Research Area in Psychoanalysis and Education
Social Psychoanalysis and Its Applications
What does it mean to pursue the comfort of daily life in the presence of profound injustice? How do acts of dissociation, denial, and silencing shape our interactions with other people? How do we make sense of the current rise of right-wing extremism and racial violence despite our awareness of the horrors wrought fascism and the Holocaust in the twentieth century? Will we respond to the ethical demands that social and political crises place on us or do we stand silently by?
These are the kinds of questions that are central to our research. We draw on psychoanalysis to better understand the unconscious social and psychological dynamics that sustain injustice. Psychoanalysis is oriented towards listening for that which remains unsaid. What might be pushed to the margins, lurking outside of conscious awareness or waiting to be discerned? We believe it is important to examine not just the nature of the individual psyche, or patterns of interaction between people, but how we are unconsciously shaped by social forces and political power structures. This perspective is known as social psychoanalysis.
Social psychoanalysis explores the unconscious societal, political, and psychological dynamics that shape us, be it in society at large or in the practice of psychotherapy. Our research has two main areas of focus:
1. Social Crises, Silencing, and Reparative Memory: We are interested in the underlying and often unconscious social, political, and psychological dynamics that contribute to the growth of social crises and that foster the denial and silencing of responsibility. These crises include the growth of right-wing authoritarianism, the impact of antisemitism and racism, the effects of genocide and racial violence over time, and the climate emergency. We seek to explore a series of questions: Why and in what ways are these crises dissociated or denied? Can silencing be replaced with a felt responsibility? How might psychoanalysis contribute to our understanding of psychological and political agency? And what is the role of reparative memory for creating awareness and change?
2. Psychoanalysis and the Political: We are interested in how the therapeutic relationship between the patient and the analyst is always and inevitably shaped by social and political dynamics (such as racism, gender, ideology, power, and socioeconomic class). How does contemporary psychoanalysis address the reality of the political, both within the treatment room and outside of it? In what ways has the profession struggled to address the political over time and how might this change? What can we learn from the radical history of the profession or from work being carried out in progressive community clinics across different countries and continents?
Social psychoanalysis is an approach that has a long yet often neglected history in the profession of psychoanalysis. It is indebted to the political psychoanalysts of the 1920s, to the early work of Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich which addressed the dangers of fascism during its rise in the 1930s, and to the postcolonial ideas of Franz Fanon during the 1950s. We draw from the history of social psychoanalysis and from contemporary social psychoanalytic research to address current social crises and the place of the political within psychoanalysis. Our approach has wide-reaching applications across multiple disciplines. It is connected to the fields of psychosocial studies, psychoanalytic social psychology, political psychology, and to current research on the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic process.
Our explorations of social psychoanalysis and its theoretical and clinical applications are undertaken within the larger, interdisciplinary area of study known as Bildungswissenschaften (roughly translated as educational sciences), which emerged in German speaking countries and the Netherlands during the latter half of twentieth century. In the broadest sense, Bildungswissenschaften examine the nature of the human mind and development across the lifespan from psychological, anthropological, sociological, philosophical and educational perspectives.
