The Depolarization Project
by Sue Kolod
Chris Heath
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
—Mahatma Gandhi (paraphrased)
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and teenage daughter took a road trip. They stopped to experience a tiny town in central Texas that is very special to us. We had stopped at this roadside hamlet many times on family vacations; played on the playgrounds, purchased toys that were my children’s favorites. Memories of this town are now part of our family collective history. It was strange for them in this brave new world to be traveling, so they wore masks. Even though there were no mask mandates yet, it was still long before the vaccine, and they were more worried about bringing contagion from the big city than catching something themselves. We were not yet aware of the sociopolitical conflicts that were emerging around the use of masks.
A very strange event occurred. A middle-aged white man saw my daughter from across the parking lot. He rushed straight to her, and to her horror, purposefully coughed on her. He then scurried away, as if he realized some degree of guilt or “being in trouble.”
We were not especially concerned about the infection risk. The problem for us, of course, was the hostility. Was this man trying to murder her? He certainly attempted to murder the bliss we associate with this wonderful country town, all the idealization we have of the maternal qualities of this oasis.
To this day I feel disturbed by this incident, and the hostility the man represents. His ignorance, paranoia, and provocative rage could never live in me. Could it?
My neighbor flies a flag representing a group that opposes the values I espouse. When I see the flag, I don’t realize how othering my representation of him is. I only see him in devalued terms; in my mind’s eye, a toxin to our culture. I have fantasies, obsessive to a distracting degree, of tearing down his flag, belittling him, of making him feel bad. But this is my friend. I like him; we’ve spent good times together. We share tools, we’ve had meals and drank together. How is it I can switch views of him so quickly?
On another level, I believe we won’t have much effect on the crisis in the Middle East; or, frankly, even in the politics of our own government. So why do we fight each other, vilify the other, over things that happen so far from our sphere of influence?
Our Depolarization Study Group is important to me for multiple reasons:
- So I can tolerate my neighbor’s offensive political signs and hateful Facebook posts.
- So I can empathize with my patient that has views opposite from my own.
- So I can have Thanksgiving dinner without giving in to my temptation to argue.
- So I can see people as whole, and hold on to my tentative grasp of object constancy when I’m blinded by my group narcissism.
Our Depolarization Group is a container for processing these primitive elements. We are a group of people, who have become friends and comrades. On another level, we create a microcosm of the very conflicts we want to understand. We trust one another and enjoy each other’s perspective, even as we are sometimes surprised and even bothered by those same perspectives.
We all have dedication to the group. It is the first reading/study group I have attended that is not much work to sustain; we are all so drawn to what we each receive. Sue and I are honored to be founders/leaders of the group, and we take pains to protect it. We are extremely careful about adding new members, and discuss the fit of potential new members thoughtfully among us. We have found this caution to be integral to the group, while the exercise also builds mutual understanding.
Each of the members has experience and expertise that adds to the group. We represent a diverse range of professions (and for the psychoanalysts, schools of thought), which increases the odds of our finding new solutions, of transcending the dialectics that divide each of us from our neighbors, our patients, and our colleagues.
I believe this is a critical project. But it begins with each of us, as I remember the humanity of and friendship with my neighbor, even when I am exuberant about hating the guy who lives next door.
Alice Maher
I was honored and delighted when Sue and Chris invited me and my young colleague Matt to join the Depolarization Project. Later, when we read Cass Sunstein, I realized that it felt like a “surprising validator.” They had recognized our efforts in the area of dialogue across ideological divides and were communicating their interest in working with us.
We all need that kind of validation. The computer, this generation’s “blank screen,” tends to bring aggressive/destructive dynamics to the surface. This group felt like an invitation, not just to read about the forces that fuel polarization, but to bring them alive in our group and support and challenge each other in our real-world efforts to address them.
Ours is a project that can and should be duplicated. Half of us are analysts with different types of training and the rest come from diverse fields—art and architecture, law, technology, education. Making analytic concepts understandable to people outside our field, and hearing their reactions, takes my thinking in magical new directions.
Psychoanalysis struggles to make itself useful on the world stage. This project offers a simple, easily duplicated way to begin.
Lorie Ammon
Amid the global upheaval brought by the pandemic and recent sociopolitical tensions, our virtual Depolarization Project emerged as a beacon of collaborative exploration and understanding. Spanning ages and continents, participants from diverse backgrounds—including cities like New York and Tokyo—gathered to dissect and discuss the impacts of deep-rooted societal divides through the lenses of noted authors like Sunstein, Sheehi and Sheehi, and Fanon exploring themes from group narcissism to colonialist ideologies. This is my reflection on the profound personal and communal growth fostered by our frank and often challenging conversations. Despite our varied backgrounds, our shared purpose and unity have been a learning process to tolerate uncomfortable discussions and create space to hear one another’s points of view. Together, we struggled to comprehend the exploding polarizations and study how psychoanalysis could explain this phenomenon.
