bringing politics into therapy

Sociologist Zygmund Bauman (2006) described “liquid fears” to capture how our terrors move seamlessly from one potential dread to another, including, as I mentioned earlier, economic dislocation, authoritarian politics, terrorist fundamentalism, weapons of mass destruction, and ecological disaster. Twenty-four-hour “you are there” access to their devastation via television and social media continuously fuels our sense of being threatened. Moreover, as Bauman argued, in our negatively globalized planet, which is a mosaic of ethnic and religious diasporas, we can no longer speak of “inside” versus “outside” or the “center” versus the “periphery,” as all kinds of boundaries—geographic, cultural, political, and demographic—melt before our eyes. (639)Shame, the quintessential emotion associated with the inability to embody the cultural ideal of autonomy and self-sufficiency, is the affective ally of hegemony. Failure is experienced as proof of personal inadequacy rather than social catastrophe. Shame often produces vengeful rage chaotically expressed. (642)We can expand the horizons of psychological remediation in our clinical work when we seek to locate where and how neoliberal patterns of responsibilization, privatization, marketization, and othering are manifest in and disturb the subject’s affective experience of self and others. (644)I believe that a social psychoanalytic process can provide a space for learning to use one’s mind to tolerate anxieties produced by our traumatogenic environment and to risk acting on behalf of desires for alternatives in social as well as personal life. A social psychoanalysis might thereby facilitate the emergence of individuals who come to know themselves as subjects able to contribute to healing our times of social malaise. (648)