by Lisa Koshkarian, Ph.D.

AUTOIMMUNE NATION 

The immune system is the body’s defense against infections. An autoimmune condition is when the body’s immune system mistakes its own healthy tissues as foreign and attacks them. I wonder if nations can have their own sociocultural version of autoimmune disease. The country and its constituents represent the body. The current political “guardians”, elected, appointed, or promoted by coercive gaslighting, represent the immune system. These wardens attack organisms perceived as threatening who are basically like them, with the same needs for love, safety, belonging, and physiological survival, mistaking them as an alien other. And yet, these targeted groups are integral to the functioning of the body. They are as healthy a part of the system as any other. Therefore, aggression against them inflames the entire country, exacerbating profound sickness.

Most Western medicine practitioners will say that there is no cure for autoimmune disease, only treatments that mitigate the symptoms. I have experienced autoimmune barrages (of the bodily and of the sociocultural kinds), and I chose to pursue remitting paths through non-normative theories and approaches. I won’t go into how I got my thyroid condition into permanent remission, but I will state that my successful efforts bolstered my confidence that taking the roads less traveled could open unforeseen possibilities.

Laplanche’s (1997) concepts of das and der Andere – the internal otherness that we perpetually carry within us that flourishes by contact with an external otherness – offer a bounty of possibilities for elevated humanity. Laplanche wishes to preserve a space in which to be permeable to the other and its inspirations. In essence, the other is not other; it exists within us. He believes that what may ostensibly appear as other is, in actuality, a dormant, unrecognized aspect of oneself. I take this to imagine that der Andere is omnipresent, if only we are primed and able to register it. Thought experiment: I’m walking the two miles to my office and observing every person I pass. Rather than asking myself, “I wonder if they are MAGA?”, for example, I ask, “What is inside of that person that is also inside of me?” I discover shared hardship, yearning, love, loneliness, anger, beauty, amusement, and sadness. I feel closer to them because our internal otherness has found a companion in the external other. I feel a greater sense of belonging, and therefore, fortification and interconnectedness. I have been othering myself, unbeknownst to me, rather than yielding to the mating of das with der Andere, procreating a prolific union.

Sociopolitical autoimmune-like processes appear in so many venues: the Executive and Supreme Court branches, law enforcement, in misogyny, racism, classism, and ableism, to name a few. The scope of our clinical practice may not allow us to moderate the sickness in these spheres, to effectively convey, “You are making a big mistake, you are bombarding valuable beings, which is tantamount to assaulting yourselves!” But we can attempt to expand the internal and external worlds of ourselves and the people we have contact with by questioning, and then exploring, what really is “other”?