An Interview with Avgi Saketopoulou

Roula HAJJAR and Safia ALBAITI

Roula Hajjar: Thank you so much, Avgi, for being with us. And for giving us your time. We want to orient the conversation slightly to help bring you into our thinking. You know, we’re trainees. We’re students. We’re early career professionals. And there were a lot of us at the conference. We noticed it, and we think it was noticeable. Many of us are either in organizing spaces or have a history of organizing and activism in New York City. That is the audience we are considering: younger practitioners, students, trainees, people straddling the activist and intellectual, psychoanalytic spaces. With that backdrop in mind, I will situate us in this moment. We are witnessing the genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel. We’re seeing Western governments assume a posture of unmasked fascism, and so we wonder, as students of psychoanalysis—as people who believe in the generative and transformative promise of psychoanalysis – what psychoanalysis has to offer as not only a way to interpret or facilitate analysis but also as a tool to act on and change the social, political, material reality. And, I think in this spirit, you know, I’ll kick us off and ask: we were moved by the term “psychoanalyticopolitical” to describe the concept of exigent sadism. Can you say more about that choice?

Avgi Saketopoulou: Yes. But, can I ask? I realize I don’t know much about your background or where you’re coming from. It would be good to know a bit about that.

Safia Albaiti: Yeah. I’m Yemeni and Muslim. Before entering psychoanalysis, my entry point was through political loss through being active as a Socialist, anti-war organizing Palestine, but it also expanded from there. And so, this question of how psychoanalysis can be generative for explaining impasses, defeats, what we have as collectives, and how to articulate them…that’s something that was my entry point into the discipline. So, I’m coming a bit full circle now, but differently. I’m not as much of an organizer right now. I’m a therapist. I’m a trainee And so, this is always like part of the context.

RH: I am Lebanese; I grew up in Beirut and came to the U.S. as an adult in 2016. My parents fled the Lebanese civil war in the 70s. My family did a different thing; they moved back to Lebanon in the mid-90s after the war ended and the city was rebuilt. I was seven. So, I am somewhat of an immigrant and somewhat of a first-gen kid. I started college at the American University of Beirut in the months after the 2006 war and in a period punctuated by civil unrest and political assassinations. Looking back it was an awful and beautiful time because it was an auspicious time. I was part of a socialist organizing community on campus that located itself within a tradition of pan-Arabism.

AS: Thank you. Part of what led me to want to know is that I realized this is a conversation between three people, the three of us coming from a part of the world that is so different from the U.S. To situate myself, I am also diasporic, being Cypriot and also being Greek. These are countries with very particular histories and geopolitical circumstances, so I’m aware of the kinds of things that we might be able to talk about or think about that may or may not be immediately experientially legible to an American reader, things that have to do with risk-taking and a willingness to act. It’s just something to keep in mind as it may inflect our conversation. So, thanks for telling me a little about your background, Safia.

To answer your question, I think psychoanalysis has much to offer toward different conceptualizations of social, political, and material reality that may enable or inspire action. I really liked your distinctively situating thinking as more than just an analysis of one’s circumstance, as your question is also about action: what might psychoanalysis offer to think about action, about acting per se? If you believe the hype, it would appear as if analysis has a difficult relationship with action —and indeed, there is some difficulty because, historically speaking, psychoanalysis has, at times, conflated action with discharge, with an inability, that is, to delay gratification or contain difficult affects, discharging them, instead into action when reflection (self-reflection, especially) might have been preferable. But, to me, it seems that it’s more accurate to say that psychoanalysis has an ambivalent relationship to action, one that is more complicated than our field is willing to claim.

I mean two things by this.

First, there are all sorts of things that psychoanalysis is doing, ways in which it is acting, even as it does not acknowledge them as action. Think, for example, about all how psychoanalysts are now at the forefront of anti-trans activism: a range of transphobic opinions are regarded as being “merely” a form of thinking. Nevertheless, this knowledge production (e.g. the idea that there are “true” transsexuals or that detransitioners are a cautionary tale that should lead us to withhold affirming healthcare from trans children) does not stand separate from action; they funnel into action (different interventions, policy decisions, etc.). I describe such positions as “knowledge production” not because I agree with its content but to show why such “knowledge” is inseparable from action. To say this differently, this is knowledge that is conceptualized as being innocent, to use a term from Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s work to refer to analytic ideas that are ostensibly apolitical, to ideas that are not tied to political commitments or political positions. This sort of “innocence” is part of how action in psychoanalysis gets passed off as “thinking,” not taking a position but as reasoning or “exploration”.

Second, we should not forget that psychoanalysis actually does have a deeply developed theory of action when it comes to the clinic, which is what we call clinical technique. Strangely, we tend not to think about technique as action, as if the way that the analyst listens or intervenes is not action. Yet, all of these are actions that clinicians easily recognize as having huge implications in the consulting room. So, psychoanalysis is not as foreign to theorizing action as some might claim. The difficulty seems to have to do not with whether psychoanalysis embraces action but where, in what circumstances, and under what conditions action is seen as a legitimate purview for psychoanalysts, and whether action is reflexively taken to be about discharge to defensively avoid reflection and dynamic exploration - e.g. when a child transitions as opposed to a “watchful waiting” approach that endlessly defers transitioning to “explore” gender dynamics.

That said, actions in and outside the clinic are not the same. So, it is incumbent on us, on those of us who are interested in what analytic thinking can do outside the clinic, to do that work or, to put it more bluntly, to open up the paths in what psychoanalysis has been obstructed from doing, how it has been held back from acting in the larger world. It is incumbent on us, then, not just to name this obstruction but also to offer analytic tools for political action to take psychoanalysis in more explicitly political directions. And to do so without being afraid of the tie between psychoanalysis and politics, to not see it as something that needs to be excused or justified, but as a site of fruitful encounter and expanding possibility. Psychoanalysis teaches us so much that’s valuable about how human psyches work, about how groups operate, about motives, and how fears and anxieties inform our social lives. That’s why I described exigent sadism as a psychoanalyticopolitical concept, to situate it from the start within that sphere, to name and claim its aspiration to (I hope!) make an analytic contribution to thinking about politics, and perhaps to even be helpful in organizing.

RH: We have a follow-up question on the distinction between thought and action, as well as the clinical and the political. But let’s talk a little bit more about exigent sadism. Could you give us an autobiography of the concept? Drawing on anything that feels okay to discuss - personal, intellectual, relational, theoretical.

AS: I’ll start a little bit with a conceptual architecture of the term. Exigent sadism pairs two sets of ideas: first, a distinctive approach to sadism, and, second, the notion of exigency that comes from the work of Jean Laplanche, and which I put to the pressure of Black studies, especially Fred Moten’s work. The way I think about it, I am still in the early stages of fleshing out the concept, so there are things that I may modify or nuance as I go forward with it in the future, so our conversation is capturing the polaroid moment of my thinking about exigent sadism right now.

