When I first started my clinical practice, I had all the financial support I could hope for; my parents helped me rent a nice office, with some cool looking furniture to go with it, in a very central location in Rio de Janeiro. But because I had no patients, the room was mostly used as a meeting room for the political collective to which I belonged, a communist organization which greatly influenced my interest in economic dynamics in psychoanalytic institutions and, because of that interest, increased my disillusionment with the Lacanian School where i do my analytic training. I didn’t study psychology, medicine, or psychiatry in college, so the more I distanced myself from the psychoanalytic community, the more insecure I felt about what legally allowed me to engage in clinical work. Of course, we all repeat the famous Lacanian adagio about “analysts authorize themselves,” etc., but this slogan alone can help increase superego pressure: I come from a family of psychologists and psychoanalysts, I have the privilege of owning one. a clinical room with no work at all, I have no formal studies related to mental health, plus I just finished my training at an institution I don’t recognize anymore — so what do I do by calling myself? a psychoanalyst? Am I using my parents’ money just to buy a psychoanalysis license? It wasn’t hard to anticipate that every potential patient who came to see me at the time was served a large plate of analytical pleasantries coming from a young man who was more concerned with his desire to appear as a psychoanalyst than with anything remotely qualified. as a desire to perform the analysis. I met most of the people -This person only once.
The reason I mention this rather mundane early misstep is because of how my political life actually affected what happened next. At that time, I was involved with a number of urban jobs in downtown Rio; we used to meet with squatters once or twice a week, to help with legal and political matters. Once, while I was there, someone asked me what I do for a living. Embarrassedly, I said, “I’m a psychologist.” I guess saying I’m an analyst just sounds preposterous, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, so I’m going with the statement that I think is the easiest to admit. No problem, no one cares: “Ah, so you’re a doctor,” the woman replied, before taking me aside and introducing me to her husband, who had just returned from a drunken bender and was having a hard time. convinced his wife that he was not having an affair with a fellow squatter. I sat down and we started chatting—and for the first time I felt ready to listen to someone in their own way, indifferent to the demands of being seen as a true psychoanalyst.
But this is not a story about how politics can help our clinical work—at least that’s not all. While my political position certainly affected my commitment to sitting down and listening to what that person had to say about his or her own predicament, there was also something at play, something more embarrassing. As I slowly realized in my own analysis, my political worldview and militancy have also helped to devalue the encounter, making it more bearable—much like one of the deflated strategies Freud discussed in “On the Universal Tendency to Decline in the Field of Love. “I could risk acting as an analyst there because, in some ways, I believe the stakes are lower: Anything I can offer is good enough for this guy.
It is worth mentioning all of this because it makes no sense to think about the politics of analysts and how our political commitments can inform our clinical hearing without also thinking about all the new problems and challenges that come with it. In fact, I have the impression that while the politics of an analyst effectively helps inform how we listen to patients and intervene clinically, on the face of it clinical work actually looks like business as usual. And this makes sense: the effect we’re looking for, after all, is psychoanalytic, so the best thing that politics can do, in a clinical setting, is to help us further detach ourselves and analysis and from the constraints that hinder the meeting of subjects of their own accord. . Politics makes itself much more clearly felt in psychoanalysis when things go wrong.
The most immediate way this can happen may be when, instead of helping us expand what might be considered an important part of a patient’s speech, the way we articulate our own political commitments ultimately limits what certain markers mean to others. In 2018, during the election campaign that led to Bolsonaro becoming president, a recurring theme with many patients was the telling of the “dinner scene” in which they confronted their parents’ reactionary political views while trying to get them to vote for the opposition Workers’ Party (PT Candidate), Fernando Haddad—a situation that usually ends badly and leads to an intense session after. For an analyst who can only comfortably expect the world to explode through the couch, regardless of their own political position, this is easy: since we are not concerned with the political leanings of our patients, all that remains is to focus on the familiar dynamic in which subjects question the lack of idealized authority only. to find a better place in the shortcomings of Others. It sounds quite “structuralist”—that is, fairly independent of decisions we don’t care about—so, after listening to a dozen of these situations, our conservative analyst might write another paper on “a new form of subjective alienation in the family, at a time of declining paternal functioning.”
