Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action

Robin McCoy Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

This fascinating volume uses psychoanalytic theory to explore how political subjectivity comes about within the context of global catastrophe, via the emergence of collective individuations through trans-subjectivity. Serving as a jumping-off point to address the structural linkage between collective catastrophe, subject, group, and political transformation, trans-subjectivity is the central tenet of the book, conceptualized as a psyche-social dynamic that initiates social transformation and which may be enhanced in the clinical setting.

Each chapter investigates a distinct manifestation of trans-subjectivity in relation to various real-world events as they manifest clinically in the analytic couple and within group processes. The author builds her conceptual arguments through a psyche/social reading of Kristeva's theory of signifiance (sublimation), Lacan's 1945 essay on collective logic, Heidegger's secular reading of the apostle Paul's Christian revolution, and Žižek, Badiou and Jung's conception of the neighbor within a differentiated humanity. The book features clinical illustrations, an auto-ethnographic study of the emergence of an AIDS clinic, an accounting of trans-subjectivity in Black revolutionary events in the U.S., and an examination of some expressions of care that arose in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action is important reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamic based therapists, psychologists, group therapists, philosophers and political activists.

Chapter 1 Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness

DOI: 10.4324/9781003136873-1

It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one.

Beryl Markham in West with the Night

Introduction

Carl Jung made a prophetic observation that spoke not only of the catastrophic effects of World War I but also foreshadowed a future whose terrifying remainders linger tragically today. From the ruins of a shattered Europe, he instructs us with the urgency of originary knowledge. “To really break with [a soul deadening] tradition,” Jung said, one has to be “willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with [one’s] own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that [one’s life] is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning” (Jung, 1927/1970, para. 268). Even though peace and economic recovery appeared to be re-establishing itself in 1927 when Jung wrote this essay, the coming Great Depression of 1929 would soon unravel any sense of regained civility or stability in and beyond Western civilization. New and appalling levels of disregard for human life, including ethnic diversity would soon advance as economic instability would further give way to already rising extremist movements that would enable decades of uncritically held violence. It was from this moment in history that Jung was urgently speaking. The traditional ways of understanding and attending to the prevailing crisis of spirit were failing.¹ Indeed, the crises at hand arose from a carelessness of thought in the first place and the withdrawal of thought from the body. Collective blindness to a ruin that none of us can escape, then and now contributed to the spread of what Bernard Stiegler refers to the “ordinary, everyday apocalyptic feeling—the feeling and the knowledge that something has come to an end” (Stiegler, 2013, p. 10).²

Jung described the inauguration of the subject (self) and redemption of a savaged Europe as being dependent upon one’s capacity to surrender to the neighbor’s plight, or as he put it—to take the step that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra could not take, the step toward the “ugliest man, who is the real man” (1927/1970, paras. 268–271, my emphasis). The “real” as I am using it here is a term created by Jacques Lacan that is correlated with the effects of contingent traumatic events that shape human beings. That is, the self is contingent³ upon its encounters with the real whose very definition lies in its utter resistance to symbolization and is therefore incomprehensible, unintelligible, and inarticulatable. While experienced as an alien force that suddenly penetrates us from outside of ourselves, the real touches us from within (one’s psychology). The sensorial effects of the present trauma, therefore, aggravates my psychical scar tissue that has accumulated over time and resonates with all of the other times I have constituently failed to understand (what Heidegger refers to as existential guilt) what was happening to me—or my world. Encounters with the real will radically disrupt our coherent sense of reality. Put another way, the real as a transcendental dimension of unintelligibility is experienced through unbearable bodily intensities such as shock, horror, dread, anxiety, and the violent whoosh of emptying out (one’s bowels, mind, stomach, vitality, or life force) while violently breaking through banal existence. For Lacan, the neighbor is the real (Žižek & Daly, 2009). What breaks through banality holds the potential for a different kind of knowledge that Heidegger referred to (following Kant) as authentic or originary knowledge from which we may begin view ourselves, our neighbor and world from a more vivifying perspective.