So, to break down the term: exigency, for Laplanche, speaks to the drivenness of the unconscious, a force that he describes as impelling us without showing us the way. I’ll say more shortly about why the part about how exigency not showing us the way is important. For him, epigrammatically, this press for movement pertains to energies that have to do with the Sexual, energies that can never be fully contained, that can never be converted in its totality into something manageable (which is what translation[1] does, in his model). Crucially, the Sexual is not the same as sexuality per se, it is tantamount, instead, to the unconscious and is polymorphously perverse. It is also the result of primal repression; in fact, he says that it results from the failure of repression. My intervention starts there, to say that it is only from the ego’s perspective that we would be warranted to describe the errancy of the unconscious as a failure; it is only a failure, in other words, if the goal is to fully master the disturbance of the enigmatic. Borrowing the term and theorization of “fugitivity” from Black studies, from Fred Moten especially, I argue that if seen not from the ego’s viewpoint but from a different vantage point, the fact that the unconscious can never be fully culled by translation, that it can never be fully contained through representation, is not a failure but part of what makes it, ontologically speaking, always fugitive. There is always a measure of energy that escapes the ordering operations of translation, a refusal, if you will, to be regulated through existing social codes and how these are formed and conducted through the parent. This escape is not a failure but a potentiality.

And since the unconscious is also about the Sexual, polymorphous perversity and drivenness, I want to also say something here about why the shift away from seeing the fugitivity of the unconscious as a failure (of containment) can be so generative. In Western political philosophy, the sexual has always been seen as something that threatens to interfere with the capacity to form and sustain societies, as a dangerous distraction of the citizenry from collective social bonds, political debate, and work. The unconscious is sexual, and it is unruly and hostile to the rational operations of building a society and a state apparatus. Part of what I find problematic about this kind of severing of the unconscious from the political is that there is always an “uncivilized” quality to the sexual, there’s always an element in us that cannot be put to work and which cannot be dominated. I put uncivilized in scare quotes because I don’t use civilization here in thinking about civilizational projects, racist agendas, or colonial investments but with respect and appreciation for what can emerge from that which escapes the organizing ordering forces of “civilization”. We can think of it as untamed, as feral (per Griffin Hansbury), as the undisciplined (per Amber Musser), as the disordered (per Oliver Davis and Tim Dean). I am interested in the political possibilities of thinking with the unconscious precisely because it, by its nature, escapes -energetically resists, we might say- social ordering. From therein, our capacity to resist what the State wants for and from us, what is good for capitalism or production, and what is good for the accumulation of wealth or the protection of private property arises. That there are forces in us that can never be tamed is not something to be frightened of, it’s the site of a possible otherwise. Exigency, then, has to do with drivenness, with a non-subjective nerveless determination that, as I said earlier, does not show us the way, does not impel us to act this or that way. It is this drivenness and non-subjectiveness that gives exigency its sovereign character.

Let me now get to the second word, sadism. Sadism is nowadays flattened from its more dimensional original meaning: mostly desexualized, sadism is now often used as a synonym for barbarism or excessive cruelty. But its original meaning, sourced from the work of the Marquis de Sade, refers to the inseparable coalition between the sexual and the destructive.

In Sexuality Beyond Consent, I fleshed out different forms of sadism, opening up the fan of sadisms, plural, to think about different currents of sadistic impulse. I have been interested in forms of sadism that move us away from the exercise of one’s will over another, a destructive sadism, where one aims to control the other, to annex the other’s psyche, life, property, land, and so on. And then there’s a rather different kind of sadism, that I call “sensible sadism,” that pertains to BDSM practice where sadism becomes mimetic, where a top, for example, acts as if they don’t care for the other person when that theatricality is, in fact, something that the other person has agreed to so the action stays within certain agreed-upon bounds (known as hard limits). Sensible sadism has the appearance of sadism; it may even have the paraphernalia —material and/ or linguistic—of sadism, but it’s as-if, not a true engagement of sadism.

Exigent sadism differs from destructive and sensible sadism. It is also extracted from the sadomasochistic constellation in the sense that sadism is not the active form, whereas masochism is the passive one. This is because exigent sadism is neither active nor passive but involves, instead, the sadist’s passibility, which is a vulnerability, a dispossession. I use the word “dispossession” not in how it’s used when we talk about the dispossession of land or property but in the sense of recognizing that there exist forces in ourselves we’re not in control of. I don’t just mean this in the sense of being, say, unaware of one’s own motivations, but in the sense of the untamable, anarchic forces I was referring to earlier, forces that are impersonal (aka, not driven by defense, relationality, or motive), forces that are not plugged into the self-preservative instinct. Exigent sadism retains the connection with the Sexual, not in the sense of sexual sadism per se, but in maintaining the tie between the polymorphousness of the sexual body. That means pleasure and ruthlessness partake in it, sometimes even cruelty; cruelty here is not about harming the other for one’s pleasure but is also directed at risking the self (which is not masochism). It is the Sexual’s fugitivity that confers upon the sexual drive a quality of resistance to being conducted through translation, that is, through established systems of representation. From a Foucauldian perspective, the sexual drive is resistant to being governed in any certain way by systems of meaning-making—that is, also, by systems of power, as the two can’t always be neatly distinguished - a resistance to be conducted this or that way by the State (e.g. when the State tells you that you have to pick between two genders), by our institutions (e.g. when an analytic institute tell us that we are splitting when protesting a genocide), even by our object relations (e.g. by how our objects are inculcated into systems of belief, structures of feelings, trailed by clouds of pressure, influence.) The Sexual, we might say, is where the source of the psyche’s capacity to resist power is rooted.

RH: How can we understand how exigent sadism can be wielded? The drive for sovereignty can also be wielded by fascism and is often enabled by powerful actors in that quest for destruction. For example, in Lara Sheehi’s formulation of settler colonial outposts. Your argument seems to be an invitation to what is generative and revolutionary about exigent sadism. And that we choose to reject that at our own risk, so to speak.

AS: I should clarify first that I am not speaking about a drive for sovereignty. In the way I am using the term, sovereignty is not a state to be accomplished nor a masterful possession of self-sovereignty, which is the point of exigent sadism. It is, instead, the drive itself that has a sovereign quality and that is guaranteed by its fugitivity, by the fact that the enigmatic is sentenced by its very nature to escape the translational forms that try to master and dominate it. In that sense, exigent sadism is not self-righteous (as is the case with fascism or settler colonial outposts), and it also involves a certain vulnerability for the sadist herself. In that sense, exigent sadism is not the purview of the one with social or interpersonal power, power positionality is delinked from the exercise of exigent sadism. And because it is operated by the sexual drive, which is energetically anarchic, exigent sadism is not something that can be embraced or instrumentalized, it involves entering into an adventure with oneself and with the other, risking the breakdown of one’s own ego and creating space that may engender the breakdown of that of the other’s as well.

