Psyche, Science, and Society

Welch: Torture, Psychology, and Daniel Inouye

My friend and colleague Bryant Welch, the founder and first Director of the American Psychological Association’s Practice Directorate has written an article explaining his understanding of the origins of the APA’s interrogations policy:

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Torture, Psychology, and Daniel Inouye:
The True Story Behind Psychology’s Role in Torture

By Bryant Welch

A seventeen-year-old boy is locked in an interrogation cell in Guantanamo. He breaks down crying and says he wants his family. The interrogator senses the boy is psychologically vulnerable and consults with a psychologist. The psychologist has evaluated the boy prior to the questioning and says, “Tell him his family has forgotten him.” The psychologist also prescribes “linguistic isolation” (not letting him have contact with anyone who speaks his language.) The boy attempts suicide a few weeks later. On the eve of the boy’s trial, the psychologist apparently fearing her testimony will only further implicate her, indicates she will plead the Fifth Amendment if she is called to the stand. The trial is postponed, leaving the boy in further limbo.

The military psychologist is merely a foot soldier in psychology’s participation in torture. It goes much deeper. We now know that psychologists helped design and implement significant segments of George Bush’s torture program. Despite their credo, “Above all, do no harm,” two psychologists developed instruments of psychological torture. They “reversed engineered” psychological principles. They used the very therapeutic interventions psychologists use to ameliorate psychological suffering, but “reversed” their direction to create psychological distress and instability. If one’s reality sense is threatened, a good therapist validates and supports it as appropriate. In reverse engineering, the environment is deliberately made more confusing and the victim’s trust in his own perceptions is intentionally undermined. In extreme form, this can ultimately drive a person to insanity from which some never come back. These were the types of techniques that were used on the seventeen-year-old detainee and others.

Military psychologists also colluded with the Justice Department to help CIA operatives circumvent the legal prohibitions against torture. Under the Justice Department definition of torture, if a detainee was sent to a psychologist for a mental health evaluation prior to interrogation it was per se evidence that the interrogator had no legal intent to torture the detainee because the referral “demonstrated concern” for the welfare of the detainee.

Most remarkably of all, this whole process occurred under a protective “ethical” seal from the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists’ largest national organization. The APA governance repeatedly rejected calls from its membership for APA to join other health organizations in declaring participation in Bush detention center interrogations unethical.

Most psychologists are appalled at what the APA has done, and many, like me, have resigned from the APA. But the true story behind APA’s involvement with torture has not been fully told.

I have had ample opportunity to observe both the inner workings of the APA and the personalities and organizational vicissitudes that have affected it over the last two decades. For most of the twenty-year period from 1983 to 2003, I either worked inside the APA central office as the first Executive Director of the APA Practice Directorate, or I served in various governance positions, including Chair of the APA Board of Professional Affairs and member of the APA Council of Representatives. Since leaving APA I have maintained a keen interest in the organization.

The transformation of APA, in the past decade, from a historically liberal organization to an authoritarian one that actively assists in torture has been an astonishing process. As with many usurpations of democratic liberal values, the transformation was accomplished by a surprisingly small number of people. APA is an invaluable case study in the psychological manipulations that influence our governmental and non-governmental institutions.

To explain APA’s behavior two questions have to be answered. First, how did the APA develop the connections with the military that fostered the shameful role it has played in torture? Second, why did the APA governance not join other health professions in prohibiting participation in the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogations,” as APA’s rank and file members were demanding?

The APA-military connection

One source of APA’s military connections is obvious to anyone who has worked at APA over the last twenty-five years. Strangely, it has been overlooked by the media. Since the early 1980’s, APA has had a unique relationship with Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye’s office. Inouye was an honored WWII veteran, a Japanese American who himself was a medical volunteer in the midst of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He entered office in 1962. For much of the ’70s, he was Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Later he became, and is currently, the chair of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which, of course, makes up the largest chunk of federal discretionary spending and is why economists often split discretionary government funding into defense spending versus “everything else.” This appropriations committee covers not only all of the armed forces but the CIA as well. Put succinctly, Inouye controls the military purse strings, and is very influential with military brass.

One of Inouye’s administrative assistants, psychologist Patrick Deleon, has long been active in the APA and served a term in 2000 as APA president. For significant periods of time DeLeon has literally directed APA staff on federal policy matters and has dominated the APA governance on political matters. For over twenty-five years, relationships between the APA and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by DeLeon.

