Cracking Up to Crackdown
Watchwords of security
The Editors
Echoing Aimé Césaire on the violent repercussions of colonization on the metropole, Fanon announced: “It is the moment of the boomerang.” From Gaza to here–wherever here is–and back again, we export our security measures, instruments, and tactics; they return to and on us. The persecutions pulse in every scene, a continuous drumbeat of repression, first felt elsewhen. This is not what Freud meant by an object refound, and yet the metaphor abides.
We hear the word security in its absence: “You will be arrested.” We hear an abundance of fear: “For your safety!” We sit passively to shout in front of police barricades: “Disperse!” “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” We see our friends and loved ones threatened by the state. We are secured; we are insecure.
We hear, too, claims to unsafety in the form of a wish to shore up a position no longer tenable. The conditions of safety must be met—somehow, by someone, in the absence of threat—but they can only, we are told, be met in the mind. A veritable therapeutics of safety and security follows hard on the heels of state violence, sounding to our ears like a sick joke. But can the mind secure security alone? Suddenly, we’re met with an early paradox of psychoanalysis, one that sets teeth on edge, grinding out our very first anxiety: am I secure, or am I being secured? Am I safe, or am I entrapped in a net of safety? Freud tells us: “Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security.” But not all are allowed to participate in this exchange. Where does my security begin, and yours end?
Adam Phillips names this paradox as our intractable dependency: “For Freud, in short, man was the ambivalent animal; for Winnicott, he would be the dependent animal. . . . Prior to sexuality as the unacceptable, there was helplessness. Dependence was the first thing, before good and evil.” The implication is that the ambivalent animal is the infant, who doesn’t, and cannot, exist without another ambivalent animal. Infantile dependency is subject. Yet that is not the scene, per se, of the prominent insecurity felt across the polity. Instead, this helplessness has been amplified and canalized by the state apparatuses, all but canceling our ability to mutually depend upon another. Worse still, those who are deemed ambivalent animals are persecuted and murdered, as the state and international liberal order tries to purify itself of ambivalence—all in the name of, as Gillian Rose glossed it, the “[f]ascist security of our own unreflected predation.”
We’ve been here before, and recently. We were also here long ago. Describing the refugee conditions of 300,000 people displaced along the Tunisian and Moroccan borders, Fanon says those in exile under colonial conditions “live in an atmosphere of permanent insecurity,” facing endless bombing with nowhere to go. Our apparent security is yet again paid for by this unjustifiable cost. Likewise, “unreflected predation” is the structural characteristic of racial capitalism, which demands dispossession as a matter of course and embroils us in an ethical-political problem, regardless of whether we countenance it or not. This situation haunts liberalism to the point that it vitiates its own defenses against something much worse. Can we traverse this fascinating impasse differently—the false promise of total security that fascism extends with a deceiving hand? The stakes could not be much higher, so let’s start from the beginning—the primal scene and infantile dilemma—in order to sketch the path we could traverse differently.
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A secure hand props up the head that cannot yet hold itself up. Nourishment cannot be secured without the other and must come frequently. The infant’s body relies completely on another body, which slowly comes more fully into view. Psychoanalysis posits security as among our earliest needs, starting with our first encounters—those most basic, physical interactions between caregiver and infant. In the infant-maternal scene, security is the shape and scope of safety. As a school of psychoanalytic thought, object relations proceeds from the premise that other people inexorably take up residence in each of our homes, our environment, our “I.” This happens prior to any welcome or knock at the door. They are simply there, and who exactly the self or other is, in phantasy, is all but inextricable from the impressions someone leaves. We take with us what they leave behind. Object-relation theorists mark out a space for a primordial association to grow up within us. This is their unique merit. “My hypothesis is that the infant,” Klein writes, “has an innate unconscious awareness of the existence of the mother.”
The infant reaches out, without saying a word, dimly aware that some figure will reach back. From infancy, the ego is there and capable of relation, functioning as a container full of contents, as Juliet Mitchell has summarized Klein’s position. But the dimensions of the container and the sifted contents within it are what is at stake in psychical reality as it takes on shape and color. Security’s original availability makes its eventual withdrawal possible and tolerable, or not. For Winnicott, this may take the form of ontological security and of its absence. To know we can “go on being,” we must first feel secure. Moreover, we are told that security not only prefigures the quality of later attachments but also the ability to move freely and without fear. Almost unwittingly, then, object relations folds itself into security relations, facilitating a different kind of exchange—a social calculus that betrays and compromises psychoanalytic precepts.