This is where the revolutionary potential you mentioned enters the picture. The generation of new psychic energy and fresh possibilities arises precisely in the crevasses of our egos’ breakdown. Such breakdown is not pleasant but anguishing, yet rejecting exigent sadism risks rejecting our revolutionary potential. However, the process is not as conscious as this phrasing may make it sound. Oftentimes, this is because we are so eager to respond to the fear that we will lose those to whom we want to remain connected, which is why exigent sadism is so closely tied with a willingness to do what is necessary even when that includes breaking relations, parting ways with groups or organizations. I don’t mean this in a facile way, as if relationships are a dime a dozen or expendable: no, we need other people, we need connections and social bonds, they are constitutive of so much that’s important in our lives. Plus, losing connections hurts tremendously. And I certainly don’t mean it in the sense of someone leveraging a relationship to get one’s way to control another. Exigent sadism, rather, gives us the sovereign impetus to bend our will, to resist the powerful seductions of even belonging to a group, of existing within a system or an organization, in short, to be in relation come what may.

I emphasize this because there’s an unspoken, deep taboo in psychoanalysis against breaking relations even when those harm us: notions of splitting, dialogue, Benjamin’s notion of the Third, all these participate in deterring us from breaking from those who harm us. This taboo ties us to our circumstances and obviates revolutionary potential. Exigent sadism does some pathclearing work towards that end; it begins a discussion about the vicissitudes of breaking relations. Even though in the consulting room, we often try to think about what keeps patients in bad relationships, we don’t have theorizing regarding the breaking of relationships. We are implicitly encouraged to believe that relationships must be preserved at all costs.

And, to go back to the other element of your question: it is absolutely true that there are forms of sadism that settler colonialism that fascism also partakes in. But I would argue that the sadism that tries to control another, to control an outcome, that tries to subordinate another person’s will, that tries to harness their labor or to appropriate their sexuality or put energy to a certain kind of use, to use them as chattel, as objects, or as extensions of oneself, sadism that unspools in these directions is no longer exigent. Certainly, it can be sadistic, but it’s a different kind of sadism than the one I have in mind. The distinctive characteristic of exigent sadism is that it doesn’t try to will oneself over another; it also has to do with one’s self-sovereignty. Here, sovereignty is not about the effort to lord oneself over somebody else. It’s about maintaining one’s sense of one’s separateness and one’s own presence in the world, in our connections with our history and our connections with what matters to us.

If it is going to generate action, exigent sadism will eventually have to combine with something else (remember that exigency does not show us the direction), but the point I am making is that because exigent sadism retains the ties of resistance to being appropriated it may, thus, also protect the subject’s critical faculties, allowing her to consider alternate paths of action, including paths that break with another or with a group. Think, for example, of all the obedience studies from Zimbardo’s prison experiment, Milgram’s research on obedience to authority, to Asch’s conformity experiments. To distance yourself from your peers and exercise your critical faculty, to judge for yourself, requires a certain willingness to break ranks, and that involves a sadism towards one’s self, risk how you are perceived, and risk disconnect. To put it more crisply, exigent sadism is not a different term for ethics but the condition under which an ethical stance may emerge amidst conditions that call for conformity, whether these conditions are about obeying the State, fearfully acquiescing to a university that prohibits the use of the word genocide, or risking displeasing a lover or your parent. Exigent sadism is not a synonym for good politics - it is not on the side of Palestine or of resisting transphobia—but, instead, the source energy to fall out of line with your objects of attachment, including (and perhaps especially) objects that make your connection to them contingent on your obedience. To put this differently, exigent sadism is how we remain enduringly available to the fugitivity in ourselves.

The reason why I said earlier that this sort of sadism involves sovereignty is that it requires one to push back against oneself before one pushes back against any other (individual or institution), to forgo one’s own tendency to keep things stable for oneself, to not cause a disturbance to oneself or to the other, to not be put in the position where somebody’s going to call you- as in Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist killjoy” (citation needed) - a troublemaker, accusations that women, racialized subjects and queer people are often saddled with. It’s always easier to stay put or to contain one’s resistance or disagreement within rational terms; to not act, that is (and to return us to the earlier part of our conversation), but to hope that the other can be convinced by rational arguments, that action -including revolutionary action- can wait until we have secured everyone’s consensus.

Since Kant, the idea of wooing the other through logic has always been the means of negotiating societies’ decisions about political action. What this misses is that logic is not the only factor bearing on “convincing” people that libidinal investment and personal interests are not soluble in logic. This is how we end up in the endless molasses of dialogue, where talking and debating become a delaying tactic; whether it is intended to do that or not is beside the point, the point is that this is how endless debate ends up operating, by constant deferral. Much psychoanalytic theory works this way too, when it comes to thinking politics; Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi have fleshed out very compellingly in their book how splitting and accusations of acting out are leveled against anyone who trespasses this, who dares to break ranks. It is important for clinicians to know that these ideas also have deep roots in political theory, especially in Western political philosophy.

RH: You said something about pushing against the self. Safia and I, while considering the conference in its aftermath, were feeling, as racialized, minoritized individuals, as two Arab women, one of whom is hijabi, that there was safety, or at least the illusion of safety at the conference. So we were comfortable, to an extent. But we were wondering, is there something about the conference space being too comfortable? You know using this idea that the reparative stabilizes and the crisis transforms. Was disruption that was meant to be more generative get blunted by this sort of manic harmony within the community, too much welcome, too much acceptance, too little tension? We called it, you know, like a “Kumbaya” enactment. So, I wonder what you think of that.

AS: I think that’s a great question. For minoritized people especially, the experience of being in a safer space can be extremely powerful for obvious reasons. I certainly understand and respect the feeling of relief that comes with that, the respite from having to be constantly on the defensive-I am not Arab, but I am a queer immigrant including from a Middle Eastern country, so I have my version of that experience. And I know how extremely seductive that is, how those spaces especially are spaces where one does not want to disturb things.

Being in such spaces is something I enjoy, but I am also cautious about it because, in my opinion, it can artificially homogenize differences. Moving away from Div. 39 for a moment, I personally feel weary of collectives where too much enthusiasm and self-congratulation reigns, collectives that don’t have apparent tensions. I am thinking, for example, of what happened with the Dyke March in NY in this year’s Pride celebrations. On the one hand, you have dykes who are trying to create space for different forms of queer experience for different kinds of gendered subjects who fall under the category of dyke. But the “safety” of that space cracks open when they put out an ambivalent statement about Palestine, reassuring about the “safety” of Jewish dykes at the march, and when they announce that the march will be fully masked (in consideration for those with compromised immune systems, and to protect from covid spread) but don’t follow through on the masking requirement. We see here the fault lines appear, and it causes a crisis: in my opinion, this is a good thing, even if the organization were to fracture, even if people were to leave and start something new because it is these actions (not the kumbaya enactment, as you and Safia called it) that surfaces the real differences, that reminds us that a shared identity (in this case, being a dyke, in yours of being Arab women, in the case of Div 39 having pro-Palestine attendees) does not guarantee shared politics.

