Clinical Conflict I: The Good-Enough Lovers
Ambivalent Dependence Across an Imperial Split
It was late winter when T and I met. There was nothing green yet peeking through the frozen ground, but the definite sense was that something was coming. I told T as much when we were texting, after we matched. They said that I was probably projecting.
The first time we met in person, T was standing inside the bar waiting for me—taller than I expected, angular, smartly dressed. Their eyes shone with an innocence that belied an otherwise clever face. They put their hand on my leg within the first hour, and when they kissed me before we paid the check, there was nothing strange about their mouth, even though I was coming out of a decade-long relationship and everything was strange to me then.
I told them I was an organizer trying to become a writer. They said they knew, as the child of a frustrated artist, how important it is for artists to do their work. “If you and I were in a relationship,” they said, “you’d be the artist and I would understand it’s part of my role to protect that.” Hearing this, something in me opened and rotated, as if toward a new light source. Years of organizing through political upheaval and corresponding organizational dramas had left me empty, formatted, unimaginative.
When I met T, many of the political organizations I had built or been part of—from community organizations that campaigned to raise the state minimum wage to national formations aiming to overhaul US foreign policy, from youth climate groups to racial justice organizations calling to defund the police—were falling apart. Everyone was exhausted. Many organizations were consumed with elaborate internal processes for adjudicating interpersonal harm; few, it seemed, had ambitious plans for addressing the larger forces that exploited, incarcerated, or deported us in record numbers. I did not know a single person who had been in leadership of an organization who was willing to be in leadership again.
T seemed to understand there is no guarantee that we become what we feel we are meant to be. I dilated at the prospect of someone protecting me from living the wrong life but was also wary of depending on another for protection. I was just learning to be on my own; my language and thoughts were still recovering the color they’d lost. When we went back to their place, T took my shirt off and traced patterns with their finger on my back. I’d never been touched like that by anyone before.
I skimmed the books on T’s shelves and asked them about their work. They told me about their winding path through medical school, the decision to become a psychoanalyst, the process of setting up a private practice. I wondered if proximity to psychoanalysis might restore the imaginative capacities I’d lost to politics. But I was also afraid of psychoanalysis. I had first read Freud as an undergraduate, and concepts like projection and transference terrified me: they implied that human relationships were false, limited. The idea that I could not know another person—or ever be known— was too lonely to contemplate, and it was part of what drove me to become an organizer: collective action allowed me to belong to something larger than myself, and historical materialism confirmed I already did. When I got home from the date with T, I revisited Janet Malcolm’s famous two-part New Yorker essay, “The Impossible Profession.” In it, she famously describes transference as “a messy jangle of misapprehensions.” Personal relationships, in her account, are
at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others.
T’s training had led them toward an entirely different view of relationships. As they saw it, the psyche was not enclosed, separated from others by an unbridgeable chasm, but bound to others by the fact of dependence. “There is no infant without the mother,” they said. The infant is hungry—and that hunger might reduce the mother to a breast, a mere object in the infant’s internal world—but the dyad is dynamic, shaped both by the mother’s response to the infant and the world’s response to the mother. Whether she can be a “good-enough mother” depended, T said, on the “environmental provisions” around her. The mother must be fed, herself, if she is to reliably feed the baby. Far from condemning us to a solipsistic reality, intimate relationships—including the relationship between analyst and patient and the relationship between lovers—exposed our dependencies and were, therefore, sites of transformation. I saw, in T, the possibility of interdependence with a partner for the first time and the possibility of becoming an actual mother with someone who would never let me reduce myself to a mere breast.
“The idea that I could not know another person—or ever be known— was too lonely to contemplate, and it was part of what drove me to become an organizer: collective action allowed me to belong to something larger than myself, and historical materialism confirmed I already did.”
A few weeks later, T took me to a concert, a hieratic electronic set in a room with vaulted ceilings. They stood behind me and occasionally kissed my head. After the show, we sat at the edge of the room, watching the audience filter out onto the street. “I think we should try this,” T said, and I agreed.
