Using Psychoanalysis to Understand Irrationality

As a Jewish undergraduate student at Cornell University, I became very interested in the causes of the Holocaust. I simply

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could not understand how millions of my people could have been murdered in modern Europe, and psychoanalysis was the first discourse that helped me to combine history with an understanding of the irrational. Once I started to read Sigmund Freud, I became convinced that his work represented the practical application of philosophy, and so I decided to major in political philosophy with a focus on psychoanalysis.

My interest in philosophy and psychoanalysis brought me to Jacques Lacan’s work, and eventually I decided to pursue a doctorate in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris. In France, I lived in a German dormitory, and I continued to study the historical and psychological causes for the Holocaust. At the same time, I started my own analysis, and I decided to become an analyst. Throughout my studies and my analysis, I remained haunted by the question of what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. This concern was heightened because I witnessed in Paris several terrorist bombings and protests against the state of Israel. For a period of time, daily, I had to witness people burning American and Israeli flags.

After I completed my analytic training and earned my doctorate in psychoanalysis and philosophy in 1990, I returned to the United States; I got a job as a clinical social worker in the court diversion program at the Bronx Family Court. My job was to help young people stay in school, but in reality, I was dealing with the crack epidemic, AIDS, and drug gangs. At this job, I turned to psychoanalysis to understand the causes for racism, addiction, and self-hatred. This focus on the unconscious causes for self-destructive behavior was combined with an interest in how history shapes the irrational influences of both individuals and cultures.

After going back to school at Kent State, I wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare and Freud and received a second doctorate in English literature. I then decided that I wanted to be a professor and not an analyst because I did not like spending most of my time just sitting down and listening to others. I also liked to work with students and help them understand themselves and the world around them better. I found that by teaching Shakespeare and other literary works, I could explain how psychoanalysis interprets human thinking and behavior in a very specific way. I also realized that literature forces us to combine our current understanding with historical factors, and so I continued to think in a psychohistorical way.

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After I taught at George Washington University, I ended up teaching advanced writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I became increasingly interested in the poor treatment of non-tenured faculty. I eventually became the faculty union president for the ten campuses of the University of California system. This position, which I held for 13 years, pushed me into many political conflicts; I always tried to use psychoanalysis to figure out what was motivating the people I dealt with. I often thought I had a great advantage because I was good at reading people and understanding how they are often driven by fantasies and irrational desires.

Emotion, the Unconscious, and Politics

To show how emotion, the unconscious, and politics are connected, I want to discuss several events that happened recently to me around the same time. In each one of these separate incidents, it becomes evident that only psychoanalysis can fully explain them. In fact, I will argue that not only is psychoanalysis a vital method for self-understanding, but it is also an important way of comprehending politics and culture.

The first story concerns my role as a lead member of a bargaining team negotiating a faculty contract with our university. It is very common in negotiating to make a series of unrealistic demands—“bargaining chips”—which will later be sacrificed to make a deal. These extreme demands help to rally your base and get your members involved in the process. However, several of our members refused to give up on our bargaining chips, and because they felt we were not getting everything we wanted, the members turned against the bargaining team itself. Next, the team became divided, and some of the bargainers decided that we should not give up anything, and so we should simply go on strike until the university gave us what we wanted. What surprised me was that the people who knew some of our demands were only unrealistic bargaining chips acted as if these demands were our intended goals, and they were willing to attack their own team to defend their unrealistic expectations. Some of these people declared that the university administration was by definition evil and there was no way to negotiate with them; anyone who tried to make a deal was making a pact with the devil.

What we see here is the way that social movements often have to rely on emotion, splitting, and victim identity to create solidarity; but this same unifying process can undermine any ability to

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resolve problems. Similar to the idea that people campaign in poetry and govern in prose, we can say that movements require irrational fantasies and emotions to motivate and connect the group; but once this solidarity is achieved, they have to switch to logic and reason. Then the problem with many contemporary movements organized under the heading of identity politics is that, while they know how to solidify their base, they become fixated on this level and cannot move to the next stage.