The group engagement provided not just solace but also a sense of assurance that I was not alone in managing the conflicts and confusion fueled by the ongoing global crises and divisions forming within the psychoanalytic community. Having the opportunity to navigate our collective confusion and distress over what we were experiencing in our world had a place to rest, a less common experience during the pandemic. More significant was the freedom to question together with one another as I was trying to wrap my mind around the toxic polarization splitting families, our country, and our national and international psychoanalytic organizations. Our premise was that we must first clean up our side of the street before aiding the community, a reassuring notion that we were not just observers but active participants in hopes of healing divisions.
Our group discussions have been a crucible, forcing us to confront and untangle the deep-seated polarization surrounding us. On more than one occasion, we witnessed the slanderous attacks on the LISTSERV regarding one of our group members’ community outreach. If I had not been a part of the group and had not had the opportunity to personally know this member who was attacked online, I would not have been moved by the accusations. Instead, I was appalled by the “primitive” behavior of my professional elders and their barrage of misrepresentations about our member. This experience ignited a vigilant commitment in me to remain diplomatic in our group and the broader professional arena, a testament to the transformative power of our discussions.
We all have some level of influence from psychoanalysis, so we clung to the hope that theories could unravel and perhaps remedy the pathologies emerging from this intense polarization. However, the temptation between us to view things polarized also emerged. My optimism for positive change toward compassionate dialogues with those who held views opposite to mine was challenged. Hearing about another member’s dangers in their gender and sexual identity expression changed me. It was palpable in our discussion and interactions that everyone cannot extend compassionate generosity to all humanity. This shift in my optimism stirred me to reconsider my understanding of the experience of how others have to adapt more cautiously to our polarized society. Being a white cisgender woman, it was only by the intimate connection with our group that my insight was expanded to empathize with the real-life dangers that exist in being othered by differences less accepted by society’s bias.
During one group meeting, I was challenged in my capacity to listen deeply, a skill underscored as essential in my psychoanalytic training. I had never felt stretched this far before until our group had an invited guest who was a popular talk show political zealot from a viewpoint opposing my own. I had prepared myself to be radically open to this guest. Instead, I had a visceral reaction, which was disdain. I could not connect to this guest, and I had to accept my narcissistic reaction of feeling superior to the guest’s viewpoint and arrogant manner. The encounter to withhold judgment and foster a deeper comprehension of why this guest was so obtuse left me feeling defeated. I could now identify with how the elders on the LISTSERV could regress so vehemently into a paranoid state.
Within the framework of psychoanalysis, which traditionally involves a thorough exploration of the unconscious, the discussions facing the significant challenge of toxic polarization left us scratching our heads without a cohesive strategy. The events of splitting based on race that occurred within the two major American psychoanalytic organizations increased pressure to address and actively work against racially polarized dynamics. This has involved recognizing my roles in these dynamics and engaging in transformative actions to promote equity within my sphere. I have opportunities to observe and experience enactments in discussions on conflicted topics that were not adequately processed in groups outside of our collective discussion group. However, internal to our group, I have observed a desire to explore further how we can better handle conflicted issues, emphasizing respectful listening even when we disagree—being allowed to speak up and not fall into alignment with the silent discomfort prevalent in my communities.
Throughout our meetings, we encountered and processed our reactions to those who held more oppositional viewpoints. I know I have felt a range of emotions and defenses, such as anger, disappointment, denial, and withdrawal. Having safety in our group allowed me to tolerate better the psychological discomfort that arose when members confronted one another’s polarizing viewpoints with mutual recognition and adopted a reparative stance. Engaging collaboratively while acknowledging these internal contradictions created a painful awareness of the struggle to engage in dissonant subjects. However, addressing this dissonance has benefited my personal growth and openness to engaging with conflictual viewpoints in my broader community. We have not resolved any of the complexes of polarization, but the tensions, I believe, have affected our integrity and generated a collective reparative effort to keep talking together.
