The Social Unconscious with Karen Weisbard, PhD

Tyson meets with Karen Weisbard to discuss the concept of the social unconscious, the law of interrelatedness, and a different approach to crossing the increasingly vitriolic political lines drawn in American society. 

Karen is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalysts. She has been practicing as both for over 20 years.

Karen can be found at her website https://karenweisbard.com/ .

Further Learning: 

https://www.routledge.com/Toward-a-Social-Psychoanalysis-Culture-Character-and-Normative-Unconscious/Layton-Leavy-Sperounis/p/book/9780367902049

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Doer-Done-Jessica-Benjamin/dp/1138218421

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Unconscious-Selected-International-Analysis/dp/1843100886

© Relational Psych 2023

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Transcript

Tyson Conner: 0:11

Do you want to learn about psychological growth without sorting through the jargon? You're in the right place. This is the Relational Psych Podcast. I'm your host licensed therapist Tyson Connor. On this show, we learn about the processes and theories behind personal growth and experience a little bit of it ourselves. This is season two, where we'll focus on the practice of relational psychotherapy, and explore concepts and theories that consider psychology from a relational lens. And please keep in mind that this podcast does not constitute therapeutic advice, but we might help you find some. And today, my guest is Karen Weisbard. Karen is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst, and has been working as both for 20 years. Karen, welcome to the podcast.

Karen Weisbard: 0:58

Thanks, Tyson. I'm happy to be here.

Tyson Conner: 1:00

And today, we will be answering the question, why is the social unconscious important and particularly important for psychoanalysis? So this is a big one, Karen. This is a big one, and you picked it! So why don't we start with how did you get interested in this? What brought you to this concept?

Karen Weisbard: 1:22

Yeah, thanks. Well, a number of things both culturally and also personally. So culturally, I think the political climate that we were in around the time of the elections - Obama, Trump - sort of created this awareness that everything wasn't quite fine in the world. And then, in fact, there was a lot of things that were sort of seemingly not fine. And then leading up to, you know, all the things that we know about happening - the me to movement, Black Lives Matter, COVID - I think was a particularly nodal kind of turning point where it exposed a lot of inequities in the world and in our culture about who can have and who cannot have, who's safe, who's not safe. Nevermind the political climate around it, just the whole sense of who is at risk. And we were all at risk, but it's sort of exposed that some people were at way more risk than others. And I think that at that point, I felt undone a bit. And, you know, all our worlds returned, rather upside down. But it just sort of became harder and harder to feel like it was somehow... that all these factors that were happening in the world were not impacting individuals, and then this sort of recognition of maybe all of this had been going on for much longer than we could have been aware.

Tyson Conner: 3:17

So over the past, gosh, what are we saying now, like, from 2016 ish, onwards, because I remember in 2015, in the lead up to the, to the 2016, election, there was a lot of -- there was a sort of -- that was the first surge of the Black Lives Matter movement. And then it really came back in force a few years later. From what I recall, that was my exposure to it, I saw like a little -- there was a blip of it there a moment where it was very present, and came back again. And between that and these other movements we're talking about, what I'm hearing you describe is this sort of like, okay, there's an awareness that there's something happening on a societal level, on a cultural level, that is absolutely having a direct impact on on people's minds and how they function and how they work. And it sounds like this category of this social unconscious. It was - your interest in it began as your attempt to try to make sense of that, using the tools that psychoanalysis brings.

Unknown: 4:16

Yes, absolutely. And trying to sort of think a lot about like the people that were coming into our offices, who we were all in the same soup, kind of together. And so that changed a lot of how I, you know, would typically practice because I would think it's the person coming in with their questions and their concerns. But now we were all there with the same questions and the same concerns, especially during COVID. So it sort of felt like, what stance do we take as therapists, what stance do we take regarding what's happening in the world? I think many of us, you know, we're inundated with people's need for mental health treatment and feeling incredibly overwhelmed, and of course, the hospitals were overwhelmed, like there was just this sense of so much suffering, and so much need, and how were we going to meet the need, and we can't just meet the need on an individual basis, because there's too many people in need. So we're gonna have to think differently, I think about the suffering that's happening in people's lives. And how are we going to sort of address that suffering out side, perhaps, of just the limits of what we can do in an individual session. And so I sort of think about also what's happening in my work individually is also starting to sort of create this social awareness that there are factors impacting how people are in their families, how people are in their relationships, that are sort of bigger than them in a way, which I think takes the load off individuals to sort of feel like it's up to me to just figure this all out. Because I feel like this is all very, rather interconnected. And I think that gives a little bit more breath and a little bit more room and maybe a little bit more opportunity for people to start to think differently, and maybe even then act differently toward other human beings and in their communities.

Tyson Conner: 6:23

Right. One of the critiques of psychoanalysis that I often hear - even from within psychoanalysis -I mostly hear this from, from from people who are, who are wrestling, I don't like this bit, is something of how how atomized they feel, they can feel like -- and by atomized Listener, I mean, like, totally individual and disconnected from all the other parts of their life, that people often feel that they are being blamed for their suffering, because every conversation about their suffering comes back to how they're responding to it. And part of what I'm hearing you describe is that this category of the social unconscious is one way to kind of shift our minds so that we're not approaching every mental health system, symptom, or pathology, or whatever, purely from the perspective of okay, what's wrong with this one person's mind and unconscious? And how can we fix them? That sounds like a project, but a good one and important one, and impossible one, which all the important ones are?

