Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.143)
Ahem.
PJ (00:11.248)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Carolyn Lawbender, senior lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. And we're talking about her book, The Political Clinic, Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the 20th Century. Dr. Lawbender, wonderful to have you on today.
Carolyn Laubender (00:33.41)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be
PJ (00:36.794)
So just kind of as a starting question, why this book? Why do we need this book and what led you to kind of do this project? I assume some of it has to do with, you have a really entertaining introductory story. Like I can feel the academic tension. Like I was like, I felt that, yeah. But anyways.
Carolyn Laubender (00:56.494)
Absolutely, yeah. So my answer kind of would come in two parts and it does pick up a bit with the climate of that story. So I think the first part of the answer and like the two parts are like one is kind of in the clinical world, the psychoanalytic and even perhaps psychological clinical world. And then the other part of the question or answer is about the academic world and academic debates. So for the clinical side of things, you know,
Since 2020, but I would say even before that in a more underground way, but since 2020, since the murder of George Floyd, and then increasingly today, as we kind of witnessed the genocide in Gaza, there's been a real sea change in the way that psychoanalytic institutes and psychoanalytic trainings and psychoanalysts are being asked to respond to the politics of their practice. So for a long time before that, I guess, so the story goes,
there's been a really dominant understanding of psychoanalytic practice as being politically neutral or politically disengaged or objective. If you go through training institutes, especially the classic ones in the United States or in the United Kingdom, which are kind of object relational, which is a term I can talk about, and ego oriented, which is also a term I can talk about, they're gonna kind of present the role of psychoanalysis as a conceptual apparatus. And then the analyst,
as kind of wanting to adopt a stance of disengagement, of neutrality, right? And that's in their understanding, this is to kind of protect the patient and allow the patient their own space for exploration. But what we started to see, and what I think that had been kind of underground for many years before this, before the murder of George Floyd, but what you started to see in the wake of George Floyd's murder, and then now we see it increasingly with the situation in Palestine,
is that especially young trainees, people who are kind of coming up, I would say young people, people of color, people who are from minoritized backgrounds, poor folks, they're understanding that psychoanalytic practice actually can't be politically disengaged. And they're asking about its relationship to social justice. And this has led to a series of really intense debates within psychoanalytic societies.
Carolyn Laubender (03:17.238)
some of which have started making international news, believe it or not. There's a Guardian story from about a year ago that focuses on a professor and a clinical psychologist named Laura Sheehy, who I know well, and she's a kind of wonderful scholar, but who was being targeted for her position on Palestine and had been deplatformed from her role as one of the organizers of the American Psychoanalytic Association, where she was supposed to give a
and they sort of canceled her talk on war because of her political views. then this had mushrooming consequences, right? Because she spoke out on her own behalf, people came to her defense, it started making international news. This is just one of many different kind of local examples of the ways that kind of historically conservative institutes have been butting heads.
with folks who are demanding that they kind of account for the politics of their practice, and even to understand their practice as political in any way. So in that clinical answer is that the book is my attempt to understand the politics of psychoanalytic practice in a primarily historical, but also critical theoretical way. I come from a background
I'm an academic by training, right? I'm not a clinical practitioner, even though I work and train in clinical programs and departments now. But I come from a background in literary study and in history and critical theory. And so when I was thinking about these questions for myself, I was really interested in like, okay, well, how do we get to this moment, right? Like what is psychoanalytic practice if there's this fervent contingent that's saying,
that it's apolitical and then this fervent contention that is demanding that it kind of account for its politics. how do we arrive here? What has been the background of psychoanalytic practice, even going as far back as Freud? And so the book is a kind of, it's a historical engagement with some of the founding figures really of psychoanalysis in a post Freudian tradition, specifically those figures who are associated with the British psychoanalytical society.
Carolyn Laubender (05:30.168)
So it's sort of a micro history of that society, but that society has huge impact on the shape of psychoanalysis globally. So that's the kind of clinical answer. Would you like to come in or I can give the academic answer as
PJ (05:47.068)
well, and I would, I would love for you, if you don't mind sharing, kind of, and maybe this is the academic, the, the story about, shoot, I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but you had a lady win, an award and then call out the former president who's in the front row. Right. And maybe that's the academic side of it, but I, obviously all this stuff is going to kind of flow together. I mean, even that you've moved from academics
Clinical.
Carolyn Laubender (06:16.398)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they absolutely intersect for me. Maybe the kind of bifurcation is false to begin with. Yeah, so the story, you're naming the story that I kind of enter the book with in my introduction. And so this is a conference that I was at at the Freud Museum in, I believe, 2019. So it's the conference title and this conference series is still running, Psychoanalysis in the Public Sphere.
I was invited to give a talk, a number of leading scholars in psychoanalytic theory and practice were also invited to give talks. It was a two day conference, very well attended. And it was my first time giving a talk at the Freud Museum. Right, so I was a very junior scholar in comparison to a number of the folks that were there. So I gave my talk and that went fine more or less, but the story that I tell is about
kind of me sitting in the back row of the conference towards the very end of it when I'd felt, I think everyone in the audience had felt tensions kind of mounting in the differences between the way that people were interpreting what psychoanalysis was. So that, you know, these tensions had been mounting through the Q &A sessions, but it sort of came to a head when a very well regarded psychoanalytic scholar and practitioner named Joanna Ryan, she was a,
on the closing plenary panel, like the roundtable panel at the end, this climate of to what extent is psychoanalysis a politically progressive practice? In 2019, you can already feel that question emerging. And one of the things that Ryan is defending is the understanding that psychoanalysis, for instance, in relation to histories of lesbian and gay folks, psychoanalysis has had a really troubled
It has been, especially in its American and some of its British iterations, it's done things like designate lesbian and gay folks as pathological, as having various kinds of psychopathologies. And it would, some of the training institutes, including the British Psychoanalytic Society, would not allow openly gay and lesbian analysts to train there, in the understanding that they weren't psychologically healthy.