After we successfully negotiated this contract, some of the disaffected members organized to replace me as president of the union. Even though over 90% of our members endorsed the contract, the dissenting people argued that our process was not democratic enough, and they wanted a leader who was more radical and would not make a deal with the other side. Using the logic of victim identification, the extremist opposition drew a strict line dividing the good people from the bad people, and they insisted on the reality of their unrealistic demands. After this point, it became impossible to have a rational discussion with people, and it was as if the entire organization had fallen prey to a collective fantasy. What I found most upsetting was that several people who had worked with me for many years started to rewrite history and replace what really happened with a set of fantasy constructions.

Around this same time, I became very involved with Bernie Sanders’ run for president. Since I had written a book on free public higher education, I was able to organize some events on his behalf. I also attended several of his large rallies, and while I supported many of his key proposals, I could not help but notice how irrational, emotional, and ignorant of the political realities the crowds at his events had become. Not only did they scream and cry like they were at a rock concert, but when I tried to engage supporters in substantive conversations over the issues, most of them appeared to be unable to articulate the basic elements of what they were endorsing. I also found it upsetting that Sanders was calling for a revolution, but he clearly had no plans to start a real revolution; and his use of the term socialism seemed to be completely disconnected from the meaning of the term.

During the same time period, I began to teach at Pacifica Institute, a graduate school of psychology, which specialized in non-traditional therapeutic approaches. Once again, I witnessed extreme irrationality on both an individual and group level, in this case involving two instances of students dramatically walking out

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of class in protest—for the first time in my 25 years of teaching. In a history of psychology class when I was discussing the psychology of groups and politics a student raised her hand and said that she was from Idaho, that everyone in Idaho has guns, and if everyone in the classroom had guns, there would be no violence. Although I am pretty sure that I never mentioned guns in the class when the student got up to leave in protest, another student joined in and left with her. Later in the same class, a student became upset while we were watching scenes from a movie and I acknowledged that I did not know a scene was set in a Muslim country. He gave a long speech comparing me to Hitler and accusing me of ethnic cleansing before he left the room with two other students following him. Subsequently, I realized that when he was giving his very angry speech, many students were nodding their head in agreement. It was like an irrational unconscious contagion had spread throughout the room.

Freud helps us to understand these events by showing how people often engage with the world on the level of fantasy and what he called psychical reality. Moreover, while we think of our emotions as highly individual responses, they are often shaped by larger social forces. We learn our emotional responses by imitating others, and so these personal reactions have a social foundation. In what he called hysterical identification, Freud discovered that people will often identify with others who have placed themselves in the position of being victimized. Since the victim is always good and pure and you cannot criticize the victim’s revenge, victim identity becomes a powerful personal and social force.

Not only are most religions based on victim identity, but most wars start when one group sees itself as being victimized. It turns out that the best way to organize a crowd or maintain a social movement is to have people unify around a shared sense of victimhood with clearly defined lines between who is good and who is evil. As Freud contended, the model for these social groups is the relation between the child and the all-powerful parent. Due to the child’s lack of power and smallness, the parent appears to be larger than life, and the helpless child can only submit to the will of the parent. Freud then added that in hypnosis we find the same relationship where someone submits to the will of an all-powerful other. He added that this type of relation also occurs in passionate love and the formation of social groups like the church and the army. In all of these cases, the submission to an authority entails a giving up

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of the reality-testing ego. Thus, it does not matter if Donald Trump lies because his followers are no longer concerned with the reality of his words or deeds.

For two years, I could not escape from encounters with mass hysteria, and I believe that I owe psychoanalysis a debt of gratitude for keeping me relatively sane. By understanding Freud’s theories of group psychopathology, I was able to deal with the extreme events and emotions I kept on encountering. From this perspective, we see that historical and psychoanalytic understanding helps to provide a logic for the illogical and the combination of these two discourses is a powerful explanatory force.

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