I am not speaking here about the narcissism of small differences. Still, rather about really substantive distinctions –in the case of the Dyke March, it was about where dykes stand on genocide, where they stand on disability rights. So, personally, homogeneity makes me anxious because it may cover over politically substantive disagreements and because it cultivates the fantasy that these are spaces that are clean of, say, anti-Arab sentiment or homotransphobic attitudes. For me, this is the more painful but more accurate and true, and in that sense, perhaps exigently sadistic position to take vis-à- vis minoritized experience.

At Div 39, you may remember, somebody in the Q&A was asking me a question about my talk and said, as a matter of course, something like, “ok, all of us here agree on these politics,” and I said to that person that I thought that “agreeing on these politics” is of very little value, that things get more substantive when we go from nodding one’s head in agreement to actually taking a stance, to taking action. I told her that if push comes to shove to stand by the things we all agree on, most of the people in that room of 800 attendees would stay silent. This is the other key feature of exigent sadism, which also makes the exigent sadist vulnerable: it costs you. You might make people not want to be around you, you might injure relationships, hurt the feelings of those who want you to think or act differently, lose that Kumbaya feeling, you might miss out on referrals, you might damage your career prospects.

I’m not saying this as if to say, you know what, you should just throw all of that away, or without recognizing their cost. Every subject has to come to accept that cost for themselves, and I say “accept” because I don’t think one consciously decides to be exigently sadistic. I think one sometimes just has to accept that about themselves, to accept that there is no other way than to follow the exigency of what draws them to resist. Even as that sentiment can eventually be coated with pride or even enthusiasm, stepping into one’s exigent sadism is more something one gives oneself over to rather than something one controls. I would even say there is a certain kind of relinquishment, a divestment from oneself. Divestment here is meant as a libidinal divestment from our translations, from the fantasy of safety or even of self-preservation of our ego, what I have elsewhere called ‘overwhelm,” and the risking of the self. In that sense, exigent sadism takes one into something unpredictable; you risk so much without being able to know, anticipate, or control the outcome. But you do it because you have to because nothing else will do

RH: You invoked this sort of Kantian promise of reason and rational persuasion. As trainees, Safia and I are entrenched in this world of theory and professional psychoanalytic language, frameworks and approaches, etc. And that helps organize learning. We also spoke earlier about legibility. I think this language and the way it is deployed renders others legible to us and us legible to others.

But then there’s this critique of reason and rationality as a mechanism to flatten, tame, and domesticate psyches and subjectivities. There’s a tension between the turning towards reason and the turning towards passion. This tension has its own valuation and costs for students and people earlier in their training within institutions, particularly around the question of legitimacy and credibility. What do you think of that?

AS: I would frame this slightly differently than the tension between reason and passion —I am not necessarily talking about passion. For me, the tension is between what reason can accomplish (and it can and does accomplish things) and the fact it cannot accomplish as much as is promised. This is because other factors that have to do with libidinality and psychic investment are at stake, and these are not things that can be managed through reason or explained away through exegesis. So, to stay with your question about training for a moment: first off, I have not yet written about exigent sadism in the consulting room, and I can’t emphasize enough how different clinical thinking informed by exigent sadism is from thinking it in the domain of the political. But as clinicians, and as trainees especially, it’s important to remember that, even as psychoanalysis often boasts its comfort with the irrational, most versions of psychoanalysis today are quite invested in converting the irrational into something rational based on history, dynamics, identifications, relational patterns, and so on. In this way of thinking, latent content is the decoding of the manifest. If, to use Barnaby Barat’s terms, we treat the unconscious as if it pertained to reading a text behind a text, then we miss out on the incommensurability between these two different systems (of the conscious and the unconscious), their different energetic regimes, and the fact that psychic time is neither chronological nor linear.

I am not saying this to argue that symbolism is to be wholeheartedly discarded, but only to highlight that an exclusive valuation or overvaluation of such psychoanalytic approaches leaves out and even demonizes the anarchy of the sexual drive. And it perpetuates the ideology that reason offers solutions to clinical problems. A psychoanalysis that is overinvested in just giving us the key to unlock the irrational and turn it into something rational and more legible to us misses that there is an inescapable tension between the psychic organization of conscious life and of reason and the operations of the Sexual, of the unconscious. At this particular moment in time, I think that an overly zealous analytic approach to identity does some of that work, that is, of imagining that the unconscious is comprehensible, if only with the right tools, that the unconscious is a warehouse of intolerable feelings or experiences, or of incompatible ideas. I feel I should immediately now clarify that legibility is no small thing, nor am I dismissing its value: it can give us a way of being in the world and a way of being recognized. Identity categories are critical to making claims for oneself, advocating for one’s group, and petitioning for one’s rights. But this can also degrade into a form of instrumental reason, as when a clinician asks a supervisor “how to treat a trans person” or “how to work with a Black patient” —as if there is a compendium of techniques to address these complex clinical matters. But if identity is not ontological (and I can’t go into this in length here), it means that as clinicians, we need to be able to think beyond identity, beyond the roadmaps our training gives us (or does not, in the case of minoritarian experience!). Such roadmaps are not useless, but you can’t take them at face value. When Ann Pellegrini and I wrote Gender Without Identity, we didn’t write it to say it doesn’t matter how you identify as it doesn’t have an impact in the world or it doesn’t have an impact on your relationships. Of course, it does. But we use the term without identity to push against the developing fantasy in psychoanalysis that addressing, say, psychoanalysis’s entrenched homotransphobia, will come naturally through an “understanding” of what gender is, of what transness is.

SA: And there’s something about identities, there’s almost like a never-ending pressure toward legitimacy. To be legible once you’re in this identity and you want to be, want to belong. You’re always reconstituting legibility and power.

AS: Yeah. And the more you’re reconstituting, the more power transforms; it comes at identity from another angle. Resisting it can also mean being outside legibility. And I mean, we see this. I’m thinking about a trans patient that I work with. When I started working with them, they were identifying as non-binary. And now they’re identifying as trans non-binary. Now, almost every trans person will have a different definition of what trans non-binary means or what non-binary means. You can say you can always go by your patient’s definition – and, of course, we should not antagonize our patients. But, still, there’s always something fugitive, an escape from the confines of identity and the way it tries to fully account for a subject. Of course, not everyone welcomes that, both theoretically and personally. Many people would rather belong to or be fully subsumed by a category; in some cases (of oppression and persecution), that can be about emotional survival and actual survival, while in others, it can be about being an overly sclerotic ego. But my point is that there’s always a part of us that is resistant to being captured, even as capture may at times even feel relieving. This is the tension to which you were speaking earlier, Roula, and fugitivity may be seen—metapsychologically speaking—from the viewpoint of the unconscious as a refusal, and this is related to the point that you were making, Safia, about refusing the privileges that come with legibility.