Carolyn Laubender (08:30.166)
And Joanna Ryan is a very publicly out lesbian analyst and was one of the first publicly out lesbian analysts to train and qualify at the British Psychoanalytical Society. And so in this kind of moment that I described where I felt like in the conference that everything was sort of coming to a head, Joanna Ryan is responding to, you know, kind of more conservative criticisms that are arguing that psychoanalysis needs to be neutral or whatever.
And she highlights the fact that as a lesbian analyst, she had been pathologized and that she had been kind of unduly limited in her engagement in psychoanalysis, right? That there had been homophobia, deep homophobia present in the society and that no one had apologized to her about it, right? Like that there had been, despite now, many of these same analysts who 15 years ago, 20 years ago were pathologizing analysts like Joanna Ryan,
In spite of that, they were now saying, but psychonalysis is welcoming for everyone. We've always been progressive. We've always been open arms. And Ryan is like, no, you have not been. I can speak to my own experience. You have not been. And there hasn't been any engagement with the fact that there was homophobia in my kind of prevention of me from engaging in training. And so she has this interaction
a member of the audience who's sitting in the front row and this audience member's name is David Bell. And he's a former president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. And he has become very famous recently for his incredibly transphobic kind of position in relation to psychoanalysis. But if you look back in his archive 15 years ago, he maintained that same sort of position in relation to homosexual, gay and lesbian analysts.
So Ryan calls, like is directly addressing David Bell in the audience. And she says, still no one has ever apologized to me for it. And so I begin the book with this anecdote because I feel like it, right, it's a kind of dramatic, it's a dramatic entry, but I feel like it captures something that I experienced sort of on the everyday within psychoanalysis, which is you have this, you have a story about psychoanalysis, which is that like, it's, you know, it's politically disengaged or it's, or we're just kind of neutrally,
Carolyn Laubender (10:49.326)
progressive, but then you have the long recorded history of psychoanalysis doing many, different sorts of things under the auspices of neutrality, right? Including like sponsoring dictators in the dirty war in Argentina, things like that. There's lots of little stories
PJ (11:07.758)
Just little stories.
Carolyn Laubender (11:08.982)
Little stories, little stories. Yeah. So I'm interested in how these two stories can exist at the same time, right? And like what we might then think about the clinic and the kind of work that it's doing around political concepts. And that's what that's the academic side to get us there to the.
PJ (11:22.34)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And thank you. I appreciate it kind of setting the stage. And you kind of you kind of reference this. Why politically neutral when psychoanalysis feels like it can speak to so many other things? I believe you mentioned religion, you mentioned art. Why do we like it didn't have to be neutral, those things. But when it came to politics, had to be neutral. Is there a particular reason for
Carolyn Laubender (11:47.32)
Okay.
Carolyn Laubender (11:52.843)
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. You know, I think one of the the way I'll maybe start by answering it is that the idea of neutrality, like I'm criticizing the idea of neutrality, and I do throughout the book, and I maintain that position. But I think it's also important to understand that the idea of neutrality in understanding politics or anything else is actually I mean, what it's intended to
is as a safeguard for the patient. Like the idea of psychoanalysis as distinct from anything like psychiatry or other psychological sciences is that you can come in, you can lay down on the couch and you can say anything that comes to your mind without any kind of social prohibition. Right? You can talk about your most violent fantasies. You can talk about your darkest thoughts, your hatred of your mother, your hatred of your husband or wife, right? You know, your ambivalence about your children. You can have the space.
and the permission to let the most kind of unconscious, conflicted, inconsistent parts of yourself out without the analyst judging you. And so that's the idea of neutrality in its best iteration, is that it's a space that gives social permission to the very conflicted nature of what it is to be a human being. And that was always Freud's belief, that human beings are
So when it comes to politics, then that would be an extension of this ideal of neutrality is like, well, if a patient comes in and, you know, let's say that they're a member of an alt -right organization and they, you know, want to spout all of their racist thoughts, but they've somehow wound up in a psychoanalysis to begin with, it isn't the analyst's place to chastise them for their views. Equally so if a patient comes in and, you know, they want to kind
They're really upset about what's happening in Gaza right now. They're really upset about the murder of George Floyd. They want to talk about that. It is in an analyst position to agree or disagree, chastise, censure, encourage, et cetera. And so from that, right, we have a kind of an open space for a different kind of relationship than you might encounter in the wider social world. And in a lot of ways, I'm very much in agreement with that position. And my advocacy throughout the
Carolyn Laubender (14:13.494)
is not the analysts should adopt the role of activists, right? It's not like that we should, that analysts should, in understanding their work as political, suddenly say like, yes, you have the alt -right patient, the neo -Nazi patient on your couch, and it's your job to turn them into, know, consciously by arguing with them or by, you know, like persuading them or whatever, it's your job to turn them into kind of like a racially progressive, of democratically minded citizen.
That's not my point throughout the book. My point is rather in trying to understand the implicit ways that an ideal like neutrality actually covers over how deeply kind of ethical and political much of psychological and psychoanalytic practice is. And that's what each chapter sort of picks through are these different concepts, things like authority in the consulting room, reparation in the consulting room, emotional security that many analysts take as
like a naturalized fact of what it is to be a human being. And I'm saying, well, is it actually a naturalized fact if we actually look, we look historically and we look socially, maybe these ideals and then the way we engage with them in the clinical realm, maybe these are actually deeply political concepts and understanding them that way allows us to think about them more critically. Do we want to agree with these then?
PJ (15:37.201)
Can you give an example? I'm sure this kind of goes throughout the book, Like when you say emotional security, how is that a political concept?