“Society is cracking up, and the state is cracking down.”
For psychoanalysts who worked on security in infancy, security wasn’t just something that happened in the recesses of the past and stayed there, only to reappear unmodified later in the consulting room. Analysts—John Bowlby, yes, but also many others—worked together with institutions and the state to turn their science of security into a predictive tool. They aimed to decide not just how to make infants feel secure but who might be secure later in life. This often took the form of securing those who were not: the supposed delinquents to come, delinquent because they were insecure. This attention to predictive conditions sent psychoanalytic precepts toward the actuarial and the carceral, wherein psychical security and safety became watchwords of state security. Although this implementation was a departure from classic psychoanalysis, one that reinforced a particular valence of security, it reveals a truth concealed in the infrastructural thicket of this ongoing social concern: one’s environment is not an idle psychical force.
The psychic life of security exists at every scale. In a different discursive frame, freedom of movement is precisely what security limits. The fantasy of a secure “inside”—the home, the people, the nation, the border—is protected from breach by the enforcement of limits that corroborate the existence of threat. The insecure nation-state is the most violent, repressive, annihilative, and its citizens become insecure in turn—both vulnerable to its wounded attachment to any given state and elected to bear the crises of its reaction. In such conditions, an excitable body politic is unleashed into a flood of anxious energy, swept along its currents and, perhaps, even under them. How to stay afloat? Do we have the collective capability to construct life rafts and, for that matter, enough of them? The welfare state is often figured as a “safety net,” naming its limits more than its possibilities. What’s rarely questioned is why the construction of limited welfare exists to protect the insecure remainders of a society and not society as a whole. The libidinal investment of welfare, for all its purported altruism, is laid bare as a limited shelter for those who fit the narcissistic image of a nation-state that rationalizes violence in the name of security’s supposed reality principle.
André Green has outlined how this kind of humanitarian welfarism plays out in the consulting room. “Here again we find the link between love and security which we were speaking about earlier,” he writes. “To be sheltered—sheltered from a world which favors excitation—by the analyst's narcissistic love as a guarantee of survival, security, and love: that is what the moral narcissist wants.” What the analyst overpromises in this scene is an idealized container for the patient, rhyming with the promises of total security in a nation-state. To leave this unanalyzed is to leave ourselves stuck inside a limited humanitarian sentimentality that has—yet again, in recent months—proved inadequate and too late.
When it's working, the analytic room can function as a shelter, a place to weather turbulence, and it’s one that might be felt as a necessary harbor as definite traumas, wounds, and losses accumulate in a catastrophic present. It is also a place where we might nurse our own wishes for total protection, total safety, and accordingly, the analytic couch becomes a life raft when it might just be a panic room that screens out the collective problems of the world. Sometimes, the problems of the world are right there in the center of the analytic dyad. Sometimes, those dyads break, fall apart, go silent.
Collective problems deserve their own analysis, penetrating into the marrow of our unconscious lives. Left unanalyzed, the things that would unsettle us might otherwise harden into defended fortresses. An insecurity of the profession, analysts are liable to become the site of resistance when they seek to function as a psychical protectorate. What kind of psychoanalysis is possible that harbors, that contains without neutralizing, which animates but does not serve the inanimate corpse of policing, which works through struggle but does not work to enable the petrified stasis of fascism? Insecure and fragile as it is, we must be willing to risk the attempt: “For politics does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged good,” as Rose contended, “but when you act, without guarantees, for the good of all—this is to take the risk of the universal interest.”
Society is cracking up, and the state is cracking down. In response, we recall a wish that Fanon began to voice in a footnote in Wretched: “Perhaps the U.S. too will bow to the will of the people. That will be a day for rejoicing since it will be a crucial moment for men and women throughout the world. The almighty power of the dollar—what security after all is only guaranteed by the slaves of this world, toiling in the oil wells of the Middle East, the mines of Peru and the Congo, and the United Fruit or Firestone plantations—will then cease to dominate these slaves who created it and who continue to drain their heads and bellies of all their substance to feed it.”
Security is always a fantasy. The question is what we make of it. To heed Fanon’s enduring wish is to grasp a lasting vision of universal security on the other side of collective emancipation.