Living Entities that Join and Separate Us: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual”

Abstract

González’s paper (this issue) strives to deepen the field of psychoanalytic thinking and the growing body of theory bridging psyche and society, by reaching to group theory and fashioning an unconscious internal structure for the social links alive within us. His paper represents an incredibly ambitious, rich, and highly complex synthesis of aspects of classical theory, object relations, relational, neo-Kleinian, Winnicottian, intersectional, feminist, multiple group, link, and critical social psychoanalytic theories. In my discussion I will position González’s ideas within the matrix of the Bionian psychic apparatus and field theories; followed by a response to his personal and clinical examples of the collective in the individual in the aftermath of the Trump election, and the challenges before us.