 |
|
|
|
|
|
PRESIDENT'S
COLUMN April 2002 Timeliness and Timelessness There is a well known (to some) passage in the Talmud that goes like this: "After the destruction of the (Jewish) Temple in Jerusalem (in 70 A.D.) Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai set up an academy for the study of Torah in the town of Yavneh." What does this have to do with our situation today and with this column? Read on, and I will try to suggest the continued timeliness and relevance of this nearly 2000 year old passage. I write this column about two weeks before the Spring meeting of Division 39 in New York. The reception at our Spring meeting will have occurred exactly seven months to the day after the September 11 attack. Scenes of horror—and for some of our members in New York and Washington, D.C., experiences of terror—have assaulted us for the past seven months. As I write, the violence in the Middle East has spiraled into nearly full-scale war. By the time you get this newsletter, our meetings will be over, and no one can predict what will happen in the several weeks it will take for this column to make its way into print and into your mail, but perhaps once again the world will have been changed. In that sense, a quarterly newsletter, written a couple of weeks before it goes to press, and then bulk mailed to you for delivery weeks later, is hardly timely (something that will be remedied as our new internet site is constructed, enabling the newsletter and other updates to be immediately available). But for now, what I write may be hopelessly out of date the moment it gets emailed to the editor. Rarely, in our lives, have we experienced such a rapid and shifting sense of how the world is. Since September 11th—and subsequently, in our visions of extraordinary religious militancy, suicidal attacks, suicide bombers, war and retaliation—we have seen many efforts to understand a world that many of us had come to experience as relatively benign. But I wonder if that benign experience is something of an anomaly, an epiphenomenon, in a longer view of things. The world has not always been benign. Some of our members fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Some are refugees from oppression and the Holocaust. Some grew up in the context of the Cold War, with the background tension of nuclear threat. Some of us may remember the Cuban missile crisis and the horrifying realization, in that moment, that nuclear destruction was not simply a vague possibility that we read about in newspapers. The Way Life Should Be If you drive North from Boston and cross the Maine line you encounter a sign which says, "Welcome to Maine: The Way life Should Be." One can feel the tension flowing from one's body as the sign greets you with its anticipation of a relaxed, unhurried, soul soothing vacation. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a decade of remarkable prosperity for much of the Western world, daily life took on a different hue. While it wasn't quite a Maine vacation, we didn't worry about our safety, except perhaps on the highways. We were lulled into vision of the world, and of life, as essentially benign, carrying only the joys and sorrows that we "expect" to experience. This was life as it should be, or should have been, filled with ordinary struggles, as well as moments of satisfaction and happiness. All that seemed to change, for Americans, on September 11th. I believe the trauma of the experience of September 11th has yet to be fully described. It was not simply the immediate horror and viciousness of this attack that proved so traumatic. It was also an attack on the way we had come to see the world—as we thought it ought to be. What does this have to do with psychoanalysis? A century ago, Freud began to expand his vision of psychoanalysis. While he continued to develop and change his clinical, technical and metapsychological theories, he took on much bigger issues regarding the nature of human experience. He applied psychoanalytic ideas to literature and art, to group processes, to religion, to the nature of human civilization, and in one of his final works (Moses and Monotheism), to the human construction of God. For a good part of the twentieth century the application of psychoanalytic understandings to the human experience continued among some of Freud's epigons and acolytes. But, apart from the contributions of Freud and Jung, it is not clear how much of a mark these have left in collective Western thinking. Ultimately, the effort to apply psychoanalytic insight outside of the clinical arena felt into disuse. Perhaps this came about because psychoanalysis itself was no longer the most exciting arena of intellectual ferment, no longer the new kid on the block. Perhaps the effort to apply psychoanalysis beyond the clinical arena overreached itself, reworking the ideas of the master, but saying little that was new. But, a central question remained. Is psychoanalysis truly applicable to understanding everything about the human experience? This is a question I think we ask too infrequently when we venture beyond our area of hands on experience. Moreover, how many minds can truly aspire to take on the "big" questions? While I believe that if we don't take risks in our thinking we gain nothing new, I think we in psychoanalysis are prone, perhaps more than in other fields, to want for a certain humility in what we think we know and don't know. Clinically, however, things have been different. Clinical psychoanalysis, despite its death proclaimed over and over again in the media, continues to develop, to remain alive and filled with excitement, controversy and new paradigms. After September 11th, which shocked us traumatically and forced us to take notice of other views of life—including a view that exalted self destruction and the destruction of others—there has