The Couch in the Marketplace: Psychoanalysis and Social Reality

THE COUCH IN THE MARKETPLACE THE COUCH IN THE MARKETPLACE Psychoanalysis and Social Reality H. Shmuel Erlich First published 2013 by Karnac Books Ltd. Published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 by H. Shmuel Erlich The right of H. Shmuel Erlich to be identiﬁ ed as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 9781782200307 (pbk) Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India To Mira The unending fountain of light, joy, and perspicacity CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix CHAPTER ONE Psychoanalysis: view from within the box, living out of the box 1 CHAPTER TWO Contributions from open systems, group relations, and systems psychodynamics 9 CHAPTER THREE Working on the boundary and analytic survival 17 CHAPTER FOUR Identity, reality, and inner experience 31 CHAPTER FIVE The identity of the psychoanalyst 41 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER SIX Der Mann Moses and the man Freud: leadership, legacy, and anti-Semitism 45 CHAPTER SEVEN Crossroads of engagement: meeting of minds or isolationism? 61 CHAPTER EIGHT The discontent of the subject and the well-being of civilisation 75 CHAPTER NINE Discourse with an enemy 83 CHAPTER TEN The psychoanalyst between uncanny reality and factual reality 101 CHAPTER ELEVEN A beam of darkness: understanding the terrorist mind 113 CHAPTER TWELVE Paranoia and regression in groups and organisations 123 CHAPTER THIRTEEN The elusive subject and the psychoanalytic study of organisations 133 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Mental health under fire: organisational intervention in a wounded service 145 CHAPTER FIFTEEN Psychoanalytic societies on the couch 167 REFERENCES 177 INDEX 185 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter Three: “Working on the boundary and analytic survival” was originally published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (published by John Wiley & Sons in 2003), and is reprinted with kind permission of John Wiley & Sons. Chapter Nine: “Discourse with an enemy” was originally published in: The Inner World in the Outer World: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, edited by Edward R. Shapiro (published by Yale University Press in 1997), and is reprinted with kind permission of Yale University Press. Chapter Eleven: “A beam of darkness—understanding the terrorist mind” was originally published in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on a Turbulent World, edited by Halina Brunning and Mario Perini (published by Karnac Books in 2010), and is reprinted with kind permission of Karnac Books. Chapter Twelve: “Paranoia and regression in groups and organisations” was originally published in The Systems Psychodynamics of Organizations: Integrating the Group Relations Approach, Psychoanalytic, and Open Systems Perspectives, edited by Laurence J. Gould, Mark Stein, and Lionel F. Stapley (published by Karnac Books in 2006), and is reprinted with kind permission of Karnac Books. ix x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter Thirteen: “The elusive subject and the psychoanalytic study of organisations” was originally published in OPUS Vol. 2 No. 1: Organisational and Social Dynamics, edited by Laurence J. Gould and Paul Hoggett (published by Karnac Books in 2002), and is reprinted with kind permission of Karnac Books. Chapter Fourteen: “Mental health under fire: organisational intervention in a wounded service” was originally published in Group Relations, Management, and Organization, edited by Robert French and Russ Vince (published by Oxford University Press in 1999) and is reprinted here with kind permission of Oxford University Press. CHAPTER ONE Psychoanalysis: view from within the box, living out of the box his book brings together diverse writings of mine from different periods. They do cohere, however, around an underlying theme, Twhich sometimes is explicit and at other times is implicit. They deal with a theme that has preoccupied me throughout my professional career: the relationship between our internal world and external reality. We live in both worlds, and have usually become quite adept at integrating them seamlessly. As psychoanalysts, however, we have a somewhat skewed way of ordering and prioritising our perceptions and insights: we view life from within the box, so to speak. We typically place greater value on the internal, psychic world and tend to search for its manifestations in external reality, rather than the other way around. This skewed perception has become our specialty and trademark, and it shapes our understanding and interpretations in ways that are sometimes not easily digestible by non-analysts. As a practicing psychoanalyst, I am deeply committed to this stance. Yet this way of putting it is not entirely accurate. Since its incep- tion, psychoanalysis has coped with the tension between internal and external causation. It is enshrined in Freud’s shift from the more easily graspable, experience-near and trauma-centred “seduction theory” to the relatively experience-distant and more difficult to grasp “fantasy 1 2 THE COUCH IN THE MARKETPLACE theory”. This swing represents a shift in the locus of causality, in what “really matters”, and therefore has far-reaching ramifications that deeply affect one’s Weltanschauung in other areas of living as well. Yet even Freud never quite relinquished his hold on trauma and trau- matogenic causality, and this tension persists to this day. It manifests itself in the present controversies that mark the field of psychoanalysis; it is indeed a fair way to understand the divergence of approaches within it. Psychoanalysis has never abandoned the wish to provide its own view and comprehension of social processes. Beginning with Freud’s writings on social and cultural issues, this trend has continued unin- terruptedly, producing a respectable volume of work, and generat- ing fascinating hypotheses and theories. What needs to be addressed, therefore, is the need for yet another book in this area. In attempting to answer this question, I realise that I cannot avoid some sort of personal account if I do not wish to confine myself to a dry schematic answer. On top of my involvement in and curiosity about individual treatment, I have experienced fairly early in my training two additional influences: the importance of a therapeutic community in intensive in-patient treatment, and Bion’s work with groups as represented in Tavistock group relations conferences. I subsequently introduced a community programme, coupled with intensive individual psychotherapy, in the in-service adolescent unit I founded and directed in a psychiatric hospital in Jerusalem (Erlich, 1983). Several years later, I co-founded with colleagues OFEK—The Israel Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes—to establish Group Relations work in the Tavistock tradition in Israel. I directed and worked on the staff of many conferences in Israel and abroad. Still later, I co-founded and served on the faculty of the Program in Organizational Consultation and Development—A Systems Psychoan- alytic Approach, co-sponsored by the Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber Centers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; OFEK; and the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute in New York. During the same time I completed my psychoanalytic training in the Israel Psychoana- lytic Institute and joined the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, where I am a training and supervising analyst, and have served as president and chair of the training committee. Undoubtedly, these parallel trends have informed my activities, my thinking, and my writing. Although at the surface they may represent PSYCHOANALYSIS 3 strikingly different modes of activity, conduct, and intervention, I never experienced them to conflict or contradict one another. On the contrary, I felt that they deeply enriched and complemented each other. Con- cepts from open systems theory served to highlight and make intel- ligible aspects of psychoanalytic practice (especially those pertaining to setting, boundaries, and role). Group relations experience underscored and informed the difficulties in managing boundaries, staying in role, and feeling authorised to do the work. It also served as a unique labora- tory for the interdigitation of person and role, of unconscious dynamics with observable phenomena. The group relations approach, welding as it does psychoanalytic and systemic understanding, has always been for me a convincing demonstration and implementation of psychoanalysis, provided that enough discipline is present so as to avoid “wild” psychoanalytic interventions. The psychoanalyst in his1 consulting room is often a very lonely person. This loneliness does not prevent him, and in fact may drive him to form ideas about the outside world. The analytic notions provided in this way may reflect the analyst’s understanding of personal dynam-

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