Carolyn Laubender (15:46.267)
Yeah, so this comes from the final chapter in my book on a psychoanalyst named John Bowlby, who is the progenitor, the creator of a style of psychoanalytic thinking, psychological thinking called attachment theory. So many people, maybe in the audience, who are just sort of around will be really familiar with attachment theory because it comes with these like
helpful little designators that have worked their way into popular psychology discourse, like secure attachment, anxious avoidant attachment. These are the categories that are the consequence of John Bowlby's psychoanalytic theorizing himself. So when we think about different parenting styles and attachment issues in children, we use that language of secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment.
Right. We're using John Bowlby's language implicitly. So that's something to kind of begin with a name. And this has worked its way into many different corners. It's in parenting books, but it's also in like books about relationships. Now, the book Poly Secure has become really popular among among queer among queer folk, young queer folk. And that draws on John Bowlby's work as well. So this is like it's sort of saturated in our culture. So in in that regard, I think
Unless you're thinking sort of really critically and self -reflectively about the ideal of security, it can seem like, yes, we all want emotional security, right? Like this is an uncontestable virtue. But when I'm kind of, when I was working through the archive of Bulby's work and when I was thinking about emotional security, especially in the history of psychoanalysis, it's actually sort of a bizarre, it's a bizarre ideal to emerge. Security.
hadn't been a way that psychoanalysts or psychologists talked about what an ideal way of being in relationships was up until, really interestingly, the Cold War. So in...
PJ (17:45.326)
Yes. I know I was like, the way that you, you attach it, sorry for interrupting, but just the way that it like reflects like what's going on, you're almost like, huh? Anyways, it's
Carolyn Laubender (17:55.214)
Yeah, it was one of those like sometimes in the archive, you'll have these moments of just like, like, my God, it's there. I understand now. And it was one of those moments for me. So, you know, this what I trace in that final chapter of the book is the co development of two different languages about security, state based languages about security, where you have a new ideal of national security coming out in 1947 with the National Security
PJ (18:03.138)
Yeah.
Carolyn Laubender (18:25.292)
and then emotional security, which John Bowlby proposes and which gains ground at almost exactly the same time. So national security is like, it's very much a Cold War language. It's a Cold War political language. Before that, we had national interest. We had manifest destiny. had different empire, right? Different other forms of empire and colonialism, of course, different justifications for what the state was doing. And it's only through the Cold War.
especially in the West, right, the Anglophone West, the United Kingdom and the United States, that national security becomes the thing that the state is trying to do for itself. Now, at the same time, you have a really influential psychoanalyst promoting emotional security as the thing that the mother and the psychoanalyst ought to provide for the child and the patient. And
In that way, there's a deep political collaboration between the two. And the argument that I make in that chapter, it's not so much that Bowlby is like mimicking the discourse of national security. Rather, I think about the popularity of Bowlby's theory as answering a deep insecurity that citizens throughout the nation state were feeling. So it's more like they're symbiotic and compensatory. And the fact of securities
continuing and intensifying popularity as an emotional vocabulary right now speaks to me to the increasing forms of insecurity that citizens are experiencing, right? In the midst of gun violence, in the midst of climate crisis, in the midst of ever -widening economic gaps, alt -right Christian fascism, the world is getting arguably more and more more precarious for people. And so of course, a vocabulary like emotional security becomes more and more more attractive to folks.
PJ (20:17.54)
Yeah, and so of course with John Bowlby, you're talking about how it applies today and it's very popular today. But I mean, you're talking about the bomb in that that time, like, you know, like people, it's weird, because I didn't have to do this, right. But I talked to my parents and I don't think about they had to do drills where they were told, hey, go get under your desks. And it's not going to do anything. You know, it's I actually was talking to
Carolyn Laubender (20:27.746)
Yeah.
PJ (20:47.604)
therapist the other day who, she was talking to her child in the store and, her daughter said, mommy, was afraid that man was going to pull out a gun and shoot us, you know, like, and this is, that's not like news. it's many kids in this generation now have feared. I didn't worry about gun violence in schools, right? Like that's not, it wasn't my, and so
Yeah, you could see how the threats are responded in that way. And it's interesting to see it respond to each and different threats. Do you think some of that is just also kind of a semantic use? And I won't say overuse of the word, but proliferation of a word. So he picks up on security probably because he's hearing it in national security. do you think there's any of
Carolyn Laubender (21:45.036)
You know, so in my work, a little, I'm not terribly interested in like an or a single origin story for a concept. And while the word authority is certainly interesting, what I'm more interested in is the way that this concept balloons at a particular historical moment across a number of different fields. So it absolutely might be the case that the word is overused. I mean, my
PJ (21:52.333)
Right,
Carolyn Laubender (22:09.728)
Every time I have a first year student who's like, well, when are we going to study attachment theory and secure attachments? There's the part of my brain that's like, could we not think about relationality and any other? Must we? Must we? Yeah, but I tend to think in my own approach to the history of psychology and psychoanalysis and clinical practice, I tend to think about the kind of development of
PJ (22:22.029)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Carolyn Laubender (22:35.342)
concept rather than like its origin point. I think it's really difficult to cite a particular origin. So whether or not it was happening in the political sphere in debates about national security first or whether it was happening with Bowlby first is a bit less my concern. And it's a bit more like why, you know, why does, why has this, both of these conversations become so popular and how do they collaborate with each other or against each other? Right.
How has, why has this become the way that we're understanding both the human being and the nation state? Like why this narrative? What is this doing for us? And what is it limiting us from doing as well, right? Like how does it enable, but how does it prohibit? And so that's the kind of toggle that I engage in in every chapter throughout the book. So it's not, the book is in no way a kind of an argument about psychoanalysis is conservativism far, far from
It's an understanding of the bivalent nature of the inherently political concepts that are often taken to be naturalized
PJ (23:41.968)
Forgive me, it's just the way that you talked about the security thing reminded me I had Colin Webster on and he talked about how technology and The history of thought kind of follow each other so for instance he was talking about medicine in this regard they talked about there was Air and air and blood was supposed to be in the same circulatory system because the only
the only pipes they had were not pressurized back in Grecian times. And then in Alexandria, they created pressurized pipes. And within 50 years, a guy in the court wrote, hey, I think there's two circulatory systems and the blood system is pressurized. And it's that same thing of like, someone's gonna make the connection. And so anyways, it's really, I don't know, that was like a connection to my own brain.
