By Michael O’Loughlin, PhD

The question of what clinical training programs and analytic institutes should do in the face of injustice and inequality has always been a vexed one. Ought the training of psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists entail an understanding of social justice and inequality, or can therapeutic work be safely relegated to decontextualized encounters with the inner psyche, without sensitivity to genealogy, history of oppression, displacement, context, class, gender, or ideology? Significant advances both in social justice theorizing and in understanding the sequelae of intergenerational transmission of historical trauma make blindness to sociohistorical context and present-day inequalities increasingly untenable. The Commission on Accreditation of APA has made strides in recent years in apologizing for past racism, and in seeking to improve both the presence of underrepresented groups in doctoral programs, and in diversifying the curriculum. Nevertheless, the Holmes Commission Report on Racial Equity in American Psychoanalysis, gives us pause about the resistance to acknowledging historical inequalities in the field and resistance to recognizing the melancholic residues of such events, past and present, in the unconscious of each one of us. I concluded my recent review of Agrawal’s (2025) Dear Institute…, which offers disconcertingly retrogressive examples of international practices in psychoanalytic training, by wondering “if there will ever be a time when the clinic can be conceptualized as what Carolyn Laubender (2024) would call a political clinic. Could we ever imagine constructing the kind of liberatory participatory and perhaps even revolutionary pedagogical structures that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) refer to as an undercommons, a place in which psychoanalysis might indeed embrace fugitive knowledge and the possibility of freedom of thought?” (O’Loughlin, in press).

All of this would be grist for the academic mill in normal times. However, in view of the upheaval that has taken place since Donald Trump’s second inauguration. U.S. society has entered a critical time in which all progressive, social justice oriented, and critical projects are under assault and threatened with abolition. Many major law firms and elite universities in the U.S. have rolled over in the face of browbeating from the Trump Administration, and the APA Commission on Accreditation [CoA] has suspended its diversity requirements because its constituent members fear retribution if they retain diversity standards. Indeed, the CoA itself fears being decertified. As the New York Times reported, the president framed the issue with his usual delicacy.  Mr. Trump has made accrediting bodies a particular target in his crusade against D.E.I. programs, threatening in one campaign video to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and “accept applications for new accreditors.” (Barry, 2025)

While there is clear and present danger from potentially retributive actions by the Trump Administration, another pressing danger is the risk of anticipatory obedience, or what Avishai Margalit (2024) calls “inner exile.” A pall of silence has descended over both academic discourse and public discourse ever since the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing conflict in Gaza. This conflict, with the massive loss of life it continues to entail, has reverberated throughout the world and caused intense polarization. Academics and public figures who have sought to frame these events historically or in terms of an anti-Zionist stance have been readily canceled or even dismissed from their posts for alleged antisemitism. I myself was accused of “wokeness” on the psychoanalytic listserv of my Institute, when I sought to enter this debate. Then, when I sought to circulate a piece of writing I had just completed on academic freedom (O’Loughlin, 2025a) to try to stimulate the kind of civil debate my university ostensibly values, it was blocked and a “moderator” was appointed to police the discussion, effectively foreclosing further dialog. Other analytic institutes have shut down their listservs completely. The precarity of speaking out has only increased since then. A lawsuit filed by the Knight Institute on behalf of the American Association of University Professors challenging “ideological deportation” of non-citizen faculty and students contains detailed examples of faculty and students engaging in chilling levels of self-censorship to avoid running afoul of current deportation practices. As a naturalized citizen myself, I admit to creeping anxiety as the government repeatedly raises the issue of denaturalization and the possibility of “re-migrating” undesirable citizens to their countries of origin. What if “undesirable” is reduced to “disagreeable”, and if disagreeableness is categorized as unpatriotic?