Karen Weisbard: 7:32

Well, it's incredibly relieving, I think, for people to realize that that belief that it must be me, it's my problem, I must try to fix it myself, it's up to the individual, is a social construction, right? One that's very powerful in our Western society is that - it's a very individualistic society. And so your successes and your failures are thought of and seen as just you. And that's a fiction, in fact, and that's what the social unconscious in the sort of awareness of that's an ideology that we have all succumbed to, and that is regularly perpetuated. And how can we as individuals start to subvert, I guess you could say that ideology?

Tyson Conner: 8:27

Yeah. So let's, let's define our terms, like when we say the social unconscious, you know, the listeners, hopefully, will mostly be familiar with ideas of the unconscious, you can listen to our episode on psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy for more in depth. As a quick refresher, there's an awful lot of stuff that happens in a person's mind at any given time in a given moment. I love the analogy of breath, where most of the time we're breathing, we're not thinking about it. Now that I've mentioned it, you are, so well, you know, hopefully, that's helpful to you right now. And turning our attention to our breath can be really helpful in doing things and in doing extraordinary things, and then doing helpful things. Whether we're doing yoga and trying to breathe into a stretch, or playing a musical instrument or swimming, being able to draw our attention to a usually unconscious process gives us more agency and helps us make good use of the resources we have. And in the world of psychoanalysis, very broadly speaking, we believe that there's a lot happening that's not conscious inside of a person beyond the physical, just workings beyond plumbing. And that bringing those things into awareness can be really effective and helpful. So how does that concept map on to something that's bigger than an individual mind?

Karen Weisbard: 9:56

It's kind of the same idea. And so this is not my idea, I want to give credit where credit is due. So Lynn Layton sort of coined the term the normative unconscious. And she sort of takes that from Erich Fromm, who, one of the, you know, originators of psychoanalysis, interpersonal psychoanalysis, did come up with the idea of the social unconscious. So maybe I can just read a definition because it's not my term. And that'll help hopefully situate the listener and also give them some access to resources.

Tyson Conner: 10:35

Absolutely.

Karen Weisbard: 10:36

So the social unconscious is sort of unconscious forces on our identity, and it exerts a pressure to internalize cultural norms, and ideologies. And those cultural forces sort of take over our unconscious processes in this form of what we can and cannot know. So maybe I just pause there to digest that, and see if that can be translated into real words or something a little more relatable.

Tyson Conner: 11:16

Yeah, I mean, so I'm thinking about a lot of things, I feel like sometimes, you know, most of our listeners would be from a Western cultural context. And sometimes it's easier to see these sorts of things when it's in a context that you're not, that's not baked into you, for instance. So it's making me think of, um, I spent some time in Southeast Asia. And while I was there, there was this orphanage that I visited, that it was part of a like Western community had sort of built the money for this thing, and they would come out and they would build things and try to help out and build these relationships. And one of the things that they did when they designed this orphanage was they had sort of an outdoor toilet setup, you sort of had to walk through the building. And then outside there was where the toilets were. And what they found was that children who were far too old to be wetting the bed, and having accidents in the night were pretty regularly. And the people running this orphanage were from the US, and they didn't really understand what was going on. And what they found out was that a lot of these kids had grown up initially, in their first few years of life had been out in, like in rural areas, and living in the jungle and living in the mountains. And they were told that outside at night is when all of the spirits came out, and the dangerous spirits came out, and you don't go out at night, otherwise, they're gonna get you. And to a certain degree, that, to my mind, that sounds like a really useful strategy to internalize. Because if you're out in the woods at night, and you're a little kid, like, yeah there's a bunch of things that can go wrong. And some of those things could be predators, and some of those things could be getting lost. And, you know, it's a long list. And so they, these kids, were just not leaving the house, even to go to the bathroom. Because they'd so internalized this idea of like, No, don't go out there, it's dark, something's gonna get me. And coming from a sort of modernist rationalist sort of physical determinist, we don't believe in the spirits kind of mindset that a lot of our listeners will have. We can look at that from the outside and say, like, Okay, this example isn't perfect, because this isn't an unconscious belief. It's not an unconscious thing. It's something that you could ask the kids about, and they could tell you. So maybe I should give up on the analogy. But that's what's coming to my mind.

Karen Weisbard: 13:56

Well, I don't think you should give up on the analogy, because I imagine what could happen and that I think this does happen is that then the problem is located in the children. Like they're having problem with bedwetting, right? Versus no, this is not a problem with bedwetting, this is a cultural phenomenon. And if we could understand what's happening, then we're not going to pathologize the children. And maybe we could sort of structurally change the situation. And I think that's also part of what happens for people, individuals that come into our offices or that are listening to the podcasts have that sense of it must be me, I must be doing something wrong. And without attention to the forces that maybe are exerted on us, all of us to sort of say, well, that's how we actually have been enculturated to believe - it's our problem. It's our solution. And it denies the level of interconnectedness that you know, it's the Winnicott thing, there is no baby without a mother. But there is also this bigger sense of there is no me without you. And both you and me are very much influenced by what else is happening out there in the world.