Inouye himself has served as an apologist for the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (“Gitmo”) since the inception of the War on Terror. In a press briefing at the U.S. State Department, held shortly after his trip to Gitmo in February of 2002, Inouye affirmed Rumsfeld’s propagandist vision of the site, and then remarked: “Watching our men and women treat these detainees was rather impressive. They would go out of their way to be considerate. …”

From what we know now, that is true, but not in the benevolent way Inouye implied. Inouye’s comments bore a chilling similarity to Barbara Bush’s famous comments about the alleged good fortune of Katrina victims, in the Houston Astrodome. The detainees, he said, are being treated “in some ways better than we treat our people.” (R. Burns, Associated Press, 2002). And he compared the Guantanamo climate to Hawaii’s. (It is “somewhat warmer.”)

More significantly, it was Inouye who recently stripped the funding needed for closing Gitmo from a supplemental appropriations bill. This “Inouye Amendment,” threw a stick in the spokes of any U.S. movement away from the worst of global war on terror policies. In announcing the funding cut, Inouye’s press release was a remarkable illustration of Orwellian “newspeak,” ostensibly supporting the very opposite of what he was doing:

“But let me be clear. We need to close the Guantanamo prison. Yes, it is a fine facility. I, too, have visited the site. Yes, the detainees are being well cared for. Our servicemen and servicewomen are doing great work. But the fact of the matter is Guantanamo is a symbol of the wrongdoings which have occurred, and we must eliminate that connection.” (Inouye, Press Release May 20, 2009).

DeLeon’s connection with Inouye is not by any means the only APA connection with defense interests. In 1951 the military established The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO) to develop techniques for “psychological warfare.” HumRRO was run by psychologist Dr. Meredith Crawford who spent ten years as APA treasurer and was deeply involved in APA activities for three decades. Crawford’s former student, Raymond Fowler, became Chief Executive Officer of APA in 1989 and stayed in that position until 2003. Today, fifty-five percent of HumRRO’s budget comes from the military.

As CEO, Fowler hired his two most important lieutenants from HumRRO, Chief Financial Officer, Charles “Jack” McKay, and in-house attorney, James McHugh. Both men have now, after lengthy APA tenures, left the APA and returned to HumRRO in very senior roles. McHugh is Chairman of the HumRRO Board of Trustees and McKay is Vice-Chairman and Treasurer. The current President of HumRRO, psychologist William Strickland, has been an outspoken supporter of APA’s policies on the torture issue. He served on the APA Council of Representatives throughout the APA deliberations on torture.

Whether and how the longstanding relationships and frequent circulation of key personnel between APA and HumRRO positions have shaped APA’s involvement with the military is unclear, but given recent events, it certainly warrants more careful scrutiny than it has received from psychologists. In fact, I do not believe many psychologists are even aware of these relationships.

Regardless of HumRRO’s role, however, as psychologists, most APA governance members have little Washington political experience. For them, Patrick DeLeon, because of his connection with Inouye, is perceived as a canny psychology politician and political force on Capitol Hill. Regardless of the accuracy of that perception, I have no reason to think DeLeon is a corrupt or evil person. Instead, from my perspective, the most interesting aspect of DeLeon has always been his apparent preoccupation with issues of status for psychologists, irrespective of the issues’ actual significance either for psychologists or the public.

DeLeon wanted to make sure a psychologist, not just physicians, for example, would be eligible to fill this or that position in the Veteran’s Administration, and he campaigned for years for VA psychologists to receive a minuscule pay increase when they became board certified. On the whole, I found these matters harmless and of at least some marginal benefit to people. Using funding from the Department of Defense he has also launched a campaign for psychologists to be given legal rights to prescribe psychiatric medications.

The torture issue is, of course, quite different. Viewed through the eyes of DeLeon’s adherents, psychology’s new found role as architects of a central component of the war on terror was a tremendous “victory” for the field of psychology. That it involved torture was peripheral, obscured by the headiness of being involved in high-level, important, clandestine government affairs. In discussions about APA’s role in the interrogations, a senior member of the APA governance described himself as “addicted” to the television show 24. Now he had his own reality TV show.