been of flurry of renewed efforts to expand the application psychoanalytic ideas beyond the clinical arena. Clearly, these ideas, published in newsletters, circulated on the internet, presented at meetings, and no doubt soon to be published, were not simply a dispassionate effort at understanding. It was our response to trauma (as, no doubt, is this column). As psychoanalytic psychologists we are in the business of understanding. And when we were faced with something that seemed incomprehensible, we have tried to apply our ways of knowing the world, of making sense of it, to these phenomena. But I am not sure how useful this effort has been, other than providing some sense of security, a feeling of knowing and understanding. Personally, I am a skeptic about the application of psychoanalytic perspectives too broadly. I wonder if our effort to apply psychoanalytic ideas beyond the consulting room is not only illusory, but may foreclose the deeper comprehension that can come only with incorporating knowledge from other fields in which we are not experts—history, economics, anthropology, politics, religion—and equally important, in keeping our questions and our uncertainty on the table without premature resolution, however uncomfortable that may be. To the extent that our knowledge is useful, it is, I believe, because it is based in experience, real clinical experience, however muddy, unsystematic and complex this may sometimes seem. But how many of us have worked with a suicide bomber, lived in a refugee camp, faced daily humiliation, lived with a sense of constant fear and imprisonment in our daily activities, or even felt grateful to be searched by a guard carrying a submachine gun in order to get into a coffee shop, if we dared to go to one? Of course, there are some things we know pretty well. One of them, which Freud understood in his earliest investigations, is that the essence of trauma is the experience of helplessness, a massive loss of personal agency, an experience of overwhelming entrapment and incomprehensibility. And one thing we may try to do when faced with this is to DO something to try recover our experience of agency, to try to feel not completely helpless and meaningless in our lives. And so we may write and speculate about the meaning of the events which have so affected our feeling of predictability and control that comes with a more benign view of the world. But I wonder if the timeless wisdom of the Talmudic passage I cited at the beginning of this column might give us another, perhaps more humble, avenue for our efforts and needs. As I understand it, this passage suggests that even in the face of the most terrible destruction and loss, it is important, vital, the essence of life, to go on with life, and that the most important way to do this is to insure its continuity, the continuity of our values, belief and knowledge, through our own study and—in a way which is sure to challenge our sense of knowing and certainty—the education of those who follow . In our own small, parochial way, in our small corner of the planet, this has been what the recent initiatives in Division 39 have been about: to revitalize the teaching and learning of psychoanalysis, both in form and substance, to insure its continuity, to provide the gift of the excitement we experience in this work to the next generation. It is in these efforts that we DO something, that we affirm life in the face of darkness and provide for the possibility of growth for ourselves and those who follow us in the future. I hope these comments are understood in that
context and have not been themselves too overreaching. I welcome your
reactions to these thoughts and will print those I can in the next
newsletter. Now for some mundane matters, still of importance to us in Division 39. First, the warmest congratulations to Elaine Martin and her extraordinarily effective committee on the success of the program of the Spring Meeting. This program has it all. It is all of what is exciting and interesting in psychoanalysis today, from every point of view and vantage point. In addition, we are especially grateful to the truly loving care demonstrated by Natalie Shear and her associate, Jen Grudza, who have had to deal with no end of challenges and last minute surprises no one could have anticipated. They dealt with them with grace, professionalism, creativity and even good humor. We are fortunate to be working with this group of professionals. And, following up on some of my presidential initiatives, I would like to welcome Dennis Debiak as the new Chair of the Committee on Sexual Identity and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Issues. This committee, a long time in coming, was approved by the Board in January. And welcome to committee members Victor Bonfilio, Randi Kaufman, Bethany Riddle (Grad Student), John Rosario-Perez and Barbara Artson. Welcome also to Margaret Fulton from Minnesota and Danielle Knafo from New York as co -chairs of the newly reconfigured Public Information Committee. They will be announcing their committee membership and plans for the year in the next newsletter. I know they bring the energy, fresh ideas and political savvy this job requires. Finally, perhaps in keeping with the theme of this column, we have been able to deliver on the commitment I made to include graduate students on all of the Division's committees. A list of these new members of our effort to involve students in the work of the Division and in our future follows below. In the meantime, if you have plowed though this, thanks for reading. Feel free to contact me at jslavin@aol.com Graduate Students Newly Appointed to Division Committees Claire Haiman, Rutgers: Education and
Training Committee Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D. Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D.,
|
