Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

Maybe it’s because I’m an old-school New Yorker. After all, pre-gentrification, post-World War II New York was the haven for pioneer psychoanalysts, refugees from Fascist Europe. So many of them came here, trained others here, opened institutes, taught, staffed hospitals, wrote, lectured, and had private and public practices with many patients and students. During that vulnerable period, our city welcomed people whose life calling was to understand and heal suffering as they emerged from mass killings by fascists. I’ve always been moved by the photograph of Sigmund Freud’s home at Berggasse in Vienna, after he was in exile in London and Nazis had taken it over. The photo depicts the former site of his offices covered in swastikas. It’s a cogent representation of the desire for understanding covered with shit. Many of these Nazis and collaborators were individuals whom the refugees knew personally and so had to be dealt with on very personal as well as socio-psychological terms. It is stunning to read over and over how psychoanalyst refugees from fascism tried to understand the fascist psychology. Many had the desire or the fantasy to engage fascists in treatment, to help them understand that feelings do not need to be acted on. I find a great beauty in their desire to understand cruelty, even when it was aimed at them. Perhaps in this way their influence, as refugees, had permeated late-twentieth-century New York City. Partially as a result of this influx of scapegoated pe...