With investigations, most prominently of Columbia University and Harvard University for alleged “antisemitism,”—though some 60 U.S. universities are under investigation for DEI policies—the push for anticipatory obedience on many campuses is palpable. I have been conducting volunteer asylum evaluations since 2005, and in 2017 I launched the Adelphi Asylum Project, currently partnered with Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that has over 2,000 volunteer clinicians engaged in this work across the U.S.  In May of this year, one of our participating Ph.D. students, energized by her experience conducting asylum evaluations, proposed interviewing me about the asylum process for Day Residue, an in-house electronic newsletter distributed to current members of the Derner School of Psychology clinical Ph.D. program, as well as to alumnae of that program. The student and I had a beautiful conversation which culminated in an 8,000-word article. The student received approval from the department chair, who oversees the newsletter, but then the dean apparently concluded that it contained inflammatory material and was, therefore, not suitable for publication. I received no direct communication and nobody identified what the inflammatory material was, except to apparently suggest to my student interviewer that I had politicized asylum because I had mentioned “the Trump Administration.” Further, the student advised me that she had been told that even if I removed the alleged unspecified inflammatory material, the article would then need to be approved by the University’s lawyers before it could be considered for inclusion. Pressure increased further when another doctoral student, a foreign student, stated that they would resign from the editorial team if the piece were published as they feared being deported based on association with these putatively “inflammatory” ideas! I withdrew the piece and it has not been published. It would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that the piece is political. Not only do I discuss current U.S. policy towards migrants, including the demonization of legal Haitian migrants in Springfield Ohio, by the Trump 2024 campaign, but, as many migration theorists do, I suggest links between the current unprecedented flow of migrants and internally displaced persons—perhaps 125 million people worldwide—and the residue of historical and ongoing neocolonial policies implemented by Western powers and globalized Western corporations. The issue at stake here is not only the injury to my academic freedom as a result of these attempts to muzzle me, but, more troubling, what does this typical and likely pervasive hyper-cautious posture say about the health of U.S. universities and analytic institutes? What message does such a posture send to doctoral students and analytic candidates? More troubling, what message does it communicate to students with subaltern identities and those many students who wish to gain experience working from social justice perspectives so that they can contribute to redressing inequality in the world? Must we dare never to speak truth to power even while that power is being deployed in a self-evidently capricious and arbitrary manner?

A note on context

In her brief history of academic freedom in U.S. universities, Joan Scott (2009) reminds us that struggles over academic freedom, and protest over the arbitrary dismissal of disagreeable professors have been with us for at least a century. She mentions John Dewey, Upton Sinclair, and George Orwell as notable champions of academic freedom and unfettered inquiry, and she documents some egregious cases where professors who spoke out were dismissed for their opinions. Universities have long been positioned by corporate trustees and demagogic public figures as guardians of ideological orthodoxy that are expected to advance the cause of unfettered capitalism, white supremacy, Christian values, patriarchy and heteronormativity, and to steer clear of transgressive and critical ideas. Historically, interpretive disciplines in the humanities were subject to assault—often in the guise of a critique of their lack of instrumental utility—but now, in addition to making room for what Ussama Makdisi (2025) calls “the Palestine Exception” to free speech, the very idea of “objective truth” in the physical sciences and medicine is being debunked in this era of “alternative facts.” Addressing the “illiberal turn” in U.S. universities tied to a troubling shift from defending free speech to inviting police departments on campus and militarizing campus police to silence prohibited speech, Albena Azmanova (2025) notes that universities are becoming unquestioning vehicles for neoliberal free-market ideology. “[F]reedom’s meaning,” Azmanova notes, “has been reduced to economic freedom: deregulation and privatization ‘become broad moral-philosophical principles extending well beyond the economy’” (p. 354). A significant byproduct of these shifts is that solidarity and collective responses are rendered taboo and those individuals who dare speak out are easily canceled or dismissed. This powerful strategy for neutralizing dissent or potential activism is abetted by billionaire donors who have long used their clout to enforce ideological conformity on U.S. universities.

In 1938, Friedrich Hayek gave the name “neoliberalism” to a freewheeling type of capitalism that through his influence and the influence of Milton Friedman has become the dominant doctrine of Western capitalism. In The invisible doctrine, George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (2025) point out that neoliberalism’s greatest accomplishment has been to normalize unfettered capitalism so that the actual term neoliberal has faded from consciousness. Monbiot and Hutchison suggest that neoliberalism masquerades as “a description of the natural order—the way things are and have to be” (p. 133). Neoliberalism’s huge shift to privatization of public utilities and diminution of government services was advanced very effectively by Margaret Thatcher’s TINA declaration: “There is no alternative.” Globalization of trade and the march to privatization have greatly diminished governmental influence, and now, in its most recent iteration, we are witnessing the growth of a new oligarchic class, particularly in the tech sector, who not only live extravagantly but are actively involved in bending world politics to serve their interests. The notion of a participatory society and the idea of citizen engagement with government are negated in favor of a nefarious alliance between libertarian oligarchs and populists with fascist leanings. Enzo Traverso (2025) refers to this movement as post-fascist because, in contrast to the big-government fascism of the 1930s,  right-wing populist and libertarian industrial and technological elites today have built an alliance to rip up the foundations of the democratic state. Kyle Chayka (2025) describes Elon Musk’s approach of taking a chainsaw to the parts of government that do not serve his needs as “techno-fascism.” The irony, of course, is that the alienation that feeds right-wing populism is actually caused by neoliberal policies that are expressly designed to disenfranchise ordinary people, commodify their labor and their consumption, and diminish any sense of national identity and belonging. This marriage of convenience can only survive as long as neoliberal mass media can convince the disenfranchised that their interests are served by neoliberal policies that are so normalized that they are invisible and therefore cannot be named or opposed.