But a more politically engaged analyst might also make the same mistake: because we recognize that politics introduces consequential differences into the picture—for example, depending on our particular left reading of the world, “Haddad” can signify “democracy,” therefore allows more room for difference, and “Bolsonaro” could signify “fascism” and less room for passion—we might ignore how these markers are mobilized by different patients, and we might treat them all the same way. I have some analyzes that literally put an entire national political turmoil into their mini neurotic drama and that would conclude this savage dinner debate story by saying something like “… keep them away from these reactionary ideas!” If I had quickly concluded that the political undertones of family feuds pointed to the subject’s separation from the Other as a total figure—because my patient had sided with the emblem of democracy against discourses of hatred and exclusion—I might have stepped in. to say, “But conflict is sometimes the price we have to pay for taking political positions, etc., etc.,” and, under the guise of strengthening the patient’s political independence, merely reproduces the underlying structure of alienation.
Other analyzes, however, were experiencing something quite different at the time: for them, this kind of situation did not assert their place in any particular symbolic dynamic, but rather obliterated the extraordinary status of the confrontation in the broader predicament of political activism. They’ve been campaigning, desperately talking to people on the streets to try to get more votes for the Labor Party, and they’ve learned, through this process, that people have all sorts of problems with PTs in Brazil today, problems who traverse complex ways with their personal histories. And, suddenly, their own parents appear before them as part of the series, as people with past personal and political histories they never considered before. Quite often, however, this relationship will only appear in the background of their session, creating discomfort in the patient’s speech, and will require intervention to demonstrate that there are similar traits between the dinner conversation and their militant activity. at another place. But if I don’t believe that politics exists—that is, that there is a singular force in the social experience of commonality that can lead subjects to paths and places alien to their own identities—I will not risk intervention that will further disperse. family drama into the wider political realm, in the hope that new contradictions and associations will emerge.
So there are two cases where political analysts come to bring together different subjective experiences, and the other helps us to differentiate them further. And there are also cases where political differences between analysts and analysts and the sudden are at stake. For example, a situation where our political commitment seems to compel us to say something not because this intervention might open a new associative path for the patient, but because we want to distance ourselves from them and their politics, because we can’t stand to be confused by it even for a second. It’s not uncommon to hear analysts proudly talk about how they interrupt racist, sexist, or reactionary monologues from their patients—sometimes pushing for an end to treatment altogether—without worrying for themselves whether this can lead to anti-racist, anti-sexist . , or a progressive effect on the actual fanatic in the room.
A paradigmatic example of this occurred, again, around the time of Bolsonaro’s election, when many psychoanalysts bragged about the fact that they did not have “bolsonaristas” as their patients. Here, politics does not inform clinical hearing; instead it forces us to distance ourselves from elements of patient discourse for the sake of the consistency of our own political identity. The situation reached a point where, for a time, the Lacanian School issued a political statement condemning Bolsonaro and all he stood for, a move that clearly made it clear that we would rather avoid having to deal with this “toxic” patient. It goes without saying (or should) that criticizing these institutional declarations does not mean saying that analysts should be apolitical or neutral—but what is the purpose of issuing these statements as analysts, rather than simply signing petitions and other collective texts, as most people do? It seems to me that the purpose of these documents is to send a clear message about what kind of patient we want to listen to—just in case the prices and location of our clinical practice don’t lead the point home.
