By Pascal Sauvayre, Ph.D. and Orshi Hunyady, Ph.D.

The etymology of the word manifesto is “to make public” – to make manifest, and it took on its distinct militant connotations as a battle cry with Karl Marx’s “communist manifesto”.  If we apply this notion to the context of institutions, the message seems straightforward: it’s time to dig up the cobbles, raise the barricades, and fight for the values that our psychoanalytic institutions have debased.

Is it time to fight for these values by eradicating institutions altogether, not just replacing one with another?  In many ways, it would seem so.

It is easy enough to find specific instances from our personal experience (and perhaps from the audience as well) in which our respective psychoanalytic “training” strayed from analytic principles, at best, but could actually be better described as downright anti-psychoanalytic.  We often like to think that these are contingent on the respective institute, and that the grass is greener elsewhere.  But in his landmark Unfree Associations (2000), Douglas Kirsner has shown that these destructive and self-destructive features are widespread in our major psychoanalytic institutions.  We might like to think that we can find a way to minimize, or even eliminate their pathological traits, but this maintains the fantasy that psychoanalytic institutes can live by psychoanalytic principles.

We believe that psychoanalytic institutions, qua institutions, are systemically anti-psychoanalytic.  That is, institutions, or the process of institutionalization is in itself opposed to the central tenets of psychoanalysis.  Beginning with the phrase “psychoanalytic training”, there is an essential contradiction between the restless soul of psychoanalysis and the nature of institutionalization, which is to bring, or impose, order, and therefore do violence to what falls outside of that order.  Finding its origins in the dis-orders (of “Studies in Hysteria” for instance), the essence of psychoanalysis has always been (in our opinion) to prioritize what has been done violence to by being sidelined, othered, repressed – the unconscious. In the same way that an ordered society creates its order by exclusion and oppression, so does the psyche, and so does psychoanalytic institutionalization.  We view this dynamic of power, violence, and exclusion as inescapably replicating itself in our society, in our psyche, and in our psychoanalytic institutions.

Let’s explore this dynamic in more detail by looking at its “primary” psychic origins. The psyche inadvertently, inevitably and unconsciously replicates the power dynamic of social institutions through the interactions that take place very early on between the child and the primary caretaker. The caretaker’s culturally shaped desires and internalized prohibitions get imposed upon the child’s psyche through the caretaker’s efforts to make meaning of the child’s behavior and inferred emotions.

This process is violent in the sense that the caretaker’s psyche in which repression already has taken place becomes forced upon the infant’s psyche proper, in which repression has not yet taken place (see Aulagnier, 2001, p11). This “primary violence”, however, is necessary for the establishment, growth and functioning of the child’s ego and sheer ability to represent. Using this as analogy, we as psychoanalysts need to have theory and formulations of technique to represent the clinical process, and the process of learning, becoming a psychoanalyst, includes this kind of primary violence where elements of the clinical process itself – and by extension, elements of the spontaneously emerging experience of the clinician – will become excluded, unacknowledged, shunned, or repressed. All interpretations/representations and all institutions that transmit a set of representations or meanings will have this effect on the individual, ultimately resulting in the formation of a professional ego/identity in the candidate. The more problematic aspect of this situation is that this “primary violence” often gets confused with, or it is even used as justification for another type of violence – one that does not serve the growth of the individual, and instead serves the needs of the cultural institution itself. In the case of psychoanalysis, these are dogmas, rigidified technical recommendations and prescriptions, that oppose both the natural evolution and change of the collective psychoanalytic understanding of the clinical process and the expressions of each individual clinician’s spontaneous, idiosyncratic analytic style. As Aulagnier puts it, this “secondary violence” is the result of the “conflict between an I and the diktat of a social discourse that has no other aim than to oppose any change in the models that it has set up” (Aulagnier, 2001/1975, p. 12).

