Joseph Scalia III
Can we Create and Sustain an Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis?[1]
Psychoanalysis has always been plagued by disruptions within its politics. In contrast to its popular or currently imaginary meaning, by politics, I mean the collectively creative practice that can only occur in an autonomous society, a society that is necessarily composed of autonomous individuals. Autonomy inheres a reflectivity in which the norms, values, prohibitions, etc. of a given society are recognized as social imaginaries, as always being only one possible set of guideposts for a society and the individuals who compose it. Although we live as though that which is interpellated in us constitutes an immutable or matter-of-fact truth, autonomy means that one is capable of, and indeed practices, reflecting upon that and creatively imagining alternatives. Inextricable here is a will to live by a critical and creative path.
Attendant to the above is the point that one creates a meaning for one’s life. Then, we must add that point that a psychoanalyst, ipso facto, is someone who, amongst other characteristics, has – in the above fashion – developed a meaning for his or her own life. Otherwise, they cannot provide a dyadic – or a group – space in which the analysand or group members can recognize their own capture in social imaginaries, and create their own autonomously determined meaning for their own life.
Now, of course, an immediate set of question arises at this juncture. That is, although it is clearer to claim the existence of such individuals, is it possible to accomplish or build a society composed of such individuals, or a society or group that generates them?
An experiment in democracy would be, in the instance aimed at by the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis, can its members come together in such a way?
From that multifaceted starting point, IDP asks several orienting questions. What constitutes a psychoanalyst? What constitutes psychoanalysis itself? What constitutes individual and collective educational spaces in which the above questions can be explored as, in fact, a collective?
Crucial considerations must serve as starting points in a group living within potential answers to the above orienting questions.
First, a democratic psychoanalytic institute must recognize the pervasive controlling or censorship practices of the historical psychoanalytic Establishment and its ruling caste. Then appears another prerequisite, the critical acceptance of the obvious sequela that it would be extremely difficult to create such a school, and that, in accompaniment to that reflection, it would always be the case that such an accomplishment, or, rather the practical answers to the above “orienting questions” would never constitute final answers, any more than is the accomplishment of an end of analysis.
Next, we might, or must, accept the premise that the traditional path to qualification as an analyst is always open to alteration, or even transformation. And yet, another question then arises. If a hierarchical approach to all of the answering of these questions is itself inherently non-democratic, what would a responsible alternative, an autonomous alternative, possibly look like? More the point here would be, what is to be done with the problem of leadership, with the nagging question of, if leaders are to be democratic, how might they avoid the opposite deadly outcomes of either authoritarianism, on the one hand, and a laissez-faire approach on the other?
Lastly, who decides whether anyone in such an institution, one which practices an inherent institutional analysis, is capable of community?
Thus begins our experiment.
[1] The ideas presented here deploy the thinking of, among others, Sigmund Freud, Felix Guattari, Cornelius Castoriadis, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Christopher Bollas, and Adam Phillips.