Tyson Conner: 15:16

Yeah, there's two threads that I want to tease out for the listener. The first is what you just made the reference to Winnicott, which to me speaks to kind of some of the relational term, which is a name that we use in psychoanalysis to talk about a shift from what's called a one person psychology, where the client comes in and gets analyzed and is told this is what's wrong with you know, you get fixed to a two person psychology, which acknowledges, okay, there's multiple people in the room, relationships matter, interaction patterns matter. I'm hyper simplifying. But for the listener, that's kind of the shift that's happened in the world of psychoanalysis over the past, I don't know what 40 years ish. And what I'm hearing, you're suggesting, this is a sort of a continuation of sort of turning up that dial as it were, to it's not a two person psychology anymore.

Karen Weisbard: 16:13

It's more like not turning up the dial. It's more like expanding the concentric circles is how I think about it. So if you have the interapsychic, you know, the individual. And then you have the relational maybe be the circle around that. Well, now, we're just increasing the concentric circles and saying, all these things are influencing the dyad. And then the dyad is also influencing the interapsychic and the individual. But it's all a concentric circle. And all these forces are actually happening at once, in all directions.

Tyson Conner: 16:47

And I imagine that keeping this in mind, requires an awful lot --like people feel this way about just the two person shift like, oh, no, now the analyst has to keep so much in their mind. And now you're saying, yeah, and then some, and I can hear those Oh noes in my head. It makes me excited. But also a little bit

Karen Weisbard: 17:09

It's daunting.

Tyson Conner: 17:10

Yeah, someone once told me the best things in life are vaguely terrifying. And this is absolutely that, as a therapist, the other thread that I want to pull out, because I think it'll be helpful as we get into this is our definition of ideologies, because that word in particular, most people encounter in the context of really heated political discourse, usually as an accusation. People will accuse one another of being ideological when they're trying to make a point, or someone will say, yeah, that movie had had all sorts of ideological like stuff in it as a way of saying someone's trying to push a certain political idea. And I think the way you're using it, and the way that I like to think about it, or have heard it described, is that an ideology doesn't have any moral implication, one way or another. It's an unconscious, like understanding of how the world works, that we just see play out around us and carry around with us all the time.

Karen Weisbard: 18:13

Exactly. It's like the water, you know, and if you think of fish in the water or the air that we breathe, it's just there. We tend not to notice, like you were saying breath earlier, the air or the pollutants in the air, you know, for instance, but that's what we could think of ideologies as it's what's in the air, and it's what we absorb into our skin. And it's what we absorb into our bodies and our brains. And that's what is the social unconscious,

Tyson Conner: 18:42

Right. And so an awareness of one's ideologies, whether they're ones that we chose, because we learned a certain thing, and we're like, Yes, I choose to believe this about the world, or just things that we picked up

Karen Weisbard: 18:55

Mainly once we don't choose. We're just swimming in the sea of it.

Tyson Conner: 18:59

Do people choose ideologies? Is that even a thing you can do?

Karen Weisbard: 19:01

Well, I'm hoping that in this sort of push for us to sort of become more aware of the social unconscious, that we actually would get more intentional about our ideologies. And I don't mean like political ideologies, but maybe even in that sense of the, I sort of think of this and this is also referencing other people, Jessica Benjamin being one of them. The law of interconnectedness, like that ideology. Where we're all interconnected. And not just people, but obviously the environment and how we regard our surround and how the surround impacts us. And if we can, I hope, create a kinder, gentler world would be one in which we might really come to sort of have this sense of a law of interconnectedness that really guides us in our very being and in our very actions.

Tyson Conner: 20:06

So, again, the widening is happening in my mind, because part of what I'm hearing is that what you're suggesting is that an awareness of the social unconscious doesn't just help inform a therapist's way of thinking about their clients experience, it actually suggests a way of being in the world for everybody, that requires us to be far more - if not thoughtful about - aware of our impact on not just other people, but the water that we swim in, other people and the environment and our pets, and basically anything that exists that we make contact with, that that impact stays behind. And having this kind of awareness doesn't let you get away from that fact.

Karen Weisbard: 20:55

Yes, I believe that to be true.

Tyson Conner: 20:58

I'm just gonna breathe through that for a second. Because I can feel myself starting to transcend... want to keep my feet on the floor. Let's talk about this idea of what we can and cannot know. That feels important.

Karen Weisbard: 21:13

So the social unconscious, I would think of as a regulatory agency, so to speak. It sort of, again, exerts its influence without us seeing it or knowing it. And it kind of allows us to not know, certain things. And so the things that like Lynn Layton talks about and other people that are writing in this area, the things that it allows us not to know are a lot of the social hierarchies that exist. So genderism, sexism, racism, classism. And so we're sort of on some level acculturated to not think about these things, to not know them. And to, you know, like in a therapy room, we probably aren't asking our clients to think about these issues. But they are powerful forces on what we can know and not know, including, like, you know, your gender, how we just take it for granted. And less and less these days, obviously, because people are thinking more out of binary terms. But these are things that we have been trained to not know and to not think about, and to not ask about, and we just make assumptions that our clients are white, that they're heterosexual... you know, we just sort of tend to sort of start there. And sometimes we have to, like, shake ourselves to be like, Okay, that's something I'm supposed to not know, in a way that this is where my starting point always is.

