Free Radicals

It’s Tuesday afternoon, one week after the 2024 presidential election. I greet my next patient, Steve, and brace myself for yet another hour of holding someone else’s terror while also silently holding my own. But this session starts differently. “I’m bothered by the fact that my partner voted for Harris,” he confesses. We both know it’s not because a vote for Trump would have been preferable. Rather, as a leftist, Steve is registering his frustration with the act of voting for any mainstream politician. “Voting for Harris conveys an okayness with the world. I can’t be okay with the world, because then I would be on the wrong side.” He pauses, then says: “I’m having trouble locating myself, politically. I feel like some of my friends are too radical—others aren’t radical enough.” 

“Radical”: I feel like I could write a memoir just on my personal relationship with that word. I was inspired as a teenager when I came across Angela Davis’s famous declaration that radical just means “grasping at the root,” and took it on as a kind of identity. In a college French class I proudly proclaimed to my conversation partner, “Je suis un activiste radical.” Even then, it was more aspirational than true. Over the years, “radical” as a leftist political stance has tempted and haunted me. I was and am inspired by the wildly creative visions of a different world, without racism, without violence, without prisons, and yes, even without police. Yet many of the ostensibly radical leftist spaces I’ve been in did not feel creative at all. Rather, they felt stifled and ossified: everyone vying to show how much they conform to ideologies that verge on dogmatic, out-quoting each other to burnish their credentials, scared of being on the “wrong side”—like Steve, and like me. 

In such spaces, it can feel risky to disagree about anything, even word choice. A conversation with an old friend turned sour when I took issue with describing the climate crisis as an “apocalypse,” because that word evokes despair. Knowing we agreed about the essentials, I thought it was safe to explore different ideas. I was surprised when this led to an accusation that I didn’t care about poor people. Suddenly I was on the wrong side, and it felt painful. I know what Steve means.

Or I think I know what he means, but then again, we are so different. While we are both gay men, Steve is an immigrant from an Asian country, bilingual and bicultural. His life is full of the tensions that come from being between two worlds, something I only know academically. I’m a white man from the Midwest. We grew up in different bodies, in different countries. Perhaps I don’t understand him at all. Then he says something that pulls me out of my head and right back into the room: “I have to spend so much time listening to white liberals, and it’s exhausting.” Instantly, a familiar panic arises within me—does he see me as a white liberal? I feel a chasm open between us: in my imagination, he is on the side of virtue, principle, and justice, and I’m on the side of complicity and complacence that voted for Harris. Knowing this is a false binary doesn’t take away my anxiety. 

For a moment I entertain the fear that Steve will see through me and declare that I am not radical enough. But then, like a kaleidoscope, things rearrange and I see what he’s been trying to tell me for quite a while: despite his confident public persona, he is tormented by the fear of not being radical enough, and perhaps even scared that I will judge him in this way. Steve works in a field where identity is front and center. In fact, more than once he has voiced the idea that due to past wrongs, perhaps only Black people should work in this field. It’s not clear where this thought originated, but Steve worries a lot about what it means for him, a non-Black person who is passionate about this subject. In particular, he is anxious about what his colleagues think of him. Sure, they respect him now, but what if that changes? 

As he talks through this, I’m reminded that being on the wrong side always comes with the risk of loss. Even before the emergence of cancel culture, I felt the inherent brittleness of being on the right side. In college we used to call it “having good politics,” a designation that was hard to win but very easy to lose. For Steve, and for me, the fear of being on the wrong side is also a fear of being kicked out of the group, losing colleagues or losing friends. If those fears led to more successful outcomes in activist movements and helped us build a better world, then it would be worth the pain. But I’m not sure that they do. 

I know that I can’t help Steve resolve the complex racial politics of who is allowed to work in his field—I’d look silly trying. What I hope I can offer him, what I hope psychoanalysis can offer to all aspiring radicals, is a different way of thinking, and certainly a different way of feeling. Reductive ideas about right and wrong can feel terribly abstract and intellectual, and they encourage the suppression of whatever feelings we don’t like. Instead, the situation calls for an emotional aliveness, alongside the logic, that can help steer a course into something richer and deeper. 

I’m in my own process of trying to find my way through this. My earlier attempts at activism were hampered by how I related to my own identity, which went something like this: I’m here as a white person to reckon with the harms that white people have done, but if whiteness is bad, how could I possibly do anything good? Psychoanalytic work has pointed to a way out of this double bind. Rather than trying to run away from the unwanted parts of the self, I can get to know them. I can accept the fact that I contain plenty of unconscious racism. The sadistic racial fantasies that drive the likes of Derek Chauvin have in some form found their way into all of our psyches. When we can get to know our own aggression, including racialized aggression, we’re much less likely to act on it. Then there is a chance of a real working-through, a healing process that might help us to dream boldly, to imagine new solutions for the problems that beset us.

Near the end of session, I wonder aloud if Steve might want to share some of these feelings with his partner—the one who voted for Harris and got us thinking about all this. But Steve isn’t sure about that. 

“Talk to him? I don’t know. It’s not something I share with anyone.” 

“So—these concerns about your work and politics, you’re not really talking through this with anyone else?” 

“No, it’s hard enough to put words to it in here.” 

I feel a glow from within as the late autumn sun goes down. Up until this moment I had not realized that Steve was sharing this part of himself only with me. He has found a space here that is safe enough for complexity, for questioning things. 

In our last minute together, I say to him: “You know the writer Zadie Smith?” (He does). “She says—I’m paraphrasing—that some things simply can’t be classified or labeled.”

Steve ponders this. “I don’t disagree,” he says in response, “but I still want to be on the right side.” And I think, as I shut my office door behind him, that it is quite difficult for us to think outside of binaries, but it is still worth reaching for.