Secondary Gain 006
The Anti-Advice Column of Parapraxis
Secondary Gain is an anti-advice column. It follows in the tradition of other psychoanalytic experiments that have opened up the consulting room using media: from Susan Isaacs’s advice columns in the interwar period and Winnicott’s radio broadcasts during World War II to experiments with radical radio, like Fanon’s understanding of the power of the radio in the Algerian Revolution and Guattari’s work on Radio Libre Paris in the late ’70s. Yet, in keeping with psychoanalytic principles, advice is not directly offered, and columnists don’t presume to offer treatment or cure or serve as a proxy for long-term care. Instead, three columnists come together to think with, and alongside, their questioner, who always has the final word.
Your columnists, writing under pseudonyms:
Dr. Lina Donato is a Kleinian psychoanalyst in private practice.
Dr. Harris C. is a psychoanalyst practicing in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr. Hodï Green is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City.
Dear Secondary Gain,
I need some help with something that’s been troubling me the last year or so. I’ve never been a fan of the idea that “there is no ethical consumption under capital” because I think it lets people off the hook—even as I largely agree with Adorno’s gloss that “the wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” But how wrong is too wrong? Put another way, is it okay for our personal lives to contradict our political commitments?
On the one hand, organizing can be a site for deconditioning and resocialization—one gradually sheds unhealthy attachments through mounting commitment to collective struggle. On the other, one can effectively launder one’s private misdeeds through association with a movement. I’ve seen this a lot recently and it’s been preoccupying me. Can a landlord be a rent abolitionist? Can a communist trade stocks? How much complicity is unavoidable, and how much is opportunistic false consciousness? Should the gain of a political community come at the cost of exceptionalizing individual behavior? And what do these contradictions tell us about our minds generally? And mine that I can’t stop thinking about this!
Thank you,
Worried about Whitewashing
Dear Worried,
It makes sense to be worried about whitewashing, the inevitable white lies and white power that covers over and attacks knowledge. Knowledge/learning/ thinking are all under brutal assault. As psychoanalysts we care a great deal about what has been called the epistemological instinct, the urge to know. With the urge to know comes a capacity to bear not knowing, what some people find intolerable. Not knowing includes doubt, curiosity, wonderment, uncertainty: all crucial for the desire to take in, to tolerate frustrations, and eventually to think. Thinking does not produce monoliths, it often generates contradiction.
You are writing about contradiction—can you bear to think about these contradictions that are an inevitable part of the mess of being human, of having a human mind? They don’t sit well sometimes, but they aren’t necessarily pernicious. You seem to be worried that they are pernicious. One of the yields of psychoanalysis, when working well, which is not inevitable, is the investigation of these contradictions, their meanings, their twists and turns and where they touch down— even in the unconscious. Maybe a psychoanalytic exploration would be valuable here, maybe even somewhat freeing.
With all the best,
Dr. Lina Donato
Dear Moral Quandary,
Your question interprets social problems. I suppose you care about the world? Good! We surely need more thoughtful citizens who grapple with questions of personal and collective responsibility. This is the stuff of Civilization and its Discontents. We enter social forms for personal gains, primary gains, not just secondary ones. There is no way that a question about what to do and how to live in the world isn’t also only about you, you, you.
I am writing this column as a psychoanalyst. I can’t really say that I am a psychoanalyst. Nobody knows what a psychoanalyst is. I hope that never changes. If we could say that The—Capital The—Das Kapital The— Psychoanalyst exists, then that would mean the end of the possibility that the psychoanalytic discourse might pulse here and there by chance in the swirl of words that constitutes the exchange between two bodies we can sometimes see looking back as having constituted that social bond called discourse. On a good day, maybe, I might manage to be a psychoanalyst. In a session or two it might happen. Psychoanalysis happens only on the condition that the particular instance of the analyst was only for that precise time in that exact way that it happened, which could never have been predicted beforehand but can certainly be demonstrated after the fact. I am writing about the logic of the unconscious.