DeLeon’s influence in the APA and with many individual psychologists, especially those from Hawaii, came in very handy for Inouye in his efforts to support the Department of Defense. When the military needed a mental health professional to help implement its interrogation procedures, and the other professions subsequently refused to comply, the military had a friend in Senator Inouye’s office, one that could reap the political dividends of seeds sown by DeLeon over many years.While we are only now uncovering the names of the individuals who participated most directly in the interrogations, I think a surprising number of them will turn out to be people brought into the military through Inouye’s office, many by DeLeon himself.

APA’s Organizational Decline

But this leads to the second and more complex question. Why did the governance of the APA let this happen under the apparent imprimatur of the world’s largest organization of psychologists? Some people assume APA’s horrifying recent behavior involved large sums of money changing hands. I could certainly be wrong, but I think the more likely (and more remarkable and pressing) mechanism has little to do with money. For reasons described below, the APA leaders who were making these decisions simply exercised judgment that was both bad and insensitive to the realities of human suffering. In my opinion, schooled by 25 years of experience with the APA, it was neither greed nor financial corruption that brought the APA governance into alliance with the Bush Administration. Instead, it was a malignant organizational grandiosity that first weakened the APA and then, ultimately, allowed military and intelligence agencies to have their way with the APA throughout the Bush Administration.

But how did the APA, of all organizations, get this way? What led to this grandiose culture? An organization does not rise or fall with a single event any more than the fall of Rome truly occurred in 476 AD. The culture of grandiosity was carefully cultivated for more than a decade by a few self-interested individuals.

What has been observable and unarguable about the APA of recent years is that the pluralistic and multi-faceted governance process I witnessed when first entering the APA in the early 1980’s was sharply curtailed during the 1990’s. Differences of opinion disappeared, and the APA suffered a terrible organizational decline. Increasingly inbred and infantilized under the tightly controlled administration of Raymond Fowler, the association agenda was primarily and at times exclusively financial, focused on making money either through real estate ventures or through what I and others felt was the unnecessarily harsh financial treatment of lower level APA employees.

Whatever one’s view of APA, few can dispute that Fowler, more than any other individual, made APA what it is today. The CEO of APA for almost fifteen years, Fowler served in one capacity or another on the APA Board of Directors for twenty-five consecutive years. While his supporters would characterize him as “astute” and his critics as “devious,” few could reasonably disagree that Fowler was the main mover in the APA for the fifteen years leading up to the torture debacle.

Most peculiarly, Fowler’s “agenda” for APA was encapsulated in the phrase “Working Together,” a noble idea that to the best of my knowledge was never attached to any actual substantive agenda. Instead, it served as a means of social control, a subtle injunction against raising any of the conflict-laden issues, challenges, or ideas that need to be addressed in any vital and accountable organization. The governance of the APA became either conformist or placid and increasingly detached from the real world.

The result was that much of the activity of the APA Council of Representatives, the legislative group with ultimate authority in the APA governance, turned away from substantive matters into an odd system of fawning over one another. Many members appeared to simply bathe in the good feeling that came from “working together.” The bath was characterized by grandiose self-referents and shared lofty opinions of one another. As it became more and more detached from reality, the organizational dysfunction became more pronounced, but this was ignored and obscured by the self-congratulatory organizational style. During this period, isolated dissent from rank-and-file members was stifled with a heavy-handed letter from the APA attorney threatening legal action or by communications from prominent members of the APA governance threatening “ethics” charges if policy protests were not discontinued. (It is unethical for psychologists to lie, and I can attest that one former APA president concluded that disagreeing with him was per se “lying.”)

Deliberations on Torture

This same grandiosity was ubiquitous in the governance’s rhetoric at the heart of the Association’s discussions on torture. Banning psychologists’ participation in reputed torture mills was clearly unnecessary, proponents of the APA policy argued. To do so would be an “insult” to military psychologists everywhere. No psychologist would ever engage in torture. Insisting on a change in APA policy reflected a mean-spirited attitude toward the military psychologists. The supporters of the APA policy managed to transform the military into the victims in the interrogation issue.

In the end, however, it was psychologists’ self-assumed importance that carried the day on the torture issue. Psychologists’ participation in these detention centers, it was asserted, was an antidote to torture, since psychologists’ very presence could protect the potential torture victims (presumably from Rumsfeld and Cheney, no less!). The debates on the APA Council floor, year after year, concluded with the general consensus that, indeed, psychology was very, very important to our nation’s security.

