David Bell: Psychoanalysts‘ Role Also is to Communicate Their Understanding to the Public

David Bell, Past President of the British Psychoanalytical Society and consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic, reflects on the place of psychoanalysis in public and political life. In this interview, conducted in Prague during the 2nd Fenichel's Conference: Psychic Change (October 2017), Bell argues that the classical ideal of analytic neutrality is strictly a matter of the consulting room. Outside it, an analyst is a citizen like anyone else, and political silence is itself a form of participation — or, as Hanna Segal put it, 'the real crime.' Drawing on Kleinian thinking, Bell examines how mechanisms such as projection and the hatred of vulnerability and dependence shape contemporary social phenomena: racism, the rise of the far right, the contempt directed at migrants, and the erosion of welfare institutions. He traces a line from Segal's work on the denial of the nuclear threat in the 1970s and 80s to present-day political dynamics, showing how psychoanalysis can illuminate what he calls the 'soil inside the human being' that allows destructive tendencies to take root. At the same time, Bell is careful to resist reductionism. Psychoanalysis does not have the answer to social and political questions, but it brings a unique understanding of unconscious life to the table — alongside economists, historians, and sociologists. He points to the Frankfurt School as a model for this kind of interdisciplinary engagement, and reflects on concrete instances where British psychoanalysts contributed to public policy, including the decriminalization of homosexuality and the abolition of the death penalty.