We have chosen the title: Violence, Isolation, and Dislocation in Oppressive Times because these topics are very relevant at this particular time. What does psychoanalysis have to say about them, historically and currently?
Currently we live in an oppressive political climate, which has provoked isolation, loneliness and dislocation. Throughout the world, we are witnessing forced immigrations to escape from oppressive regimes. In this forced immigration, children have been killed, starved and separated from their families.
I have been trying to write this editorial for weeks. Many ideas and images came to mind, but the words could not be transported to the paper. Why is it so difficult to write at the present time, especially about psychoanalysis? Is it because we live in a chaotic virtual time, or is there more to it? These questions were the focus of a Division 39 Review: Commentaries, Writing and Psychoanalysis. The co- editors, Emma Lieber and Monroe Street Schostal, stated in their introduction, “That Which is Real”:
“At the start of a recent meeting of a psychoanalytic working group, each of the members went around the room detailing their inhibitions, symptoms, and anxieties as they related to writing. One couldn’t write until he had read everything he could think of on the topic at hand, which meant writing was perpetually deferred, disinvested. Another was too in love with his citations, smitten with the poetry of his textual beloveds: enough homage to fill a bookshelf. Another wrote in fits and starts, despair always on the horizon. One of us—meaning the two of us editing this volume—reported a symptom that involved trying to make other people, especially loved ones, write. Clearly, this wish for others to write could be understood as the corollary of a question about how to produce, in writing or anywhere else. Where do words come from? Can we ever trust them to appear? What must happen for such an emergence of language to take place?” (page13).
Reflecting on their last sentence about “the emergence” of writing, I had a series of associations and reflections. I think to write is to open an area, a state of mind that contains an element of tension. This tension is like a fire, and the fire propels us to use words to illuminate what has not been said or written. For this reason, I think writing is always an unfinished process that gives further impetus to keeping the fire going. The fire is what keeps us alive.
But what can be done if you are paralyzed, perturbed and unable to write? You can give up, spin pens and pencil in the air, or persist — hoping to find a way to give expression to your thinking. It can take many forms. Psychoanalysis in the last twenty years has embraced conceptual ideas from aesthetic theories and figurative arts, which were part of the early psychoanalytic culture. For this issue we received many poems, essays, pain-tings, and collages. The entries seem more like a dream, without directly describing the violence, isolation and oppression around us.
Peter Goldberg’s essay is on violence and aggression. Highlights the process of dissociation as a defense to cope with difficult emotional states. I feel that violence creates a diffuse state of depersonalization and ego splitting. This last concept opens new ways to comprehend psychotic structure.
Violence fuels oppressive political waves. Violence and oppression accentuate a sense of loneliness and isolation. In the work of Hannah Arendt, one finds the most illuminating aspect of isolation, loneliness and the role of power. Her work has inspired contemporary political theorists and philosophers to understand the current oppressive political situation around the world.
Samantha Rose Hill (2021) in her new commentary on Arendt explains the concept of loneliness. Hill states, “the German word Arendt use for loneliness is verlassenheit, which means a state of being abandoned or abandon–ness. In this loneliness, one is unable to realize one’s full capacity for action as a human being, and one is unable to make new beginnings. Totalitarianism destroys the space between people by ruining their ability to think, and their relationship with themselves. One becomes isolated in one’s thought, unable to tell the difference between what is real and what is not. And in this, loneliness is dangerous because it destroys the state of solitude, which is a necessary condition for thinking (page 132). The key concept in Arendt’s work is thinking and linked to action.
What can psychoanalysis say and do in this tumultuous time.
I think that psychoanalysis around the world is addressing social issues, such as the topic of injustice, race and gender considerations and marginally the political. These problems were addressed by the late Argentinian analyst Janine Puget in her 2011 work that dealt with social subjectivity; with an in-depth discussion of psychoanalysis, philosophy and the political. The theme of the political and the social is the major articulation of the Brazilian school. Their motto is “psychoanalysis is the social.”
I think the most interesting topic in the field of politics and psychoanalysis is from the work of Winnicott. A panel discussion has been published in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi lead by Riccardo Galiani. In his discussion he mentioned the emergent field of psychoanalytic political theory. Their discussions focused on the work by Matthew Bowker e Amy Buzby (2017): D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory. Recentering the Subject and the work by Sally Swartz (2019) Ruthless Winnicott The role of ruthlessness in psychoanalysis and political protest.
These new ideas I think can help us to cope and comprehend the unconscious structures that stimulated violence.
At PINC we are on the same trajectory paying attention to the social in the work of psychoanalysis in the community, and elaborating a new curriculum and a new transmission of psychoanalytic ideas via seminars the institute offers. Critica is on a parallel track presenting many new views on psychoanalysis both from around the world and locally.
I would like to thank the PINC community for their sup-port and encouragement. I would also like to thank the editorial team for their enthusiasm and hard work in keeping the fire of writing alive.
References:
Leiber, E. and Street Schostal, M. (2022) That which is Real. Division Review. No 27, Summer.
Hill, S. (2021) Hannah Arendt. Reaktion Book. LDD. London.