RH: I was even thinking that in your keynote. I think, for folks like us, you know, or I’ll speak for myself, there’s a relief when another theory came to us, through you, that we don’t have to repair because there is, as you’ve said so often, this push that to be a subject that can and wants to repair is a professional and mature and social subject. Not that there was a theory contending otherwise, I felt a sense of relief. Now it’s not just a visceral, senseless motivation, a reactive anger guiding behavior to sever or move away. Now, I can explain my feelings using theory. You use this metaphor of leaving one vine, and you talk about suspension. But for me personally, it’s seductive to know that there was something else I was going grab onto, another theoretical orientation, which is not, I think, what we’re talking about when we think of exigency. In exigency, there’s no way. We don’t know the way. We don’t know much about the next vine.

AS: Indeed, I have been very critical of the notion of repair for some time now. In the keynote, I spoke about how the depressive position especially operates as an accouterment to a psychoanalytic doxa that centers relationality in ways that champion the preservation of relations, come what may. Psychoanalytic theory has conditioned us to accept repair as the apex of psychic maturity, firmly orienting us towards accepting others’ reparative gestures, however insincere or hollow they may be, of staying in relation, no matter the cost. The reparative, however, dampens sexual energies that fuel our willingness to act when necessary and to divest from relationships that harm us-it is part of how the taboo on severing relations that we discussed earlier is constituted.

Oftentimes, when I discuss my critiques of repair, I am asked whether we have to jettison repair, why not just nuance it, surely some reparative models are worth salvaging. First off, I don’t think repair is going anywhere, it has too tight of a grip on hope -and we do need to be able to think about how one comes back from a rupture -though, for me, transformation rather than repair is a more worthwhile path. Most importantly, I am always interested in how quickly colleagues who feel interested in my critique of repair get anxious about how to repair repair. If repair is shown to be a problem (in the way I lay out), isn’t the rush to repair repair itself indexical of how quickly we move in to repair the aggressor, which is one of David Eng’s critique of repair? Again, I don’t think repair will be thrown out entirely, but if I make the reparative my critical targe it is precisely to alert us to the impulse to protect repair and the conceptual architecture that subtends it.

So, to loop back to your question, thinking with exigency and against the reparative is indeed not about having a guaranteed substitute solid place to land to. The metaphor you are referring to was about how risking the self (overwhelm), may feel to be beyond someone’s affordances. I said that in real time this can feel like being suspended mid-air, after one has let go of one vine propelling oneself forward, but before a next one has appeared. This is a risk in the order of what Marquis Bey has described as “thinking and living in excess of our present conditions”. I owe the metaphorical image of the vines to my colleague, Karen Melikian, and I use it because it’s doubly powerful.

First, it conveys how the sense of being in midair is unnerving, but does not necessarily mean you’re falling—though, of course, there is no guarantee, the leap is a true risk. For example, if you try to address something problematic in your psychoanalytic Institute, in a relationship, and they are unwilling to truly engage (I am not talking about the perfunctory, “yes, we want your feedback,” etc.), it might not turn out well. You may, of course, be bringing it up out of naivete, without knowing that, DEI initiatives aside, organizations are rarely committed to redistributing power, but if not, you are doing it because you’re accepting that you can’t do anything else, because you are refusing to live by these conditions.

Second, this metaphor captures something about the necessary movement, the propelling into something else. My critique of repair is connected to this. We know that there is no way really to return to a pre-traumatized state, and while the reparative does not claim this, it absolutely cultivates the fantasy that there is the way to return to a prelapsarian self, to a pre-traumatic self. Repair, in this sense, overpromises: for example, when we say things like, “I thought my patient had worked through x trauma, but when she got in y situation, it all came back,” we are betraying that we do, in fact, believe that a trauma can be worked through such that its psychic become eliminated.

By contrast, exigent sadism is more interested in what happens when someone stays more present with the wound; this is one way to think about what it means to be suspended between the two vines. To stay in the wound, to stay awake and alive to what has happened, to what is still happening, to not be seduced by the fantasy that it can be repaired, put in the past where it can stop oozing. Many of us, including many of our patients, would rather turn away from that – and the way to turn away from it is through the notion of the reparative, which nourishes the hope that one can get over things, leave them behind by processing them.

Staying with the wound is not easy, for so many reasons, and this is another aspect of what makes exigent sadism difficult for the sadist. If exigent sadism opens up the possibility of divestment, by which I mean libidinally divesting from relationships, from organizations, even from the notion that one can be restored to a time before trauma, that means that we have to be willing to go at it alone, to look for new comrades and affiliations. But the hurt of having had to divest, never leaves you; it’s a wound that can always reopen and this is not something to be afraid of, it’s part of what it means to be alive.

RH: Yes, separating or leaving the relationship, you can still be very much still invested in it. You can still be emotionally bound. You alluded to this earlier and you’ve said the clinical application is not something that you’ve advanced sufficiently to perhaps want to talk about. But one thing that you did say at the conference, at the Gender without identity book talk, was that we must accept the incommensurability of the social, political with the clinical, lest the clinical work be degraded, and I think you were saying degraded into a political education. So, I was wondering how does the deployment of psychoanalyticopolitical concepts, to use your phrase, clinically come up against this challenge of incommensurability.

AS: Yeah. I think the reason why I’m emphasizing so much the vulnerability of the exigent sadist, and how exigency is not about exercising one’s will is because you also cannot enter the clinical situation imagining that exigent sadism will give you a way to talk to your patients about politics the way we talk about them in the public square. If somebody doesn’t want to talk about their racism, for example, forcing them to do (e.g. by constantly interpreting it) is not a clinically sound path – and not only because it might threaten a rupture. You have to be able to see how that ripples into their life, how it manifests in the transference. And while you wait, you are vulnerable as a clinician, which I think is part of what we sign up for as therapists.

As you know, I am one of those analysts who believes that the political very much belongs in the consulting room. But it doesn’t belong in the consulting in the same way it belongs in the pedagogical context of a classroom. Our patients always get to say, “I’m not interested in that,” and it is then our job to be thinking of defenses, of what the disinterest is about, what it protects and what it enables. I think that defense interpretations are always easier (more obvious and, at times, more effective) than interpretations of libidinal investment (when you might, for example, show a patient her privilege and how committed she is to preserving it). So, this work happens obliquely, not head on, and like all clinical work it is always at the border of the patient’s consent I can’t go into this here but it’s an idea I’ve developed in Sexuality Beyond Consent but, briefly, if we just stayed away from whatever our patients say they can’t or won’t talk about, the work would not go very far; it would commence, but in the words of Jay Greenberg, it might not launch. To work on the border of the patient’s consent is also to provide a measure of support, and that recognizes that the political does not necessarily appear in the consulting room as politics, which is not to say that politics do not belong in the consulting room. If, for example, one cannot be talked out of one’s racism or one’s Zionism - and I firmly believe that to be true - the work proceeds not by linking (making interpretations and connections) but by what comes undone, through overwhelm and through the undoing of links. This is an anguishing process for the patient and also for the therapist, it’s not reparative work it’s transformative work, and it’s much better than a patient who’s able to parrot back something that their therapist wants to hear, or some good political slogan.