Carolyn Laubender (24:41.602)
No, it's absolutely right that we use that there's this constant collaboration between the metaphors that we have about, you know, the human mind or human functioning and then the metaphors and technologies that we have in the world. And to give a psychoanalytic example, which is it's absolutely what you're saying about kind of the circulatory system versus like pipes and the way that they work. Freud oftentimes thought about the human body through the language, the emerging language at his time of thermodynamics.
Right, so he was using kind of scientific discoveries and thermodynamics to understand the libido and the different kind of pressurized functions of the human body. so, and this is like, know, the scholars in science studies and feminist science studies will oftentimes argue that, or it is one of their basic claims that scientific knowledge is human production, right?
insights and theories are produced by human beings and they bear the mark of that throughout history. It's not to say that they're wrong, right? I mean, this is no advocacy for like an absolute abandonment of kind of scientific knowledge. It's just to acknowledge that like all human thought is human produced, including scientific knowledge, and we use metaphors and language and the kind of available narratives that we have at a historical moment to understand the world around us and that those are constantly shifting.
PJ (26:06.81)
Yeah, and those metaphors have strengths and weaknesses, which kind of goes into a lot of what you're saying with, you have these different, in a lot of ways, metaphors that are being traced through this history. And each one has, they're not neutral. They have strengths and weaknesses for different people groups, for different, but I digress in your, anyways.
Carolyn Laubender (26:09.985)
I'm sorry.
PJ (26:34.092)
As we look at kind of that beginning, you talk about democracies, children and Anna Freud and like the idea of on good authority. Even as we look at kind of the distance, there is an enormous amount of authority for the practitioner, right? What are you tracing from the political side through Anna Freud?
Carolyn Laubender (26:58.498)
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so Anna Freud for, you know, anyone who might not be deep in the archives of psychoanalytic history, like I happen to be at this moment in my life. Anna Freud was the daughter of Sigmund Freud. She was the only of Sigmund and Sigmund Freud founder of psychoanalysis, this like distinct way of thinking about the human mind as, you know, the unconscious is the truth about what it is to be human. This is Freud's unique contribution to thinking.
Anna Freud was his youngest daughter born in 1895. And she considered herself psychoanalysis as twin throughout her whole life because she was sort of born at the moment that Freud was inventing psychoanalysis. And so she was the only of Freud's children to take up his professional calling. She lived with her father throughout her entire life. She studied and became a psychoanalyst herself, qualified very early on as one of the first female psychoanalysts.
And she became one of the founders of child psychoanalysis, which was like a development off of, an offshoot of psychoanalysis that Sigmund Freud and his kind of bevy of disciples and acolytes were kind of experimenting with at that time. So Anna Freud in the 1920s was developing child psychoanalysis as distinct from adult psychoanalysis where they worked with primarily neurotic adults would have been the language that they were using at that
And so in when you're like creating a discipline from scratch, you're sort of trying to figure out what works best and what to do. And one of the interesting things that I explore in that, like the first part of the book, which is the first two chapters is the extent to which psychoanalysts were absolutely mystified by what sort of creature the child was, like absolutely mystified by it. They came up with an, like,
any number of different theories about who children were, how they functioned, that were so wildly divergent from each other. And yet they all sort of believed each of them was right individually. And this is sort of true of child psychology and psychoanalysis throughout, nobody can quite agree what sort of being the child is. And so they're all kind of contests each other about like, this is the way that they functioned or this. And so for Anna Freud, she's working in the
Carolyn Laubender (29:21.474)
There's no settled theory about what the child is. There is certainly no diagnostic rubric about how to go about helping children who have emotional distress. And, you know, she was coming that when she was working, we have to remember this is the end of World War One. We're watching amplifying anti -Semitism and racism happen throughout Europe. There's the major shifting and reorganization of national boundaries that happens as a consequence of the close of World War
where kind of Austria -Hungarian empires de -partitioned, becomes ethnic nation states. All these changes, right? So children were having kind of, you know, predictable emotional responses. And so she's working in the clinic and one of the early concepts, and this is what it takes us to authority. One of the early concepts she experiments with is the idea that the psychoanalyst needs to adopt a position of authority in relation to the child. That they essentially need to stand in for the parents.
and kind of provide a good enough or good authority that on the one hand won't allow the child total free license to do whatever they want, but on the other hand, isn't overly strict and stringent in a way that would encourage the child to become, in a psychoanalytic understanding, obsessional or be overly self -censorious, like overly self -critical, overly inhibited, overly fearful, whatever. So this was a really...
contentious position for Anna Freud to adopt, the idea that the analyst should adopt a position of authority in relation to the child. Because certainly her father, the founder of psychoanalysis, was not advocating for the analyst to be an authority figure. But Anna Freud was saying that when you're working with children, you actually need to be an authority figure for them. You need to do all these things because children are very different from adults, right? And so you have to do different things with them.
because they're so very different from adults. And so that's what Anna Fred was doing in her clinic. And in that chapter, what I think about is the connection between that emphasis on authority and then as I was just mentioning, the really seismic political changes that were happening throughout Europe at the time. So, know, throughout Europe after World War I, you have the kind of decommissioning of a lot of these huge imperial structures, right? Like the Austro -Hungarian Empire gets kind of,
Carolyn Laubender (31:43.222)
Ethnic states get created in the wake of it after World War I. And the emergent vocabulary instead of empire is newly democracy, right? Mass democracy starts to gain ground politically speaking throughout Europe for the first time in that kind of historical moment in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. And so I'm thinking about Anna Freud's really sort of baffling. It's like a baffling attachment to authority, right?
PJ (32:10.426)
Hmm.
