Psychoanalysis/Trauma
A possibly significant but obviously significantly under-developed hypothesis, a hypothesis that has less to do with causes and more with surrounds, impressions, and movements:
Moment 1 The sturm und drang ethos of the nineteenth century that fed the psychoanalytic (un)conscious, the ethos that stripped ancient Athens of humour and irony and rewrote its own history and tradition, which is also to say much of its future, as a melodrama and in the process repackaged aggression as a manufactured aberration, this ethos suddenly became the very real trauma, a.k.a. the First World War, psychoanalysis has had to suffer as opposed to, say, theorize or analyze.
Moment 2 The popularity of a cemented and cementing meta-psychology (seen most evidently in Ego Psychology’s over-investment in an agenda of development, resolution, and normalcy) in the 1920s and 1930s is a phenomenally defensive response to the first instance of the trauma (the chaos and devastation of the “war to end all wars”).
Moment 3 The rise in the tragic character of the psychoanalytic environment in the 1950s and 60s (as per the Lacanian conviction in a profoundly wounded relation between the human and the world as well as the Kleinian insistence on an intractably paranoid-schizoid strain contaminating every aspect of the lived experience) is both a direct effect of the second instance of the trauma (the Second World War) and a reaction against the reaction to the first instance of the trauma (as per Moment 2 above);
Moment 4 The subsequent appeal of a psychoanalysis of nurture (exemplified by the self-psychological and inter-subjective re-reading of Winnicott as a “love heals all” approach) reflects an attempt to obfuscate, yet again, the tenacity of aggression and its underlying roots.
In sum Certain twentieth century defining moments of psychoanalysis, as both a practice and a theory, correspond to the familiar three-step response of the traumatized: rigidity-fragmentation-denial, a response that is hardly sequential and hence all the more traumatizing.
Might there not be a moment at which psychoanalysis can not so much step outside of the last two centuries as instead move along with them, into a new century and a new millennium that are not only riddled with their own pressing conflicts and strategies, but also open to their more current, and hence more specific, resources and dynamics?
