The Existential Therapist in conversation. REMAINING STEADFAST IN AN AGE OF BABEL. Part 1

by Leading psychotherapists and authors Harriett Goldenberg and Mary MacCallum Sullivan 

1.

What is psychotherapy? Of course it represents a healing art; a way of ‘helping’ – of standing with people struggling with emotional pain and trauma, alongside them in their attempt to grapple with life’s challenges and dilemmas. But psychotherapy, beginning with psychoanalysis, has always also been a revolutionary and provocative enterprise, tracing the alternative, sometimes dark, influences of the mind, queering the pitch of the ‘rational man’ promised by Enlightenment humanism and modernist philosophy. The ‘unconscious’, characterised in Freud’s early thinking as ‘primitive’, infantile, but later as having the capacity to see and understand far more – and differently – than our conscious awareness permits. Psychotherapy uncovers and allows socially unacceptable feelings, attitudes, desires, a space to be heard, engaged with, unpacked.

With this in mind, our task is to explore the role of psychotherapists and psychotherapy trainers in a time of ‘culture wars’.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out in her 2023 Reith lecture on Freedom of

Speech, we live in an era of social censorship, polarisation, categorisation and militancy. Debate is shut down and bullying is prevalent. This is leading to constricted thinking and communication; to smaller, reductive ideas about ourselves and others.

Postmodernism has been reduced to a new ‘progressiveness’ to which ‘there is no alternative’. We see conformity to a liberal mindset that recognises ‘freedom from’ - no limits to one’s individual freedom - while assuming compliance with a particular social and political framework set out and maintained for them by others. What has been lost is a sense of ‘freedom to’, a recognition of personal autonomy, agency and responsibility, within a social context in which there are others who may, by their existence, limit one’s possibilities.

The concept of identity is fashionable because people are no longer sure who they are.

Key social identities formerly, in the words of Stuart Hall, ‘sutured’ the subject into

‘relevant social structures, giving social interaction a degree of predictability and unity. This state of affairs was itself riddled with difficulty, but it is a feature of the post-modern condition that self and identity have become more fragmented, and the process of identification more problematic and contentious in a culture of transferable identities (‘identity-shopping’), cosmopolitan diversity and individual choice. The emergent ‘politics of difference’ is defined by new social movements engaging with issues of gender, ethnicity and nationalism’ (McCrone, 2001: 150).

In a laudable and much needed attempt to redress historic wrongs - the invisibility, omission, discrimination and oppression visited on those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial practices and on a range of minoritized groups and identities - by creating ‘safe’ spaces for those categories to thrive, a new competitive ‘victimism’ has been created, where there can be ‘no tolerance of intolerance’. As a result of this, and of the new concept of hate crime, we find ourselves in a climate of mistrust, silencing, social ‘cancelling’ - new forms of bullying and exclusion. Under the aegis of social justice those who are judged, in accordance with questionable criteria, to be privileged, are to give way to those categorised as victims.  Is this not simply an inversion of the disrespectful, dehumanising stereotyping being railed against?

© The authors, 2025

[1] The story of the Tower of Babel, (Gen 11:1 –9) ‘represented in symbolic terms the final disintegration of that order and unity which God had brought into existence in the primal act of creation’ (Hooke, S H, 1962). A modern perspective may find a parallel with the advent of postmodernism and its fracturing and fluidisation of agreed meaning in the languaging of our ‘identity politics’ and social interaction.