We might, then, loop back to what we were talking about earlier in discussing divestment, because the kind of divestment I am speaking to is not just divesting from another person, you yourself come undone, divesting your libidinal bonds between representations, which is what self-transformation also means. If, for example, one’s racism gets transformed through an analytic treatment, this does not happen in a surgically targeted way, as if that piece is changed while every else remains untouched everything in the psyche; to use Dominique Scarfone’s term, [the ego] has to be dis-membered and then be re-membered, one comes undone. The sense of overwhelm I have theorized is very much about that, about the fact that no one surrenders their libidinal ties eagerly – ties that bind together the self, ties that bind us to others, to ideals, to organizations, to parties, and so on (remember Freud, from Mourning and Melancholia, “it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position”). In the keynote I quoted a poem by Constantinos Kavafis, where he talks about how he who wants to grow their spirit has to accept that half the house will have to come down. The house that has to come down is you; the exigent sadist is exquisitely vulnerable because she becomes dispossessed from her own self. Clinically speaking this is not something the analyst does to the patient, the analyst merely facilitates the circumstances for it. The stakes and ethical commitments of clinical work are obviously different than how we live our political lives outside the consulting room, which, again, is not to say that politics do not belong in the consulting room. I’m curious as you’re hearing me say this, as younger clinicians, how does this sound to you?

SA: I mean, I can say for myself, I think going back to experiences I’ve had, I used to think about divesting from organizations that I was a part of… the way I made sense of it psychologically, was like Antigone, right? I kind of in some way buried a part of myself and had to move to something else which was like being a professional clinician. But, actually, in rethinking this myself, there’s an exigent sadism that was a part of it. It was a choice that was generative. Hard, but generative, and brought out a different part of me. I have a better grounding, maybe. I lost something, sure. But I gained something, too. So, when I think about the idea of how to do political work in the consulting room. I think that patients appreciate how you’re modeling your reactions as well.

And it’s a practice of a politics of selfdetermination. If you believe that in yourself, it comes to inform how you approach your patient. You kind of want your patient to appreciate you politically, because they’ve seen it in practice. Which, I think is a different approach than a kind of a pedagogical one of politically educating your patient.

AS: Yeah, what you’re saying is so great because the question of what it means to have this present in yourself when you’re working clinically, is, I think, another very good way of putting it. Patients will have all kinds of reactions to that in their therapist—and they may sense it even when their therapist’s actions are not known to them. And while yes “modeling” is one way to think about it, it’s important to be aware that it can also generate anger, competitiveness, fear. The sense of self-sovereignty we are talking about can also incite envy, because it’s a really strong position that not everyone is willing to risk. In the consulting room, those are all things that you’ll have to deal with in the transference, and that’s another big difference with political life and organizing. Not in the sense that there’s no transference in the latter (there most certainly is) but your position is different and thus, also, your responsibilities and your handling of it. When you’re sitting with a patient who’s been vulnerable with you, whom you have known for some time, even someone very angry or hostile, someone overtly racist or sexist, you can also listen for and discern the vulnerabilities inhering in these [missing word?]—and we have a different responsibility in relation to these kinds of affects in the clinic than we do in our personal lives and in our political life. This is one of the things that makes exigent sadism categorically different in the clinical realm.

RH: I think maybe a few days after October 7th, we had group supervision. Safia and I were there, and we were speaking about locating where we were at that moment. As people but also as clinicians. And I said that I really didn’t know what to do if a Zionist patient said something vicious to me. I genuinely couldn’t think of what I would do or what options were available to me. Because the ways that I’ve been trained to respond would not feel…authentic. It’s not even so much that I want to teach at that moment. It’s more that I don’t want to abandon something, a sincere position. So, I could ignore, I could dissociate, I could move on. But none of these options would feel sincere enough. It was a simple but also difficult question, and I don’t know, Safia, if you agree, but I don’t think we really know how to proceed. And it is not like I expect or even want someone to write a sort of a protocol for us to follow, but just a space to think about what is ethical in moments like those is helpful.

SA: I mean, I remember that conversation because it made me think about Lacan’s short session and cutting at that moment.

AS: That sounds to me like a theoretical out.

RH: That’s exactly it; it’s a theoretical out.

AS: When I said it’s a theoretical out, I meant that it’s a way of using the theory to give the therapist an out but I don’t think that this is how the variable length session is supposed to work, to give the therapist a break from a patient. So I have so many thoughts about what you are raising, about the question of how we might respond when a patient comes in and says something very aggressive or provocative or even that harms us.

To me, the worry about not being authentic is less about transparency—there are all kinds of things we are not transparent about with our patients - but more a question of what to do with that feeling, what to make of it and what do with it. For example, a patient who is talking about something that is very violent, that touches something that is meaningful to you personally, who knows they are speaking to their Arab therapist in a way that might hurt or threaten, is different than a patient who is talking hatefully about a genocide to someone they think is “neutral.” One of the differences is that these may pertain to different transference configurations.

For me, in the way that I work and supervise, authenticity feels like a very vexed issue. I am obviously not advocating for being inauthentic, but, for one, real and ongoing authenticity would expose the patient to all kinds of things that may not be about the patient’s treatment but about us, or the timing may be not ripe to bring them up, etc. Of course, I am not saying that if you have a Zionist and your family is being murdered in Palestine, you just have to keep it together, because you’re the clinician here. In such circumstances, you may indeed reach your limits, and we do as clinicians have limits. But part of our work’s ruthelessness (for the clinician) is that we also try to stay present for what the patient is bringing in (e.g other affects dressed up as Zionism might be the – dysfunctional - way in which a patient introduces things they are afraid of in themselves, e.g. their capacity for hatred). So, ideally, there needs to be some room, between feeling intensely about what the patient is saying to me and immediately going to termination.

I am not saying that termination should be off the table always and categorically. Once in my practice, I have had to terminate with an analytic patient several years into the treatment because I felt so abused by them that I could no longer be useful to them. But I want to be honest that I also terminated because, though I had a sense of the dynamics driving the abusive behavior, I personally could no longer bear how they were treating me, it was affecting me too much for my own well-being. This was a 4 times weekly treatment, and the termination happened after many years of work together, which I mention because I want to emphasize that I am not somebody who believes that as a clinician you should take anything, nor that we are in the consulting room to be treated as punching bags, and that such decisions should not be made on the spot. And while I named the dynamics in bringing up termination, I also owned my own incapacity: I had simply reached the limits of what I could metabolize, and that was a limitation in me, in what I could sustain for this patient.