Tyson Conner: 23:09

Right? I'm thinking about this, I was working with someone who recently who was working through their feelings about their own aggression, right? Like classic analytic stuff, right? Like going back to Freud. sex and aggression. Heck, yeah, that's our jam. And I was just being like, great, I feel comfortable here. This is my world. I'm comfy. But this person... it took me weeks, and I'm embarrassed to even talk about it. But they are a black man. He's a black man. And his aggression has very different real consequences in his world than mine does, as a white man, right? Like, that is something that I could approach it from the realm of theory that I have it says, This is how people work. And this is what's happening on the unconscious level. And all these things that I could get into and say, No, this is how it is. But the reality is even throwing out the like risk of death of like, if police get called on him versus me. His aggression in a workplace, even just like advocating for himself, will be experienced fundamentally differently than mine. And so he treats it very differently internally than I would. And like, I felt like a real dummy for taking as long as I did to figure it out. But I'm wondering... this feels like one of those things. The social unconscious says, You don't have to know about that. You don't need to know about that fact, you don't get to.

Karen Weisbard: 24:38

Right and I would hope that you wouldn't beat yourself up that it took you so to speak that long to get because on some level, you got something about this person's experience that you needed to get and he needed you to get and there's also going to be a limit to what you get, because you're not going to get it.

Tyson Conner: 25:02

Yeah, I'm thinking about how so many of these things that feel like they're part of the social unconscious tend to be things that have pretty intense cultural conversations around, especially in the realm of politics, but also just more generally on social media, just social issues. That like, there's a heat around it, that I'm thinking about, like, someone who might be listening to this, and we're bringing up issues of race and gender, and like, hetero patriarchy. And these sorts of categories who might say like, Ah, I've heard all that stuff. And, you know, here's the statistics about how women really don't earn less than men on the dollar. And there's a whole like energy around saying, Actually, that's not real. And I'm curious - it feels like we could somehow make sense of that.

Karen Weisbard: 25:59

Yeah, I would hope that we wouldn't get into sort of debates about what's real, or what's factual, as much as I'm hoping to increase sort of our curiosity about, oh, that's a very interesting stance to be taking that that's not real. So something is exerting an influence and something must feel very threatening to sort of disavow something so strongly to say, well, that's not true, or that's not real. And that's what I'm more interested in is what's going on, because there's some threat, I believe, to the self, to some position of identity or some subjectivity position. That that has to not be true. And so, you know, listeners can't see, but there's like, my hands are like, That can't be true. And so I'm pushing that away from me, which for me is like, wow, there's some vulnerability here. And the person that says that can't be true, right? I can't know that. That is what I want to get to, I want to get to the vulnerability like what's happening right now that that is so threatening, that there's something about the possibility of something being true that is really hard to digest or tolerate. I mean, I feel like if we can get into people's vulnerabilities and the disruption, obviously, that this way of thinking engenders and then requires us to tolerate, then we also have much more compassion and less heat around these issues. Because we're like, oh, my god, we're also vulnerable.

Tyson Conner: 27:51

Right. I'm reminded of when I was in college, all of my friends were philosophy majors, because I'm drawn to arguments, I suppose. I don't know why. And then when I started grad school, and started training, become a therapist, I was in one of those conversations, those philosophy conversations. And I pulled out this like really basic therapy skill, right? Where somebody was making some point or other, and I was in the position where I needed to respond. And what I said - I kind of wanted to be done and go do my homework - and so what I said was, you know, I'm less interested in actually answering that question and more interested in figuring out why it's so important to you. And the person who I asked that question to, it was like I'd thrown a wrench into the gears. Like he was like, wait, no, that's not what we're doing. Hang on, you're not playing the game. And oh, you know, I was just trying to get out of the conversation. And it worked. But I feel like that exact thing just happened just now. Right? Where you are like, actually, like, that intensity of people's response is something to be curious about. Not to see it as like, Okay, I need to defeat that way of thinking, but rather, oh, gosh, why are our ways of thinking, so deadly important to us? What about this? What is this doing for me? Why do I need this so badly? And also, why? Why does this other person need it so badly, so badly that people will go through pretty incredible lengths to try to refute an idea that what I'm hearing you say is maybe it's because something about that idea you can't know. Something in them says no, you can't know that thing.

Karen Weisbard: 29:37

Right. And something about that idea is also holding them together, structurally holding them together. I must believe this. I can't allow in anything that would disrupt that because it actually would disrupt my whole structure.

Tyson Conner: 29:53

Yeah. So you said that the social unconscious especially has a lot of power around people's identities and sense of self? Can you speak more to that idea?

