On Being Angry with Psychoanalysis Forever

ABSTRACT

Building upon the work of Agnes Callard on the moral philosophy and psychology of anger, I attempt to critically reframe the ways in which the anger of internal critics and dissidents within psychoanalysis is understood. Through a consideration of the literature, and of my own intergenerational family history (with psychoanalysis and otherwise), I offer a challenge to a common (and, I argue, often bigoted) framing of such anger as wantonly rageful and indicative of a desire to destroy psychoanalysis. Rather, I propose we should understand and engage with this anger as provoked by a failure of white-, straight-, and male-dominated institutions and communities to join with and share psychoanalysis with people not from those groups. In this light, the anger of internal critics of psychoanalysis should properly be understood as both a protest and an invitation into a process of contrition and repair that can return all parties to a state of co-valuation of, and cohabitation in, the psychoanalytic community.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).

Notes

¹ The first two quoted phrases are from Sulkowicz’s letter of resignation, which, being an e-mail, is not cited under APA formatting rules; the third quoted phrase is a quote from Sulkowicz in Conroy (2023).

² In this case, I am using bullshit not in its colloquial pejorative sense, but in a narrower and more ethically specific one (though not without some pejorative zest). Following Frankfurt (2021) and Graeber (2018), and building upon Carter (2023), I am using bullshit to refer to speech or conduct that lacks a regard for the actual truth of an issue or situation, because the bullshitters (whether individual and/or institutional) have an investment in a way of seeing the world without regard for its material accuracy. Often, this investment is a matter of protecting or advancing the material and psychological interests of the bullshitter. In this formulation, bullshit policies and statements (e.g., a statement that repudiates racism by an institution that is willfully blind to the actual ways its own racism works to advance the material and cultural interests of its members) reflect an effort to fashion a self-serving narrative about reality that is at variance with observable and demonstrable fact. Bullshitting is not always a matter of lying, though lying may be involved, but often it is more a matter of the kind of self-deluding motivated reasoning, scotomizing, and doing and undoing that should, in principle, be well familiar to a psychoanalyst. For more on how bullshitting of this nature operates in psychoanalysis, see Carter (2023) and Carter et al. (2023).

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Notes on contributors

Carter J. Carter

Carter J. Carter, Ph.D, L.I.C.S.W., is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and a lecturer in the Doctorate in Clinical Social Work program and affiliated faculty of the Program for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an activist, psychotherapist, farmer, union organizer with the Massachusetts State College Association, small-town newspaper recipe columnist, and pain in the neck.