Social Consciousness

I have wondered whether there is something to learn about what organizes consciousness around issues of marginalization in the origins of psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s “otherness” as a Jew in his cultural context has been linked to his theory about the unconscious, namely that capacity to be aware of something “other than” the dominant group’s consciousness nicely parallels the divide between the conscious and unconscious aspects of mind. One of my conclusions from my limited education about Freud is that his experience of marginalization coupled with his ambitions regarding his theory led him to de-emphasize his own Jewishness with the thought that antisemitic discrimination might jeopardize his success. I wonder if this, coupled with Freud’s considerable privileges, contributed to the lack of attention to marginalization and power in general in psychoanalysis’s founding. It is my experience that issues related to marginalization in psychoanalysis are often an “afterthought” and that this is its own version of the larger issues of marginalization.

To briefly describe what I mean by marginalization, I would say that marginalization is the process by which groups that hold more power than others, “dominant groups,” knowingly and unknowingly reproduce inequitable divisions of power that limit the power of other groups, “marginalized groups.” The power that is limited can range from more material forms of power such as access to autonomy or resources, to more symbolic forms of power such as status or social recognition.

To me, being socially-conscious means grappling through personal experience and education with the existence and specificity of societally-based dynamics of privilege and power. This involves understanding the common ways that subgroups divide and maintain power and the specifics of such division of power in a given context. The context I am most familiar with is American society and culture, for indigenous persons, descendants of early settlers, descendants of chattel slavery, and recent and less recent immigrants.

To my understanding, American society and culture has elements of oppression according to class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, gender diversity, ability, age, religion, recency of immigration, and level of education among other issues. As an important aside, belonging to an identity group can be a personal and internal process but also, particularly for identity groups with a perceived aesthetic component, identity can also be externally assigned to a person. Therefore, people may experience marginalization for an identity group they have been externally assigned to, even if they do not identify themselves as belonging to that identity group.

Finally, to me being socially conscious requires great humility about knowing, the capacity to listen to the truth of other perspectives, and continual effort to expand awareness. It would be unsurprising, for example, if on this page of writing I have demonstrated my lack of knowledge about an experience that has not entered my conscious awareness. The practice of psychotherapy, in its pursuit of meaning-making, is subject to the influence of a therapist’s awareness and perspectives. I am, just as my patients are, a being that exists in a world shaped by history, politics, and power. I value deepening my understanding, including understanding the limits of my understanding. I also welcome the opportunity to engage, with patients and consultants, differences in opinion and perspective.