Psychoanalysis and politics

Abstract

Following the trauma of Nazi persecution, mainstream psychoanalysis abandoned its concern for the unconscious elements in social and political processes. The self-restriction was given a theoretical justification by H. Hartmann in his psychology of the self. The present author here sketches the periphery movement of an alternative “political psychoanalysis” with reference to M. Langer, A. Mitscherlich, P. Parin and his own work. His thesis is that if psychoanalysts do not consider their own entanglement in the social structures and conflicts that characterize their own time, they are in danger of themselves becoming, within their institutes, unconscious victims of irrational social influences, and in addition miss the opportunity to enlighten society by critical involvement.     

Psychoanalysis and Trauma

This article articulates some of the problems that surround the use of the term trauma in psychoanalytic theory and suggests that the key element for a theory of pathogenesis and mental functioning is not the either/or of external versus internal causation or trauma versus drive. Rather, it is an understanding of whether, or to what extent, the raw data of existential experience is or is not transformed into psychological experience. From this perspective, trauma is whatever outstrips and disrupts the psyche’s capacity for representation or mentalization. Absent the potential for mental representation, these events and phenomena are historical only from an external, third-person perspective. Until they are mentalized, they remain locked within an ahistorical, repetitive process as potentials for action, somatization, and projection.