What Can Psychoanalysis Offer to Alleviate Toxic Polarization - Harriet Wolfe

What if God had created Eve not at Adam’s service, but acknowledging his human condition of helplessness and absolute dependence on another human being? What may be the influence of this Western myth of the creation of civilization upon our subjectivity, especially regarding gender differences? These and other interesting questions are posed by Susana Muszkat in this paper about male violence and its naturalization in society. According to her, gender-biased behaviors associated with masculinity (and femininity) are sustained by fixed cultural codes and repeated unconsciously across generations, in the absence of interventions aimed at deconstructing them. Is it God’s fault, or is it the way we read the myth? Susana Muszkat is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, a full member and faculty member of the Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of São Paulo. She sees adults, couples, and families in private practice and in institutions. Susana has a master’s degree in Social Psychology, which led her to studies on masculinity, violence, and gender, and to coordinating talk groups for men convicted of domestic violence for 15 years, where she had the opportunity to reflect on the “social construction of masculinity.” She noted that men get trapped in static roles and cultural demands—as they are always expected to be strong, have courage, and engage in risky behaviors—differently from what is expected of women. According to her, this ends up affecting their mental health, generating violence as a product of having to maintain this Ideal Ego. In an attempt to get rid of feelings of insecurity, they react with violence. Susana coined the term “violence from identity distress” for this emotional condition.

Why does the analyst write? And further why might the analyst write different kinds of pieces such as clinical writing, scientific papers, narratives, or poetry? There are always the considerations of the impact on our patients, their confidentiality and privacy (theirs and ours) but the desire to write and the writing process as well as its products are interesting to explore analytically. In this episode, Jennifer Davids discusses how she relates to her writing process which she links to the process of thinking, gestated as ideas and words and delivered through a process she calls writing through, a form of working through. For her, the process is not without struggle, searching to express herself in a second language that fits the images and sensory-rich world of her mind. And there are anxieties associated with the process of gestating an idea, “Do I have something to say?”, “Can I produce something worthwhile?”, of publishing her work including the anxieties associated with clinical writing and related themes of confidentiality and privacy. Her process is thoughtful, creative, courageous and inservice of the larger group of analyst readers who might be in dialogue with her.

Are the limits of what can be said – the field of the non-verbal, the texture of affects, everything that resists symbolic capture – the true challenge facing psychoanalysis today? In her thought-provoking podcast, “The Body as a Pulsing Frontier”, Ema Ponce de León offers her particular view on the theme of the body in psychoanalysis, developed through her dialogue with Freud and with contemporary authors. Among other ideas, she suggests that the analyst not only listens but also “resonates bodily” feeling in their own body the patient’s pre-verbal elements, especially with those with limited capacity for symbolization or with severe trauma. From this perspective, Ema Ponce proposes an embodied metapsychology in which the body is the fundamental support and grounding of the psyche, which is born out of the original body-to-body encounter, within a constitutive intercorporeality. In this embodied metapsychology, the author highlights concepts such as the tonic dialogue and introduces others such as tonic-emotional mirroring.

"Psychic Change and Enactment: Some Reflections" is the work that Ariel Liberman offers us, to examine psychic change from a relational perspective, placing enactment as a central moment in the analytic process. Far from understanding it as a mere technical error, he presents it as a shared repetition (by patient and analyst) that, through insight and the analyst's disidentification with the embodied object, can become a transformative experience. In dialogue with the logic of the “deferred action”, how are these scenes resignified “après-coup”? How can the unthought in the analytic field open new possibilities for symbolization and change?

"How does the psyche navigate the interplay of impermanence and resilience? In 'Vicissitudes of Transience', Jhuma Basak explores the concept of transience through psychoanalytic, cultural, and philosophical lenses, drawing connections between Japanese and Indian contexts. Through myths like Ajase and cultural forms like Bhatiyali songs, Jhuma Basak illuminates how transience shapes our relationship with loss, desire, and creativity. Bridging Eastern and Western perspectives, this reflection invites us to consider the feminine principle of fluidity as a path to embracing impermanence." This article is part of the book “Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India” (Routledge, 2025), a collaboration between Osamu Kitayama and Jhuma Basak exploring primal relationships in Japan and India through a cross-cultural psychoanalytic lens."