“…[I]t is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and wait for the natural evolution of the transference arising out of the patient’s growing trust in the
psychoanalytic technique and setting, and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making interpretations. … It appals (sic) me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients in a certain classificatory category by my
personal need to interpret” (italics original). Winnicott makes clear that he does
still interpret with patients who have developed the capacity to “use the object”, but that doing so with those deficient in this capacity will bring on defense in the form,
for example, of aggression, in the form of destructive action. It is providing a holding environment, a facilitating environment for societal interlocutors to develop the
capacity for object usage that is one of the main points I propose for “working with the unconscious in cultural life,” one of the main functions I propose for the
psychoanalyst qua citizen for the world. The complement of this provision, the
second of the two cultural psychoanalytic functions I am proposing, is that which is akin to interpretation in the clinic, when we can rely on the interlocutor’s own
management of his id impulses, be they greed, aggression, or lust. Then we can
invite critical reflection which challenges passionately held convictions., because the
individual already has this capacity, a capacity which is being insufficiently deployed at a given juncture. But this latter can occur or be developed in a work group, a
group which has formed in order to accomplish an agreed upon task, formed to do rationally driven work, only when the basic assumptions posited by Wilfred Bion, those of fight-flight, pairing, and dependency on a leader, do not unconsciously
undermine the group’s capacity for work. Bion shows that the way out of the pitfalls of the basic assumptions is an understanding of their effects and a “communal attack” upon this “common enemy.”
It seems to me that for a group of otherwise opposed interlocutors to come together to attempt to solve what Emmanuel Levinas calls “insoluble problems,” each member must adopt a certain responsibility in relation to one another, a responsibility of which Levinas also speaks.
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