Thinking Psychoanalytically (and Historically) about the State of the Nation: 1939, 2019

NYPSI’s 1036th Scientific Meeting:

“Thinking Psychoanalytically (and Historically) about the State of the Nation: 1939, 2019”

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

8:00 – 10:00 pm

Presenter: Elizabeth Lunbeck, Ph.D.

Discussant: Ben Kafka, Ph.D.

Many have observed that emotion has increasingly come to dominate in the realm of politics, eclipsing rationality, nurturing violence, and threatening democratic forms of governance around the globe.  Historians in particular have sounded the alarm, invoking the catastrophic consequences of democracy’s dismantling in the 1930s to caution against complacency.  In this presentation, I look at the writings of the 1930s and 1940s psychoanalysts who witnessed  Europe’s embrace of fascism.  I show that concepts rooted in the idiom of narcissism (among them omnipotence, grandiosity, and magical thinking; humiliation, helplessness, and insecurity) and drawn from psychoanalysis’s disavowed originary practices (such as hypnosis and suggestion) figured centrally in their understandings of their own historical moment.  I suggest that their focus on feelings and emotions rather than on instinctual drives was lost to American psychoanalysis in the postwar period, rendering it phenomenologically impoverished, and conclude by arguing that their conceptualization of narcissism as a coherent structure of feeling offers us a powerful tool with which to understand the shocks and dislocations of the present.  If, as has been suggested, the “right to feel” is now consensually recognized in the political sphere, then current analytic understandings of narcissism are critical to grasping its complexities and power.

2 CME/CE credits offered. 

Elizabeth Lunbeck, Ph.D., is a professor in the department of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of several prize-winning books, most recently The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard, 2014).  She is Academic Associate Member of APsaA and BPSI, and holds an MA in counseling psychology.

Ben Kafka, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. He is also an advanced candidate at IPTAR, and sees patients in private practice downtown. He has been a member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Fellow and Chair of the Executive Committee of the New York Institute for the Humanities; and a Rita Frankiel Memorial Fellow of the Melanie Klein Trust. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012) as well as a number of articles, essays, and reviews. He is currently working on a book about gaslighting, double binds, folies-à-deux, and other forms of induced insanity.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

1. Discuss the contributions of 1930s and 1940s analysts to understandings of mass followership in non-democratic societies;
2. Explain the differences between feelings and emotions on the one hand and apparatuses and energic cathexes on the other as frameworks for understanding individuals’ psychologies;
3. Explain the ways in which leaders can mobilize narcissism to connect to their followers.