An Appendage to the main posting. 

An addition to the ongoing post

 

A year ago, (May 2022) I watched-on TV- with millions of Americans, a black man (J. Floyed) stretched on the ground with a white police officer putting his knee on the black man’s neck, while that man was moaning and groaning from time to time that he was unable to breath. This scene was in full daylight, in a crowded street while people were taking pictures and videos. No one called an ambulance, because the police officers in the scene were busy searching the man’s car. The man ended up dead.  

I thought that I was watching a scene from the seventeenth century, and the same mentality of slavery of the black. As an Egyptian who lived fifty years on the border of the USA and watching mostly USA media ….and a psychoanalyst too, I thought that I am watching a return of the repressed. It meant that something in childhood (or the childhood of a group) was repressed (forgotten completely). It returns as it was without any modifications or elaboration. Ther were some interesting discussions in the early sixties about the return of the repressed, which some very perceptive analysts even considered the third year of analysis the time when most of the current issues that instigated the need for Analysis are examined and the basic and foundational in the psychoneuroses are ready to be dealt with. This was a concept that some analyst named a return of the repressed. There were just very few papers on the subject for fear of turning psychoanalysis into a predictable process, thus the concept of the unconscious would be badly distorted. 

However, I believe that noticing the return of the repressed is an important psychoanalytic issue because just a quick review of psychoanalysis of the groups is more likely to reveal some commonality in the returning unconscious pains of nations. The return of the repressed is useful in explaining national and shared emotions in countries that did not deal with the repressed well enough to stop it from returning. The interesting part of the discussions regarding the return of the repressed in the third year of an analysis is the similarity with major social changes in a society as some historians underlined.  

The collops of the European Empire came after the second world war and the various small wars of southeast Asia and Africa. During those events many of the ‘repressed’ issues in this late empire returned in the form of a cal for democracy that was never was an issue before and even became one of “the social values” of the modern political scenes.  ing.