I was very excited to read Bruce’s editorial. The idea of culture change at PINC is essential at the current time. Bruce clearly detailed a plan to transform an ideology of whiteness and promote a psychoanalytic institute that provides opportunities for a more diversified group of analysts and a broadened view of psychoanalysis. We strongly agree with these changes.
We at Critica would like to thank both the PINC community for their support and the authors who have submitted pieces on the subject of “Psychoanalysis and Otherness” for this issue. Their innovative ideas are very impressive.
My brief editorial follows Carolina Bacchi’s in which she conveys the struggle of “Otherness” to find a place in our society. It provokes violence and aggression, a state of madness. Why this difficulty, why this violence and madness?
After the election, on January 6, 2021, the US Capital Building was invaded by a violent group who tried to take over the Senate. Last month in Atlanta a young man killed eight people. In Denver another mass murderer killed ten people. Every week the police kill a black man. At this time the Asian community is the target of racist attacks. The cause of these crimes by white supremacists seems to be a resurgence of hatred, a return of the repressed. Contemporary historians have linked this violence with the beginning of slavery.
Why is there so much aggression and cruelty toward other human beings? Primo Levi, in his book Se questo e’ un uomo (1947), asked how it is possible that one human can treat another human with such violence. He spent his life trying to understand the de-humanization of man.
Freud, in his old age, was also puzzled by aggression. He explored the predatory nature of it, stating that “man is a wolf to man” in Civilization and its Discontents. This elaboration of the concept of aggression led to changes in his later theoretical ideas.
Recently the concept of aggression and civilization is revisited in a seminal paper by Rosine Perelberg (2020), “Psychoanalysis and Social Violence: Civilization and Discontent Revised” in which she links Freud’s ideas with the violence and aggression that has taken place in Argentina. She reviews the revolutionary work of Janine Puget and Yolanda Gambel, two Argentinian analysts, which critically analyses the social violence during the military regime. Puget and Gambel’s papers link clinical psychoanalysis and social reality in an original manner which is very pertinent to contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
Perelberg concludes:
“The articles by Janine Puget and Yolanda Gambel belong to a different and important intellectual and clinical path: one of trying to engage with the malaise in civilization. Psychoanalytic writings like these have been able to point out the destructive drive as inherent in humans and manifested in group or societal situations. The question of what conditions allow violence to express itself needs to be examined in conjunction with other disciplines: history, sociology, political science, philosophy, literature and art, as well as the work of contemporary psychoanalysts, have addressed the challenges of finding ways of representing and keeping alive the memory of something that challenges traditional ways of representation” (p 1261).
Solving this complex problem is an immense task, one which has always confronted psychoanalysis. I think the PINC community and Critica can continue this journey with intellectual rigor and alive, fertile dialogue. We are seeking ideas, words, and images to express the unconscious in all its different manifestations.
Reference:
Jozef Perelberg, R. (2020). Psychoanalysis and social violence: Civilization and Its Discontents revisited. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 101(6):1248-1263