Carolyn Laubender (32:10.452)
Why? Why do you need authority? Why this? Everybody is telling you that this isn't really psychoanalytic, yet she clings to it for a while. And so I'm thinking about this as representing a of a clinical grappling with the decline of the Austro -Hungarian Empire and the rise of mass democracy, which was also really hotly debated at the time. We think about democracy now as being like, yes, it's the thing that we want. It is the political good.
especially in the West, right? That's our idea of democracy. But that understanding of democracy only really became popular after World War II. So it was only after the genocide, the Holocaust, it was only after a kind of mass racial genocide, and the failure of fascism alongside that, that mass democracy became sort of an uncontested political ideal.
And so at the time in the 1920s and 30s, people were pretty suspicious about mass democracy. It wasn't universally embraced. Lots of folks wanted a return to empire. Lots of folks wanted the authority that was represented by that. And so I read Anna Freud's sort of attachment to authority in the clinic as a political grappling with the rise of mass democracy and the status of like the questionable status of authority within mass democracy.
If you don't have an imperial rule, or who do you look to, how do we establish the authority, even of a constitution? And so I think about these two things as kind of informing each other, her kind of attachment to authority in the person of the analyst, and then the changing status of authority politically.
PJ (33:49.784)
Is it hard not to psychoanalyze Anna Freud when you're like, do you find yourself just like, why Anna are you so attached to authority with you?
Carolyn Laubender (33:59.892)
It's, it's, you know, it's the constant pitfall, I think, of working in psychoanalysis is that it always can turn back around on you. So there's there are funny stories of like, early psychoanalysts were especially unboundaried in their willingness to engage in these kind of ad hominem attacks. or a psychoanalyst named Ernst Jones once called anapheroid a tough and indigestible morsel. And he suggested
He suggested, yeah, it's a great language, isn't it? A tough and indigestible morsel. And he suggested in a letter to Sigmund Freud himself, founder of this movement, and Ernst Jones is one of his most, you know, one of his followers, he suggests in a letter to Sigmund Freud that Anna Freud's failures as a psychoanalyst are due to her being improperly analyzed. Now, that is important because Sigmund Freud was the person
PJ (34:55.748)
Right. Yes.
Carolyn Laubender (34:58.554)
who had analyzed his own daughter. So there's all of this like, you know, if only you weren't so neurotic, you could see that, Lots of Fred's fights with his male disciples, including like Alfred Adler and Carl Jung really famously, like the end part of their
ends with these letters between the two with the two kind of psychoanalyzing each other and saying like, yes, but it's because you're, you're like, you've got a father complex and you couldn't see this possibly because you're too attached to X. So it's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's a popular style.
PJ (35:34.904)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, I, I read Freud, in college and, I think I got like through, is it on the origins of dreams? Like, is that the title? know. I, I, yeah, there's a good, yeah, it's a good month of you just like have to get it out of your system. You're like, man, I could just do that. You could, you can analyze like that forever. Like there's always, it can be.
Carolyn Laubender (35:47.048)
Mm -hmm. I should have dreams.
PJ (36:04.304)
Yeah, it could be that kind of trap. I was curious if that still happens to, you know, people who are well versed in the field.
Carolyn Laubender (36:12.686)
Absolutely, absolutely. mean, personally, I think it's a bit of a pitfall, especially when in... If I'm having a conversation with friends, right, I'm willing to do a different style of thought than I am in my own academic work. But I think academically it's a bit of a pitfall precisely because... I guess the first reason is because we don't have access to the psychologies of any of these people. All these folks that I'm talking about are long dead.
PJ (36:33.166)
Mm.
Carolyn Laubender (36:35.734)
Right, so to assume that based on anyone's published work or their reputation or a historical archive that you could ever make a truth claim about the mentality of another of that person, I think that that's a methodologically, I think that's a methodological failure. So that's like one side of it. And the other side of it, I think is that it's like one of the things I resist in psychoanalysis is the extent to which it can become this exactly what you're describing, this recursive.
all -consuming style of thought. And I think that that is a, I feel like that's a dangerous way of engaging in this interpretive project that psychoanalysis offers. And it just leads to less living and more, yeah, more kind of self -cannibalizing, yeah, self -reflection.
PJ (37:28.841)
It's like the psychological version of doom scrolling, You could just sit like kind of that morbid introspection. You've talked a little bit about authority you used with Anna Freud slightly differently, but as we talk about the political neutrality and what the goals are, what is good,
Carolyn Laubender (37:31.724)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (37:54.56)
and the authorities we use to determine what is good and kind of how do we navigate a shifting framework.
PJ (38:06.209)
Is there a of a two -part question? So I'll just start with this. You've talked a lot about the political side of it. Is there, does that kind of, the word political is used a lot, but I feel like we're getting into some philosophical, moral, and ethical questions as well. And so, you know, I love talking about the interdisciplinary side of things.
How far field do you feel like a lot of this goes into kind of like those philosophical and ethical questions?
Carolyn Laubender (38:36.318)
It's a great question. It's also one of the questions I get asked almost every time I give a talk is, all right, so by the political, what do you mean? And I think it's so it's that's an important question for me, because in my understanding, I have a distinct understanding of the political that's very informed by feminist theory and by decolonial postcolonial theory. So for me, I would say first and foremost, the political for me,
PJ (38:44.584)
Yeah, right,
Carolyn Laubender (39:04.002)
doesn't just stop at the water's edge of state policy or voting or electoral politics, things like that. It's not just about the state. And this understanding of the political really comes from, would say first, my deepest grounding in it is in a history of feminist theory that understands that what has been nominally understood as the private sphere is deeply political, right? So for instance, who does the housework? Who does the childcare?