Cultivating an insurrectionary unconscious: A role for psychoanalysis

The foregoing discussion may seem far afield from clinical work, though Carolyn Laubender’s The Political Clinic suggests otherwise. One useful entry point to thinking of our work as political is through the notion of subject formation. Generations of writers have built on the work of Michael Eigen, Andrė Green, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donald Winnicott to illustrate the complexity of subject formation and the psychic complexities that emerge when ruptures in those early introjective processes leave a child lacking recognition or even bereft of a capacity to be. This entire body of work on early subject formation is vulnerable, however, to the charge of familialism, namely, to adopting a narrowly intrapsychic view of subject formation in which the mother or primary caregiver is privileged. Jean Laplanche’s assertion, in  Essays on Otherness, that subject formation is constructed through alterity is a necessary corrective, reminding us of the ideological and social bases of subjectivity. In The violence of interpretation, Piera Aulagnier not only offers a description of the lacuna at the core of subjectivity when a child is subjected to metabolic excess within a family, but her work also allows us to understand how ideological systems such as colonialism, forced migration, state terror etc. can erase genealogical filiations and leave humans bereft of capacity to anchor meaning and think freely. Aulagnier is very clear on the ways in which society lays the foundations for children to become conservative or reactionary subjects.

…every society privileges what encourages the status quo and its models, a status quo that is defended at first by those who are privileged by those models. But it must be understood that no society would succeed in doing so if it could not use the force of violence that it exerts…in order to preserve the illusion that what, in fact, is in the service of conservative intentions conforms to the needs of the psychical structure. (2001, p. 107)

The question of interest then is what happens when genealogical continuity is ruptured by alien ideological forces and the meaning-making capacity of a child is silenced or erased. With respect to sovereign authority, a danger is that a child’s own desires will be annulled as the child learns that “an Other decides in all sovereignty the order of the world and the laws according to which its own psyche ought to function” (Aulagnier, 2001, p. 182). This provocative clinical question comes into sharp relief in Karima Lazali’s Colonial Trauma, in which emotional constriction, muteness around genealogical and sociohistorical trauma, and a severely impaired capacity to free associate are present in the consulting room as sequelae of colonial suffering. Further psychoanalytic insights into the role of genealogical and sociohistorical residues in the unconscious can be found in Abraham and Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel, and in Davoine and Gaudillière’s History Beyond Trauma. In Dark Continents, Ranjana Khanna makes good use of Abraham and Torok’s work in explicating how racial melancholia represents just such a residue that resists symbolization.

Another dimension to be considered is the ways in which our patients and students construe themselves either as solitary individuals or as potential members of collectivities. In Out of the Dark Night, for example, Achille Mbembe argues for the cultivation of a politics of fellowship to counteract the neoliberal effort to negate collectivity, while Suely Rolnik, directly addressing the insidious effects of neoliberalism in Spheres of Insurrection,  argues that the only answer to a reductionist individualism that gives people the illusion of agency and creativity while, for example, faithfully executing corporate tasks, is to cultivate an insurrectionary and collective unconscious that causes people to re-imagine their lives and take steps toward their own liberation.

My current intellectual project is to articulate a critical social psychoanalysis that is capable of exploiting the power of psychoanalysis to articulate an inclusive, sociohistorically grounded, liberatory social vision. As I noted recently, Jacqueline Rose remains an inspiration for such work:

In Resistance (2007), Jacqueline Rose points out that the power both of great literature and of psychoanalysis is the power to unsettle “all idealized, official, rhetorics, whether of nationhood, race, religion or state—its powers of resistance, one might say” (p. 12). Rose is unequivocal about the importance of psychoanalysis in undoing the certainties and reassurances that are peddled by the sovereign, but she is equally insistent that we do not use that as an excuse to valorize psychoanalysis and see it as a savior for all the world’s ills:

Psychoanalysis remains for me the most powerful reading of the role of human subjects in the formation of states and nations, subjects as driven by their unconscious, subjects in thrall to identities that will not save them and will readily destroy the world. I also believe that it offers a counter-vision of identity as precarious, troubled, uneasy, which needs to be invoked time and time again against the false certainties of our times. But it is precisely analysis, and we should not ask too much of it. If we do, we risk…asking it to play the part of redeemer, prophet, saviour, which is, as Freud pointed out, to go against the spirit not to say the therapeutic rules of psychoanalysis itself. (p. 35).  (O’Loughlin, 2025a, pp. 17-18)