Karen Weisbard: 30:05

Okay, so a good example of this is my subjective self says, I'm a good person, right? I'm a good person, I care about other people, I see myself is open minded, kind, willing to think about things. And then let's say something happens. And I've been unkind, or I've hurt somebody, or I have, like some expressed a bias of some sort, that I didn't know I had. And so then now, what do I do with my own sense of self? How do I not fall into some shame and guilt? or denial? Or how do I allow some space that what defines me as a good person isn't just that I'm good? What also defines me as a good person, is that I recognize that I can harm others, and that I have harmed others. And that is a state of like tolerance, and it sort of expands my sense of subjective self. Because now I'm no longer tied to just good/bad. But also I'm, again, back to that law of interconnectedness, I'm indirectly and directly responsible for how another feels. And my sense of self can become more whole, I think, and much more broader if I can sort of tolerate that that's a part of my subjectivity. It's part of what I would say is all our subjectivities is, can we tolerate that sense of, we're not just good/bad, we harm others. And that's part of our subjectivity.

Tyson Conner: 32:16

Yeah, I'm thinking about how I feel like, it's interesting, a lot of the examples that are coming to my mind are about race. But this is about a lot more than that.

Karen Weisbard: 32:28

More than that, in the sense of it's not just about race, because it's -- I write in a paper that I'm going to be giving about an experience of a comment being made to my kid on the street, that was very derogatory. And as we're walking away, I say to my kid, was that person talking to you? And my kid said, Yeah, that happens all the time. Now, my kid is trans. And so the responsibility isn't just that, okay, now this person on the street harmed my kid, and I was enraged because it's my kid. And I don't want my kid to be harmed. But I could have also just kept walking down the street and ignored that that happened, and not stood with my kid to say, I just heard what you just heard. And I'm going to say to you that just happened. And we can both know that that just happened. And I can sit here in my rage and my pain and your rage and your pain. And we're in this one moment going to be together. Right? And I think we're regulated a lot to not notice; like not notice harm, not noticed that someone says something to you on the street, not notice if a parent, you know, says something mean to their child, that we just you know, we all have heard stories of sitting at the dinner table and no one's looking at each other. Right? Because everybody's wants to ignore what just happened, dad just exploded or someone at Thanksgiving made a racist comment and we're all going to just go on as if nothing has just happened. And that then just shuts us all down and then forces us in a way to pretend/dissociate/not sit with pain and not sit with suffering and not sit with awkwardness and not sit with acknowledgment that... we both just saw that right? We both just heard that. And we can both know that that just happened.

Tyson Conner: 35:03

Because knowing that that just happened means being able to be with the pain. And it's really hard to be with pain, people don't tend to like that I don't like that. And it sounds to me like part of the difficulty in what we're talking about is that like, to acknowledge the reality of the social unconscious, is to acknowledge how we are all involved in these things that cause a lot of pain and cause a lot of harm. And that that can't be undone by being good. There's a -- when when talking about these categories of like, what's a good person? What's a bad person, right? We all want to believe that we are good people. And oftentimes, as a therapist, when someone comes into your office, and they don't believe they're a good person, that's a problem. Right? That usually causes trouble for them. And I've been thinking in this conversation about superhero media and children's media, because those are worlds that I'm in and specifically around the question of, of racism and sexism, especially, right? Because those are great little shorthands to identify someone who's a bad person in those kinds of stories, or even environmentalism, right? You've got Captain Planet versus the polluters and it set up this like, here's the bad guys doing the bad thing. And then here's us, the good people doing the good thing. And we can't be doing the bad thing too, because we're good. When I first started learning about systemic racism, I remember having a conversation with my dad, where he was like, No, you don't understand. I'm not a racist. I know racists, they go to Klan meetings, and I would never do such a thing. And he's thinking about that - hi dad, you're thinking about that has evolved, since we had that conversation. Don't worry about it. I was like, 2008, you're cool - He listens to the show. So I just want a little bit of kindness. But to bring this awareness of the social unconscious into a healing relationship, which is what we're talking about, like we're not this idea, just more broadly, as like a hey, think about the world this way. We're talking about people who want to be healers, which most psychotherapists do.

Karen Weisbard: 37:25

And most people do. I think it's not just for us as therapists, but it's for all of us to sort of feel like, Oh, if we feel the pain of others, then we are healing, we ourselves are healing. Because again, back to that interconnectedness, it's sort of like, when you feel upset, you could feel the cells of your body, I think starting to change. I think you could feel your capacity for empathy, to start to grow. And I do believe that we all would want to be healers in a way we all are saddened by the state of the world in whatever world we live in. We're saddened for X reasons. You know, like, even the people in Florida are saddened by the state of the world. Because they want to heal, you know, we all might not agree that this is the way to heal, you know, so they could impose laws saying, Well, this is how we're going to heal. But if we can sort of be like, we all want to eliminate suffering, we've had very different ideas of how that might happen. And we can't really eliminate suffering. But we can try to sort of understand that we all I think are trying to be healers in a way even though it looks on the outside, like some people are full of hate. And they probably themselves again, are people who have struggled, who are struggling who have been treated hatefully themselves. I mean they're under the cultural forces of their own.