Matt Bogaty
I joined the Depolarization Group at the invitation of my colleague, Dr. Alice L. Maher. As executive director of the organization she founded a decade and a half ago, Changing our Consciousness, my mission is to develop tools that will help people break out of echo chambers and have deeper communication on a mass scale. In the initial stages of this work, the Depolarization Group served as an invaluable vehicle for analyzing the small-scale conversational experiments we were conducting in the context of existing theories of how misinformation and extreme beliefs propagate through a population. More recently, the Depolarization Group has shifted from a professional to a personal outlet. Particularly in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel, I have enjoyed being able to discuss my views in a nonconfrontational environment and also to be exposed to ideas I wouldn’t normally take the time to engage with in my busy day-to-day life. It has been a deeply enjoyable experience being part of this group.
Tom Hennes
I am a designer for museums and memorials and other types of experiential environments. Many of the projects I’ve worked with have been at the center of polarizing situations, sometimes on a local scale, often on a national scale. In some, notably South Africa’s Freedom Park, which is a project of national reconciliation, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, contestation is self-evident. But even in those where no explicitly polarized content is evident at the surface, I have seen how social rifts, many of them papered over for years or generations by silence or politeness, can erupt without warning in the course of planning. I’ve found it essential to be able to work productively within conflicting perspectives that emerge in this kind of work, because a controversy, when it rages beyond anyone’s ability to control or understand it, can destroy a project that otherwise might have brought significant benefits to all of the communities that are behind the warring individuals. And I also have to say that I and my colleagues within the projects have been unsuccessful at least as often as we’ve been successful.
The challenge of effectively working within these situations has drawn me ever deeper into the relational and intersubjective frames of psychoanalysis and the study of group relations, which I find enormously useful to help untangle, at least to a degree, situations within a project that are otherwise baffling. I joined the Depolarization Project after hearing an online session that featured recorded excerpts of a conversation between Alice and Bobby, along with a discussion among others in the group. The members seemed to be a vibrant collective that was attempting to do something substantive at a time when many seemed only to be talking around the edges or joining in the fray. Our monthly meetings have been a wonderful opportunity to engage with this professionally- and personally—but not racially—diverse group about polarization as something to be thoughtfully explored, not to be fought over.
The space and constancy of our discussions has led me in many directions. I have become more intensely interested in how group affiliations affect the positions we take or hold in polarized situations, and how individual and group unconscious processes, when triggered by anxiety resulting from perceived threats to those affiliations, produce patterns of behavior that may seem to an outside observer to be irrational and out of proportion to the substance of the argument or situation at hand. I’m also interested in how it can be that people who see the world in ways that significantly overlap can be utterly blind to each other’s version of reality when they’re thrust into a polarized situation. I’m interested in how, in such cases, it seems to become existentially threatening—even annihilating—for people whose identities have become fused with opposing groups to engage with each other from a perspective of curiosity or openness, so that heedless conflict becomes the only apparent option, in a complete collapse of interpersonal relating.
Perhaps most compellingly, I’ve become obsessed with the question of why it seems to be so pleasurable for people to engage in vehement, polemical argument—particularly when the argument appears to seek destruction of other’s position, if not the other themself. To what extent is the polemical argument a welcome release of aggression—of hatred—toward others who are perceived to threaten one’s own group with annihilation—even, and perhaps especially, if that threat triggers forms of annihilating shame, as I have come to suspect is not infrequently the case. And to what extent is the desire to annihilate the other, even by argument, reflective of the need to transmute the fear of one’s own annihilation into pure, unadulterated hate?
The group helps me to play with such ideas and formulations. We in these discussions know that logical formulations have no power over the polarized dynamics that have brought us together, yet none of us has yet been able to formulate more than wobbly hypotheses that might point toward a way forward, opening space for alternative ways of approaching conflict. One thing has begun to take shape in the group, however, and that is a way of talking through occasional but significant differences among ourselves, and a shared interest in exploring them as fully and openly as we can.
Sue Kolod
The process of polarization has always fascinated and frightened me. Several years ago, the training analyst issue came up at my institute, William Alanson White. The vitriol and intolerance were stunning. A friend saw someone who held an opposing view walking down the street and ran into a grocery store to avoid her. I wondered, What would cause someone to do that?
Why do psychoanalysts seem so ill-equipped to deal with conflict? Aren’t we trained to embrace conflict in our work with our patients? And if we can’t deal with it within ourselves and our communities, how can we possibly help anyone else?
During the pandemic, the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories, and mask refusal felt scary. The underlying rage was palpable. The question of what we have to offer became more urgent to me.
I recall my college years at the University of Chicago where debate and disagreement were encouraged. It was pleasurable and fun. My roommates and I argued late into the night. Now debate and disagreement are not tolerated. It is only possible to talk to people on the “same side.” And it has only gotten worse since October 7th.
