Their attempt to dodge our offense is an independent link- it guts political effectiveness and clinical impact of psychoanalysis-the emperor has no clothes

(Naomi, Unmasking Psychoanalysis: An Emperor, a Boy, and the Search for New Clothes , ed Petrucelli, Schoen, Snider)

A Yarn of Lies – Analysts as The Swindlers of The Tale This brings us to a third reading: analysts as the swindlers of the tale, our theories, diagnostics, and techniques – a yarn of lies – designed to mystify, silence, and oppress. In what ways, does psychoanalysis, like the clothmakers who inculcate self-doubt in the emperor and his subjects by telling them that an inability to see the fabric was a sign of stupidity or unfitness for office, employ similar tricks and sleights of hand to uphold the patriarchal status quo? These questions call for an engagement with deconstructionist critiques – particularly those drawing on feminism and critical race theory – and their reckoning with the relationship between power and knowledge. Post-structuralist philosophers (e.g., Churchland, 1986; Kuhn, 1962; Haraway, 1988) remind us that knowledge is produced discursively within a system of rules that determine what can be true or false, real, or not. Such observations prompt a reflexive attention to what voices get muted and how psychoanalytic theory does the silencing. From the hysterical woman8 of the Victorian era to today's borderline patient,9 there is an extensive history of diagnosing women as crazy to deny their perception of reality and to silence their dissent (Emily Mann notes a play she wrote about just such a woman in the second chapter of this volume). In what ways do we continue to employ technical principles, such as the transference and resistance (here to the analyst's “truth”), or theoretical constructs such as co-constructed reality and the unknowability of the unconscious (Shames Dawson, this volume), to deny our patients' perception of reality, and thus avoid that which is too disruptive? There is a history, also, of denigrating, silencing, and excluding those in the field – From Jung, Tausk, and Groddeck to Adler, Reik, Ferenczi, Reich, Horney, Bowlby, and Fromm – who have dared to question the status quo (Orange, 2020). Specifically, it was those who spoke with a distinctly humanistic voice – a voice that stressed the effect of culture on psychosexual development and neurosis, and who challenged psychoanalysis’ naturalization of patriarchy – who were often subject to ex-communication. There is Freud's infamous denouncement of Alfred Adler's paper on the “masculine protest as the central problem of neurosis” as “not psychoanalysis” (see Orange, 2020, p.42). There is Ernest Jones’s posthumous denouncement of Ferenczi as insane and subsequent refusal to publish his work, which effectively disappeared Ferenczi's criticisms of the analyst's “professional hypocrisy” and its potentially traumatic impact on the patient, as well as his advocation of a distinctly antipatriarchal analytic stance (1949/1988). There is Karen Horney's disqualification as a training analyst by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and her subsequent expulsion from the APA for her criticisms of Freudian orthodoxy, especially as it related to women's psychology. Again and again, we see the same story play out. To question psychoanalysis’ alignment with patriarchy is tantamount to heresy. Thanks, in part, to our humanistic, antipatriarchal predecessors, today's analysts enjoy a far greater degree of freedom. And yet all too often, we see the mavericks of a previous generation become the patriarchal gatekeepers of the next. Statements such as, “this is not psychoanalysis” and accusations of being “insufficiently analyzed” are just two ways in which those in positions of authority continue to employ markers of intelligence or fitness for office to silence the revolutionaries and inhibit their willingness to challenge the boundaries of accepted wisdom. Absent an ongoing reckoning with our psychoanalytic history – our patriarchal ghosts – not yet turned to ancestors – will continue to haunt our hallowed halls.