For the Greater Good of Psychoanalysis: Response to Carla Fischer’s Paper “Psychoanalysis and Dictatorship in Chile: A Non-Existing Relationship”

Abstract

My response to Carla Fischer’s paper enlarges upon one of the powerful subthemes she introduces. Beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, there is a long history in psychoanalysis in which questionable decisions furthering the interests of the institution itself have been made at the expense of individual psychoanalysts. These conscious and unconscious choices have established an unfortunate precedent; they have had a profound effect on the culture of psychoanalysis as a whole, with technical and theoretical consequences that continue to reverberate throughout the profession. The “submission and castration” of the institution of psychoanalysis, as Fischer puts it so succinctly, have led to a loss of integrity and the sacrifice of the founding principles of a discipline that had privileged understanding, an investigative discipline that sought the truth even if that truth was a threat to the social order.