So there are exceptions in extreme cases, and the situation you described, Safia, could conceivably prove to be such a case. But being a clinician involves trying to bracket some of our reactions to reflect on what’s unfolding: for example, there’s a difference between somebody coming in with Zionist rhetoric because that’s their way to get under your skin -that requires one kind of clinical responsethan if somebody’s coming in because they have grown up all their lives, being told there was nobody in Palestine, that the land was promised to Jewish people and who may be in the process of realizing or might, through the treatment as well as other factors, come to realize that they’ve been lied to. And that’s different, again, from somebody who learns this history but is unfazed by it, and feels entitled to the “promised land” and to speaking to you about it without concern for its implications for you. These are already three – and there’s many more variations —distinctive places for a patient. But if we can’t suspend our feelings long enough to find out, we will never know. Ideally, one has a supervisor to consult, an analyst or therapist of one’s own, to discuss this with. I say to supervisees all the time, come and talk about these things in supervision, talk about them with your analyst, it can help you figure out what belongs in the therapeutic relationship and how. Sometimes you actually have to sit on it for quite a bit before you have a sense of where it’s coming from and what it is about. Is it defensive? Is it a repetition and if so, of what? How are you getting embroiled in it transferentially? If you immediately go to authenticity, you’re missing out on all of these opportunities, though –and this is something that needs to be said and is not said enough in training—sticking around to find out is not without pain or anguish for us. Sometimes, most of the times I think, we find ways to work with such patients, we also clarify our own feelings, our own transferences and countertransferences; at other times, and this I think is more of the exception, something may be too unbearable for us and we need to stop. The decision is ultimately yours, though having the help of a supervisor and an analyst is important. How is this sounding to you?

RH: This is very helpful. And, I think, highlights the need for good supervision. Which I believe I have. At the end of the day, patients are coming to us. It’s not a personal relationship. What I feel wary of is when the patient comes in the next day and the next day and the next day…watching myself start to hide a mug or hide a shirt, or hide a kaffiyeh.

What’s happening for me, and all to say that’s material, probably, to navigate for myself.

AS: Yes. If you are moved to move your kuffiyeh out of the way, you’re going to want to think about why: are you afraid of the patient’s aggression, are you worried that you will lose the patient’s idealization, are you afraid that they will unthinkingly identify with you when they don’t, in fact, share your politics, are you trying to sidestep the transference in some way? If this is connected to a dynamic issue (e.g. a Jewish patient is too afraid that confronting the genocide would cause a rupture with their family), are there ways to take your insight (about why you’d want to hide your kuffiyeh) and bring it into the session, a way that might generate less resistance and which might find your patient’s own ambivalence rather colluding with them in projecting it into you? And there are questions of timing: if your patient was just diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, you might balance things differently. And you have to trust in repetition, that things will come up again.

There are so many things to consider about such moments, so what you were saying about supervision is so important. I’m glad you have that space. I wish everybody would.

SA: I am thinking about how many experiences we’ve heard of the reverse. Of analysts who were more Zionist, who preempted or said something about their inability to hold space for their patients and the need to terminate after years of work with pro-Palestine patients. And that’s actually more of the stories that I’m hearing.

AS: Absolutely.

SA: And there’s no space to discuss this in the field. Right? Less so.

AS: Indeed. I, too, have heard these stories so many times, and so many times from people who are heartbroken. Heartbroken because they didn’t realize that their analyst was Zionist, and are all of a sudden encountering in a person they deeply trusted, someone would by-stand a genocide. And then there’s the other angle, that so many people have had the experience of their analyst not being able to manage their affect and stay with their patient’s material, to not have their concern about the genocide be met with a “but, Hamas” kind of response, or with a “what about Israeli suffering?” reactivity, analysts who are beginning to have conversations that are meant to try and convert their patients, intended to suppress the patient’s reality and the patient’s emotional experience.

RH: What we’re talking about reminds me of exigency because when I was having that interaction with my patient, what was most disturbing, truly, if I’m to think about it, was myself. You know, my feathers were ruffled, I was feeling an interior turbulence. I think we expect something of ourselves… not to feel…as a commitment to neutrality. There’s this posture of being really steady and settled. And, now that I wasn’t any of those things, I was afraid of myself. I’m feeling a strong charge, the energy is moving in a certain way. What we’re saying is that’s not something to be afraid of, or it is, I guess, something to be afraid of.

AS: What you just said, Roula, is very powerful because it’s true that some of these feelings may scare us, their intensity may frighten us, catch us off guard. It does not help that we are trained to expect that while yes, we may experience some feelings, these are not too intense, and if subjected to selfanalysis (or supervisory conversation) they will wane in intensity. Erotic countertransferences are an excellent example, because they can feel so heated, so unlike anything that resembles how our literature languages erotic affect where it’s often described in more lukewarm terms rather than the full force of feeling heatedly drawn to or even in love with a patient. The fright we feel about the intensity of our responses to patients can then galvanize a distancing from the patient, or a projection to the patient, attributing to them an intention to frighten us. Of course, we always need to think about what the patient is contributing, what the patient may be non-consciously trying to provoke in the analyst. By the way, I have been using the word analyst here in a very expansive way, not just for those analytically trained, but for clinicians thinking with psychoanalysis.

RH: I’ve heard this question be posed to you at least twice. But we’re still curious. The thing that’s come up over and over, particularly a question that organizers and activists—people whose belief in/work in and belonging to the collective is most critical— might pose when engaging your work on exigent sadism, and this idea of dethroning repair as the apex of mature psychic functioning and mature social relations. Communities, collectives require an aspect of prioritizing connection over atomization. And sometimes at great personal cost, arguably for one’s own happiness, or to realize certain political commitments. Is that like acquiescent masochism? Does your work prioritize the individual? And what does that mean for the collective?

AS: Yeah, this is a really good question. And yes, it has been asked of me a couple of times, but not this way. When you say that, to some degree, all collectives require subordinating the individual will to the group, including to the will of the group that will arise out of this process, this is all already in Rousseau, social contract theory 101. This is how all societies are supposed to function: by surrendering their self-interests and personal will to the State, which will then organize social life and social action. So, to me the idea that collectives are formed by handing over ourselves to a group, is from the get-go suspect.

This, by the way, is also how the prioritizing of relationality seeps into, infiltrates, movements. What collectives require is a shared vision and shared political commitments, not personal connections and liking each other, let alone the notion that we will all get along. Ideally, people with shared politics might also share connections but politics is a project with certain objectives that need to override personal ambivalences, likes and dislikes, competitiveness, not liking how someone does things, not being able to bear this or that about them. What brings people together in these contexts is a shared political vision, and that, to me, has to supersede everything else when we organize. We may or may not make friends, or form deep bonds through that process, but it’s neither guaranteed nor is it the goal (and here, let us also remember the perils of the Kumbaya feelings you and Safia raised earlier).

