simple matter, because it requires moving from the field of the psyche to another field of phenomena that they have little or no experience with, i.e., the social. This shift is like shifting from medicine to epidemiology. Talking about a medical problem in clinical practice is not like talking about the same medical problem in socio-epidemic phenomenon. The main point is that we cannot apply the same understanding of the individual (criminal mind) on a society that is suffering from an increase in criminality. The social is made of hundreds and thousands of different individuals. Even a small group of individuals who are alike (psychoanalysts !!) act differently as a group; their psychology as individuals change and a different spirit takes over.

This point of view has to deal-I think-with three issues: 1. what creates the other, the social or the psychological, 2. what could be the link between a social theory and theories of the individual,3. Is there or could there be a psychoanalytic theory of society?

I believe knowing more about those three issues will ultimately allow dealing with another perplexing question: do people create their leaders or is it the leaders who influences people? Is it Alexander the great who encouraged the Greeks to invade the world or was it the Greeks who were eager to go beyond their group of islands and created Alexander to actualize their desire? 

1.    The Social and its Psychological Counterpart:

The late events of unrest, demonstrations, obvious political conflicts, and raising the issues of race discriminations in the USA could be explained by clear and blatant police racial bigotries. Putting the issue in this way proves that there are other factors that are not considered: police bigotries is not a new matter and was evident- in the same manner-for a long time before. The percentage of black incarcerations compared to whites is another evidence that what happened lately has been happening before too.  It seems that nothing new is recently started to change. Yet, the rise of the white people in solidarity with blacks and their adoption of the spirit of objecting to police behaviour is something new. It is new because that change is not response to changes in the circumstances; it is change in people white they are or black. It is a change in the American society not just its black minority. Moreover, this change is not in the ‘material’ conditions of people (income, education, class structure, etc.). The change that happened lately is a change in the psychological characteristics and attributes of both blacks and whites.  As a foreigner, who is observing from a distance, black Americans have produced a strong evidence that they are as capable as the whites, when they find the stance, and they serve the country as well as whites do with the same dedication and skill (federal and local governments, media, etc.).

However, some Americans, and not just a few, could no longer build their narcissism on the old conviction that blacks are inferior people. They also could not ameliorate deep rooted hatred and aggression toward blacks to be simple despise and disregard. Psychologically, the whites who still do not accept equality of the blacks are preserving old means of maintaining a narcissistic feeling of distinction, and transmitting it from generation to generation. The unobvious but proof to the still existence of those resistant attributes is their sudden and sporadic displays in social relations. They come out like the return of the unconscious in individual cases.  To say it briefly “the social pre-exists the individual but uses its tools of expression as the means to make a statement”.

2.    The Suddenness of Social Change:

Social changes that create new individual awareness (counterparts) look like a sudden turning point in a regular stream of affairs. As an example, the gradual industrialisation of the North in the United State gradually created few businesses and businessmen (Carnegie, Roosevelt, Morgan, …)  which and who wanted to expand in the south and modernize that part of the US. Notwithstanding their progressive intentions and the leadership of Lincoln, they also realised that they will benefit from the war itself (W. Scheidel), 2018). The minds of the northern Americans and the new emigrants made the civil war a possibility, a fact and an act. At the same period of time, the no change (fixation) in the south maintained the notion of farming and slavery unchanged, therefore they denied the change in the balks around them. All big historical events happen in the same way because they surprise the people themselves who unconsciously changed. The equivalent to that in the individual is the impact of an interpretation on a patient while he is preconscious of what he was relaying to the analyst.

Therefore, it is important when we try to understand what is happening now is to listen to what those acts are saying to us preconsciously. They are not saying that they believe in slavery but they say we still believe in racial discrimination: Why, and why more policemen than expected of law enforcing people? More than that: the events are saying (preconsciously): they are not like us. The events happening now in the streets of cities and town in the USA talks about unusuality in one of its forms. This is not a racial matter. Racial discrimination is ‘used’(preconsciously) to object to other inequalities. The dream of Americans was always equal opportunity. The present-day dream is looking for the value that supported that dream till now.

3.    Thank God that very few people listen to psychoanalysts when it comes to social matters; or they would have lost trust in us as therapists too. As a preparation for the point I want to make I would like to mention a short exchange with a colleague, many years ago, about ‘socialising’ psychoanalysis? He claimed that we know all what it needs to understand human phenomena, whatever,

I asked why Wars? He said it the natural aggressive endowment in us. Why aggression in us is a natural thing he replied because introjection persecutory object that we need to keep getting rid of. I stopped the discussion there because Klein’s vocabulary will keep him going uselessly.  Sadly, analysts in American association jumped on a term-otherness- as the key to riddle of racial dis crimination.

In reality, in child psychology, the child recognises his mother’s image in mirror few weeks before showing any sign of know who is the other child who sits on his mother’s lab. We know ourselves as others and we remain otherness to ourselves for ever. We say I and one as exchangeable pronoun. This approach to explaining racial discrimination stop sat the point of departure. It is not otherness but the rejection of separateness is the problem. A British is otherness but a black American is an I that I hate. Let’s look at that closer because white persecutors could be diverting their self hate away from themselves.

I do not believe there is psychoanalytic theory of the social, as there is no sociological theory of the psychical. That does not answer the question that is the core of the next part of this posting: since there is a link between the social and the individual could there be a theory about that link; could we have some guiding principals to examine the link between racial discrimination and the evident need for social changes in the American ……..etc.?