Tyson Conner: 39:06

Absolutely, I'm thinking about I recently heard of someone who has some very conservative family members who were visiting around the same time as some friends who are gender non conforming, and there was a conversation with these conservative family members about like, please just respect and use their pronouns. It's just a kind thing to do. And there was a bit of a conflict around that. But the friends came and visited and the visit was lovely. And after they left, the thing that that really conservative family members said was, we were surprised by how kind they were. They were just so kind. And, you know, I have some incredibly conservative family members who based off of their social media coverage you would think just like going around ready to beat up anyone they come across to is even vaguely different, who have extended some of the most clear and direct material kindness to me and my family of anyone I'm related to. And what I'm hearing you speak to is that these positions that we come to, as a way of like, making conscious sense of the socially unconscious movements don't actually reflect anything about our desire to be human beings together. They say a lot about, like, how we think we go about doing that, perhaps, but also that we're set up to come to really bad conclusions about each other. My assumption about the conservative family members would be that they don't want anything to do with me in my kind. And yet, they have lent me vehicles for months at a time, right? Like there's something human here that we want to make not human. And say, like, actually, no, we have the way to do it. And related to this question of healing, and being in healing relationships, it sounds like accepting the reality of a social unconscious, also requires accepting your own ongoing participation in those harmful things. We all walk around with biases, right? Most people accept that. But it's another thing to say - and we all walk around actively participating in these patterns and systems that continue to perpetuate harm against people that we care about and want to help heal.

Karen Weisbard: 41:29

Exactly.

Tyson Conner: 41:33

So how are you supposed to do any good?

Karen Weisbard: 41:37

Well, for me, this is so hopeful. I mean, I believe psychoanalysis has the power to change the world. And I sort of feel like we can bring these understandings into all kinds of communal and community settings. There's lots of really interesting projects that are happening by psychoanalyst, and that are sort of psychoanalytically informed that are bringing people together to sort of listen, how do you listen to one another? How do you recognize another person? How do you sort of talk about these issues in ways that aren't like politically heated debates that get to our vulnerabilities, and soften us and I sort of feel like, as we become aware of how adhering we are to certain social structures that we just can't let go of, you know, and in psychoanalysis those structures might be, you know, you have to see somebody three, four times a week in order for it to be psychoanalysis sort of like, well, why does it have to be that like, why and why are we fighting about that? And is that promoting the work? And is it making it accessible to more people? Because that's a pretty systemic requirement that somebody come that often and pay that much money? You know, I mean, there's just a lot of restrictions in that. And so we can sort of start to say, well, what are we holding on to here? What's so important? And if we loosen some of this systemic structure, are we thinking that makes it less valuable? Or dilutes its importance? These are some of the things you hear in the world of psychoanalysis, people get really concerned. Or why are we talking about social issues at all? But for me, it just feels like, No, this is like the future like this is gonna blow our minds like this is gonna blow the whole thing open. And then Gosh, what if all of this were just so much more accessible?

Tyson Conner: 43:49

Yeah, good question. What if it were?

Karen Weisbard: 43:53

I feel like the world would be a better place. I don't know.

Tyson Conner: 43:56

Yeah. I mean, in some ways, that's part of my hope, with projects like this. You know, books are great. And videos are great. And podcasts are great, especially the free ones, because people can access some of the ideas and hopefully have a little bit of some of the experience. I think, as you were talking now, I was realizing that fear feeling that I was having that said like how to do any good. It's interesting that'sthe language I chose because I think that part of what this category and this way of thinking about people does is it requires that you let go of being able to be all good as an individual, or all bad. Like accepting one's participation and say, climate catastrophe, just by driving a car and owning an iPhone and which like some of those things are kind of unavoidable to persist in like modern society, you need a smartphone, more people own smartphones than homes, like, people got to get around, we don't have systems to get around that don't burn fossil fuels, and there are bunches and bunches of other ways that we're all constantly participating in a system that's literally killing our capacity to live on the planet. And that doesn't make us all a little minions of Satan walking around.

Karen Weisbard: 45:27

Or I think what people fear is also that that will just make me feel so depressed and hopeless, because what can I really do? Or what difference does it make? I'm a big proponent of yes, that feels very bad. And if we just stay feeling bad and guilty, then we really aren't allowing ourselves access to other emotions that we could have here, which might be okay, so I could probably drive less like, maybe I could walk to the store instead of drive to the store, if I am in somewhat of the vicinity of that, and what could that do for my body? And what could that do for the climate? And again, back to the interconnectedness like... we have to guard against that falling into a depression falling into the hopelessness, where it just seems like what's the point, it's all gonna go to hell in a handbasket anyway? Which you can hear lots of people feel that way and fall into that place, and it's work to not do that, you know, it's work to find a different side of the seesaw or to sort of step on a different pedal at the moment to sort of be like, okay, yeah, that's all true. It's not as if that's not true. And yet, how do we resist that becoming, again, our whole identity,

Tyson Conner: 46:59

Right, if all that we can do is see the ways we're participating in harm, then we cut ourselves off from the ways that we're also participating in healing. There's this idea from group theories of like a cybernetic system, and cybernetic is a word that the Listener will probably recognize from like Sci Fi stuff - is this data like Star Trek? But as it was explained to me, the original idea of a cybernetic system was a system where if you make a change in one part of the system, then the whole system changes in response. And it's not like, you know, taking a board out of a wall. It's like taking a piece out of a bicycle, for a bicycle to work well, all the pieces are in place. And if you've ever worked on a bicycle, you know, if you make changes to the length of the handlebars, then that changes how you ride the bike. I also heard recently someone say that when thinking about, like, human behavior, it makes a lot more sense to think of each person as a node in a network, as opposed to thinking of each person as an individual making rational choices that optimize their best good.