*
I liked T. I liked their radiant face appearing at the door, their jockish gait, their clean smell. I liked that every time they came over they had a loaf of bread or a pint of ice cream; I liked that every time I came over there was a fresh duvet cover on the bed, an air filter humming, a single flower tilted in a vase. T was freely affectionate and wholly capable of devotion. They made plans for us—buying tickets, making reservations—and when they told me what to do in bed, I didn’t feel debased. I liked not being in charge and I liked that they seemed unafraid of their desire, of their aggression, of me. I imagined T’s psyche as a large, rambling house where they had spent appreciable time in every room. The first evening I made dinner for us, I pushed onions around a pan of hot oil while birds chirped and the waning sun fell on the new leaves in the back yard. The days were getting longer. T appeared at the top of the stairs, asking if I could help break down some boxes, and I thought to myself that I’d like to break down boxes with them forever.
I liked, too, that both T and I belonged to what Freud called “impossible professions.” Analysis, education, and government were “doomed to failure,” Freud wrote, leaving workers in those professions with a constant sense of their own insufficiency. I was not in government—I operated in the realm of extra-parliamentary politics, itself a reaction to government’s failures—but the organizer’s task was, I thought, as impossible as the governor’s and the analyst’s. Becoming a writer was one way I was trying to deal with my insufficiency. When T and I met, I had just begun research for a book about the history of leftist strategy in the US. I thought that if I could find what had been buried in our collective memory and reclaim our strategic inheritances, I might overcome the confusion I felt in our current conditions. In our work, both T and I sought to recover what had been lost or repressed, embers of a past still glowing in the present.
One morning, I told T about an interview I’d conducted with a labor organizer who’d recalled his belated encounter with Marx’s Capital through a class at the People’s Forum. The teacher routinely exclaimed to the students, “Blood, breath, bones!” She wanted to remind the students that human beings, with all their hungers, were the basis of politics. A meeting is just a bunch of bodies breathing in a room, the teacher had said, sacks of blood and bones. It was easy in this era of politics to forget that. Walking up and down the street with signs, issuing statements, signing petitions, calling our elected officials: all of these amounted to vague threats we lacked the organizational capacity to deliver on. We had forgotten that we were not words, but blood, breath, and bones—and that elites were, too. Political relationships were defined by a dependency that we rarely used to our benefit; if the politician depends on our votes and the boss on our labor and our consumption, then perhaps we were the mother.
Since T had been trained as a doctor, they understood the body in ways I didn’t. In bed, they tapped along the surface of my body to teach me where my organs were: a hollow sound for the lungs, stomach, bladder; a dull sound for heart, spleen, liver, kidneys. But they cautioned me against any kind of crude materialism. “Blood, breath, and bones are real. But on their own, they don’t mean anything. Politics is about meaning—that’s what moves people, and it’s also what keeps people from moving.”
T told me their parents had taken part in the Iranian Revolution shortly before T was born, and the failures of that revolution had left T impatient with the materialist orthodoxies of the old communists. The earliest years of T’s life were spent hiding in a basement during the Iran-Iraq War, rats darting across the room as American bombs dropped overhead. When the family secured a visa to the US and fled to a small, mostly white city in the South, T’s life was irrevocably severed at its origins. T had to learn a new language, and they had to navigate a new culture in which their parents could no longer serve as reliable guides. T learned the hard way that if they carried their parents’ anti-imperialist sensibilities to school, they would be mocked on the playground; if they carried playground chatter about Saddam Hussein home, T’s parents balked at their child’s American weak-mindedness. One morning at school, T refused to pledge allegiance to the flag, remaining seated while the others stood. They could either be a traitor to their family or to their new country, rejected by their classmates by day or by their parents at night—and so they chose their parents.
Now, as they looked back on it, T saw that this impossible choice was structured by a “split” within US empire itself, which had to deny its own violence to protect the fable of its democratic, humanitarian aims. This split was not just in official government rhetoric but also in Hollywood films, the curricula in schools, the hiring of journalists, and the granting of literary awards. The fictions of liberal internationalism suffused the American consciousness, uninterested in the details of our foreign policy or its mass casualties. This split also divided T, who could either embrace the facts of their own life and find themselves at odds with their classmates and teachers or try to forget themselves, redacting the details of their own history to become consonant with the imperial myth. This was why, T said, politics was not just about blood, breath, and bones, but also about meaning, the symbolic regime that invisibly policed the perimeter of the sayable.