Jung contended that the self’s telos was furthered through the principle of enantiodromia when encountering the real of the neighbor. Enantiodromia is a psychological process that occurs when the emergence of an unconscious opposing quality is integrated into the personality. Zarathustra, as the Nietzschian “Superman/Dionysian” figure was analogous with the Jungian self and the ugliest man represented his shadow opposite. Elaborating on this idea further, Jung stated: “The man that makes for growth is the ugliest man, the inferior man, the instinctive collective being, and that is exactly what he loathes the most” (Jung, 1998, p. 164). This step toward the real of the neighbor, Jung continued was generated within the individual from a “higher plane of love” and compelled one to break out of heretofore unconscious deadening social and psychological ideological restraints, as St. Paul had done (1927/1970, para. 265).

Let’s take a deeper look into Jung’s engagement with Nietzsche’s text. Jung identified Zarathustra’s moment of truth as culminating through his violent sensorial repulsion upon taking in the real of his neighbor. Leading up to this moment, Zarathustra finds himself on a path in a barren wasteland depicted as a valley of death that is devoid of all animal life (Nietzsche, 2012, pp. 310–311). Nietzsche describes the impending face-off as one that slowly registers through the protagonist’s encroaching anxiety and darkening mood while pulling his awareness inward. “Then, however,” Nietzsche narrates, “when he [Zarathustra] opened his eyes, he saw something sitting by the wayside shaped like a man, and hardly like a man, something nondescript. And all at once there came over Zarathustra a great shame, because he had gazed on such a thing” (p. 311). Zarathustra encounters the real of the ugliest man, his neighbor.

If only Zarathustra could have tolerated the unbearable intensity of his own terrible shame when faced with the horror of the ugliest man’s ex-sistence⁴…a shame that momentarily evoked a deeply personal and ethical response to the impossibility of his neighbor’s demand that is also, and this is a central point of this essay…crucially linked to the fate of his own dawning humanity. However, this is not the step that Zarathustra could take because the shame in witnessing the rawness of being human overwhelmed him. Let’s follow the text with a sample of the ugliest man’s retort to Zarathustra upon his failure to bear the shame that is evoked under the neighbor’s disemboweling gaze:

Thou thinkest thyself wise, thou proud Zarathustra! Read the riddle, thou hard nut-cracker,--the riddle that I am! Say then: who am_I_! –When however Zarathustra had heard these words, __ what think ye then took place in his soul? PITY OVERCAME HIM; and he sank down all at once, like an oak that hath long withstood many tree-fellers….heavily, suddenly, to the terror even of those who meant to fell it. But immediately he got up again from the ground, and his countenance became stern. (Nietzsche, 2012, pp. 311–312).

In a single moment, we can see how Zarathustra’s shame was rapidly converted to sternly masked pity, thus demoting my neighbor as fellow creature into less than.

This unconscious dynamic is played out ubiquitously in daily life such as when I mindlessly give my spare change to a nameless homeless creature in my neighborhood or other countless impersonal so called charitable gestures that momentarily absolve me from a more intimate or dangerous libidinal connection with the empty thing (das Ding or the enigmatic core of being/self). Our embeddedness within collectives is both a source of social belonging and deadening hegemonic control. We are (all of us) helplessly lulled in our human animal status that is lodged in a primal level of uncritically held immersion in our every day practices with others, what Jung referred to as “the herd,” Heidegger described as “das Man” or Stiegler the “inhuman-being that we are” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 164; Jung, 1998; Stiegler, 2013, p. 132).⁵ The collective hypnotic experience of das Man, however, is susceptible to sudden and meaningless eschatological disruptions that may compel us to decide a new way of being—where what once had seemed impossible becomes possible. Contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou elaborates on this idea thus:

There is only a particular kind of animal, evoked by certain circumstances to become a subject – or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject. This is to say that at a given moment, everything he is – his body, his abilities – is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path. This is when the human animal is convoked to be the immortal that he was not yet. (2001, p. 40)

In other words, something actually happens to us, a kind of radical contingency that violently pulls us down to our knees by revealing an inescapable and singular poignancy. If we can contain our unbearable libidinal intensities without going up in flames, possibilities that were here-to-fore unthinkable can reveal the obvious…that it is time be serious.

