The Undream: When the Clinical (Becomes?) Political

Abstract

Contemporary psychoanalysis has undertaken the task of addressing how the social and political dynamics become verges of the clinical psychoanalytic experience. This contention defies the usual theories and frames we use in our clinical practice, which may be determinant to the conscious and unconscious experience of both patients and therapists. This paper strives to open a space for reflection over three of this verges: the personal and the political; the socio-historical register and the present emergence in the analytic setting; and the possibility of yielding microfascisms though radical imagination. Based on a clinical case story, I begin by questioning the cleavage between the personal and the political, as the sociopolitical history of both analyst and patient entangles inadvertently in the clinical situation. I then proceed to identify elements of power-based relationships that manifest in the therapeutic space. I propose that the transit from microfascim (Deleuze) to radical imagination (Castoriadis) is available to the clinical dyad in the process of resignifying the vestiges of traumatic social history, encrypted as a potential repetition in every human subject. Through the willingness to be aware of and realize this struggle, the undream can emerge as a new personal and political perspective, anchored in a relational experience, and with the potential to transform a binary psychic fracture into the dynamic process of rebuilding the “politics of experience,” thus achieving resolution.