Listening to T, I came to understand that it wasn’t simply a moral humiliation to make a home in the very country that bombed you out of your own, but also a source of madness to be surrounded by people who deny that those bombs dropped in the first place. To the degree that T experienced an internal psychic split growing up in the US, it was structured by the much larger split of an empire that disavowed what it took from others to feed its own hungers.
I also understood, listening to T, that whatever organizing I’d done to counter US imperialism had been far less ambitious than what T’s parents had attempted through the Revolution. T had borne the costs of that organizing, of the Left’s failures in both Iran and in the US. As T crossed the perimeter of the sayable, I could tell they were braced for my skepticism; I could also tell they were skeptical of me and my politics. But skepticism at our age was normal. The youthful fantasy of falling in love had been replaced, at forty, by a tenacious sobriety. Transference now felt less like a blazing sun and more like a pinhole of light in a windowless room. I hoped to be a pinhole, at least, for T, a “good-enough” partner who could accompany them in the split that fractured their life, even if I could not repair it.
*
October 6th, 2023: a last day of levity. We bought overpriced vintage jeans in a glossy block of stores downtown. By the end of the day on October 7th, we knew that a wave of unimaginable violence was coming. What T and I did not know was that our own world would shatter in the process.
A few days into the Israeli onslaught, a Jewish organization I had cofounded years earlier held an event in Washington Square Park. The event was publicized as a vigil to mourn the dead, though which dead, and why, were not specified. I felt it was important to act instead of staying home and doom-scrolling, but was newly wary: what, exactly, were we mourning? Was it the already asymmetrical loss of life on “both sides”? The terrible mistake of Zionism itself? Still, I understood the strategic ambiguity: the organizers wanted to attract a wide range of people and convert those they could to oppose Israel. Local elected officials showed up and The New York Times covered the event. Maybe this was the way to stem the tide of public opinion moving right.
T questioned why coverage by The New York Times would matter. Whom, exactly, were organizers hoping to convert? I told T that in the years leading up to October 7, polling showed that Americans’ “sympathy for Israelis” (in the bizarre parlance of the polls) was dwindling and their “sympathy for Palestinians” was growing; that shift was overwhelmingly in the Democratic Party’s base, since Republicans and independents stood more consistently with Israel. It was hard to imagine a pathway to ending US aid to Israel through the Democratic Party, I confessed, but it was even harder to imagine such a pathway outside of it. As frequent voters and donors, liberal Zionists were an influential part of the Democratic Party’s base and if they swung right on Israel, they would either harden the Democratic Party’s position on Israel or take their financial vote to the Republican Party. Neither of those seemed like good options to me.
“Romantic love, as it turned out, was not fundamentally solitary but crowded: there was no way of knowing each other without also getting to know the dense thicket of absent others we brought with us.”
But T was dubious that liberal Zionists could be moved at all: they were racists who claimed to oppose racism and would therefore resist any reckoning with the contradictions of their position. It was not until T pursued psychoanalytic training late in their medical residency that they had the strange sensation of being treated as if they were stupid. Shortly before October 7th, the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis released a report confirming that analysts of color widely reported feeling demeaned and overlooked; “racial enactments” were ubiquitous and fear of retaliation for simply addressing race was widespread. In the months following October 7th, these “racial enactments” accelerated, with Zionists on professional listservs accusing other analysts of propagating hate if they so much as shared a link to a psychoanalytic conference in the West Bank. When T looked at social media, they saw children in Gaza being bombed in their homes, as they’d been bombed as a child in Iran; when T opened their email, they saw their colleagues endorsing it in the rhetoric of humanism. T worried that if they so much as voiced their opinion, those colleagues could end their career. They were confronted daily with their dependency on a profession and a society that, by all appearances, wanted to kill them but wouldn’t admit it.
