Psychoanalysis, society, and politics

Abstract

It should come as no surprise to our readers that we dedicate this issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis to the ways in which the field of psychological research founded by Sigmund Freud can help us understand and deal with social and political problems, now that the war in the Ukraine has been going on for more than three months. One of us (M.C.) owes to the book by Andreas Kappeler Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Kappeler, 2022) the welcome and necessary knowledge of the complexity of the history and the development of the national identity of the Ukrainian people, a process which has been going on for several centuries, and which reminded him of the similar long process undergone by his own country, Italy. Although Italy had already started having a national literature in the thirteenth century, it was only in 1861 that it became a politically unified country. This happened with the Ukraine only in the summer of 1991, but given its position on the border between the European Union and Russia, as well as the lack of an adequate capacity of dialogue with and containment of Vladimir Putin’s aggressive strategy and plans, we are now confronted with the most terrible war we have had in Europe since the end of World War II. And there is no way yet in sight for how such a war can come to the end. “Psychoanalysis and political economy” by Siegfried Zepf andDietmar Seel (both from Saarbrücken, Germany) is the first article of this issue. We propose it to our readers also in order to remind them of how much its first author – who passed away in October 2021 aged 84 –was genuinely committed to a socially critical psychoanalysis. No wonder that his 2009 article “Consumerism and identity: Some psychoanalytical considerations” has received 2760 views and occupies second position on this journal’s list of Most Read Articles (see Zepf, 2009). One of us (M.C.) originally met Siegfried Zepf in 1990 through the German “Bernfeld-Gruppe,” a group of colleagues committed to developing a critique of “institutionalized psychoanalysis,” as the editor of the book “Wer sich nicht bewegt, der spürt auch seine Fesseln nicht” – Anmerkungen zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Psychoanalyse (Zepf, 1990). It is no wonder that, in the article written together with his colleague and friend Dietmar Seel, Siegfried Zepf focussed on the way in which psychoanalysis can be dealt with from a Marxist point of view, with particular regard for the way in which we have our patients pay us for the work we do with them, and not for the result we are able to obtain – that is, irrespective of whether or not we cure them. The authors’ analysis brings them to conclude that, in psychoanalysis, the suspension of truth value, the tolerance shown towards contradictory concepts, the lack of conceptual criticism, and the exclusion of sociocritical issues seem to be effects of psychoanalysts’ interest in realizing the exchange value of their psychoanalytic treatment and their accompanying lesser interest in its use value. From Germany comes also the following original clinical contribution, the article “Unresolved shadows: German encounters in the consulting room” by our Berlin colleague Stefanie Sedlacek, a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) whose article “Avatar of desire? – Virtual space of possibility in video and telephone analysis” has just been published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. As the DPG was one of the four founding societies of the IFPS in 1962 (see Huppke, 2021), our journal has dedicated much space to the reconstruction of the development of psychoanalysis in Germany since World War II. No. 1/2021 was the fourth of a series of monographic issues on “German themes in psychoanalysis” edited by one of us (M.C.; see Conci, 2021). With her paper Stefanie Sedlacek adds a very important clinical dimension to the ground covered in the four issues. Through it we learn that, although the reunification of West and East Germany dates back to October 1990, her patients seem to be still living in a divided country, this giving rise to an internalized split identity, whose defensive use in the transference has to be continually worked through in analytic work. Such a “split German object” is impersonal