We psychologists were both too good and too important to join our professional colleagues in other professions who were taking an absolutist moral position against one of the most shameful eras in our country’s history. While the matter was clearly orchestrated by others, it was this self-reinforcing grandiosity that led the traditionally liberal APA governance down the slippery slope to the Bush Administration’s torture program.

During this period I had numerous personal communications with members of the APA governance structure in an attempt to dissuade them from ignoring the rank-and-file psychologists who abhorred the APA’s position. I have been involved in many policy disagreements over the course of my career, but the smugness and illogic that characterized the response to these efforts were astonishing and went far beyond normal, even heated, give and take. Most dramatically, the intelligence that I have always found to characterize the profession of psychology was sorely lacking.

Outside the self-absorbed culture of the current APA governance, to the rest of the world, the APA arguments simply do not pass the red-face test for credibility. Instead, their transparent disingenuousness only made the APA sound embarrassingly like apologists for the Bush Administration.

Conclusion

The inability to deliberate rationally on the torture issue was but the tragic denouement of an organizational process that was actually set in motion in the early 1990’s, largely to serve the convenience of a very small number of individuals. As a result of the management style of the 90’s, the governance of APA was ill prepared for thoughtful deliberation on a matter as important as the torture issue. The governance was simply over its head in trying to effectively address such a socially and ethically consequential issue. This was especially true in a debate in which one side had organized support from powerful military interests, then-current APA presidents like Gerald Koocher and Ronald Levant, and Senator Inouye’s office all pushing for APA involvement in the interrogations. Few people stood up to them, and those who did were people who were inexperienced in the duplicity and manipulative style of politics that characterized APA.

With the increasing uproar from the membership and the media, APA’s more recently elected leaders and the current CEO, Norman Anderson, have been extraordinarily quiet on the subject of psychologist and APA involvement in the torture issue. Instead, second level APA employees have been put out front to defend the APA position to the membership and to the public. These are almost exclusively people hired by Fowler to fit into his carefully designed model of an organization that would be controllable, if somewhat non-dynamic and uncreative. Thus, the public relations staff Fowler hired, the staff legal and psychological expertise he hired, and most remarkably his ethics director have all served as the “face of APA” on the torture issue in recent years. Not surprisingly, forced to function under the watchful eye of the public they have not acquitted themselves in credible fashion.

In a recent book, I used several organizational examples to illustrate that many of the same techniques of political manipulation used in the Bush Administration were used in other organizational settings. Many of those examples were drawn from the APA. At the time of writing I never dreamed the techniques would lead to APA’s complicity in torture.

But such is the fate of a regressed and chronically manipulated organization. Despite being an organization of psychologists, APA has been subjected to considerable manipulation but to very little analysis. The people who run APA have “reverse engineered” the very field of psychology itself and used it against its own membership.

Psychologists are amongst the most moral and ethical people I know. They deserved better from their national organization, just as Americans throughout that same era deserved better from their government.
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Bryant Welch is a clinical psychologist and attorney living in Hilton Head, SC. He is the author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind, St. Martins Press, 2008.)

June 16th, 2009

Carrillo: Psychodynamic Experiences in Cuba

Costa Rican psychoanalyst Eddie Carrillo has written a piece describing the initial stages of his project teaching brief psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy in Cuba. I also asked hi to describe his sense of the island since the transfer of power from Fidel Castro to his brother:

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Psychodynamic Experiences in Cuba

By Eddy Carrillo R.
Asociación de Psicoanálisis Crítico Social
San José, Costa Rica

In March of 2008 I began working on a project training a group of Cuban psychiatrists and psychologists of the Ministry of Public Health in the city of Havana. I would like to share some thoughts, and perhaps, why not, even some feelings, on this ongoing experience. The project, in a nutshell, hopes to provide instruction in short term psychodynamic psychotherapy to a group of 15 mental health professionals (of which 10 are reaching the final stage of training) interested in working clinically from a psychoanalytic perspective. Before getting into any further detail of this project, it is important to understand a bit of the context in which it is taking place, and for that, it is crucial to at least vaguely appreciate where psychoanalysis stands today on the island of Cuba.