On the other hand, there are also situations where the uneasy ambiguity between analysts and analysts and that brought about by politics, can actually be very productive. I know we all like to think that Lacanian psychoanalysis operates in a shift from connection to disconnection: the patient comes and greets us directly, asking for help to relieve some symptoms; when transference is formed, that “imaginary” relationships are broken and new partnerships emerge between the subject and the “symbolic” Others, the ghost dialogue that reveals itself is equally subject to language confusion as analysis continues, to the point that the loneliness of the subject’s encounter with “real” contingencies can finally acquire a new dignity. That’s all true, I guess. But it is also true that all of this is also conditioned by the fact that analysts are equally caught up in the same process. More important to me than the mystical question of “who analyzes Freud” is the fact that he also needs analysis—namely, that psychoanalysis, from the very beginning, implies a common ground between analyst and analysis, because the unconscious cuts diagonally across both, informing not only why we need to listen to the patient, but also our awareness of the pitfalls of listening itself. This similarity is not positive, to be sure, but it is important enough to imply an additional axiom for all our dealings with “real clinics” or all talk of “non-relationships” in Lacanian psychoanalysis: suspect any “real” part that can only annoy your patient but not yourself.
So when it comes to politics in the clinic, sometimes an interesting intervention can emerge precisely by pointing to something that makes us politically indistinguishable from our patients—not because of the imaginary bond created (we’ve seen how that can go wrong), but because it can help empty political fantasies while maintaining political form. Sometimes when faced with a major tragedy—such as the cataclysmic flood that destroyed half of Petropolis earlier this year—an analysis might evoke their political ideals and the need to “do something about it” as a reproach to themselves and others, motivated by anger and impotence before the state ignores the situation. It may be difficult, in these cases, to disengage the libidinal incorporation of the political sphere into the inhibiting neurotic dynamics without also questioning this political commitment itself, referencing political impotence back to a personal deadlock and indecently reducing it to a fantasy drama subject. On the other hand, by intervening to include ourselves among those constrained by the political possibilities afforded by today’s left ecosystem, we may be able to move from ideal politics to real politics, from personal inhibitions to spaces for effectively enabled collective action. —but these only appear as possible channels for our discontent if they cease to be compared directly to the major political movements we personally envision as solutions to our feelings of impotence.
Part of what allows us to emphasize certain ambivalences in speech—for example, obfuscation of some words or sentences, leaving them to the inherent indeterminacy of language—is precisely the belief that no one is exempt from the cunning of this uncomfortable signifier. If this were not the case, this interpretation could never have created breathing room for our patient—a tear in the fabric of the discourse, inviting some creative re-stitching—because this intervention further confirms the analyst’s power and capacity to anticipate where this punctuation will lead the subject. The subtleties of actual political organizing can play the exact same function: surrendering political fantasy to the uncomfortable constraints and ambivalences engendered by political life maintains the discontent quality of subjects—rather than reducing their anger about social catastrophe or political injustice to some private affair—while may create room for political discovery precisely because analysts, like everyone, are also traversed by the contradictions and shortcomings of real political struggle.
In some cases, political belief in this general dimension may emerge as the belief that we can take some patients’ political idealizations seriously and help them refine their ideas, exposing isolated constructs to constraints that compel them to follow through and cooperate with others. . Usually, when we uphold the belief that our patients are capable of thinking politically, a distinction slowly emerges between the barriers that are the product of the real existence of other people—people we need to consider, convince, and cooperate with if we are to be truly politically successful—and fantastic stalemate that prevented us from engaging in any form of collective organization in the first place. This is a free association challenge between people who come to help free association between words. And sometimes these shared political beliefs can lead to true solidarity—such as joining analyzes and fundraising to help flood victims in Petropolis and thereby democratizing anxiety about how small or insignificant these actions are—because we believe that these similarities are not always strengthens imaginary relationships, but sometimes highlights everyone’s adherence to the difficulties of political organization, including—especially—the difficulty of sustaining our own clinic economically. It doesn’t always work — and it certainly won’t if we ignore the specifics of each clinical situation — but sometimes it can.