why it is that certain forms of emotional care are partitioned to certain bodies, et cetera, that these aren't just personal questions, or rather that they are personal questions, and that in the famous feminist mantra, the personal is political. And so a lot of early feminist work throughout the 60s and the 70s in the United States and then in the United Kingdom as well was really
engaged in this kind of project of consciousness raising, which was a way of saying that these things that you thought are your issue or your problem, these difficulties that you've been having are not in fact privatizable, and that the private sphere is really determined by the public sphere, and that these two things interact and you can't separate them. So from a Marxist feminist point of view, why is it that women do all this free, what Marxist feminists would call reproductive labor? Well, it's because
they support the kind of the male breadwinner going out and doing productive labor. And then the capitalist gets to keep all of the surplus of the reproductive labor that women do in the home. And that this is, it's a functioning system, right? But it's a system that shortchanges women who do all this unpaid work that then gets like shuttled out to the capital. And like that's the Marxist account of it. But this is like my way of saying it, first and foremost, the political is also the personal and the private to me.
because I kind of come from this feminist background. The second part of this is that almost at many points throughout the book, I use a hyphenate phrase, the ethical political. And I mean that really intentionally. So when you're saying that we're getting into ethical territory, I think that's absolutely right. I think I'm always thinking in terms of ethical politics. This is a phrasing and framing that
Carolyn Laubender (41:26.594)
Foucault uses as well, especially in some of his late works when he's thinking about ethics and care of the self stuff. But for me, it has to do with understanding that when we're trying to create imaginaries for justice, when we're trying to organize states and distributions of resources, when we're thinking about what the right framework for governance is, or how we kind of make reparation or whatever, those are political projects. But if you follow them back,
about like, well, why should we be doing these things? What is the justification for them? The place that I always arrive at is that it's because fundamentally these are political projects that work on behalf of ethical ideals, right? Ideals about how we should treat one another, relational ideals about how human beings should relate to and be treated by one another. These are ethical systems inherently. So I think at the level I come from,
I build back down to the level of the personal and the interpersonal in my understanding of why we should or shouldn't hold certain political ideals is because fundamentally political systems are ethical systems as well. And so we need to understand that when we're arguing for things like justice, it's because this has an inherent ethical capacity to it. so throughout the book, if you're looking through the book, you'll see
oftentimes use the shorthand of the ethical political because I think the ethical is inherently political because it's about how we should be with one another and then the political is inherently ethical because it's about how we should be with one
PJ (43:02.24)
One tremendous answer. It's almost like you've been asked that before The and this is brutally simplistic but yeah, and a lot of what I When I get the chance on the show to talk about language that crosses disciplines So that you're gonna have epistemological questions that are part of this and metaphysical questions that are part of this So, of course, there's like philosophical
Not in the sense, and this is where, like, this does get brutally simplistic, and I apologize to whoever's listening, but not that epistemological and metaphysical questions are deeper than the ethical or the political questions. But in the sense, and I think it's been a long time, but I think it was reading Wittgenstein, this idea that we have explanations that provide anchor points, and they support each other. And so
your decisions about epistemology are not necessarily the foundation for your political or for your ethical, but they do tend to secure each other in terms of like kind of like more like a net and like the knots in the net rather than, you know, kind of some classical epistemologies where it's like brick by brick and you're like, well, if you pull out this one epistemological brick, the whole thing falls down. It's like, no, I...
I'd probably find an epistemology that's like, just believe in treating other people equally. So I'd probably find a you know what I mean? Like a different support system. And so is that a kind of a fair way to think about it? Like you're not necessarily getting into philosophical, but like there is like, you can see the strands leading off to some of those anchor points, right? If that makes
Carolyn Laubender (44:49.751)
Yeah, I think it's a great way to think about it. And I would say that like the interaction between the ethical political and the epistemological is like, you know, I come from the position of the ethical political and I'm looking at a field that is primarily epistemological, right, that's interested in truth claims. So lots of clinical psychoanalysts, especially those who have been traditionally trained who are more on the orthodox side of things. Lots
Lots of those folks think about their work as it's like an inherently or implicitly an epistemological pursue. They're interested in truth, right? They believe the truth is, and I'm not by saying they believe, I'm not trying to criticize this because truth is important to me. I, you know, it's an important project that psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts engage in. But when they're doing their work, they're interested in truth. It's an epistemological project. Each psychoanalyst from
John Bowlby to D .W. Winnicott to Melanie Klein to Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan, all of these psychoanalysts have their own epistemological and interpretive systems that they're working with. And psychoanalysts who are working in the wake of these folks, you know, work in those epistemological traditions. So they're interested in truth and they're trying when they do their writing and when they practice, they're trying to pursue this form of truth. And so just like you were describing with the nets,
I come from a sort of different angle and a different training. And I'm like, yes, I mean, think the elaboration of truth is a really important project, but we can't lose sight of this other half of the equation, right? Which is that there is no epistemology separate from an ethical political ideal, right? That there are many truths. And this is like, this is a kind of way of thinking about science that goes back through like Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, certainly.
but that understands that truth is, again, it's historically contingent and it's historically contestable for that reason. And so I come through this kind of ethical political angle and I'm like, yes, but what about the other nots in the equation, right? There are many ways of constituting truth and there have been in the history of psychoanalysis, many established truths that we would today have great issue
Carolyn Laubender (47:01.26)
For instance, the idea that gay and lesbian analysts are pathological, right? This was a cornerstone belief, a truth claim among psychoanalysts in the mid -century in the United States and in the United Kingdoms that held for a really long time and that I think you can still see the legacies of. Psychoanalysis has been used by different...
Yeah, by different folks, different institutes to justify colonialism, to justify those who are living under, you know, colonial rule as, and I'm thinking of a psychoanalyst named Octave Minoni, who wrote a very famous book that Frantz Fanon critiques. But Minoni was to some extent, not exactly justifying colonialism, but certainly pathologizing those who were colonized as to some extent psychologically needing.
that colonization, right? That they were, in his work, they had a dependency complex. So those are claims that now, right, those are truth claims that were accepted at the time that we would now have great issue with on ethical political grounds and that we have different truth claims that we make now in accordance with our ethical politics.
