How to create social activism: turning the passive to active without killing each other

Abstract

This paper describes our efforts to organize a group of psychotherapists to apply their knowledge toward social justice activism. This organizing required us to look at our surrounding US culture of consumer capitalism and reflect upon how its ideology worked with the Bush administration's exploitation of fear to garner public support for imperialist actions. We wanted to apply what we know about the unconscious dynamics of trauma and attachment to understand how citizens were being manipulated by the government and what they would be looking for in their national leaders. Lastly, we discuss the pressures on our evolving group from within as well as from the surrounding culture, and assess our successes and the places where we could have used from more reflection. While we focus on psychoanalysts, we suggest that particular group dynamics are intensified when members of a group are all culled from one profession.