A reliable history of psychoanalysis in Cuba is not easy to come by, nor is it my present intention. However, as with everything else regarding Cuba, an historical review is necessary, albeit for now a very brief one, in order to understand whatever current reality one hopes to tackle and analyze. In the case of psychoanalysis, and psychodynamic psychology and psychiatry, one has to rely mostly on verbal accounts of those who were present, or knew those who were present, back in 1959 and the immediate years following the Cuban Revolution. There’s always the internet of course, but who knows how reliable that can be. As difficult a task as it might seem, there is what appears to be a commonly held historical “fact”: with the victory of the Cuban Revolution, psychoanalysis, being perceived as a bourgeois science, fell in disgrace. While there was never, as far as I can tell, a formal governmental prohibition of the field, it was certainly frowned upon. Of an original handful of psychoanalysts (anywhere from 5 to 15, according to different accounts), most fled to the U.S. Those that remained for the most part no longer practiced psychoanalysis, or at least not openly and not what we might consider “psychoanalysis proper”. Some even publicly denounced psychoanalysis. However, a colleague and friend who was exiled in Cuba when escaping during the days of the dictatorship in Argentina, remembers working psychoanalytically at a public hospital. Nonetheless, according to my sources, these cases were few and far between. Adding insult to injury, it also a well known fact that in the early sixties psychoanalytic theory was excluded altogether from the world of academic psychology, and remained so until very recently.

In the mid-eighties this began to change in Cuba. The country took somewhat of a self-critical approach to the history of post-revolution Cuban society, which resulted in a renewed sense of intellectual openness and possibility. This seemed to unlock an underlying interest, dare I say need, for psychoanalysis. This era led directly to one of the first explicitly open contacts of psychoanalysts with post revolution Cuba. This “return of the repressed” so to speak, began in 1986 with the first of seven “Psychoanalysis and Marxist Psychology Encounters”. From this point forward it is possible to speak, if not of psychoanalytic practice proper, at least of a burgeoning psychoanalytic discourse within Cuban academic society. So much so, that the Department of Psychology of the University of La Habana, via it’s clinic, (COAP, or Centro de Orientación y Atencion Psicologica) opened a sub-department of psychoanalysis, which later split into two, as tends to happen in our field, becoming the Department of Psychoanalysis on one hand, and the Department of Lacanian Psychoanalysis on the other. The COAP is also currently offering a Masters program in Psychoanalytic Psychodrama, funded by MediCuba Suisse, an NGO that provides medical aid to Cuba, working to somewhat mitigate the effects of the embargo within the health field.

It is within this context that the current training program began. The main focus lies within the purview of MediCuba which, as I just mentioned, looks to assuage the very detrimental effects of the embargo in the field of health services in Cuba. The Short Term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Project (PBOP, for short) hopes to provide clinical tools, both theoretical and technical in nature, to colleagues in the mental health field in Cuba. This objective includes a two-fold approach to psychotherapy in Cuba. First, to provide clinical training that is appropriate to the socio-economic conditions on the island, taking into account that psychotherapy is practiced almost exclusively by mental health professionals in state institutions (outpatient and inpatient) and community health projects. While long-term or open-ended psychotherapy is on occasion accessible, it is by no means the norm. Second, given the recent changes in the attitude towards psychoanalytic thought, I wished to provide a novel, in Cuba that is, yet tangible psychoanalytic approach to colleagues who for the most part have access only to cognitive and systemic perspectives to psychotherapy and are clearly eager to acquire a different, and perhaps more profound approach to clinical work.

This second aspect has indeed been confirmed by my experience so far. The level of motivation, interest and curiosity has been almost overwhelming. Considering that the members of the group in training has nothing to gain in material or economic terms, it is most refreshing to work with psychiatrists and psychologists who wish only to become better at what they do. They are moved solely by the desire to improve their clinical skills, and thereby provide superior help to their patients. Well, that and a great deal of intellectual curiosity. It is interesting to note that among the members of the group is the daughter of one of the most famous psychoanalysts of the original pre-revolutionary group (one of the few that remained in Cuba). While I am not sure what this means exactly, I can say that she is moving slowly back to a field, a way of working clinically, that was previously a practical impossibility. This alone makes the effort worthwhile. In addition, being able to circumvent an embargo that has nefarious consequences in terms of material and intellectual resources is in itself also quite rewarding.