If we imagine political organizing as entailing the substitution of abdicating one’s will to the State to abdicating it to another group, a collective, a movement, call it what you will, then we’re merely reproducing the same process, migrating it from one group to another. This is where self-sovereignty comes in. Think about yourselves for a moment. I suspect that each time you have decided to organize, you have to make some decision, to step into something, to think about what you might be giving up, what you might be risking. If you don’t step into that out of a place of sovereignty, of having made a concerted decision that you just have to accept those risks because you can’t bear things the way they are any more, that you can’t live with, say, a genocide unfurling with your tax money, if you enter these spaces without your own critical consideration, you are more likely to end up in a place of what Freud described as mass psychology, where a charismatic leader can manipulate the collective and take them to a really problematic place that has nothing to do with their original values.

To say that differently, I don’t think that the substitution of the individual will by the collective will guarantees ethical political work by any means. If that question comes up, about whether in maintaining our selfsovereignty we are siding with atomism, it’s because we have bought into the idea that can only mean self-interest. But it is certainly possible to have self-sovereignty and be quite interested in the world, not just in how to promote oneself or how to preserve one’s self-interests or entitlements. Think for example about Aaron Bushnell: there is a different meaning to his self-immolation if it comes out of a self-sovereign place, as opposed to killing himself in the throes of following a movement. If you’re joining a movement to, say, fight for Palestine, fighting for Palestine should be more important, always centered, and you will always have to be assessing whether the group is continuing to live and organize towards the values that matter to you. There is, indeed, something bigger than relationships to one another that drive a movement (though, don’t get me wrong, relationships help a lot!), and that is your ethics: self-sovereignty comes in in the course of accepting that you have to follow that trail and what it will cost you. To prioritize the collective’s relationships to each other, smuggles back in, I think, the notion that, of course, an individual is only thinking individualistically, and I don’t think we have to accept that.

RH: Safia, what do you think?

SA: I take it as an opening for something more. I almost want to hear more. I know that we’re almost, you know, running out of time. But I think it’s extremely important to talk about how sometimes we enter into a mass psychology..that’s kind of inevitable. Every time you are part of a collective, there are those ties.

AS: Is it inevitable though? Surely, when a gestalt forms that’s larger than yourself and you get excited by something that’s larger than yourself there is a pleasure in giving yourself over to it. But does that not restore some sense of innocence, even a regressive idea that the group will take care of things, that it can be trusted. Sure, you may trust the people around you, and maybe you have a great leader, and maybe nothing will ever go wrong - though I am not sure that that ever happens. But for me, movements that are made up of people who just surrender their will over to the movement are worrisome. To put it differently, a movement that cheats its participants from their critical faculties (e.g., that expects or yields obedience, even when that’s done under the rubric of “collectivity”), can easily be coopted into fascism.

RH: I put forward as a general orienting point in the beginning this fantasy audience that I was conjuring of people like us, early in their careers. My idea of who was at the conference. Is there anything you’d want to get through to this audience, anything we missed that you might want to emphasize.

AS: There is one thing that I want to say, especially addressing early career people. It’s one thing to critique psychoanalysis and another thing to not engage it. By all means, critique, even take down what you think is problematic, but to do that you’ll have to study it deeply first. Of course, you don’t have to know psychoanalysis, you can direct your political commitments through other channels. But if you want to do psychoanalyticopolitics, you’ll have to know your psychoanalytic theory very well; it’s not enough to name all of the harmful things that psychoanalysis has done and all its problematic ideas. Like with a jenga tower, you have to have a sense of what you are unsteadying by pulling out a block, what part of the house will have to come down, what needs to be rethought and what is unsalvageable. You’re going to need to know what the conversation is right now, even as it may be difficult, painful, hard, phobic, hateful for minorities, hostile to difference. If you love psychoanalysis, you can’t spare it but you also can’t be facile in your critique – and that’s a hard thing to do because much of psychoanalytic theory is also conceptually dense, and that can feel exclusive, let alone too much energy to spend on something to criticize it. My own personal opinion is that we need the new generation of analysts, to be politically engaged and theoretically innovative: who else will write the better theory we so desperately need?

There is a trend that I’m seeing right now that worries me quite a bit: of young, politically committed, hopeful, determined clinicians who will say they don’t read psychoanalysis or that they refuse to cite it. I mean, refuse all you want, but if you want to have a psychoanalytic conversation, if you want a better psychoanalysis, you’ll have to build it. Choose your interlocutors, of course. Engage Black feminisms, queer of color critique, trans scholarship, decolonial studies, history, biography—you really, don’t have to stay within psychoanalysis. But you also have to know psychoanalysis. Sorry. This is a little bit of my manifesto. I’m especially worried about that because I think that that’s how we’re going to lose the battle of building a better psychoanalysis.

SA: Yeah. And it’s touching on what we identified in the theme of this issue of the journal. Our feeling of this ambivalence of conference attendees about the future of psychoanalysis and what to do with that. It’s not a stable place to be in. And, so, something has to change in the field. That’s what’s represented there. And are the institutions, as they are, as they exist, are they going to continue to be the same ones? And so we kind of have to look at it both from the outside in. And that’s really what we’re trying to capture here.

AS: Intellectually speaking, simply rejecting things is a low hanging fruit move. For example, if you’re going to say, I don’t want work with a patient who comes in and says Zionist things to me, my question would be, what is the theoretical revision you are proposing? Because you obviously don’t mean that we should now start terminating with patients that upset us in big ways. To be clear, I’m not saying this like ironically, but very very seriously, as an invitation to think. What would be your proposition, give it some thought—is there a level of distress above which, an analyst gets to opt out? How do we communicate it to the patient? What do we do about the fact that this would make patients not trust us enough to say things (they think) might upset us? Is this about a new kind of technique? A new kind of matching at the beginning of treatment? I would not agree with half of the things that I just said, but that’s not the point: the point is that what moves us forward is when each of our “no”s are accompanied by doing the work and taking the risk of saying new things, things that people may not agree with, or that you yourself will not agree with yourself in two years from now. Writing theory is actually much more risky than it seems— which is why I said to you at the beginning that my thinking about exigent sadism is very much in evolution. Half the people I’m talking to these days are saying that it’s a good idea, but “sadism” is an unfortunate choice of a term, better to select another one that’s less conceptually fraught. I feel clear that I can’t do that (for reasons we didn’t go in today); but I’m also thinking about it every other moment. What I am trying to say is that if you want new thinking, the stakes are high, your generation has to be part of creating it, which is not just intimidating but also exciting. You’re going to be part of how new theory gets formed and of the changes it brings to the field!

RH: Thank you. I hope we continue to be in conversation for a long time.

AS: I hope so, too. It was really nice to meet you and get to know your thinking some. And I appreciated being asked questions I haven’t been asked before. So that was also really fun, thank you!

Endnotes

1. Translation, for Laplanche, is the process of converting the unbound energy of enigma into meaningful bits, coating those kernels with meaning, thus making them psychically representable. Enigma, briefly, has to do with the inscrutable (because unconscious) communications that unavoidably surcharge any and all communications that the adult addresses to the infant.

Contributors

Roula Hajjar, LMSW is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, and a candidate in analytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.

Safia Albaiti, LMSW is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, with an interest in political psychoanalysis and spirituality in her clinical practice and poetry.