What Can Psychoanalysis Offer to Alleviate Toxic Polarization - Harriet Wolfe

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Jun 26, 2025

Harriet Wolfe, a prominent psychoanalyst and president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, shares her insights on toxic polarization and its psychological implications. She introduces the International Dialogue Initiative, a diverse group aiming to address historical traumas through deep listening and storytelling. Wolfe emphasizes the importance of constructive dialogue to counteract dehumanization and promote understanding. She also discusses the role of collective trauma in shaping identities, especially in post-war contexts, and highlights how compassion can bridge societal divides.

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INSIGHT

Polarization as Psychic Splitting

Toxic polarization mirrors the paranoid schizoid phase in individual development, where integration of differences is impossible.
It simplifies threatening realities but remains static and maladaptive for societal progress.

INSIGHT

Self-Reflection in Polarization

Psychoanalysts can deeply reflect on their own role in toxic polarization, conscious or unconscious.
Our psychological identifications affect how we address polarization in our personal and professional lives.

INSIGHT

Aggression and Dehumanization

Aggression is innate and emerges early in development without obvious purposes.
Losing recognition of aggression's harm dehumanizes both victim and aggressor, breeding violence.

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The current social, political and historical context offers many difficult challenges. We have experienced up close and from a distance awareness of a remarkable number of challenges including the wars, political unrest, growing socioeconomic inequities, climate catastrophe, and human and animal suffering. These times are also marked by polarized thinking, including among analysts, candidates and in our communities. An application of a psychoanalytically-informed method that rests on psychoanalytic clinical theory but focuses on group experiences of psycho-historical conflict as it continues in the present is offered as a means to facilitate deep and moving change when there is toxic polarization.

In this episode, Dr. Harriet Wolfe presents a unique application of psychoanalytic thinking. She describes an interdisciplinary group that is international, intergenerational and diverse that meets periodically to apply analytic thinking to intractable large scale historical group traumas. This method, called the International Dialogue Initiative includes psychoanalysts but also others (e.g. economists, lawyers, diplomats, historians) who share stories and deeply listen with the purpose of gaining perspective on unmanageable feelings through exploring cases of traumatic residues. While others, including Freud have theorized application of psychoanalysis to groups, this particular use is novel and important in today’s times and speaks to how psychoanalysis can be truly psychoanalytic and at the same time be applied to political and social issues.

Harriet Wolfe, M.D., is President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Her scholarly interests include clinical applications of psychoanalytic research, organizational processes, female development, and therapeutic action. She has co-authored a number of psychoanalytically informed guided activity workbooks for children, parents and teachers to help children cope with natural and manmade disasters. She has a private practice of psychoanalysis, and individual and couple’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy in San Francisco.

This Podcast Series, published by the International Psychoanalytical Association, is part of the activities of the IPA Communication Committee and is produced by the IPA Podcast Editorial Team.