From Freud to Fanon to Freire: Psychoanalysis as a liberation method.

Abstract

I n preparing to write this chapter on psychoanalysis and liberation psychology, I recently found myself in the lecture room of the William Alanson White Institute for psychoanalytic training in New York City after a lecture by Pratyusha Tummala-Narra (2016), psychoanalytic psychologist and author of Psychoanalytic Theory and Cultural Competency in Psychotherapy. In the midst of talking to some friends and colleagues, I suddenly realized I was standing between a portrait of the founder of interpersonal psychoanalysis, Harry Stack Sullivan, and a portrait of Cultural School theorist and Frankfurt School don Erich Fromm. I was struck not only by the fact that I was standing between two giants of the contemporary psychoanalytic landscape, but as a Puerto Rican psychoanalytic psychologist also standing in for those whose contributions have been rendered invisible within the psychoanalytic "canon"-the ghosts of People of Color who have made outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis, liberation psychology, and their intersections with social justice.For example, Ralph Waldo Ellison, the renowned Black novelist and essayist, was a clerk in Sullivan's private practice in the 1930s during the later phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Sullivan enlisted the young Ellison in reading and critiquing his writing, and the two enjoyed having lunch together, where they would talk about race, class, literature, and psychoanalysis (Rampersad, 2007). These dialogues left Ellison curious about how to integrate sociology, psychoanalysis, and the Black experience. He would go on to collaborate with Richard Wright on a series of publications on psychoanalysis and Blackness, and later

Problems of hate and emancipation: Some considerations for liberation psychology.

“…Yet, even when hate is directed outwards, towards hateful social systems and institutions, there remains a risk that hate becomes personalized. Gaztambide (2019) reminds us of how antifascist activists in 1936 El Salvador enacted brutal violence on members of the Catholic clergy who were thought to have been sympathetic to the earlier fascist rebellion. Miéville (2022) similarly draws our attention to an article published in Socialist Worker celebrating a young child from a wealthy background being mauled to death by an animal.…”

“…Added to this, the meaningless, alienated nature of work under capitalism tends to breed hateful attachments not only towards one’s managers, employers, and fellow workers, but also towards oneself and the commodities that they produce or services that they offer (see e.g., Fromm, 1955). At the superstructural level, capitalist ideology—like fascist ideology (albeit in different ways and at different intensities; Césaire, 1972)—relies on a hated scapegoat figure who is made to stand in for structural oppression and/or subjective antagonisms (Gaztambide, 2019; Stavrakakis, 2002). This scapegoat figure may be the workers with whom we compete, or it may be those most marginalized by capitalism (e.g., refugees, those dispossessed from their land, the lumpenproletariat).…”

“…Instead, confronting hate within the self represents an attempt to diminish the power of hate, to take responsibility for hate, and to avoid repressing hatred or mistaking it for love (see Fromm, 1955). As such, to follow the psychoanalytic injunction is to hold and interpret both love and hatred, together, so that love might rise above hate (Gaztambide, 2019). In working from this injunction, we can attempt to understand and interrogate the place of hatred in anticapitalist movement building.…”

Community psychoanalysis and the generative landscape of our times

“…Psychoanalysis has been criticized, and justly so, for being racist, sexist, homophobic, and elitist. And yet Freud was deeply wounded by both racism—the Jew as black (Gaztambide, 2021; Stoute, 2021), and sexism—the male Jew as female, not manly (Aron & Starr, 2012). He was denied opportunities, and had to flee for his life from the encroaching Nazi forces.…”

Marielle restored? Mortuary graphisms, memory and ritual in intersectional and anti-racist responses to necropolitical violence in Rio de Janeiro

“…In particular, Neusa Santos Souza’s analysands and research participants’ frequent mention of a ‘wound’ ( ferida ) that never healed led the author to identify the ‘Narcissistic injury’ as one of the most prevalent and lasting effects of structural racism upon the racialised psychic apparatus, as it experienced or anticipated upward social mobility (Souza, 1983: 78). Beyond clinical settings, careful observers of Brazilian society would soon realise that such ‘Narcissistic injury’ projects itself upon the social fabric as a proper social trauma, one whose continued disavowal is a metadiscursive, corollary and nation-building aspect of all forms of racial, political and epistemic violence in the country (Arreguy and Montes, 2019; Gaztambide, 2015; Haynal, 2014).…”