This secondary violence, Aulagnier elaborates, “is as widespread as it is persuasive, […] it succeeds in abusively appropriating the qualifications of necessary and natural, the very same that after the fact the subject recognizes as proper to the primary violence from which his I emerged” (p. 12). The distinction between an actually necessary, primary violence posed by – the culturally structured – interactions between caregiver and child, and the secondary violence that only masquerades as necessary is important when we consider our function and responsibilities as psychoanalysts who are in charge of training and who are the representatives of psychoanalytic institutions. The question becomes: is there a way to manage the contradiction between our efforts to hand down knowledge and deliver a psychoanalytic understanding of the social world while retaining our allegiance to the psychoanalytic principles we espouse? The answer most often given in the past was to come up with a new set of theoretical principles that undermine the previous “regime”. Unfortunately, this new understanding more often than not has become the foundation for a subsequent institutional rigidification and “secondary violence”.

The splintering of institutes and schools have often been motivated by this allegiance to fundamental psychoanalytic principles and to its revolutionary aims, and the origin story of our own institute finds its élan in Clara Thompson (2017) and others, and the overthrow of Freudian ‘orthodoxy’.  And yet, the replication of orthodoxy, as Clara Thompson herself lamented, seems to be an unavoidable trap.

Yet the soul of psychoanalysis is to combat the dynamic that leads to this trap.  Our motto, “to make the unconscious conscious” involves paying attention to and valuing the detritus of repression.  To complicate our task, not only is the bringing to light of the unconscious always limited in scope, it also creates its own shadows – it generates its own repression.  This is the case not just in clinical practice but in the realm of theory development as well, as Russell Jacoby describes so well in his groundbreaking, The Repression of Psychoanalysis (1986).  Although Jacoby, as student of Herbert Marcuse, attributes this repression to the specific socioeconomic and political context of American psychoanalysis, our position is that it is inherent to institutionalization itself, the sociopolitical context providing its own specific gloss.

As we explore the echoes between the violence in society, in the clinic, in the psyche, and in the psychoanalytic institution, a particularly intriguing aspect are the contradictions inherent in the phrase “psychoanalytic training”.  Without even going into the toxic politics of an institute, the very goal of “teaching” psychoanalysis contains, at its best, inherent contradictions.  These are found in expressions such as “courting surprise”, “being comfortable with not knowing”, or “cultivating spontaneity”, among many others, which are frequently used without any sense of irony.  While there is an inherent contradiction in the teaching of psychoanalysis, it is not in itself an unworkable problem, but the belief that there is no such contradiction is.  “Not knowing”, “surprise”, “spontaneity”, are indeed fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic practice, but ones that, like the unconscious, elude any clear cut attempt to “teach” in the ordered functioning of an institution.  If the belief in the coherence of “psychoanalytic training” is held too strongly, it leads to a bad faith performance of these ideals, captured so well by one of our mentors when he says: “At this institute we are experts at not being experts” (Warren Wilner; 1996).

And yet, our institutions, with all their power, enforce precisely such a performance.  Whatever is learned in our years of ‘training’ can only be accomplished in the liminal spaces of the institutional margins, at best, or in spite of it, not because of it.

Does that mean that psychoanalytic institutions should be dispensed with, for the sake of psychoanalysis?  There is a strong argument for doing so.  But the problem is that this path maintains the same fantasy of a “pure”, “un-compromised” psychoanalysis in the greener pastures outside of institutions.  The fantasy then returns to become its own form of oppression, marginally different from the belief in institutions.

