“Don’t Be a Useful Idiot!: Fascism in Psychoanalysis, and Antifascist Psychoanalysis”
CE Credit Pending Approval for SPPP Members
***This session is being recorded***
Date: November 4, 2023, 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Psychoanalysis has a problem. We have been made useful idiots for fascism. How did we get here? And what do we do now?
In this interactive webinar, I will sketch the history of authoritarianism and psychoanalysis from the beginning. From Freud forward, our intellectual history is characterized by a succession of charismatic intellectual leaders with authoritarian tendencies. The terrain of our field, especially our fragmented archipelago of institutions, has been shaped by the turf wars of these charismatic authoritarians. Decades of sectarian intellectual fighting has, of late, given way to an armistice we call “theoretical pluralism,” which amounts to a refusal to actually debate whether theoretical premises are right or wrong as a way of preventing what amount to faith-based cultural conflicts within the profession.
Organizing ourselves along these authoritarian lines, institutionally and culturally, and treating psychoanalytic theory as a matter of faith, has made psychoanalysts and our institutions increasingly credulous and uncritical. Our standards of evidence have slackened to accommodate a psychoanalytic community in which few are willing to be told that they are wrong. This has reduced our intellectual immunity to propaganda and disinformation.
Fascists have sniffed out this vulnerability, and are using our credulity to their own advantage. Their goal, I contend, is to make psychoanalysis a beachhead in academia and medicine, as they prosecute cultural and legislative crusades against minorities. I will discuss recent controversies in the psychoanalytic profession, animated by red-baiting disinformation and agitprop. I will argue that these controversies are largely the result of a successful fascist propaganda campaign linked to bigoted legislative efforts across the United States targeting people of color, queer (especially trans) people, and leftist academics who work on BIPOC and queer issues.
Reviewing this intellectual history, recent and remote, is a predicate to crafting a psychoanalysis that is capable of resisting and responding ethically to fascist propaganda and policy. I will propose a new model of antifascist psychoanalysis—antifanalysis, tentatively—that builds upon the most evidentiarily and ethical sound aspects of psychoanalytic theory and grafts these together with anarchist theory and practice. The central concern of this antifanalysis is understanding the psychosocial dynamics that produce abuse and coercion, as well as those that promote resistance to abuse and coercion, what scholars in Native American Studies call survivance. The praxis of antifanalysis is to cultivate greater capacities to resist and prevent abuse and coercion, both at the level of individual psychology and at larger interpersonal, structural, and communal levels of scale. I hope to think together with the audience about how to imagine and promote this new orientation to psychoanalysis, as to strategize about how we might improve our institutional and cultural capacity to respond to disinformation and bigotry.
Carter J. Carter Ph.D, LICSW is trying very hard to be an antifascist. He is a union organizer with the Massachusetts State College Association, because unions are the strongest bulwark against fascism. Consequently, fascists hate union organizers almost as much as they hate queer people, people of color, Jews, anarchists, local newspaper columnists, and college professors—Carter is all of the above, so he needs all the help he can get. He is also a mediocre farmer and a (hopefully) good enough parent. Incidentally, he is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts; Lecturer in the DSW Program, and Affiliated Faculty in the Program for Psychoanalytic Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania; a clinical social worker with a private practice in psychotherapy and clinical supervision; and Past President of Section IX.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to elaborate on the meaning and psychological effect of fascism.
- Participants will be able describe how authoritarianism has shaped psychoanalysis’s evolution.
- Participants will be able to discuss efforts of resistance to fascism within psychoanalysis.