What then are the conditions within my intersecting worlds of experience and my own psychology that allow me to respond meaningfully to my own singular moment of truth? How do I come to acknowledge the enigma of my neighbor as an obligation to make myself accountable to myself and to others for what I say and do (Butler, 2005)? In this essay, I argue for a notion of political action that can emerge when the realities of what concerns us in our everyday lives becomes radically penetrated by a destabilizing threat to what we deeply care about. Such a destabilizing threat has the potential to completely alter how we care, think, practice, and creates a possibility for starting over again in the face of powerlessness from conditions where there is no hope.

In the process of writing this paper, I realized that I needed to expand my research approach into an interdisciplinary design in order to respond to the questions I pose in the introduction and throughout. As such, I focus on the themes that the questions evoke and engage in a sustained dialogue with those themes from different ways of knowing within academia (theory) and outside of it (the applied action that can occurs through collective inquiry). The disciplines I thematically engage are philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. My aim is not to bridge theoretical divides into a unified whole but to critically hold what is thematically relevant. While this research framework includes aspects of a traditional compare and contrast approach in addition to a critique of different thinking systems, it predominantly attempts to reach outside of those systems by looking creatively into new ways of investigating questions that are beyond traditional frames of understanding with the aim of attempting to rethink what it means to be a human subject amidst collective blindness in our moment of history.⁶

The narrative journey that follows does not provide the reader with closure to the questions posed but will, I hope, provide an impetus for further discourse. To this end, I engage with Slavoj Žižek’s political theory as it relates to political subjectivity along-side of Badiou’s characterization of the subject indelibly marked by an event of truth. I attempt to balance the theoretical and methodological rigor behind this notion of political action as it intersects the emotional, relational, and creative experiences of actual people engaging the real of the neighbor amidst a plague. Illustratively, I use a concrete example that arose from and in response to the catastrophic effects of the real of the AIDS pandemic in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s and 1990s from an autoethnographic perspective.⁷ Autoethnography is a contemporary form of social research that attempts to understand the complexities of individuals among others and their unique struggles within the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and essentially how to make meaning of an existence that has suddenly lost its foundation in the midst of a crises (Adams, Jones & Ellis, 2015). As an analyst/psychotherapist member of this forming community, I use my own experiences in conjunction with the oral and written histories of my immediate colleagues and long-term survivors in the study of the conditions under which the emergence of a community-based clinic run for and by the people living and dying of AIDS occurred. I portray a revolution of egalitarian-based care that emerged from a social void that cracked open and illuminated the real of AIDS.

Lastly, I wrestle with early Heidegger’s secular reading of the Apostle Paul and the Christian revolution as means of engaging his formulations of authentic knowledge and its co-affectivity within group contexts. I incorporate distinct aspects of Badiou and Jung’s use of Pauline doctrine to augment the discussion. Heidegger was interested in understanding what he referred to as the “factical life experience” or the here-and-now existence of Paul and the early Christian community he founded as it was shaped by their co-engagement with the event of conversion and eschatological rupture. I attempt to unthread certain intricacies of facticity to the extent that we might better understand how the Pauline subject of the Christian revolution might be relevant to contemporary emancipatory enterprises whose ontological ground (and transcendental agency) is rooted in authentic rupture.

Theoretical considerations of political subjectivity and action

Žižek offers a political theory that does not separate the subject from the social/political/historical forces from which it is embedded except through its particular encounters with the real. He views the symbolic structures the subject is always already inserted in throughout life as the very conditions of possibility for identity. This includes a polity that has failed to adequately recognize and/or come to terms with the crisis it is undergoing as was the case with the AIDS crisis. Indeed, the subject in Žižek’s mind is a political possibility to be realized through the political act that can only occur when the subject encounters the real of a particular societal absence via the lived experience of disavowed others or those who live outside of society’s material, emotional and/or social scope of recognition...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Ladson Hinton
• Introduction: Healing is political
• 1 Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness
• 2 From leper-thing to another side of care: a reading of Lacan's logical collectivity
• 3 A subversive reading of Kristeva and sublimation
• 4 Trans-subjective agency illustrated in the reals of US (post) slavery racism
• Index