Karen Weisbard: 48:13

And so that's back to the law of interconnectedness. Right? We tend to think of ourselves as these isolated individuals, or the mind is this isolated entity. And I think there's a lot more hope and value and science that supports in fact, that is a fiction. That's not true. That's not how we are. There's great books right now being written about the communication between trees and forest, about the whole interconnectedness of the understory, and how trees are a community of family. And, you know, that's the world we live in, like, we're all interconnected, so if we can sort of hold that, the potential for healing and harm, but also more wholeness is there.

Tyson Conner: 49:09

Yeah. And what I'm hearing you say is that to get there, there's -- I'm sort of condensing a lot of our conversation down to like a few, like, now I'm all on this chew on this, like ideas. One of which is, why is it so important to believe that, that thing that you have the big reaction to, why is it so important to believe that? Get contact with your vulnerability around it, and then opening up awareness within yourself to the ways that the systems around you are impacting the way that you think and exist in the world and holding that, in a way? I think- you haven't used this language but - it sounds like that requires a little bit of grief. Room to grieve the harm. And also open yourself up to all of the ways that you are that... that influences both ways. The social unconscious, as I'm hearing you describe it, it isn't just a thing that we're all stuck in, and it's our doom. It's something that we can choose to interact within, kind of like going back to that breath analogy, like knowing that we can think about our breathing means that we can play the flute. I'm thinking about, I don't know if I said it on this podcast before. But I think a lot about Max Faber, the sociologist who wrote the Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he talked about the concept of the iron cage, the idea being that you have this community that will have a shared value, something important that they care about. And then they'll build systems around that value. And in that book, he traces starting with sort of Puritans and their value of doing hard work as a show of piety towards God. And then the systems that get built up around that hard work, eventually evolving into, I think he stopped his analysis somewhere around Benjamin Franklin, but like systems of loaning and receiving debt, and working with capital and maximizing wealth, and he's kind of traced this process. And he called this the iron cage, where you build systems around a value, and then you build systems around that system. And then eventually, the system becomes the value in itself. And you're left with these systems that are vast and complex, completely divorced from any human value. And he was a bit of a pessimist as a lot of those early sociologists were, and he thought like, and then you're stuck. It's the iron case you're stuck forever. But something that I'm noticing in conversations like this one, and in other spaces, is that actually, like human beings, I think, are driven more by our shared values, sometimes than our shared systems. Maybe not always, but often enough, that I think there is a drive to return to those values, whether they're values of connection or equality or care, compassion, healing, whatever it is. What I'm hearing you say, is like becoming aware of the iron cage, and the ways that maybe you're still stuck in it to a certain degree?

Karen Weisbard: 52:29

Well, back to maybe that the systems also are regulating our values. And so without being aware of the cultural systems that regulate our value, for instance, of care. And then we think, Oh, well care is associated with women, let's say or care is associated with the home, so that it's hard to embrace maybe that sense of a value of care when we also have all these cultural forces that are naming that as something that belongs to a certain segment of people, or a certain gender. Just it's sort of back again, to like, how do we expand the concentric circle out to be like, Oh, eating, a notion that we think of as value, not value laden, such as care, or kindness might, in fact, be value laden and highly regulated by systems that say, this is where you get to do this, or this is where you get to do that, or you better not do it there. And so it's sort of this back and forth, looking at the concentric circles, how far out does that go? And then how is that exerting its influence? Back on the individual that they again, back to they can't even know, right? That something that seems so innocuous is so prohibited,

Tyson Conner: 54:00

Right? Yeah, Hoo, boy, that idea is just opening up lots of thoughts, just even even in how we write laws about mental health care, and like how those impact things and like, the fact that we live in a state where children over the age of 13, are like, fully in charge of their own mental health care decisions, and how that reflects back to the value of children being able to have their own privacy and agency as they enter adolescence. But the problems that that causes for children who aren't able to make those decisions for themselves, and the fact that we live in a state that has, you know, a rule that any mental health facility for anyone else for the are under the age of 18 cannot have locked doors, and how that's also a value based on maybe we don't imprison children for being sick, and how that means that many children have to go out of state to get the care that they need. That, like, the systems and the systems that I'm speaking to are like laws that you can look up online. But there's so many other systems that are much more subtle and much more invisible than that, and how they impact how we even make sense of what does it mean to be kind to someone? And that's a big topic to think about. So, listener, have fun with that. So we should probably wrap up. Thank you for your time. On our way out, as we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't get to that you wanted to make sure to include in our conversation?

