15. In Search of the Oracle:
The Fate of Social Attitudes in
Psychoanalytic Theorizing
Presenter: |
Michael S. Keren, PsyD |
Chair: |
Marilyn S. Jacobs, PhD, PsyD |
Self Psychology Page | 21th Conference
Program
Psychoanalysis in general, and Self Psychology in particular, has been slow to join the discourse surrounding social attitudes regarding race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This paper attempts to examine and understand this deficit. Revisiting both Freud’s and Kohut’s use of the Oedipus myth, the paper observes how both authors paid selective attention to detail by ignoring the role of the oracle in the myth’s narrative. Exploring the role of the oracle in the narrative, the author argues that the oracle can be read as a metaphor for social attitudes. As the oracle was disregarded in psychoanalytic theorizing, so has the influential role of social attitudes such as racism, sexism and homophobia been ignored as organizers of experience, and thus analytic material.
The paper argues for revisiting these attitudes as a content of the unconscious of the individual. Focusing of the prereflective unconscious, as explained by Atwood, Stolorow, and Brandchaft, the paper argues that these attitudes impact everyone, and serve to organize experience, motivate behavior and shape the analytic encounter. The historic unwillingness to examine these attitudes in the analyst, the theorists, the patient, and the analytic milieu have limited the appeal and usefulness of psychoanalysis.
Michael S. Keren, Psy.D
The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity