Psychoanalysts are increasingly aware of the impact of irrational forces and processes on their most cherished endeavors. Our life’s work is the intimate, one-on-one meeting with individuals in the secure setting of our practice. It is our major commitment and foundational identity. It can easily create the illusion of a safe and protected space which we guard and maintain tenaciously for our clients, and for ourselves. But it does not take much to puncture this membrane and to undermine the feeling of safety and security. In such moments and circumstances, we realize that the irrational forces we are used to encountering in the inner world are no longer safely contained. They have impinged on our psychoanalytic setting, our minds, and our capacities.
The response to such impingements is often one of shock, disbelief, outrage, and helplessness. It stems from our heavy reliance on dealing with the internal world of psyche, mind, awareness and its gaps and distortions. We count on the positive inner forces and on good objects to help withstand irrationality. Within the boundaries of our daily work, we have learned that with patience and perseverance this usually works and triumphs over irrationality.
But we are also aware, and many have experienced it directly, that this stance may be momentarily undermined and shattered. The most blatantly destructive attacks may emerge in external reality, over which we have no control, yet they directly affect our practice. Examples vary, ranging from life-threatening calamities, such as war, Covid-19, or climate change, to ruinous economic conditions, political upheavals, and attacks on democracy. Destructive forces may also erupt in the familiar environment of our psychoanalytic societies and institutes, threatening the social fabric, creating controversy, and threatening splits. We tend to attribute these to pathology and ignore the fact that whatever individual aberrations and ideological differences exist, they may express deeper issues and conflicts stemming from group and organizational dynamics. Such dynamics characterize every social entity – families, groups, organizations, states – and psychoanalytic organizations are no exception.
As Freud, Bion, and others realized and taught us, the individual leads a dual existence: his own subjectivity makes him unique, while at the same time he is a “herd animal” that exists and survives in group formations. Our bias as psychoanalysts is for the exclusiveness of the former, but we can also create space for understanding the latter – that our individual existence is inextricably wired with our social enmeshment. And as psychoanalysts we know that unconscious dynamics operate and manifest as irrational yet powerful forces to be reckoned with. Learning about and better understanding such unconscious irrational processes can prepare us to know, meet and handle them more usefully.