Why do I respond to your question about the individual and the collective with this flourish about the psychoanalyst? Because what a psychoanalyst does is not of the modality of the universal, but instead of the singular. Morality often hiding under the guise of “ethics” today is of the order of the universal. I don’t trust anything that is a “for all” solution. In fact I don’t trust solutions . . . I rely on problems, carefully developed and cultivated problems. In the odd universe of psychoanalysis these go by the name of symptoms.
Therefore, my advice to you, is to take your question, which is a good problem, which is also inevitably a singular problem, forget about the universal, and see if you can make something of it by way of psychoanalysis. It’s fun! Give it a whirl, because we won’t manage to think our way out of it.
Fractally yours,
Harris C.
Dear Worried about whitewashing,
Here are some words I hope might be of use to you. That’s really all a psychoanalyst can offer.
At the core of your anxiety, I believe, lies a fundamental ethical question: How should I live my life?
The philosopher Jonathan Lear views psychoanalysis as a way for philosophy to become tangible—particularly in the realm of ethics. At its essence, psychoanalysis invites us to grapple with the ethical question: How do I want to live? This is not merely a moral reflection—it’s an exploration of how the mind constructs reality, relationships, and meaning. Psychoanalysis begins with the premise that the mind is always theorizing itself. Breakdowns—manifesting as symptoms, slips, or dreams—reveal the unconscious at work, shaping how we experience the world. The mind doesn’t just observe the world; it recreates it. And this recreation is profoundly relational. The self is never formed in isolation; it is always in relation to the other. As feminism reminds us, the personal is political—and ethical, too.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell reflects on the ethical aspect of human life, describing it as “a continuing task, not a property, a task in which the goal, or the product of the process, is not a state of being but a moment of change, say of becoming—a transience of being, a being of transience.” In alignment with this, psychoanalysis frames being human as a challenge, a present choice, and a continuous exercise—something that is not predetermined or fixed, something in constant flux, something that is not arrived at once and for all, call it the naked human condition, because, as Cavell points out, and psychoanalysis agrees, we can also hide ourselves even in our nakedness.
For psychoanalysis, play is a key element of the ethical task. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said, it serves as an intermediate, transitional, liminal space —representing a threshold between the beginning of a process and its completion. Play is a constant state of becoming, a space where one can experiment with different ways of being—trying out various selves, desires, and narratives. This imaginative freedom is central to ethical becoming. Within the psychoanalysis process, play provides the analysand with the opportunity to move beyond repetition, interrupt unconscious loops of suffering and too stereotyped ways of identifying ourselves. The analytic space, therefore, is a kind of ethical laboratory
I invite you to play.
Playfully,
Hodï Green
Dear Secondary Gain,
Thank you for your reflections on my quandary, and for the reassessment of the practice which the question seems to have solicited from each of you. I agree that contradiction is at the core of my question and also at the core of what psychoanalysis can make available as an object for thought and play, rather than as a punishing and slippery riddle that is perhaps, as Harris says, not the individual’s responsibility to solve. Although my initial question was about the false consciousness of the bourgeois activist who seeks individual material gain while participating in collective struggle, I also worry, as fascism intensifies and occupying powers are increasingly responsible for doling out chances at life, that resistance will be in conflict with survival. If one’s land is stolen, is it wrong to pursue its retrieval in the thief’s court? How do we hold on to contradiction in these moments, and how do we relate to the wagers of our peers who choose to negotiate this differently? I do believe these are psychoanalytic questions, precisely because the brutality of this political condition forces each individual to negotiate the balance of resistance and complicity on a daily basis: in relationships, in work, in the way we spend our money. And if analysis isn’t the realm for such questions, but these questions no less monopolize the foreground of individual consciousness in times of political peril, then what does it mean for the clinic to reject the genre of the problem rather than adapt?
Thanks again,
WW