I have focused until now on how political analysts add new and interesting variables to the picture. One might say that these variables lead to an extended theory of countertransference, with the caveat that, with the introduction of politics, our ordinary Lacanian reduction from the general to the imaginary needs to be eliminated. I decided to focus on the analyst side first because I truly believed it was the only way to avoid falling back into a conservative position which, when faced with new challenges in the clinic, couldn’t help but conclude that it was the world that had gotten off track, rather than suspect that maybe we haven’t managed to keep up. However, this is not an argument meant to eliminate the possibility of new symptoms and deadlocks appearing; it should help us clarify the conditions for clarity on some of this novelty.
For example, political life produces its own subjective deadlock, which is specifically tied to certain political practices, their material and symbolic forms of organization. One of my patients is part of a collective that is actively fighting for the transformation of our patriarchal social mores and for the legal recognition of more forms of romantic relationships than just monogamous heterosexual partnerships. However, the dynamics of his personal relationship are not necessarily in line with his values and strategic principles. Sometimes intense jealousy creeps in, along with the desire to control the life of the partner; other times he feels a deep unease with the way sexuality has attached itself to images of power and violence. And things can get even more complicated when the way we collectively articulate our political mapping of the world leaves little room for even mentioning these contradictory tendencies without jeopardizing another important distinction, a tension that often adds an anomic dimension to suffering.
But is there anything new here? I believe that, without the conceptual and technical tools to help us navigate the political implications and the unconscious, it is impossible to say. For example, if an analyst simply lacks the political conviction that the scope of a possible romantic relationship exceeds the boundaries of heteronormativity, they can easily describe the patient’s predicament multiplying by his own outbursts of jealousy as evidence that politics has become a refuge from castration for him. and that sexual difference, as we know it, is bound to return with “hysterical” vengeance. These will be contemporary sexual encounters, critical moments of leftist politics as opposition.
Rather than thinking of the psychoanalyst as a passive vessel whose ears cannot function like a seismograph sensitive to the upheavals and fluctuations of the world in general, we prefer to think of analysis as an encounter where we “meet the world halfway”—where the changing times are visible to the analyst. stuck in the same change. But meeting the world halfway and allowing the political commitments we keep as our own to enrich our clinical hearing in no way means that we should join the superegoic chorus that tortures this militant, who further punishes him for not living up to his ideals. On the other hand, the political diversification of what we think may actually help us shed light on the novelty of the single problem he faces: the challenge of how to construct new libidinal arrangements without ignoring the real forces that shape our history and personal form. satisfaction. It’s an open, public, real problem—he faced it, and so did I.
I remember years ago a patient who had an intensely militant life as a member of a leftist party in Rio—funny, the same party I used to be. He was the first in his family to attend college, where he became involved with the student movement and later with Trotskyist leanings in a socialist political party. This increased political involvement took a heavy financial toll on his life, as he lived far from where party gatherings took place and, being unemployed, he had to rely on his parents’ help to continue his studies and travel around the city. He always cites the precarious conditions his parents endured throughout their lives as one of the main motivations for getting involved in politics—but feels guilty that the economic costs of this engagement fall on them or make him lose focus on getting his rights. diploma, something his mother highly valued. Within his party cell, these questions do not exist: he is seen as a model militant—what we call tarefeiro, a “tasker”—and even if it were possible to describe his personal impasse more openly, this would have probably tarnished his image among friends. friends, who are important sources of acknowledgment and support outside the family.
One day, the education minister came to Rio to perform in public. The militant group organized a demonstration in front of the building where the incident took place. At some point during the protests, things got heated, and the chants and banners didn’t seem to have any effect, so protesters started throwing things at the sides of the building, to make their presence felt. My patient picked something off the ground to join in on a new tactic and, just as he was about to throw it into the building, he remembered that he had just sent a CV to the same address in hopes of getting a paid internship. Feeling a burst of deep anxiety, he passed out, right then and there.
But when this militant wakes up, having passed out in protest, he is faced with a decision that also confronts me and every other psychoanalyst interested in what is new in our clinical practice: we can either return home, or we can create new markers to share these contradictions with. with our colleagues.