Do psychoanalysts have anything to offer to alleviate toxic polarization? This is the question that formed the basis of the Depolarization Project.
In our readings, two concepts have helped me understand polarization—what fuels it and what can “break up the echo chamber”: Volkan’s concept of the “chosen trauma” and Cass Sunstein’s concept of the “surprising validator.”
Vamik Volkan defines chosen trauma as “the shared mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered at the hand of an enemy. This chosen trauma can be reactivated when the group’s identity and survival is threatened.”
Sunstein writes, “People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions. But they may reconsider if the information comes from a source they cannot dismiss. ‘If someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.’” Sunstein refers to such a person as a “surprising validator.”
Let me give an example of how these two concepts helped me.
In our group, we decided to read several chapters from Psychoanalysis Under Occupation by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi. Although I’m not a Zionist and have had very little to do with Israel in my adult life, I noticed a visceral negative reaction to these readings. Several members of the group loved the book and felt very positive about it. One person referred to it as “breathtaking.” Because I respect each group member, it was not possible for me to dismiss their evaluations. That’s when I began to reflect on my chosen trauma.
My grandparents were hot Zionists. They spoke Hebrew at home and dreamed of emigrating to Palestine. In 1933 the family moved there. For some reason, they decided to come back to the US. On their way back, they stopped in Poland and my mother met her aunts, uncles, and cousins, most of whom were murdered by the Nazis, except for a few who made it to the US or Israel. My grandmother, whom I adored, frequently told me about frightening events that had happened to family members. She reassured me this could never happen again because of the State of Israel.
Although I hadn’t thought about my family history in relation to Israel for many years, it had become part of the fabric of my being without even realizing it. Only when I had this negative response, bordering on revulsion, did I begin to understand how this part of my family’s history had become my chosen trauma. And the group members were my surprising validators.
I value the depolarization group because I can express my thoughts and emotions without feeling judged. At the same time, I enjoy the debate and differing opinions. It has brought back the fun and pleasure in disagreement for me.
Alex Kolod
As an attorney, I am one of the non−mental health professionals in our group. I was invited because our first readings were from a book by Cass Sunstein, one of my law professors, and because my mother is one of the founding members. We are one of two parent-child pairs in the group. (As an aside, I am not sure how that impacts the group dynamics, but it seems worth pointing out.)
In the beginning, I saw my role as that of providing context to Sunstein’s writings and to learn from the psychoanalysts. At that time, we were more focused on conspiracy theories, why they can be so dangerous and why people believe them. For most of us, I think, we were trying to figure out why certain other people, Trump supporters, for example, were exhibiting such extreme views and behaviors that we all found profoundly disturbing. But as we branched out into other texts and topics, polarization became our focus.
This was a big shift, in my view, because it changed the question from “Why are they like that?” to “Why are we all like that? And when?” And as this became our aim, it allowed us to tackle difficult subjects in which we do not all agree in a way that, to me, feels productive and enriching. Within our group, at times we have had mini-dialogues about communism and capitalism, Israel and Palestine, homophobia and transphobia, in which members have real disagreements, but through the discussions, I think we have learned more about one another and our beliefs in a way that promotes respect and understanding and also allows us to get more out of the texts we choose to read together than any of us would alone.
How did we do this? For me, I think good faith is the key. I have complete confidence that nobody in our group is just trying to win an argument or speaking just to hear themselves speak. This may be because we started out in relative agreement and bonded over that for several months before we eventually moved on to topics that could bring about uncomfortable disagreement. This is in stark contrast to the session we had in which we invited a nonmember with reactionary, and, to me, offensive views, about a variety of subjects. Most of us had trouble connecting with him, or even had trouble wanting to connect with him. And for me, a big part of that was that I just did not believe that he was being honest and vulnerable with us. He was grandstanding, changing the subject, and getting very emotional in ways that seemed designed to avoid having to answer tough questions. I think there was value in this session, as we were later able to discuss how it felt and why it did not feel like a real dialogue, but it was very different from our usual sessions. Personally, because I felt like he was more debating than dialoguing, that made me feel like debating as well. I was not interested in showing him who I really was because I became invested in wanting to prove that he was wrong or a hypocrite, which, as we have seen time and again, is actually a terrible way to try to change someone’s mind.
- Sue Kolod is president-elect of the North America Psychanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC), a member of the board of directors of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), training and supervising analyst and faculty of the William Alanson White Institute, and co-leader of the Depolarization Project.
- Email: s.kolod@wawhite.org
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