Getting back to the training process, I have been greatly impressed by the willingness of the trainees to conceptualize mental phenomena in terms of unconscious processes, resistance and defense, and most noticeably in terms of transference. For the neophyte, these are not easy concepts to grapple with. Yet it is clear that most of the trainees already had an intuitive grasp of these notions, and an ease of comprehension that at first hand seemed surprising. I believe that one of the reasons for this is that within Cuban academic circles, what is known as the “culturalist-historic” view is quite pervasive. This is the case even if therapists are mostly cognitive or systemic in their original training. As a side note, how the Cubans have managed to combine these approaches is still mystery to me. But what I think is happening is that this almost natural tendency to think historically has allowed the members of the training group to look at psychodynamic therapy and in an almost organic way, see the connections between clinical phenomena and patient history. The link between transference and early object relations (always seen within a social-cultural context), traumas, childhood and adolescence seems to be second nature to them. So while the theoretical concepts and specific techniques might be new to the group, they are by no means foreign. That is to say, while they were never trained to explore the unconscious connections between past and present, between early development and transference, they were quite at home doing so once they felt they understood the technical issues.

Presently, the trainees are exactly at the point where they will in fact apply psychodynamic techniques with two supervised cases. This is of course where the PBOP will be put to the final test. Will the trainees feel at home, both technically and theoretically? Will the patients show significant improvement? Will the trainees themselves find that they can better understand, empathize with and help their patients? These questions will hopefully be answered in August, when the last leg of this two year project finally reaches the end of our joint experience. I keep my fingers crossed.

There is a final issue that deserves some attention. Given the current changes in the Cuban government and its policies, as well as the current changes from the Obama administration and the official U.S. stance towards Cuba, one can’t help but ask oneself what the future holds for Cuba in general, and for psychoanalysis in particular. This may be an impossible question to answer. But I would like to raise a concern that has been on my mind since I last returned from the island.

Perhaps a brief clarification is in order. It is no secret that those of us who take upon ourselves a variety of projects in Cuba are, in greater or lesser degrees, supportive of the Cuban Revolution, and its attempts at staying the advance of western capitalism. In my personal case this does not mean that I disregard the existence of some forms of capitalist mechanisms that do exist in Cuba. There is certainly private ownership of material goods, despite many myths to the contrary. There are also limited modes of individual private ownership of capital (agricultural and animal farms, small private bed and breakfasts, etc.). Furthermore, should one take a rather strict glance through the lens of a classical Marxist perspective one would have to admit that property concentrated in the hands of the State is in fact a monopoly, and therefore a capitalist mode of economic organization. So although the title of the ruling Communist Party might be somewhat of a misnomer, it is nonetheless irrefutable that a clearly defined socialist structure has been instituted for half a century. This model has survived only through the tough perseverance and courage of the Cuban people as well as the government. Ever since I started frequently visiting Cuba back in 2003 there has been talk and speculation about what the power structure might look like once the charismatic figure of Fidel Castro stepped down. Some people would have harsh comments towards the Castro brothers, others would fervently defend them. Despite these differences the sense of direction of the country was never in doubt. Or at least never did I feel that there was any doubt in this respect. It may be that when I began traveling to Cuba Fidel Castro was still head of the party and therefore of the country. Perhaps there has been, in part, some kind of cult of personality that sustained the hopes of the Cuban people, and kept them strongly holding on to socialist ideals. But this sense of security in their subjective revolutionary and socialist identities is no longer as palpable as it once was. By no stretch of the imagination am I implying that in general the Cuban folk I have thus far met are willing to embrace neo-liberal market oriented models, far from it. They are quite aware of the dangers and pitfalls of so-called advanced capitalism. My personal experience, and this is the only thing I can submit at this time, is simply that there is no clear sign as to which direction the newly restructured government is going to take. Some people profess great hope, other great frustration, but none can venture a guess as to where they see Cuba going. This is not only troubling for Cubans, but for the Latin American left as well. We have always looked to Cuba as the last bastion against capitalist imperialism in the region. Be it from a pro or anti Castro perspective, we have always taken Cuba to be a sort of ideological compass. And at a crucial time when Latin America is trying to construct its own alternatives to the neo-liberal model that for decades we have adopted, and I use the term adopted euphemistically, it seems to me this apparent lack of current clarity is reason for concern. It might be the complete opposite of course, that Cuba too will have to find new alternatives, different to its’ enduring but struggling model, and at the same time different than entering the worlds of market driven/private capital economies. If anything the Cuban people have shown to be nothing if not resourceful. Thus, if that is the case, as Latin American countries it would appear we are all in the same boat, so to speak. Thankfully for the time being the boat seems buoyant.

