Abstract
An understanding of the relationship between the political and the personal and of the roots of this relationship in the nature-nurture debate has been hampered by a lack of appreciation of dialectical relatedness in unconscious experience. The identifications and disidentifications that frame the dialectic between self and other also scaffold the relationship between the individual and his/her cultural surround. A. Samuels describes a preexisting link or “primary mutuality” between people that exists on personal, social, and political levels. Cultural distinctions, such as class, race, and gender, dichotomize human qualities, ignoring more subtle gradations in sameness or difference. In the related unconscious, the political and the personal both reflect and are reflected in the infinite dimensions by which people are psychical beings. Cultural divisions are formulated around dissimilitude and objectification, but anchored in symmetry, sameness and subjectivity. Conscious identifications that lean towards difference unconsciously correspond to disidentifications with sameness.