The Great Depression

Jessica Benjamin, PhD

After the first fearful weeks of confinement under the threat of Covid19 passed, my attention returned to the unfolding economic and social disaster that the pandemic was inaugurating in the United States. Exposing all the fault lines in a society already hollowed out, most aspects of social protection and support having already been damaged or eviscerated, the calamity of collapse was upon us. As millions became unemployed, as the government’s failure to rescue them became more apparent, it seemed as if the unemployment of the Great Depression of the 30’s was on everyone’s minds. 

For me, unlike most people, the story of the unemployed in the Great Depression was transmitted as part of my family culture, my father’s role in the organization of the unemployed was the most important narrative within our family history.  Even so it surprised me how I experienced as a personal loss every failure of congressional action to legislate for adequate protection of wages for the unemployed—and related rent, mortgage, food supply, lost health care benefit. This failure felt like a  blow dealt against everything that my father, and with him my mother and all other radicals of their generation, fought for. At times, watching the consequences of the successful Republican rollback of all the New Deal protections of working people I felt grief on my father’s behalf, the loss of everything he was devoted to, what he aimed to do not only to protect people but to give them a way to act on their own behalf, in solidarity and with hope. Feeling once again the threatened loss of that solidarity and hope when Bernie stepped down, I found myself weeping.   

In the 1930s my father, a young Communist from a radical family that immigrated from Vilna and settled in Chicago led two national demonstrations, the Hunger Marches, in December 1931 and 1932, was head of the national Unemployed Councils, and later the effective leader of the Worker’s Alliance.  The Unemployed Councils, spearheaded by the American Communist Party, first proposed the idea of Unemployment Insurance to be provided by the government, an idea not yet on Roosevelt’s or the Democratic Party’s mind. This demand on the national level was accompanied by grass roots organizing against evictions and for relief from municipal agencies. In cities all over America, council groups would defy landlords and put evicted tenants furniture back into their apartments and house  (in New York alone in 1932 77,000 families).  Notably, the Councils were racially integrated, and the unemployment demonstrations never failed to include demands for racial equality and protection of immigrants.

How is it possible that this history could be erased? What forces allowed people to forget what they knew about the need to take care of and protect each other, fight for each other and not only for oneself? This question of how people are psychologically bent toward self-preservation or social creation shaped my turn to psychoanalysis. What allows people to change? What makes them feel empowered to make their own history? What does patriarchy have to do with it. 

 There’s more to this story, including sorting out the fragments that came to my child’s mind before I knew exactly what my parents did, and also to the time when no one spoke of anything…the McCarthy years of fear,  surveillance, uncertainty whether we would be allowed to continuing living in the United States or be deported. Is this time of uncertainty and loss resonating with those traumas, I ask myself, or is this current onslaught on our life world, our planet, on all the vulnerable people in need not enough to generate such grief? Is it my real father’s losses, or the loss of the ideals and the hopes he embodied for me? My identification with my parents’ hopes and fears, shaped my life and my work, even as the ways I was hurt and disappointed, rebelled and critiqued them.  Out of this grew my rebellious psychoanalytic stance, and my eventual return to collective trauma and loss, my search for a psychoanalysis that really does heal the wounds of history. And I find that even when I can’t bear to look at what’s happening, I can’t really take my eyes off the prize… in the midst of this terrible calamity, can’t help hoping the arc will bend even as I’m feeling grief for what was lost.

photo credit: Markus Spiske/Pexels