The question that I wrestle with is the following: What might psychoanalysis offer Cuban society in this new era, which by the way might include an embargo-free country? And for that matter, what type of psychoanalysis? For example, would a psychoanalytic perspective that holds fast to the notion of so-called neutrality be applicable in Cuba? Perhaps a skirmish might ensue between orthodox models and a psychoanalytic left, between schools that propose that psychoanalysis is ideologically neutral and those that espouse an ideologically committed psychoanalysis. Perhaps this struggle is already afoot. These questions linger in my mind, not being able to adequately answer them. But then again maybe that’s just me and these questions are no longer relevant to most in these desolate post-ideological times of ours.

2 comments June 16th, 2009

Maddow & Dean on Obama DoJ attack on gay marriage

Rachel Maddow and Howard Dean on the Bush Obama administrations defense of the Defense of Marriage Act:

June 16th, 2009

Iranian doctors and nurses protest

Iranian doctors and nurses protest Tuesday.

A reader of Andrew Sullivan provides this account of what is being said:

One woman (maybe a nurse) shows a sign which says 8 people were martyred here last night. Toward the end of the clip the young man (whose voice breaks down many times) is saying that he witnessed the brutal beating of women and children and wonders who these brutish forces are. He speculates that they are not Iranians, but Lebanese Hezbollah.

June 16th, 2009

Obama Justice Department spits at gays

In the typical Obama fashion of betraying those who most strongly supported him, his Justice Department has launched a major attack on the gay community. Last Friday they issued a brief in defense of the “Defense of Marriage Act” that echoed every vile, right-wing slander on gay marriage. Presumably they think they can gain “bipartisan” credit with their torture-defending Republican and Blue Dog Democratic buddies by spitting in the face of their base in the gay community. The final straw is their likening lack of recognition of gay marriages to refusing to recognize incestuous relationships.

The gay community is enraged and boiling over. Even the “moderate,” mild-mannered gay lobby group, the Human Rights Campaign, has issued a strong open letter in protest.

I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones:

And the courts have widely held that certain marriages, performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum. See e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 170 A.2d 726, 728-29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened public policy of th[at] state.”

At the rate they are alienating their base — human rights advocates, single-payer health care reform advocates, gays, unions, antiwar activists — the Obama folks soon may have no friends left but their Wall Street  buddies.

The New York Times editorialized on this indefensible action by the Obama administration:

A Bad Call on Gay Rights

The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights.

A gay couple married under California law is challenging the act in federal court. In its brief, the Justice Department argues that the couple lack legal standing to do so. It goes on to contend that even if they have standing, the case should be dismissed on the merits.

The brief insists it is reasonable for states to favor heterosexual marriages because they are the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.” In arguing that other states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages under the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, the Justice Department cites decades-old cases ruling that states do not have to recognize marriages between cousins or an uncle and a niece.

These are comparisons that understandably rankle many gay people. In a letter to President Obama on Monday, Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, said, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

The brief also maintains that the Defense of Marriage Act represents a “cautious policy of federal neutrality” — an odd assertion since the law clearly discriminates against gay couples. Under the act, same-sex married couples who pay their taxes are ineligible for the sort of federal benefits — such as Social Security survivors’ payments and joint tax returns — that heterosexual married couples receive.

In the presidential campaign, President Obama declared that he would work to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, the administration appears to be defending it out of a sense of obligation to support a validly enacted Congressional law. There is a strong presumption that the Justice Department will defend federal laws, but it is not an inviolable rule.

If the administration does feel compelled to defend the act, it should do so in a less hurtful way. It could have crafted its legal arguments in general terms, as a simple description of where it believes the law now stands. There was no need to resort to specious arguments and inflammatory language to impugn same-sex marriage as an institution.

The best approach of all would have been to make clear, even as it defends the law in court, that it is fighting for gay rights. It should work to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that bans gay men and lesbians in the military from being open about their sexuality. It should push hard for a federal law banning employment discrimination. It should also work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress.

The administration has had its hands full with the financial crisis, health care, Guantánamo Bay and other pressing matters. In times like these, issues like repealing the marriage act can seem like a distraction — or a political liability. But busy calendars and political expediency are no excuse for making one group of Americans wait any longer for equal rights.

1 comment June 16th, 2009