Groups and Identity I

First Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2024-25, Fall Term — Fridays, 12:00-1:30pm
Karen Weisbard, PsyD
Jeanette Farrell, MD

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September 13, 2024

[32 pages]

In this paper, Gonzalez outlines the challenge and necessity of incorporating an understanding of social groups into psychoanalytic theory and practice.  He writes:

“The individual and the group have a co-determining relationship…human subjectivity is what happens at their crossroads…. In its function as a theoretical hinge, the concept of identity marks an identification not with a particular person but with a social location, a social location that is itself a function of groups.”

What comes to mind about your own experience of belonging to and being “subject” to groups?    What do you take from his assertion “to claim that one is fully conscious of the structuring power of these identifications is at best naïve and at worse, violent”?   How do group identifications transmit social hierarchical forces into our clinical work?

González, F. (2023) On Identity and the Political in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 92:567-598

We will spend two classes discussing this paper.  We will use this same structure for the first three sets of papers we discuss. In the first class, we will explore the ideas that the author, in this case González, is presenting.    We will try to come to a common understanding of the concepts he refers to.  Please ask about anything you do not understand, that will be useful for everyone.

In the second class, we will dig deeper into the questions these ideas bring up, including how we use these ideas to understand ourselves and our interactions with patients.