by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

SHOULD WE ALL BE ACTIVISTS?

In a panel titled, “Losing Our White Minds” at this year’s Division 39, Dr. Diane Swirsky asserted that therapists should raise issues of bias, privilege, and social justice, even when not raised by patients. Therapists of all races should be talking about racism with patients of all races. This suggests that analytic therapists’ values should manifest in treatment. If we believe that racism is wrong, for example, we should respond from that position. In contrast to classical neutrality, this redefines the analyst as a kind of activist.

Of course, as a theory of health and sanity, suffering and healing, psychoanalysis ineluctably engages sociopolitical and moral questions. Ethical conundrums such as the nature and extent of conscious reason, freedom, and responsibility permeate our field.

In her paper for the same panel, Dr. Lani Chow suggested a second kind of activism for analytic practitioners: putting ourselves on the proverbial couch. If Whiteness is understood as the status quo, hierarchy, and privilege derived from structural and historical dynamics, then “losing our white minds” involves persistent interrogation of established ideas and ways of being—including within our field, and within our own minds. It involves deliberate attentiveness to the negated and marginalized.

In his keynote, “Addressing the Other in the Face/Place of Social Injustice,” Dr. Francisco Gonzalez recommended yet a third kind of activism: engagement in group life and political struggle. When we engage with issues of identity and oppression, we’re engaging with collective consciousness and unconsciousness and processes of social change. Working on these issues entails working at the level of the social, and group life is hard. It’s painful, messy, frightening, and confusing.

And yet, lest we dissociate from economics — lest analytic discourse on race and gender merely reflect the virtuous outrage and feigned radicalism endemic to the privileged left, “talking about” rather than “talking with” marginalized others — analytic activism ultimately involves a direct confrontation with the material contingencies of contemporary capitalist society. This might mean advocating for changes in graduate school and analytic training that permit more diverse participation (e.g. make it affordable), or we might need to accept insurance and offer sliding scale payments in order to serve more diverse clients, or lobby for human-centered in-depth clinical care.

Of course, across all three of these distinct forms of activism, analytic therapists understand that the question of how to live cannot be answered abstractly, and resist dogmatic or prescriptive moralizing. Analytic activism begins with receptivity, working on the negative, moving towards the unsaid. Analytic activism follows anxiety, discomfort, homing in on our symptoms. It accepts contradiction and complexity, and mistrusts established truths. It looks towards the margins. It perpetually unsettles our knowing, so that new thoughts can emerge. A challenging project, surely, but exciting.