This was why, T thought, we should shun Zionists and cut them out of every aspect of social life. I was both intrigued by this idea and wary of it. Organizers, on the whole, are oriented toward sanctioning elites and the organized opposition, not members of the public, and especially not those who might be converted to join a movement’s wider coalition. But psychoanalysis, T explained, took a somewhat different view. From Freud to Klein to Bion, psychoanalytic thought underscored that social life is structured by norms and taboos; if people act in a principled fashion, it is not because they have strong internal standards but rather because of an introjection of a social demand to conform.
T believed there simply weren’t strong enough social taboos to inhibit Zionists from acting out; if anything, many Zionists were socially rewarded by their peers, even when they flouted professional codes of ethics. We needed to withdraw those social rewards, T argued, and replace them with social costs. This struck me as undeniably true. But it also struck me as a theory of social behavior without a corresponding theory of politics. I could tell that T and I had begun to polarize: they thought I had a fantasy of political coalition with the enemy, and I thought they had a fantasy of politics without coalition at all. Underneath T’s proposals, I heard a quieter demand: to protect them from liberal Zionists and to join them on the outside of the imperial split instead of trying to bridge it.
One night over dinner, T remarked that in their conversations with others from the Middle East, everyone freely expressed rage and disgust; by contrast, T found me coolly analytical. T asked if I ever felt the desire for vengeance. “I do,” I said. “On some level, that’s why I became an organizer. There need to be consequences for people who desecrate life.” The truth was that vengeful thoughts passed through me like storms throughout the day, but rather than voice them, I channeled them into meetings, plans, actions. “Maybe it’s your training,” T said. “The same way I learned to be measured when someone came into the ER with a gunshot wound, you learned to be measured in the face of a genocide.” I was alarmed by this. Was I relegating the expression of righteous anger to the very people most likely to be cast as dangerous and aggressive? Was I participating in the liberal split that regarded grief as a “mature” depressive position and rage as a “juvenile” paranoid-schizoid pathology?
T asked me more about my own origins. I had grown up in a Jewish family whose conclusion, from our history, was that anything bad that happened to us—pogroms, forced migration, disappearances—could have been avoided if only we’d been more careful. Anger at external forces was regarded as hysterical, impractical. Politicization in my teenage years came with an anger I did not know how to metabolize except through action, and action was often in coalition with liberals: coalition with liberal voters to win elections, coalition with liberal politicians to pass legislation. On a conscious level I had accepted the temperamental demands that political coalition with liberals had made of me; I now wondered whether, on a less conscious level, I was simply avoiding social rejection from my own family. Either way, it was becoming clear that the social and political benefits of sublimating my anger this way came at the cost of intimacy between me and T. So long as I did not express my own rage openly, T seemed to be more alone with theirs.
We decided to go away for the weekend. We went to the Berkshires, where we ate scones among the people of rural New England, who seemed, with their perfect teeth and floral wallpaper, happily unaware of the genocide proceeding apace. We went on walks through the woods, took bad selfies, and tried to play tennis. I could barely summon the energy to swing a racket. I joked darkly about the symptoms of genocide in the metropole: rashes, gut issues, a loss of libido. Nothing was funny. At night, T made a fire and put on an album by Time Wharp. We laid down on the bed and did not have sex. As the music swelled over the speakers, a wave of sadness rose in my chest and I suddenly felt like crying. Not wanting to play the role of the grieving Jew, I held it in. Then I heard T exhale. I looked over and they were crying, as if the same swell had passed through both our bodies but only found expression in theirs. “I know,” I said. But when they looked at me, I could tell they didn’t think I knew.
The following spring arrived. The Uncommitted campaign, an attempt to pressure the Biden administration to call for a ceasefire and an arms embargo, took off. The Biden, and then Harris, campaign would need every vote to win and I hoped that the Uncommitted effort could show, in real numbers, that support for the genocide could cost Democrats the presidency. Once it became clear that Harris would not break ranks with her predecessor, T was furious with the segments of the Left that had attempted to move her—that is to say, furious with me.
When I reposted something online from the Uncommitted campaign in the lead-up to the DNC, T called me. They told me that they couldn’t be with someone who endorsed any effort aiming to “save the Democratic Party from itself.” It was unforgivably naive, in their view, that I would raise hopes that the Democratic Party would ever do anything other than protect the Zionists slaughtering people in Palestine. “I thought I could tolerate this level of political difference in a romantic relationship, but I can’t,” they said.