Let’s go to Thompson herself to see how she managed this dilemma in her creation of the William Alanson White Institute and its struggles with the American Psychoanalytic Association. She describes the history of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the US as having a sort of early honeymoon period, in which institutes were free to organize themselves as they wished, and in 1932 they were all welcome under APsA’s umbrella organization, the Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies.  But beginning in 1946, with the influx of European refugees, things began to change.  In line with Freud’s well known contempt for the US, the European analysts who quickly gained prominence in local institutes and in APsA, looked down on American analysis and analysts, and they felt that the “standards” of psychoanalysis (as a practice and as a system of thought) should be clearly established.  This meant determining which institutes, which faculty, which analysts, and which graduates could be “recognized” as “analytic”.  Who could be included, or excluded.  A well known example is the sidelining and blacklisting of Karen Horney, which was followed by a number of others, including Clara Thompson.  She describes “increasing attempts by the American Psychoanalytic to take a monopoly of this field to control it.  Not only to control the thinking but to control the number of students that can be recognized” (2017; p. 26).

It was in this atmosphere that the William Alanson White Institute began with Clara Thompson at the helm.  “We would not like to see psychoanalysis become a closed religious cult, which it seems to be on the verge of becoming” (2017; p. 27), which then simultaneously created “heretics”.  Of course, many who did not agree with this mentality said nothing, preferring to go along to get along, and told their students to do the same, to mouth the desired beliefs and to hide their own.  But she objected to that strategy of continuing to “belong”. “If we are really people who are helping people to become free and to find themselves, what kind of cowards are we that we should go around and act as if the Gestapo were after us? After all, the American Psychoanalytic cannot put us in jail or in a concentration camp, yet.  And yet this seems to be the feeling which they have instilled into the whole group of the American” (2017; p. 27).

In the thick of the fight with the American Psychoanalytic Association, in which all the training analysts of the institute were being stripped of their status, and therefore their students and candidates as well, she recalled being asked why she insisted on staying part of the organization by suing them when it was trying to expel the institute she had begun?  “Why do you bother to sue them? Why don’t you just go off and run your own  show, and let them go their way?” (2017; p. 26).  That would certainly seem to be one way of giving to the temptation to avoid conflict either by conforming superficially (to which she objected) or to escape it by leaving.

She replies, “Well, I think there are two reasons why we just shouldn’t sit. That’s what all the dissidents have done, and I think it has been to the detriment of psychoanalysis. And it has also been to the detriment of the dissidents” (2017; p. 27).  For the sake of subversiveness itself, Thompson insists on remaining part of the system.  She explains, “because if you have to start your own institute, the tendency is to overemphasize your own point of view, and also you lose the constructive criticism that goes with talking with people who disagree with you.  So, it seems to me, if it’s humanly possible, we should remain in contact in some way with the main psychoanalytic stream” (p. 27).  What Thompson is advocating for is to stay within the organization one is fighting against both to avoid becoming the very thing we are criticizing and for the sake of the organization one is criticizing.  “If we withdraw, we leave everyone open to continue to create a power situation, and it is conceivable that they might get a serious degree of power in psychoanalysis in the foreseeable future if nobody puts a stop to this particular cult-like attitude of theirs” (p. 27).   And, we might add, to stop the slide of institutionalized psychoanalysis into anti-psychoanalysis.  Indeed, staying in the organization and maintaining one’s subversive activities against its petrification provides hope.  She concludes, “and another thing I think we can do is to give the people inside the American more courage to assert themselves” (p. 27).

All that being said, an important caveat she provides to stay in the organization is, “if it’s humanly possible”.  What is the limit beyond which it is no longer humanly possible to remain in a destructive system of “secondary violence”?  In our reading, Thompson is purposefully imprecise about this limit because there can be no clear-cut objective criterion, but rather only a lived experiential limit for each of us to determine when our inevitable compromises have reached a level of bad faith that vitiates any vestige of psychoanalytic principles.

From our perspective the terms psychoanalysis and institution are opposing poles of an ongoing and evolving dialectic that, at its best, can be generative.  At its worst, it is precisely when the dialectic is broken and when either side of it, either the oppression of institutionalization, or the chaos of destruction, dominates.  Maintaining the dialectic is indeed the most difficult path, and this involves the recognition of our compromised and problematic position as members of these institutions.  This recognition is then accompanied by sustained discomfort throughout one’s professional trajectory.

