On Identity and the Political in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Weaving subjective musings with theoretical speculation, this paper explores various themes on the question of identity. I consider identity as identification with a social location, where that social location is a function of groups. As such, identity is inherently contingent, a relational affair, a soft assembly. Though not a particularly psychoanalytic concept, identity is currently being tasked with considerable work in psychoanalysis: functioning as a hinge between the dual registers of the personal and social unconscious. Like any symptom, the term identity both obscures and indexes, signaling the urgent need for a radical revision of theory. The more we use the contingency of identity—how we find ourselves identified (by others as much as by ourselves) in this place and time, whatever this might be—rather than its fixity, thought to transcend place and time, the more that the concept of identity can be used in a specifically psychoanalytic way to help us explore the terrain of the political, which I distinguish from the terrain of politics proper. These ideas are employed to consider the current moment in psychoanalytic organizational life, which takes place under the sign of a fundamental paradigm shift (that is to say: catastrophic change).

Keywords:

• Identity
• political
• groups
• demarcation
• collective
• social unconscious

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Increasingly, patients bring into analysis problems in their sociopolitical life. I am fond of saying that if the hysterical body was the privileged site for the development of psychoanalysis for Freud, then for us today it is the group.

2 It is my contention that in the late sociological papers, Freud is on the cusp of a third revision of his theory, incorporating group psychology as a domain in its own right, irreducible to individual psychology.

3 In a brilliant exposition of psychic life as musical elaboration, Blum, Goldberg, and Levin (2023) emphasize the necessity of group life, of linkage to what they call the weave of human togetherness.

4 This is not to imply that groups cannot become artificially homogenized, subject to hegemonic groupthink as a defensive operation. Bion’s basic assumption mentalities describe dynamics that tamp down the inherent multiplicity of the creative and well-functioning group (Bion 1961). More specifically, Lawrence, Bain, Gould (1996), and Hopper (2009) have both described basic assumption mentalities in groups of this kind (Oneness or massification).

5 As the increasingly well-known history of Trigant Burrow, one of the early presidents of the American Psychoanalytic Association, makes clear. Burrow was expelled from APsaA for his views on group psychology. See Pertegato & Pertegato (2013). Burrow’s expulsion is but one in a list of marginalizations for heterodoxies linked to matters of the social, political, or collective (consider Reich, Horney, Sullivan, and most recently the controversies within the American Psychoanalytic Association centered on Lara Sheehi [Conroy 2023]).

6 Even solidly mainstream analytic writers upheld explicitly political values: Winnicott (1986) espoused a psychopolitics of democracy, Meltzer (1973) one of permanent revolution.

7 Because the term frame is already soaked in the individualism of conventional psychoanalysis, I use the term demarcation with an explicit link to the social unconscious. See also Tylim & Harris 2018.

8 The frame for the analysis is different but analogous to the frame for supervision and the training frame for progression; we should extend this further, to the frameworks that allow psychoanalytic work at the level of the organization.

9 To position myself: my politics are on the left, including in my psychoanalytic politics. I believe psychoanalytic institutes should take a clear stand against structural racism for more open forms of practice, including the active teaching of community psychoanalysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco González

Francisco J. González, MD, is Personal & Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), where he also helped found and serves as Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track, and on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, JAPA, and Parapraxis, and on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. He practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.