When I hung up the phone, I was in shock. I felt a sense of grave failure that T could not depend on me. I also felt relieved from the pressure to prove that I was dependable by proclaiming my rage, shunning liberals, and avoiding party politics. The longer the genocide went on, the less we seemed to know each other. Our attempt at interdependence had not made us family, but strangers.
*
In the months following our breakup, I obsessively retraced the fault lines that ultimately divided us. Had transference seduced us into ignoring an unbridgeable chasm between us? Or did our breakup indicate a failure of transference to hold us together through the shattering genocide and the fractious movement that tried to stop it? Why couldn’t we work?
Maybe our hearts were so broken by Gaza that we couldn’t help but break each other’s. There is a long tradition of this on the Left. A hundred years ago, the socialist AJ Muste suggested that when a trade union is losing ground in its industry, the organizational tensions always simmering beneath the surface can erupt into an internal war. In these cases, he wrote, “the weakness of the union’s legal and social position is the cause of factionalism, not factionalism the cause of its weakness.” The conflicts between me and T had escalated with the political losses; as it became clear that no one had the means to stop the genocide, our own fights grew more factional and more destructive.
In Bionian terms, one could argue that the frustrations and anxieties stemming from political loss can effectively transform a work group into a basic assumption group. As the commitments that bind the group erode, it can devolve into a fight-flight formation. Most of us can’t leave this country, and none of us can quit the reality of what Israel has done to Palestine and the rest of the world’s complicity in it, but we can leave our organizations and we can leave each other. Maybe T and I had regressed in the context of a disorganized Left.
The truth was that the anti-imperialist Left was rarely organized into sophisticated work groups in the Bionian sense. What existed of an anti-imperialist tradition in the US receded dramatically during World War II and the Cold War; the rise of neoliberalism cemented the Left’s marginality in American politics, and mass organization all but disappeared. For the last fifty years, the anti-imperialist Left in the US could cohere in “work groups” around discrete actions or specific campaigns, such as those to end the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, and US interventions in Latin America and the Middle East. But faced with an intractable opposition and ferocious repression, the movement often fragmented. The Palestine solidarity movement in the US today is the largest it has ever been, and yet most people in it don’t belong to any organization at all; if you aren’t a Palestinian, a Muslim, a Jew, or a student, it is not entirely clear what organization to join. Some conjectured that T and I had distinct goals, but the fact was that there was no organization in which our distinct social locations could meaningfully contribute to a shared goal, whether of ending the genocide, defunding Israel, or hastening the decline of US empire.
In the absence of such an organization, we regressed into the camps that defined the broader Left. Transference did run aground of frustration, as T had promised. And it revealed that, for all our middle-aged skepticism, we both still nurtured a fantasy that the other could protect us from politics—that is to say, from an environment lacking provisions. In such an environment, we couldn’t be good-enough partners to each other. And so the splitting at the heart of liberal imperialism split us up.
*
Toward the end of our relationship, without knowing it was the end, I signed up for Farsi lessons. T had told me they were different in their first language—they had never felt truly at ease in English—and I wanted to know them in their native tongue. When we broke up, I decided to go to my first lesson anyway, and then I kept going. Tears came to my eyes unexpectedly when I learned the words for child, home, near, far, life, to be born. Friends asked me why I would study Farsi with no one to speak it with and no immediate prospects of visiting Iran. Maybe it was an instance of mourning badly, refusing to let go of what I’d lost. The language became a place I visited in their absence, a medium retaining the traces of a place I’d never seen and to which T had never returned.
It was also a way of staking myself elsewhere, on the other side of the imperial split. The distortions and daily exhaustions of life in the metropole want me to forget what happened to T in Iran and what is happening to millions in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iran today. That forgetting divorced me from reality first and T second. In the process of seeking them, T brought me closer to a world from which American imperialism had separated me. Romantic love, as it turned out, was not fundamentally solitary but crowded: there was no way of knowing each other without also getting to know the dense thicket of absent others we brought with us; we could only depend upon each other anxiously, without the means to protect each other from the larger forces that have stolen so much from us.