Yet again, we are writers or institute directors and we wish to make a place for our voices to be heard. Yet further, we might be part of a community group aiming at
improving public education for all students and we discern the group’s blind spots as unwittingly perpetuating or aggravating some of the very problems it aims to resolve or ameliorate.
In all of these situations, I have sometimes acted contrary to what I am here
proposing – sometimes in ways reparable and sometimes not. To “wait and wait” can be the most difficult thing. Of course, it inheres much more than a passive
waiting. It necessitates that we are filled with the effects of the destructivity that our fellows are repressing, it necessitates that we survive it, that is, that we receive the projective identifications that are disavowed, that we do not act in any way to
discharge those effects, and we wait for our peaceful provision of this potential space to be critically filled by interlocutors who are moved unexpectedly by this receptivity. If there are the two functions that I propose, then it becomes necessary that we
differentiate between those who are yet to become capable of object usage and those who already are so capable but who are critically derailed for more classically
psychoneurotic reasons, those who, in the clinic, can receive and work with an
interpretation, those who, in society, are able to contemplate new ideas even when those ideas oppose long-invested ones.
When I say I propose these two cultural functions, which I have sometimes metaphorically thought of as the staff and the sword, I propose that these are already existing functions, inherent in being a psychoanalyst, but which we have not yet made explicit as necessary to be situated in group undertakings. Our choices are either to repress – or helplessly bemoan, which amounts to the same thing - what is
happening to our world; or else to be transformational objects 7 in every social
activism opportunity we find ourselves; or – through our own wish to be rid of the effects of the world’s destructivity and thereby interpreting prematurely and
5