You Can Take a Horse to Water

The connections between psychoanalysis and political struggle are long-lived and multiple. Many people may not be aware for instance that much of the thinking of that great theorist and activist of the Algerian revolution, Franz Fanon (1925-1961, author of The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks) has its origins in his first posting in a psychiatric hospital in Algiers ‘founded on the premise that native Algerians were constitutionally primitive, puerile and stubborn.’ You can see why he might have been moved to activism.

This last quotation is from a fascinating recent article The Impossible Patient by Amia Srivinsan (Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford and the author of The Right to Sex) the London Review of Books about the overlaps or not between these different disciplines, psychoanalysis and politics;. Sometimes the LRB leaves me scratching my head, but this is a very readable piece, understandable even for the near-total lay person. I hope you can access it without a subscription, but if not, subscribe!

I don’t want to risk over-simplifying a complex argument, which takes in notions of ‘safety’ with equal reference to the Palestinian struggle, the Holocaust and so-called ‘gender wars’. But somewhere at the heart of it is a conversation about the effectiveness (or not) of psychoanalysis and its ability to have an effect on the analysand – paralleling this with the effectiveness or not of political engagement and the possibility (or not) to change the mind of others. Psychoanalytic practice is essentially dyadic, a collaboration between patient and analyst, however asymmetric or uneasy and however many others (mother, father, Society, other) may invisibly populate the analytic scene, says Srinivasan. One could at a pinch usefully consider the scene of Forum theatre played in front of any audience and mediated by a Joker in the same way. (I do not mean for a second to abrogate the great knowledge and extended training of the psychoanalyst to the more humble role of mere Joker - but hear me out).

The piece tracks back through Lacan, Foucault and others right back to the ‘daddy’ (intended) of them all (Freud), all of whom express opinions on an essential element of practice – how much the analyst is vocalising their own diagnosis to the analysand or not. The conclusion, I think, of Ms Srinavasan is that the less the powerful person (the analyst or facilitator) says, the greater the likelihood that the therapee (for us, the spect-actor) may come of their own accord to a realisation, a discovery, which may help them understand their own place and potentialities in the world and navigate life better and more empathically.

The early versions of Forum as described by Boal sometimes sound like they were simply attempts to convince the participants of a truth, rather than the actual desire to ask a question. The fact that in the lineage of the Theatre of the Oppressed, Forum Theatre comes after Simultaneous Dramaturgy, and before that Agit Prop, would back this up. However, it is my firm contention, backed up by my observation of Boal over the many years of our connection, that as his invention became better known and more practised, more and more he embraced the idea that the Joker’s job really was not to tell the audience anything, but rather to open a path for them to find their own way to an understanding (which may or may not be a ‘solution’).

That doesn’t mean that for a moment he abandoned his own (essentially originally Marxist) beliefs. Nor does it mean that we on the left are going to make Forum Theatre from a position of absolute neutrality, in spite of the notion of the apparently ‘Neutral Joker’. Far from it. Those of us who make Forum Theatre have our own agendas, of course. We place ourselves in particular contexts in order to help people discuss issues we consider important, with others who know about them, in the profound hope and belief that in this way they will come to conclusions with which we sympathise – combined with an understanding of the nature of oppression and a sympathy with the oppressed. We cannot control our audience’s thoughts (and why on earth would we want to) - but being optimists, which surely all socialists are, we believe that rational (and emotional) human beings will eventually arrive at a truth which values all humans equally and believes that oppression or domination are wrong. And if, to offer an improbable but theoretically possible test case, in a discussion about race an audience of spectactors were to arrive at a majority conclusion that some races were superior to others, we would probably step away from the Joker role and simply declare our own revolted opinion without any recourse to ‘neutrality’, and subsequently give up this methodology altogether; I should stress that, in the many hundreds of Forum shows with pretty open agendas I have jokered, this has never happened to me. Which is why I am still at it.

I am extrapolating wildly from the original article, which I commend to your reading. But it stresses the belief that, however much the analysand may want the analyst to tell the answer, to diagnose the problem, the less that happens, the better the outcome. And so it is in Forum Theatre, where, the Joker, like the analyst, is endowed with a tremendous power, which is seductive for the person occupying that role and easy to seek exploit for manipulative ends – ‘I know the answer, let me just tell it you’. But this will not have the desired effect. Rather, like the analyst, the joker needs to ask ‘good’ questions and listen carefully to and amplify or feed back interesting answers. And in this way, little by little, we may find our way to a truth.

Being a simple soul, I have always tended to express this guidance to the Joker as - ‘You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.’ Srinivasan ends her article with a rather more scholastic summary apparently quoting ‘Aristotle’s rejoinder to Plato’[i] that ‘the psyche can flow from action’ (somewhere in the Poetics I guess, the article has no reference)….what is sometimes needed to become the sort of subject who feels empowered to stand up to the boss or the police or the state, is simply to act, in some small way, as if you already where that sort of subject. To stand up and find yourself standing with others, find yourself winning with others. And then to find yourself a subject with a great measure of freedom and power and more desire too, that you ever knew.