SPRING AWAKENING
BY AUSTIN RATNER 
Spring Awakening (first edition of the play), 1891
HUMAN BEINGS have no breeding season, no rut or estrus or musth as some mammals do. When we talk about “the birds and the bees,” however, we’re talking the language of springtime. This issue of TAP marks the arrival of spring with themes of love, sex, desire, and addiction. Our writers explore the necessity and the difficulty of human togetherness, and chart paths forward through its complications. Wherever there are flowers, there are also bees.
Desire can sting. For example: marriage. Psychoanalytic psychologist Enrico Gnaulati, author of a new book, Flourishing Love: A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships, applies to marriage the notion of the “Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” an analogy he gets from Freud, who in turn borrowed it from Schopenhauer. “Hedgehogs need to huddle to stay warm,” Gnaulati writes. “However, given their sharp quills, close proximity guarantees pain.”
That could be said not only of marriages but of psychoanalytic associations.
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To that point, psychoanalyst Himanshu Agrawal shares further reflections on APsA’s recent internal conflicts, writing on life as a person of color in APsA, and in India, the UK, and the US. He does so with hopefulness rooted in acknowledgement, not denial, of pain. In this sense, Agrawal echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s words before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. In the famous “I Have a Dream” speech he gave that day, he referred to the Founding Fathers’ declaration of universal human rights as a promissory note that had yet to be fully paid to Black Americans. Yet he hoped the country’s founding promise would be redeemed. Indeed, his activism would help redeem it. “We refuse to believe,” King said, “that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” That very day, two hundred miles north in New York City, a double homicide occurred that would lead to the wrongful conviction of an innocent young black man, nineteen-year-old George Whitmore Jr., whom police coerced into a false confession. Whitmore spent a decade in jails and courtrooms on bogus charges. But his suffering also led to unforeseen progress. The miscarriage of justice against Whitmore helped decide the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona that established a new right of due process, the so-called Miranda right of the accused to remain silent under questioning.
Psychoanalysis is even younger than America. Despite its failings and internal conflicts, the field may fulfill its promise yet. What is needed is the courage to imagine change. What is needed is for people to keep trying, even after we fail. Sociologist and social worker Ross Ellenhorn is an expert at helping others to reclaim hope after failure and try again. He writes about failure, hope, and “sacred originality” in his extraordinary book Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life, a delightful exegesis of Crockett Johnson’s classic 1955 children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, which extracts from Harold’s journey vital lessons for how to live and how to try again. Ellenhorn gives an inspiring interview in this edition of TAP about his community-integration work with addicts and other veterans of residential treatments.
Small examples of trying again abound at APsA. For a long time, nonanalyst psychotherapists unsuccessfully sought equal membership in APsA. They finally achieved it last year. Now that members of the Psychotherapy Committee have equal status, Margo Goldman shares the committee’s experiment with “distributed leadership,” an approach to group management that’s less hierarchical and more engaging of committee members. It’s also a descendant of psychoanalytic thinking on organizational psychology, as articulated by pioneers like Manfred Kets de Vries.
Social workers are another group APsA might welcome and incorporate better than it previously has. Flora Lazar offers a study of social work’s important role in the history of psychoanalysis and points out that the majority of mental health services in this country are provided by social workers. Social workers, for that matter, are trained to attend to the well-being of communities. An organization like APsA, seeking to overcome disfunction and grow, ought to consider recruiting more social workers. Social worker Mike Langlois has not found it easy, financially or socially, to join the psychoanalytic community, as he writes in a witty and poignant first-person essay. One hopes that might change.
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Desire must have an object, but is that object always a person? Greed is a form of desire that gropes for satisfaction in the inanimate realm. Psychoanalyst Alan Karbelnig unpacks the climate crisis as a product of oil company greed and of denial that thwarts our attempts to regulate that greed. “Given that global warming will definitively make the horrors of Israel v. Hamas, and Russia v. Ukraine look like minor misfortunes,” Karbelnig wrote last year in his Substack newsletter, “I propose that we humans must take an activist stance.” In this essay, he suggests psychoanalysts have a role to play in climate activism by helping others understand the intrapsychic motives to cling to the status quo, and by using the psychoanalytic idea of triangulation to unite opponents against a common threat.
Illustration by Austin Ratner
Greed differs from addiction, as psychoanalyst Lance Dodes hastens to point out, but addiction too aims manifest desire at an inanimate object: drugs. Dodes, author of the book The Heart of Addiction, returns to TAP’s pages with his principle that addiction is a compulsion serving to ward off a feeling of helplessness. Psychotherapists should consider this formulation when they help patients who suffer from addiction. I would add a cautionary note, however, that psychoanalytic practitioners are ill-advised to assume they have the only answers necessary or sufficient to treat this complex, challenging, varied, and often very dangerous problem. The new TAP aims generally to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and other realms of thought and practice, and Ross Ellenhorn’s interview provides a useful companion piece to Dodes’s narrower approach. Ellenhorn reflects on practical necessities beyond psychotherapy in the treatment of addiction—the importance of social supports, for example, for addicts whose symptoms present obstacles to living and working among others with complete freedom.
