How to deal with economic crisis in psychotherapy. The role of the psychoanalyst as a ‘bourgeois’ and as a ‘citoyen’
I’ll show by providing four clinical examples how economic crisis and neoliberal politics affect patients in psychotherapy. The psychoanalyst has to treat more and more people with burn-out syndroms or suffering mobbing or unemployment. Generally speaking the question is how to deal with cumulative traumatization and invalidation. My point is, that the psychoanalist in his role as a bourgeois (that is: in his daily practice) has to revise the concept of ‘neutrality’ and engage himself more actively in the concrete social field, where his or her patients are struggling for psychic health. Moreover, the psychoanalyst should interfere in his role as a ‘citoyen’ with general politics. Thanks to his very specific knowledge about the dialectics of the conscious and the unconscious, he or she may contribute in better recognizing and fighting the emerging fascism in Europe (e.g. Italy or Hungary) and help develop new and realistic utopic concepts on the short of the longer terms for a future democratic society.