PJ (48:18.478)
And this, think, is part of where a book like yours fits in because you have the clinical work, which is very important and has done good work for people and bad work for people, obviously, you we're talking about. And you see like look at some like Frantz Fanon, who their critical work, his critical work made the clit. I'm sorry, not clinical work. Excuse me. Academic work made the clinical
better. I know I want to be respectful of your time, but if you don't mind, can we talk a little about the decolonizing side of it? Because I feel like we kind of we hit the two other major sections. I would love to hear a little bit about how decolonization and I think it's a good follow up to these questions of different epistemologies, right? And the way that they inform the psychoanalytic pursuit.
Carolyn Laubender (49:16.568)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so colonialism is so important to the history of psychoanalysis and to these two sides of it that we're talking about, right? Like the kind of the understanding of it as deeply politically engaged and then the other kind of more institutionally codified side of it that's like believes it's a political. So Franz Fanon, you know, was...
certainly an anti -colonial activist, a philosopher, an anti -racist activist, but he was also a psychiatrist, right? And oftentimes in the most superficial accounts of Frantz Fanon, the so the story goes element of it is like Frantz Fanon began as a psychiatrist and then was working in Paris. He was born in Martinique, right, in French colonies, and then was working in Paris and kind of working in liberation movements and then was working in North Africa.
And through all of this clinical work, he became more more disillusioned with the clinic and so just became a decolonial activist. That's one reductive account, I think, of Fenon's work because he never abandoned psychiatry. He wasn't a psychoanalyst proper. He was a psychiatrist. So he never abandoned psychiatry and the practice of the clinic. was rather, as you put it, that his...
His decolonial advocacy made the clinic and his clinical work so much stronger and it really informed the way that he was. have you frozen?
PJ (50:28.298)
no.
Carolyn Laubender (50:41.23)
Hello?
PJ (51:15.768)
Hello. We have a, we had a thunderstorm like that hat. We are having a thunderstorm. So it's been going on. was like, please don't please. okay. So apologies. the, yeah, yeah, it's Florida. Like, you know, it's like perfectly clear and then like, boom, we got something. I, we were talking about France Fanon and we were talking about philosopher and psychiatrist. thank you for your patience.
Carolyn Laubender (51:16.488)
you're
Carolyn Laubender (51:35.438)
Yeah, 3 PM.
Carolyn Laubender (51:44.398)
Sure, yeah, no, no problem. I know those thunderstorms and it's 3 p .m., right? This is when they happen. This is the thunderstorm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so should I just pick up at the beginning or where I left off?
PJ (51:49.962)
Yeah, always. Yep. Every day.
PJ (51:57.415)
If you don't mind the beginning, think you went static there, near the beginning.
Carolyn Laubender (52:03.954)
Yeah, no worries. So, yeah, so Fennon, you know, he trained as a psychiatrist and the typical story about him is that as he was working as a psychiatrist in France and then in North Africa, he became and seeing, seeing the effects of colonialism on his patients as he was seeing them, right? He was seeing people who were had been tortured by the Free French Army, or not the Free French Army, that had been tortured by
kind of colonial forces. He was seeing people who'd had, who were kind of having internalized nightmares because of colonial racial regimes. And so the typical story about Fanon is that as he's seeing more and more of this in the clinic, he becomes more and more disillusioned with psychiatric work and turns towards his anti -colonial activism.
And this is a really reductive account that is in my estimation, and I think many historians now would say this, it's an inaccurate account of Fennon because even when he resigned from his psychoanalytic work in Algeria, and in France, he continued to practice as a psychiatrist. He took up other positions as a psychiatrist and he continued to meld his psychiatric work, for instance, in the hospital he was working at called Blede -Jouanville.
He continued to meld a psychiatric work with his political work. So as you put it, his political commitments really deepened and transformed his psychiatric understanding of the clinic. So he's one of the most famous, I would say, figures who uses psychoanalysis in his published writings, especially. And he wasn't a psychoanalyst. He was a psychiatrist.
But he was reading Jacques Lacan and he was really informed by psychoanalytic thinking in his own kind of conception of what he was doing, regardless of how he was trained. So he's like the most famous post -colonial and decolonial figure who uses psychoanalysis and uses it to try and understand the limitations in his work, especially with Arab patients in North Africa and Algeria, the limitations of the psychoanalytic clinic.
Carolyn Laubender (54:15.874)
traditionally understood. Because he was like, the things that are working in the clinic for like the colonial white women he was treating were not working for his Arab and Muslim patients. They were just not working. And so he was like, he was understanding that there was something culturally specific and racially and religiously specific about clinical treatments that had been taken to be objective. Right? And he was like, these aren't. And so he redesigned things for the Arab patients that spoke to their ethnic backgrounds better.
And he understood this to have a huge impact on the quality of their treatment. And there's lots more to say about Fanon, including the fact that he was almost always working through a translator because he didn't speak Arabic. So he had his own kind of colonial legacy as a French citizen in that regard. And he was Black, but from Martinique. And Martinique has a kind of heightened status in relation to French colonies. It's a complicated place. But he was just one.
of many different psychoanalysts and psychiatrists who were using psychoanalysis for varied ends. So one of the little stories I can tell, and I'll be mindful of time as well and try and be brief, but one of the little stories I can tell is from the 1970s in Brazil. And it goes like when people refer to it, it's called the Lobo affair. And it speaks to these two sides of how psychoanalysis is a political
PJ (55:24.258)
no worries.
Carolyn Laubender (55:38.638)
But so it sort of begins with a figure named Amacar Lobo, who is in training in Brazil in 1973. So he's like a psychoanalytic trainee, and he's also working for the military dictatorship as a torturer. So he's training in a psychoanalytic society that either doesn't know about this or willfully turns a blind eye to it and accepts it.
