by Molly Merson, MFT

ON MOURNING, TRANSITION, AND TRANSFORMATION: SAYING GOODBYE TO THIS COLUMN

In July 2016, I spoke with Impulse’s then-editor, Shlomit Gorin, about contributing articles to the column Psychoanalysis in the News. My colleague from the Women’s Therapy Center, Ripple Patel, had been the feature contributor for several years prior and left the position in June of that year. Ripple had a way of finding cultural and psychoanalytic “deep cuts” (a music nerd reference), articles from around the world about the ways psychoanalysis and art, music, and creativity intersected, which I deeply admired. My hope was to use the column as a platform to speak of psychoanalysis in culture from a systemic lens, by finding news pieces that attempted to frame social analyses via psychoanalytic ideas and perspectives. 

Then, just a few months later, the 2016 presidential election sent a surge of concern through the Bay Area psychoanalytic community, the nation, and beyond. The types of articles I was seeking became more and more available, as social theorists turned to Freud, Lacan, Klein, Kristeva, and Fanon to understand the political “primal scene.” Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic clinicians began breaking the “Goldwater Rule,” speaking out through blog writing, presentations, scholarly papers, and interviews, attempting to warn about the potential harms of the new president, as well as what this election might tell us about the social psyche of this country and sociopolitical sentiments throughout the world. Feminists and Black scholars shared their viewpoints and experiences of racism and misogyny in ways that were deeply psychoanalytic. Through the articles I have been able to find, these two locations, the social and the intrapsychic, have appeared irrefutably interconnected.

What opened up for me, then, was not only the damage that could be done by leadership whose political marketing message relied heavily upon gaslighting, splitting, devaluation/idealization, and degradation, but an evocation to peel back the layers of how this moment came to be. In perhaps a moment of après coup—or simply hindsight—I understood that this election result should not have come as a surprise. For many, it wasn’t. This country is, among other things, a settler-colonial nation whose aim has consistently been to advance Whiteness and property ownership, codified in anti-Blackness, coloniality, and genocide, based on the exclusion, or threat thereof, of anyone deemed not-White or not-proximal-enough to Whiteness and wealth. Through my research, including the articles I have found for this column, I have come to understand that this country has always upheld White supremacy. With Philando Castile’s murder, Breonna Taylor’s murder, George Floyd’s murder, and countless other people murdered by the state, I rage and grieve and rage again. It is horrifying to reckon with the extent of White supremacy and racism in its full, blatant, violent force. It is also a privilege not to. Those of us who remain now contend with a process of grief and mourning, to grieve for ourselves and on behalf of those who cannot, which involves a growing capacity to sit in unresolvable paradox, rage, sadness, and empathy. 

This is not a melancholic experience for me. Rather, in somewhat Freudian terms, my libidinal energy remains cathected to life, to learning, to grappling, to expanding what is possible, to creativity, and to potential space. Increasingly, I am finding self-authorization through re-learning my story, and by prioritizing deep listening to the lived experience of myself and others, including listening to the Earth as a living being, and in particular centering those stories or knowledges in myself and in others that have been elided or obfuscated in favor of upholding normative unconscious processes (Layton, 2006).

Lately, I’m having a hard time finding these notions reflected in “the news.” What I am finding, though, is that so many of my psychoanalytic colleagues, co-conspirators, elders, and peers are writing, speaking, presenting, and publishing on these issues in journal and conference spaces, talks, books, and on podcasts and social media. I am grateful, and inspired.

I hope I have energized this column as a space which centers lived experience. I hope this has been a space that has helped readers grapple with the paradox of living deeply and honestly while bumping up against a society that conscripts, interpellates, and delineates borders without concern for our sense of deeply-rooted home, or our migratory nature or desire. Hopefully this column has found a way to braid the liberatory practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic perspectives alongside an active engagement with our social and political world, and each other. I will remain grateful to Shlomit for this chance, to Ripple for the platform, to Michele McGuinness for staying the throughline, and to Sydney Tan, Danni Biondini, and June Lin-Arlow, the editors I’ve worked with over the past five years (and who have gracefully tolerated my “extended” deadlines). Finally, to readers and community, thank you, I cherish you. To whomever fills the potential space to come: carry on.