In Stories from Life, writer Drew Villano narrates her journey through drug and alcohol addiction in a way that subtly illuminates the psychological meanings it accrued in her life. Psychotherapy helped her understand and disentangle from addiction by understanding and disentangling from the emotional fallout of her childhood. With great artistry and a powerful voice, she shares with us the story of her grief and its devious ramifications.
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What is the most forbidden desire? Perhaps it’s one of those uncivil feelings from early childhood—small children’s jealous longing to possess one of their parents in the same adult and intimate way that the other parent does. The flowering of that desire brings with it bee stings. Just ask Oedipus. My risqué article on the Oedipus complex, featuring an interview with “OnlyFans’ Favorite MILF” and a tour of incest-themed internet porn, argues irreverently that this theory is not so obsolete as some would like to imagine.
Sabina Spielrein, author of the first doctoral dissertation ever written in psychoanalysis, is famous for her Oedipal passion for an older, married man—her former psychiatrist, Carl Jung. Henry Zvi Lothane has helped translate into English for the first time Spielrein’s Russian diaries and previously unpublished letters. He shares excerpts of his book The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein and tries to reclaim Spielrein’s impressive intellectual legacy from the salacious legends that have trailed after her. In David Cronenberg’s 2011 film A Dangerous Method, for example, Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender depict Spielrein and Jung engaged in sadomasochistic sexual acts when it seems unlikely the real historical people ever consummated their relationship physically.
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Spielrein and Jung wrote and thought creatively. Many psychoanalysts do. Most of the writers in this issue are in fact practicing therapists. I’ll be bringing in more new voices from outside the psychoanalytic community in the next issue. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to feature in this one original artwork by some accomplished and talented first-time contributors to TAP. Cartoonist and self-proclaimed “legacy media victim” Jason Novak has published his cartoons in many publications, including the New Yorker. Photographer Micheal McLaughlin’s veteran eye has been hired by every corporation from Apple to Verizon and yielded multiple solo exhibitions at the Robin Rice Gallery in New York City; his gorgeous landscapes appear in TAP’s pages alongside Alan Karbelnig’s piece on the psychology of climate change. And Ian Campbell’s haunting and evocative fine-art photographs of “forgotten places” capture the lights in the darkness reflected in Ross Ellenhorn’s interview.
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I derived the title of this issue’s editor’s letter from the 2006 Broadway musical Spring Awakening, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 German play, Frühlings Erwachen: Eine Kindertragödie, which was almost certainly known to Freud. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud obtains an example of serial parapraxis from a book on Wedekind’s plays; an actor kept flubbing the line “The fear of death is an intellectual error” in Wedekind’s one-act Die Zensur (The Censorship). According to the New York Times, Wedekind “was continually at odds with the censors until his death in 1918.” The playwright regularly took on sexual and transgressive subjects and was once jailed for satirizing Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The resonances between Wedekind and Freud are in fact striking. Like Freud and Nietzsche before him, Wedekind attributed much suffering to humanity’s heavy-handed repression of its own animal nature. His play Spring Awakening bore a telling subtitle reflecting that suffering: A Children’s Tragedy. Wedekind blames his young protagonists’ suffering specifically on ignorance about their own sexuality, an ignorance enforced by social prohibitions. When a central character asks her mother where babies come from, for example, she’s told the evasive German tale about the stork bringing them. Later, the young girl becomes pregnant by rape.
The stork legend had significance for Freud, too. We learn from his autobiographical writings that his determination to set the record straight about human sexuality originated in childhood frustrations with such lies. This led to some revolutionary discoveries in his adult work. But in his determination to resist the antisexual forces of repression, it’s also clear Freud could overcompensate. Freud’s accounts of human development and suffering sometimes overrated sexuality and underrated attachment—love and hate, dependence and independence. It remained for later generations of psychoanalysts to refine his theories and assign attachments more weight.
It’s easy enough to confuse sex and love. They seem to impersonate each other from time to time. Tender, loving feelings can sometimes be harder and scarier to feel than sexual ones, and sex can displace love in our thoughts and actions. Love can displace sex too, as it does when we give attachment theory so much weight that we ignore sexuality and its attendant guilty conflicts, as some appear to do in entirely abandoning old theories like the Oedipus complex. Sex and love are dance partners and adversaries in the psyche. Perhaps that’s why Lester Bangs, portrayed by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, says great art is about “love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love.”
As we awaken to spring and its mottled skies of sun and rain, these are good mysteries to contemplate.
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.