PJ (55:51.212)
you
Carolyn Laubender (56:05.868)
He's training at a psychoanalytic society and then moonlighting as a torturer for the secret police. So this information becomes public through the work of a psychoanalyst named Helena Besserman Viana, is I believe how you pronounce her last name. And she finds out that this trainee, Lobo, has been working as a torturer for the military dictator, like the rising military dictatorship.
And so she takes these documents that prove that Lobo has been like, know, low key torturing, like actually just torturing people on the side. But it's actually, it's just not low key. It was like on the down low, you know, like he wasn't exactly promoting it, but he wasn't really hiding it either. But he was just torturing people. And so she passes these documents that prove that Lobo was a torturer.
PJ (56:37.39)
You want to say low -key because you don't want to admit the horror of it. It's like that's like it's not low -key. was Yeah, high -key
Yes,
Carolyn Laubender (56:57.71)
over to another leftist analyst working in Argentina in 1973, right? And dirty war starts in 74, so things in Argentina aren't great either. She passes this over to a psychoanalyst named Mimi Langer, is Marie Mimi Langer, who is a leftist figure working in Argentina at the time, in order to help out Lobo as a torturer for the secret police. Now, Langer gets all this stuff together and gives it all to the IPA, the International Psychoanalytic Society.
The IPA's response to this, instead of saying like, my gosh, what a scandal, we must disqualify this person, right? This is, we can't accept this. Instead of doing that, the IPA gives all the documents back to the training analyst who's overseeing Lobo's supervision, the supervising analyst, who's a man named Leo Bernetti, who is, was Nazi trained himself. So they give all of this documentation back, including the fact that Besserman Viana was the whistleblower.
So, and that allows the Brazilian psychoanalytic society at the time that was in complicity with Lobo to identify Besserman Viana as the whistleblower and like essentially out her in this political conflict. So I tell that story because in Latin America at this time we are dealing with military dictatorships and the global south and you have these two kind
conflicting views about what psychoanalysis should be doing, acting themselves out in this really dramatic way, right? Besserman -Viana being like, psychoanalysis needs to not be in alignment with military dictatorship, right? Like its project cannot be one that's allied with state repression and torture. must be, it must understand its political project to be a progressive and leftist one. Whereas Lobo and the Psychoanalytic Institute, right? The IPA were essentially saying, nope,
It's fine if we're allied with military dictatorship, right? This isn't in conflict with our values. Jacques Derrida calls this out later in a very influential piece of writing called Geo -Psychoanalysis and the Rest of the World, calls out the IPA's complicity with the dirty war in Argentina especially. And so in this, this story is important because it shows the different ways that psychoanalysis has been used in relation to colonialism and decolonization, right?
Carolyn Laubender (59:18.326)
It has absolutely been used as an apologia for colonialism, as a defense of state violence, as a defense of various forms of torture, both psychological and physical. But it has also been used by figures like Fanon, by figures like Marie Langer, by figures like Bethram and Viana, as an advocacy for and a contestation of colonialism.
And so you see that you can see the malleability of psychoanalysis when it comes to colonialism really
PJ (59:50.602)
I would love to draw us to a close here. that's such a beautiful picture of the, I think you've used the word bivalence throughout, like the two very crazy paths. You have the story and then just that clear outline of how it's been a tool of one side and tool of the other. I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how much I appreciated at the end of the book, you kind
As you're talking about politics and psychoanalysis, a lot of my own work has been in philosophical hermeneutics and specifically like interpreting art. And a lot of people push for politics and art and they'll talk about it. And it becomes a justification for bad art because it's politically what they want. And I really appreciate that you kind
warn against this pitfall in psycho, like psychoanalysis needs to do with psychoanalysis does well. That will include some political stuff, but the point isn't to make it political because that's a, that becomes an excuse for bad psychoanalysis. So one, thank you because, you know, I have great faith in Columbia university press, but I was like, I was like, okay, so how, you know, how is this going you know, sometimes you end up reading one of these. It's like, we just need to like have.
just this like, and it's like, no, no, like you have to make sure that it's done well, right? And so I appreciate that. I appreciate that, that kind of self -awareness for our listeners. And I know a lot of what you're addressing is going to be to kind of the, the clinicians and the psychiatrists and to the academic world of psychoanalysis.
But even for, if you can have something for our listeners just throughout the week, what is something you'd have them think about as kind of a takeaway from today, our interview?
Carolyn Laubender (01:01:49.74)
Hmm, that's an interesting question.
Carolyn Laubender (01:01:57.452)
Yeah, I suppose it's gonna be a really shallow answer, I think. But I suppose just the recognition of the extent to which mental health concerns and mental health practices correspond with our political reality. That's just kind of the base.
I mean, both the kind of anxieties we have, the fears we have, the desires we have, and the vocabularies we use to understand them, but then also like the practitioners we sort of go to see and how we try and take care of ourselves. That all of these things, they're deeply bound in the place in which we're living, right? They're deeply bound in the place in which we're living. So I guess my con, like this, and this is the feminist background in me. My background is literature and gender studies.
I think that convictions about objectivity are wrong -footed from the beginning. I think that we need to think about an ethical political schema, not an objective, not an investment in objectivity. I objectivity oftentimes operates as a cloak for really dangerous beliefs and ideologies. So I'd always just kind of encourage people to reflect on the extent to which we are, to use Donna Haraway's language, situated.
right, our own situatedness. And this applies as much to our kind of ways of understanding ourselves and the way we process our world as it does to the kinds of practices, however varied, we engage in to try and kind of take care of ourselves in this like, this new slow apocalypse we've all found ourselves in. So that would be my closing, yeah, my closing suggestion.
PJ (01:03:39.054)
shallow or deep, I do think it's incredibly practical and helpful. So thank you. I appreciate it. And it's been a real joy talking to you today. Thank you, Dr. Laubender.
Carolyn Laubender (01:03:48.628)
Yeah, thank you so much for the time.