Michael O’Loughlin is Professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in the Ph.D. and Psy.D. programs in Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University, New York. He has authored or edited many books, including, most recently, Precarities of 21^st century childhoods: Critical explorations of time(s), place(s), and identities (2023) and (with L. Rothschild and S. Akhtar), the forthcoming Between amnesia and recollection: Environmental, creative and clinical pathways to memory. He writes on intergenerational trauma, psychosis, childhood subjectivity, refugee and social justice issues, fascism and populism. Since 2018 he has been coeditor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He is editor of the book series, Psychoanalytic Interventions: Clinical Social, and Cultural Contexts for Bloomsbury.  He is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. He founded and directs the Adelphi Asylum Project. He has a private practice for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on Long Island, NY.

References

Agrawal, H. (Ed.). (2025). “Dear Institute…”: Candid Commentaries from Candidates in Psychoanalytic Training. Routledge 

Azmanova, A. (2025). Free speech or safe speech: The neoliberal university’s false dilemma. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 92(2), 347-377.

Barry, E. (2025, March 27). Under pressure, psychology accreditation board suspends diversity standards. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/health/psychology-dei-apa-trump.html 

Chayka, K. (2025, February 28). Techno-fascism comes to America. The New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk

Makdisi, U. (2025). Beyond the Palestine Exception. Critical Times, 8(1), 1-29.

Marchese, D. (2025, January 18). The Interview: Curtis Yarvin says democracy is done. Powerful conservatives are listening. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html

Margalit, A. (2024). Internal exile and politics. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 91(2), 401-420.

Mishra Tarc, A. & O’Loughlin, M. (2025). Review of C. Laubender, The political clinic: Psychoanalysis and social change in the twentieth century. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 42(3), 167–169.

Mokdad Zmitri, M. & O’Loughlin, M. (2024). Essay review of K. Lazali, (2023), Colonial trauma and S. Rolnik, (2023), Spheres of insurrection: Notes on decolonizing the unconscious. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 41(4), 212-217.

Monbiot, G. & Hutchison, P. (2025). The invisible doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism (& How it came to control your life). Penguin.

O’Loughlin, M. (2020). Whiteness in the psychoanalytic imagination. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56, 2-3, 353-74.

O’Loughlin, M. (2023).  Negotiating agency in the formation of subjectivity: The child, the parental Other and the sovereign Other. In O’Loughlin, M., Owens, C. & Rothschild, L. (Eds). Precarities of 21^st century childhoods: Critical explorations of time(s), place(s), and identities. Lexington Books.

O’Loughlin, M. (2024). Meeting migrants: Mourning, possibility and generativity. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Special Issue on Social Justice and Psychoanalysis, 41(4).

O’Loughlin, M. (2025a). Academic freedom: Challenges to cultivating a revolutionary unconscious in a neoliberal world. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 30(1), 7-24.

O’Loughlin, M. (2025b). Imaginando uma Pedagogia Descolonizadora para Crianças: Uma Perspectiva Social-Psicanalítica Crítica/Imagining a decolonizing pedagogy for children: A critical social-psychoanalytic perspective, Psicologia da Educaçã. 57, 23-32. https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/psicoeduca/issue/currenthttps://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/psicoeduca/issue/current

O’Loughlin, M. (In press, a). Review of H. Agrawal (Ed.), Dear Institute: Candid Commentaries From Candidates in Psychoanalytic Training From Across the World. Journal of Psychoanalysis [Sao Paulo].

O’Loughlin, M. (In press, b). Cultural ruptures and their consequences for mental health across generations: The case of Ireland. In I. Lambrecht & A. Lavis (Eds), Culture and Psychosis. Routledge.

O’Loughlin, M. (Under review). Who are my people? Troubling community in psychoanalysis.  Analytic Agora,

Traverso, E. (2025, June 9). Fascism: Thinking the present with history. Critical Times Blog: In the Midst. https://ctjournal.org/2025/06/09/fascism-thinking-the-present-with-history/

Schleifer, T. (2025, July 9).  Elon Musk consulted Curtis Yarvin , right-wing thinker, on Third Party. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/politics/elon-musk-curtis-yarvin-third-party.html

Scott, J.W. (2009). Knowledge, power, and academic freedom. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 76(2), 451-480.