The New Frontier of Psychoanalysis:

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Current Politics:

            This post is not interesting to clinically oriented psychoanalysts, but -I believe- it is interesting to the analysts who appreciate its method of deductive and inductive thinking in eliciting out matters implicit in other issues. This way of thinking is the way we psychoanalysts lead to revealing the unconscious to our patients. This too is what a good political leader does for his followers. But knowing from personal experience that such an attitude takes years and years of maturation in both the analyst and the political followers; whether the analysts are politically inclined (like several left-wing analysts in France in the fifties and sixties), or some politicians who were analytically trained. The idea- as I noticed it in myself was subtle and neither my leftist leanings guided my practice, nor my practice made me understand social matters differently. Only years after I stopped my clinical work did I realize that the link was there in me but in disguise. As I politically refused the standard political explications of the links between causes and effects with disguised implicit moral explanations, I rejected the standardized ‘explanations’ of psychopathology based on ‘sensible’ understandings of repression and resistance. The link between dialectics in history and politics like Hegel’s dialectics supported by Marx- Engels explained the rule of social evolving and advancing, Freud's principle of interpretation\ construction\reconstruction was the way the patient gets rid of his psychoneuroses.

        What added to my conviction of the link between psychoanalysis and Marxism is subtle, but also the glaring misunderstanding of the regular ‘leftists’ that imperialism (the end of the European empire) is no longer a reality but only fiction of a degenerating old narcissism. Communists did not realize that while capitalism was dying communism was also dying with it. The only classical communist country surviving till now is North Korea, and the only glorifying capitalism, as the way it was till the end of the wars in Asia, is the disintegrating USA as both an idea and a country. .On the other side of the equation, analysts remained fixated on some old analytic concepts like Unconscious, Repression, and the Libidinal explanation of narcissism. What is unconscious in psychical life is mechanisms, not some things, and what is repressed is not an urge but a meaning, and narcissism (as in the myth itself) is a confusion of the duality of the subject's I/Me. Very little has been said about the death of psychoanalysis because most (if not all) psychoanalysts considered psychoanalysis to be a profession of psychotherapy and did not realize that Freud -himself- was a product of a European leap into learning about the human subject as a sperate existence from his old conventionalities.

       From the Psychoanalytic to the Political:

         The end of something is the birth of something usually better than the one demised. I am saying that because around the time a chose psychoanalysis as a career, the world was adjusting to no more World Wars, especially with the European empire already collapsing. As such, a great deal of historical data as facts showed within the psychological makeup of humans, including the previously revered leaders. Thus, seeing psychoanalysis in a none clinical context made me realize the power of that theory in opening a very wide vista in regard to almost everything humanly related. Some years ago I read a book on Einstein's Wars and the European scientific societies of great thinkers that were there just before the burst of the wars, thinkers (if not greater) who were around him at that time. It actually made me wonder if there is an unobvious link between wars-local or international- and social leaps: to answer this question we have to acknowledge that there are unobvious connections (unconscious!/)  between major changes in the different fields of knowledge and bursts of destructiveness in the human race. Within what I knew of previous empires a question forced itself on me: is aggression a precondition of advancement?  The answer I have is that aggression is instrumental in getting rid of the present to facilitate the emergence of the new and better. The examples of that are many and easy to identify. So, those scientists that came along with Einstein have actually made his aggressive assault on 'gravity and space' change us to the extent of making aggression an old sense of false distinction. In better words: we can look at history as a dynamic entity that deals with the same individual psychology but on a larger scale of time, space, and elements of the dynamic setup. The problem is to make a distinction between psychoanalysis emerging from the discoveries of individuals and emerging from the 'not individual in the individual (social morality is different in its purpose from individual morality).

An example is quite needed now. 

A study done by a French psychologist in the mid-fifties of last century showed that the sample of prostitutes she interviewed were less educated than the general population of Paris females. They had typical lower middle-class standards of morality and they considered prostitution "just a profession"  that has a social function. They were slightly less educated than French society in general, but not in other aspects related to basic morality or social ethics.  The main difference was in the degree of social responsibility to their groups: they were more dedicated to their comradery than two smaller but valid groups of the main French society. The interesting thing in that study is the higher social devotion of the prostitutes to each other, than women who were not part of an identified social group. The morality of the distinctive group was higher than the same morality of individuals. This study showed that psychical issues in the individual take an additional value when that same person is in a group of the same background. 

            Therefore, psychoanalysis remains the same for groups and individuals with the possibility of a difference to serve an additional psychological demand imposed by the group. Therefore, psychoanalysis as the theory of the subject is valid in dealing with an individual or a group of individuals who get some of their narcissism from their group. As such, the psychoanalyst could-just could- apply the theory of the subject on the subject in any group formation. Politics creates different social formations. As marxism could apply to different socioeconomic formations. The best proof of that is what constitutes social change and if it has any resemblance to psychotherapy?