by Danni Biondini, LMFT

I came to psychoanalysis, as most things, with opposition. 

Hailing from a line of San Francisco garbage men, I was committed to my family’s working class rebellion. I was a teenage anarchist, back before the tech takeover, when people in San Francisco still believed in stuff. I was vegan. I read Foucault for fun! I entered graduate school problematizing everything, spouting phrases like, “psychology as a normalizing discourse!”, and had a vague idea that becoming a therapist would help. All my notions were theoretical, though; I had yet to discover the purpose of people.¹

The psychoanalysis I learned was one that aligned with my opposition. I learned about Freud’s free clinics, about psychoanalysis as a subversive practice, radical in the etymological meaning of radical: to the root. I was drawn to psychoanalysis for its marginal position, for its promise of providing change on a structural level. Unlike its more mainstream, norm-enforcing nemesis, the psychoanalysis I learned was not concerned with mere symptom reduction, or helping people adjust to an unjust society. I was drawn to a psychoanalysis that took a critical stance toward the status quo.²

Now I teach graduate students, and try to share the foundational importance of psychoanalysis, but also its continued relevance. This can be difficult when teaching the savvy new generation of grad students, who were raised in a post-critical theory culture, and raised on the internet, and have learned to demand the representation that has been denied them. They are done with Dead White Guys, to say nothing of their relationship with the still-living. And I get it.  Despite being a Freud fanatic, I often share their critique. 

Psychoanalysis, and especially our psychoanalytic institutions, can feel very narrow and rigid and distant and, well, white. Is it, though? Altman chronicled how psychoanalysis “became white” in the United States as a way of assimilating to the dominant norms of the society,³ after once being marginal and critical and subversive. Psychoanalysis assimilated to the dominant gaze? I imagine Foucault rolling his all-seeing eyes.

And that is how psychoanalysis lost its edge. But how do we help bring it back? Often times the theory seems hella outdated. We talk about psychoanalysis as being experience-near, but the overly intellectual style I once loved can now read like it was written by someone who has never known suffering.⁴ Too often, we lose people we could have engaged because the way we teach psychoanalysis is boring aF.⁵ Critical as I am of tech culture,⁶ I’m equally critical that we teach psychoanalysis as if the century since Freud never happened and the internet didn’t exist. I read overwrought academic papers and I think: Wow, this idea could have been better presented as a meme.⁷

So, here is the obligatory statement about my excitement to be joining the board of NCSPP, as the new editor of Impulse. I share an interest with the board in asking: how can psychoanalysis remain not only relevant, but also retain its radical origins?  How can it help us think about problems at their root? As we all know, it’s 2019 and these times are terrible. But psychoanalysis has lived through terrible times, and reflected on terrible times, and we believe that psychoanalysis has something useful to say about it. But in order to broaden our reach, we have to make psychoanalysis interesting again.⁸

Far less oppositional after my analysis, I am hopeful and excited about what is happening in our community. Look at our future events! We have an Annual Lecture coming up with Dr. Kirkland Vaughans, on Plugging the School-to-Prison Pipeline. This will be a wonderful talk which will address the structural conditions of racism and white supremacy in the US, and how this impacts our collective failure to mentalize Black boyhood.

There are other cool things happening in our community. For example, I’ve been attending this year’s Child Colloquia Series at SF-CP, whose focus this year is, “The Utility of Psychoanalytic Ideas in Novel Settings.” The December meeting was about consulting to mentors of at-risk children. Holly Gordon and L. Eileen Keller spoke beautifully about the work of helping mentors attune to the emotional experiences of the children. The January event focused on Elliot Gann’s work on hip hop beat making as a therapeutic intervention. Adam Blum, as discussant, shared his thoughts on music: music as a vitalizing domain, the musical aspects of traditional psychoanalytic work, the strange failure of music to inspire Freud.⁹

See: people in our community are doing interesting, creative, subversive work. Psychoanalysis can still be radical! There are plenty of people thinking about psychoanalysis at the margins, and at Impulse we will continue to highlight this work. There’s an exciting new generation of psychoanalytic clinicians emerging. As in a good analysis, we are engaging with the ideas of our forebears, our psychoanalytic parents, and moving beyond them to do our own thing with what we’ve been given.

Speaking of our parents: In closing, if nothing else, psychoanalysis is wonderful at addressing human suffering and reminding us who’s to blame.¹⁰ What could be more radical in this neoliberal nightmare than shifting responsibility back where it belongs. As the short story writer Gary Lutz put it, “Some days my trouble is nothing more than the heavy concentration of both parents in my body.”  

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¹ Having read Discipline and Punish is cool and all, but as the poet Mary Ruefle says, “When you go crazy you don’t have the slightest inclination to read anything Foucault ever wrote about culture and madness.”

² But most of all, I think, I liked finding a theory of therapy that elevated intellectualization to the level of intervention. (Then I got analyzed and realized I have too good a personality to hide behind a blank slate. Good thing there are lots of ways to do analysis. Hi to my current relational analyst, aka my substitute dad.)

³ Altman, N. (2006). How Psychoanalysis Became White in the United States, and How that Might Change. Psychoanal. Persp., 3(2):65-72

⁴ Although, of course, I know it was probably written by someone who has deeply known suffering and has vowed to never know it again.

⁵ “As Freud.”

⁶ Especially as a San Franciscan, RIP my city.

⁷ My hope for psychoanalysis is we will soon realize that nobody is interested in hearing you read your paper, and we will introduce a meme-only lecture series

⁸ Sorry, for both the implied insult and the allusive sentence structure. Dominant culture still creeps inside.

⁹ Shout out to Adam, former Potential Spaces editor in this very newsletter. He’ll be back in March to give the Scientific Meeting, on the oceanic feeling in analysis as in music. As someone whose main associative fantasy in analysis is re-imagining my life if I’d been parented by Freud and Dolly Parton, I have great appreciation for Adam’s appreciation of the musicality of analysis. 

¹⁰ Hi dad!