Sehrbrock, Joachim

How have the white, middle‐class, Eurocentric ideologies and practices of the Western psychoanalytic canon prepared us to make meaning of the complexities of our pluralistic world? Psychoanalysis has been criticized for its predominantly decontextualized and depoliticized perspectives that emphasize universal intrapsychic unconscious dynamics. In the context of a sociopolitically critical view of psychoanalytic theory and practice, I will reflect on what it means to keep conducting 'business as usual' in an era where movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, as well as the health inequities that became apparent due to the Covid‐19 pandemic are clear warning signs that our world is deeply troubled by injustice. I will argue that psychoanalytic theory and practice is not immune from this injustice. I will also contemplate aspects of a socially just psychoanalytic vision that may reverse decontextualizing, depoliticizing, and prejudicial trends using the principle of social thirdness, which expands traditional views of thirdness to include the patient's and therapist's embeddedness in the larger sociopolitical currents that inform and shape their engagement with each other. Reflecting on themes such as race, sexuality, gender, and sex/gender nonconformity, both the collapse and repair of social thirdness will be described and illustrated with relevant clinical examples.

In the face of movements like #me too and Time’s Up, clinicians are challenged to navigate the intricacies of socio-political multi-dimensionalities of prejudice and the ways prejudice weaves through various aspects of psychological work. In this paper, I suggest that the intersubjective experience of prejudice is a collapse of thirdness, a collapse of the dialectical recognition of sameness and difference, or self and other. Furthermore, leaning on principles of intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis, I also offer a refinement of the concept of thirdness in relation to prejudice by pointing to the need to bring into focus larger socio-political currents and layers of experience that are intricately woven into the fabric of thirdness, thus constituting a social thirdness. Particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the clinical pertinence, as well as collapse and repair of social thirdness in the context of gender and sexuality. I will use several carefully disguised clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and their relevance to psychotherapeutic work.