Psychoanalysis in Fractured Times: A Path of Depth in a World of Extremes
There are moments in history when psychoanalysis becomes more than a quiet practice of listening—it becomes a way of life. In times marked by political polarization, institutional breakdown, and rising authoritarianism, choosing psychoanalysis is not simply a therapeutic method. It is a stance. A commitment to complexity in a culture increasingly drawn to binary truths.
In recent years, the American social and political landscape has revealed deep psychic fractures—rifts that have long existed beneath the surface. These wounds express themselves through racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and a growing suspicion of intellect and nuance. More disturbingly, the cultural atmosphere has seen the return of fantasies once believed to be historical relics: purity, strongmen, scapegoating, and the resurgence of moral panic around difference.
In such a world, psychoanalysis invites something radical: the refusal to simplify. It offers a space to explore what is denied, disavowed, or cast out—not only in the individual psyche but in collective life.
Between Exile and Responsibility
Some individuals carry stories shaped by migration, marginalization, or not belonging. They embody experiences that challenge dominant cultural narratives. These stories are not just private but political. And in the psychoanalytic space, such histories can be felt—sometimes in the silence between words, sometimes in the tension within the therapeutic frame.
What psychoanalysis offers is not an escape from reality, but a container for it. It allows space for what cannot be said elsewhere. It honors ambivalence. It tolerates contradiction. And it does so without collapsing into defensiveness or ideology.
The Freedom to Fall
Authoritarian systems—whether in politics or in the psyche—thrive on idealization and persecution. They divide the world into winners and losers, insiders and outcasts. Vulnerability is mocked, uncertainty is pathologized, and truth is often replaced by allegiance.
Psychoanalysis offers a different rhythm. It begins not with control but with the fall—with the experience of doubt, breakdown, and unknowing. It does not measure success by dominance or clarity, but by the willingness to stay with what is difficult and to learn from the descent.
This process of inner work resembles the kind of freedom described by Nelson Mandela: “To live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” Such freedom is not given. It is practiced—again and again—in the encounter with the self and with another.
The Mountain of Becoming
There is no finish line in psychoanalysis. No final breakthrough. Instead, there is a long and often invisible journey inward. A process of becoming—of discovering parts of the self that were lost, silenced, or exiled.
This path is different for everyone. Yet along the way, something essential happens: the capacity to symbolize pain, to transform silence into speech, and to encounter one’s history without being imprisoned by it. Psychoanalysis doesn’t promise quick solutions. It invites depth. It restores the possibility of meaning in a world increasingly drawn to distraction and denial.
A Journey Worth Making
In a time of forced forgetting—when history is rewritten and slogans replace thought—psychoanalysis insists on remembering. It is a slow, careful process of working through. A place where grief can be mourned rather than bypassed, where trauma can be named, and where freedom is reimagined not as escape, but as relationship.
For many, especially those who have experienced exclusion, the psychoanalytic process becomes a way to reclaim voice, complexity, and emotional truth. It is not a linear cure, but a courageous return to parts of the self long buried.
In the face of collective dissociation, psychoanalysis offers something deeply countercultural: the invitation to think, to feel, and to change.
Suggested Reading
Mandela, N. (1994). Long Walk to Freedom. Little, Brown & Co.
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. SE, Vol. 12.
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.