THE ANALYTIC FIELD
A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: In Conversation with Daniel Jose Gaztambide A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology By Daniel Jose Gaztambide Lexington Books, 2019 Your book reads as a counter-history of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis projects of liberation, but also as an acknowledgment of the history of psychoanalysis’ complicity in repression. The link made in the book between psychoanalysis and psychologies and theologies of liberation suggests something of your personal history. In true psychoanalytic fashion, we’d have to go back to my mother. It’s not a book about Puerto Ricanness, but yet it is insofar as it is grounded in my life experiences. When I was a kid, my mom was the secretary of our pastors at our church; the pastors were a curious bunch. One of them was getting his doctorate in clinical psychology, and our head pastor was exposed to psychoanalytic thought in his seminary training. Psychology and psychoanalysis informed how they thought about community, and mental health and well-being were key issues in our church. My mom would bring home these older nosological books that were translated into Spanish, and talk to me about them, which made for a different kind of bedside story! She would engage in armchair psychoanalysis of our island politics, people we knew, and at one point “diagnosed me” as a colérico melancólico—as having a melancholic-choleric temperament. I brushed her off, thinking, but I’m so gregarious and outspoken! It was only in hindsight that I realized my gregariousness and sense of humor was a defense—and my mom saw through me. In the way that most kids want to be firefighters or doctors, from about age seven or eight, I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. All of those ideas were in the ether. Also influential was growing up noticing all of these unspoken things in our culture in Puerto Rico. On the one hand, my body was idealized because I have light skin and “good hair.” People would say things like, “oh, your son is so beautiful,” and eventually, someone would say the quiet part out loud, “because he’s so white.” Colorism and White Supremacy textured the immense poverty, inequality, and violence happening on the island regularly. I went to sleep as a child to the sound of bullets and coquís (a frog species indigenous to Puerto Rico with a unique call). Nobody commented on this or helped me mentalize about this reality, treating it as if it was natural. Psychoanalysis, as an inquiry
into the unsaid, perhaps the unspeakable, spoke to this need to make meaning of a colonial situation. When I went to college at Rutgers, I double-majored in psychology and religion, working on a series of projects on relational theory and religious experience under George Atwood, who was on faculty in the undergraduate department, and James W. Jones in the department of religion. They recommended that I apply to and attend Union Theological Seminary, where they had a department of psychiatry and religion, which was deeply psychoanalytic. My first thought was you’re sending me to seminary?! In truth, it was one of the most transformative experiences of my education. Union was grounded in a diverse array of liberation theologies; all centered on a social justice perspective. At the same time, I
Tim Maul, Grand Central Station 4
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SUMMER 2020
was in there between two worlds, trying to find my place. I loved psychoanalysis but also became engrossed in liberation theology. How do I place these two discourses on the same page talking to each other? During a guest lecture in one of Ann Ulanov’s classes, Claude Barbre from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology brought up Ignacio Martín-Baro’s work. I started reading Martín-Baró and was excited to explore an integration between psychoanalysis and Liberation Psychology. At the same time, I was reading Jessica Benjamin’s Beyond Doer and Done To and [Paulo] Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Benjamin wrote about intersubjectivity and recognition, Freire about intersubjectivity and humanization. Noting those parallels became the foundation of my master’s thesis. But that’s when I realized there was more to this relationship than