Karen Weisbard: 55:42

I guess the only other thing that I would want to include is that when we talked earlier about, like our identity, or a sense of subjectivity, I think we all know we are not comprised of just one thing. And that we have many positions we occupy in our lives. You know, I'm a psychologist, I'm an analyst, I'm a mother, I'm a daughter, you know, all of those things affect how I see myself, how I conduct myself in the world. And I think it's just so helpful for listeners to sort of be like, you're not just one thing. Your identity and your subjective self is composed of so many, sometimes competing, forces that if we can try to have compassion, for we're sort of wrestling with a lot, even though we're an individual, but we're wrestling with a lot, as is every single person around us. And it's not also clear cut. And so when you feel confused, or when you feel like, why am I feeling this way? Or, you know, it's probably for lots of really good reasons.

Tyson Conner: 56:56

Yeah, that makes me think about our - we did an episode on multiplicity of self and multiple self states and all that all those ideas, and then also, in conjunction with a social unconscious concept. And these identity self categories that we have, that we didn't even know we were picking up that were may be given to us, that we might start to wrestle with just how, like, it's always helpful to have a community to work so that within to have others with you, and that struggle. And I imagined for this in particular, like for the social unconscious stuff for our awareness of our social location, how helpful it can be, not just to accept oh, gosh, I'm wrestling with a lot right here. Oh, man. So are we all right? If you're a man wrestling with your own masculinity and taking it realizing messages you've taken in and but when you're allowed to be kind and when you're not, maybe there are some other men who also feel that way and might be open to being vulnerable about that. Similar ideas around other identity markers. That we pick up in relationship, maybe it's something that we can wrestle with and engage with together in relationship.

Karen Weisbard: 58:12

Yes.

Tyson Conner: 58:14

That is hopeful. That's nice. Lovely. Well, Karen, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anywhere that you'd like to be found, and the Listener, if they're interested in this, we will have references to the folks that you cited in the show notes. If you have any specific books you want to call out? Or if someone's like, wow, that Karen lady, she's pretty cool. Where can I hear more what she has to say?

Karen Weisbard: 58:41

Well, I have a website, which is www.KarenWeisbard.com. Some of my writings are accessible on the website. I would like to put a plug in that, you know, this is the work I love to do. I love to teach, I love to help people sort of become more aware of their practices and what they're doing. But also, I would like to sort of move psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ideas into community settings. So if any of your listeners have or work in communities, or agencies or places where you're like, I think this would be a great conversation to have in my community, I would love the opportunity to sort of be part of those kinds of conversations too.

Tyson Conner: 59:33

Absolutely, so what definition of community?

Karen Weisbard: 59:37

Could be in your church, it could be in your synagogue, in your workplace, it could be at your school. I mean, I just think there are so many settings. It could be community mental health. Where people want to talk about this stuff. We're all like trying to figure it out. You know, and I just think that there's a lot of spaces that could be created for people to come together and hear about these ideas and also start to think about them in terms of their own individual and group and family and communal spaces.

Tyson Conner: 1:00:12

Yeah. Thinking about vulnerability, I'm thinking about Bob. Bob Bergman has said - Listener, he's an analyst in Seattle - has said that the scariest thing that a human being can do -- this very definitive statement, but it's meant to be provocative. The scariest thing for a human being isn't death or death of a loved one. It's going up to someone and saying, why don't you and I go do this and such together? And having the other person say, No, I don't think we will. So like, I'm aware that even in your invitation, you're inviting people into vulnerability. You're saying like, hey, I want to do this with you. Reach out to me and ask, and like, oh, man, you're inviting vulnerability from the word go. This is work that requires such bravery. But that is a soft bravery. Which is giving me all the willies, I like it.

Karen Weisbard: 1:01:04

So that's what I would like to say, like, please reach out and not just to be like a client, but like, reach out if you feel like this conversation could be in your community too.

Tyson Conner: 1:01:15

Absolutely. Well, links to all of your information will be in the show notes, as well as the books that you recommend and your website. And yeah, thank you again, this has been delightful.

Karen Weisbard: 1:01:27

Thank you.

Tyson Conner: 1:01:31

Special thanks to Dr. Karen Weisbard, Karen can be found at her website, KarenWeisbard.com. link in the show notes. Also in the show notes for this episode, you'll find links to a few books written by some of the theorists that Karen cited in today's episode. The topic that we discussed is broad and comes up and touches on a lot of areas of psychoanalytic theory and thought, but I thought that these three books would be a good place to start for anyone who's interested in diving a little bit deeper into this complex, deeply interconnected category. The relational psych Podcast is a production of relational psych, a mental health clinic providing depth oriented psychotherapy and psychological testing in person in Seattle and virtually throughout Washington state. If you're interested in psychotherapy or psychological testing for yourself or a family member, links to our contact information are in the show notes. If you are a psychotherapist and would like to be a guest on the show or a listener with a suggestion for someone you'd like us to interview, You can contact me at podcast@relationalpsych.group. The Relational Psych Podcast is hosted and produced by me Tyson Connor. Sam Claney is our executive producer with technical support by Ally Raye and the team at VirtualAlly. Carly Claney is our CEO. Our music is by Ben Lewis. We love you buddy.