Alongside Clara Thompson at the origins of the William Alanson White institute was Ralph Crowley, and he poses this provocative, even if obvious, question:

As with any new organization born of revolt, the problem is that of continual furthering of the principles for which it revolted. Has it furthered those principles or has it settled back in an orthodoxy of its own? In what ways has it maintained its freshness and appeal to new revolutionaries and in what ways has it not done so? (Crowley & Green, 1983; p. 3)

This dilemma captures the challenge of the difficult dialectic we are trying to flesh out.  How is it possible to remain an “activist” within an institution without losing one’s integrity as an activist? How does one remain psychoanalytic in a psychoanalytic institution?  Especially as one “belongs” to that institution!

To fully grasp the difficulty of maintaining this tension, let’s go back to Aulagnier’s concept of primary violence.  As we have loosely compared the development of the psyche to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, then both must rely on the curtailment of the libidinal drives in order to accomplish this sublimatory process.  But this requires putting the death drives to work to contain, to limit, and even to shape the clamor of life and libido.  As André Green put it in his study of sublimation, “the Eros of life, without mitigation, without being amended (without repression), is unlivable but it is life in all its power.  Conversely, when Eros is transformed, displaced, diverted upon what it itself has contributed to create in order to remain livable, to the extent that its creations inevitably propose themselves to be rivals of life, then they can only be paving the way for the death drives” (1993; p. 316).  The “primary violence” of the death drives is necessary to contain the potentially destructive ebullience of libidinal Eros.  However, we must also recognize how “easily” the institutions and psychic structures that grow out of that containment can become appropriated by the death drives and lead to a qualitatively new form of violence.  The latter, “secondary” form of violence is precisely what may make it no longer “humanly” possible (as per Thompson) to stay within the institution.

How we determine when that line is crossed is highly personal.  It might involve some guidelines that have informed our own experience.  For instance, “moving the needle of the discourse” might be a more accessible/realistic goal than changing the system, and have more impact than leaving.  It might just have an (often unseen) impact on others to feel less alone.  Also, and perhaps more importantly as we move up the ranks of an institute, we have found it vital for us to be there for the candidates and students, to validate their experience of the violence instead of being a secondary representative of that violence by masking it through rationalizations and thus invalidating their (and our own) experience.  The restlessness of the psychoanalytic turmoil within ourselves can be thought of as the guide to one’s always compromised independence and integrity.

Finally, this uneasy struggle at the heart of institutional life can be thought of not just as an echo of personal dynamics, something “we”, as psychoanalysts are all too quick to reduce it to, but also as refracting the challenges we face in the sociopolitical context, particularly the present one, which has contributed to laying bare inherent institutional violence unchecked by any counterweight such as Eros and truth, let alone psychoanalytic truth.  As Clara Thompson put it, “after all, the American Psychoanalytic cannot put us in jail or in a concentration camp, yet” (2017; p. 27, emphasis added).  The chilling prescience of her “yet” couldn’t link these two moments in time any better.

References

Aulagnier, P. (2001/1975)  The Violence of Interpretation (A. Sheridan trans.) New York: Routledge

Crowley, R. & Green, M. (1983) “Revolution Within Psychoanalysis: A History of the William Alanson White Institute.” Unpublished Manuscript

Freud, S. (1895/1955) Studies in Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud  (J. Strachey trans.), Vol. 2, London: Hogarth Press

Green, A. (1993) Le Travail du Négatif. Paris: Éditions de Minuit

Jacoby, R. (1986) The Repression of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: Chicago U. Press

Kirsner, D. (2000) Unfree Associations. London: Process Press

Thompson, C. (2017) “The History of the William Alanson White Institute”.  Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Volume 53, #1, pp. 7-28.

Wilner, W. (1996) Personal Communication.  William Alanson White Institute: NYC