by Nicholas Hack, Psy.D.

“At the mention of Trump, I am immediately all ears and immediately defensive. I think to myself, ‘He’s saying I’m like Trump.’ The shutters come down in my mind. I can hardly allow myself to think of that possibility.” - Annie Sweetnam

In a time when society feels increasingly polarized, the lines between us and them seem clearer, more rigid, and more intense. Whatever labels we use to identify ourselves and our Others – liberal, conservative, POC, white, not that kind of white, old guard, radical, etc. – in this heightened, often chaotic moment we know at least one thing definitively: that we’re the good ones, that we’re on the right path. It’s those people over there that are the problem.

I understand the split, and I feel it. In politics, the news, and on social media, almost cartoon-like caricatures of Bad Guys (pronoun intended) are plain for all to see. The consequences to individuals and communities are real and too often violent. It can dominate the attention.

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In the opening quote, Annie Sweetnam (2019) struggles with a patient’s association. She’s made an interpretation and her patient feels misheard and frustrated. He shifts topics, talking about Trump, about how he pretends to listen but doesn’t. She hears the communication clearly: “He hates Trump, and he knows I do, too,” and yet here he is, “…saying I’m like Trump.”

While the comparison feels repugnant and she wants to reject it, Sweetnam courageously grapples with the possibility. Fighting within herself for a freedom from self-protection, she explores what was happening when she interpreted, where her mind and mood were. Through this vulnerability she finds “some truth on that day with that patient in that moment that I was acting in a way that was similar to one of the many obnoxious ways Trump acts.”

I read and reread this article and each time I’m taken aback at her ability to go there. Within my comfortable border walls, separating this/good from that/bad, it’s hard to imagine being able to do the same. In these moments, she says, “…the clinical work involves giving freedom to whatever might feel alien within ourselves, even when, or better said, especially when we experience these feelings as belonging to the patient.” Despite the vast distance between her and this particular Other, she finds a way to recognize and reckon with the kernel that is the alien-within. And crucially, rather than leading to shame, guilt, or paralysis, she feels “a freedom, a lightness,” a liberation of sorts.

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One of the questions I keep hearing is about what psychoanalysis offers beyond the consulting room. In such a polarized time, I think accounts such as Sweetnam’s help answer that question.

In it, I hear the potential for an enlivened, freer way of being. In it, I hear a generative and deeply uncomfortable way of closing the gap between the Self and the Other, a way that’s necessary especially when we see the bad exclusively out there. Without closing one’s eyes to what’s actually happening and without ending in paralytic moral relativism, we’re offered a way out of the split, a way to destabilize those internal walls separate me from them. We’re offered, and maybe we can offer, a way to freedom.