Daniel Jose Gaztambide - A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology

Mission Statement

Psychoanalytic Studies seeks psychoanalytically informed works addressing the implications of the location of the individual in clinical, social, cultural, historical, and ideological contexts. Innovative theoretical and clinical works within psychoanalytic theory and in fields such as anthropology, education, and history are welcome. Projects addressing conflict, migrations, difference, ideology, subjectivity, memory, psychiatric suffering, physical and symbolic violence, power, and the future of psychoanalysis itself are welcome, as are works illustrating critical and activist applications of clinical work.

See https://rowman.com/Action/SERIES/LEX/LEXPS for a list of
advisory board members.

Titles in the series

A Peoples History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, by Daniel Jose Gaztambide

Rethinking the Relation between Women and Psychoanalysis: Loss, Mourning, and the Feminine, edited by Hada Soria Escalante

Lives Interrupted: Psychiatric Narratives of Struggle and Resilience, edited by Michael OLoughlin, Secil Arac-Orhun, and Montana Queler

Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness, edited by Marie Brown and Marilyn Charles

Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema: Uncoming Communities, by Jessica Datema and Manya Steinkoler

Women & Psychosis: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, by edited by Marie Brown and Marilyn Charles

Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family, and Childhood in India, edited by Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag Mishra

A Three-Factor Model of Couples Psychotherapy: Projective Identification, Level of Couple Object Relations, And Omnipotent Control, by Robert Mendelsohn

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This is what the LORD says: Administer justice and righteousness. Rescue the victim of robbery from the hand of his oppressor. Do no wrong or violence to the stranger, the fatherless, or the widow. Do not shed innocent blood in this place.Jeremiah 22: 3

You must not exploit or oppress a stranger, for you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt.Exodus 22: 21

Quitate tu, pa ponerme yo. / Remove yourself, so I can place myself.Puerto Rican saying

I was walking through the book stacks of Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, balancing a leaning tower of books between my hands and my chin, looking for a copy of Jessica Benjamins The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988) for my masters thesis. I was writing about the parallels I saw between her psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity and Paulo Freires critical pedagogy, noting a resemblance that could provide an entry point for a dialogue between psychoanalysis and liberation psychology. Paulo Freire, after all, had been a major influence for Ignacio Martn-Bar, the founder of liberation psychology itself. Making this connection could provide me with a way of talking about psychoanalytic thinking as a participant in social justice activism. I was not too enamored with Freud back then. He seemed stuffy, cold, distant, and unrelatable. My undergraduate studies and much of what I was exposed to at the time impressed upon me the idea that Freudian psychoanalysis was outdated, irrelevant, and past its prime. Worse still, psychoanalysis and its founder were irredeemably White, bourgeois, and oppressive. Psychoanalysis did not address issues of culture, let alone inequality, colonialism, and oppression. It was part of the problem. But maybe, I thought, there was the possibility for contemporary, especially relational psychoanalysis to be part of the solution. What was old was bad and what was new, well, it had to be good.

Liberation theology and psychoanalysis were strange bedfellows at Union. Students and faculty looked askance at psychoanalysis with suspicion at its erasure of social and political forces in the life of the soul. Psychoanalytic faculty and students at times, too, recoiled as they defended why a focus on the inner life, the passions, and embodied aliveness was meaningful irrespective of politics, but also crucially important to them. As a masters student from Puerto Rico with a commitment to social justice and a desire to explore how psychoanalysis and clinical psychology could inform social liberation, I found myself trying to bridge worlds, communities, and discourses. Could psychoanalysis, despite its retrograde history with respect to race, gender, class, and sexuality still have something to say to me? Could it

I trip over a small ladder; my fumbling grants the stack in my hands wings as books flew everywhere. I get absentminded sometimes when Im deep in thought. I start to berate myself for not looking where Im going when I spot a book out the corner of my eye. I scan the title a couple of times to make sure Im reading it right and that it says what I think it says. Freuds Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice19181938. Elizabeth Danto. Freud and... social justice? I did not know what to make of this book, but I was curious. I pulled it from the shelf and added it to my stack.

A year passed. I defended my thesis, and during this time I applied and was admitted into Rutgers Universitys Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP). I did not remember Dantos book until the day I was packing to move from New York City to New Brunswick to start doctoral school. In between filling boxes with books and clothes, I took a break and decided to leaf through the book. I was immediately enraptured and finished it within the day. My thoughts were racing as what felt like a hidden and forgotten history revealed itself through Dantos work. A different history from what I had been led to understand, one in which Freud and his colleagues were in thought and in deed engaged with expanding the contours of psychoanalysis to include issues of economic inequality, racial discrimination, and colonial exploitation. Dantos work led me to Sander Gilman, and his erudite volumes on Freuds racial identity as a Jew growing up in an anti-Semitic climate that treated him, and the rest of the first generation of psychoanalysts, as an other. Through Gilmans work as well as others, I became exposed to a different depiction of Freud and the early analysts, one in which they navigated a world brimming with far-right fascism, everyday racism and discrimination, and the ebb and flow of inequality that affects us all. For the first time, the story of psychoanalysis spoke to me.