SEX in Review

Jessica CHAVEZ

With the 2024 Spring Meeting theme of SEX , Jess Joseph and I celebrated psychoanalysis as we have come to understand it—a theory of sexual subject formation that posits a subject shaped by a repressive social order and always just past the horizon of knowability. SEX was meant to disentangle the notion of perversion from its historically violent role in regulating, pathologizing, and criminalizing desire. Moreover, we wanted not only to explore the potential of psychoanalysis to liberate gender, sexuality, and the body from repressive social inscription but also to diagnose the political formations that come to bear on our desires. The perversions are inescapably political—as described by Marcuse (1959), they “establish libidinal relationships which society must ostracize because they threaten to reverse the process of civilization which turned the organism into an instrument of work” (p. 50).

We found this all very exciting. We received each abstract submission like a dazzling gift, agonized over choosing between them, and carefully crafted our final program. When it came time to write my opening remarks for the conference’s first night, however, I found nothing to say. I persevered, trying to come up with something, anything, but my hands were empty. I embraced it, not knowing what to say, and wanted to invite it in for reflection. What I initially thought was writer’s block revealed itself to be an inner resistance to saying more. It felt like an ethical stance, and finding something to say felt frivolous. What more did I have to say about genocide, about mass neglect alongside obscene accumulations of wealth, about the injustice and horrors of racial capitalism, or about the snuffing out of queer life?

I have often had quite a lot to say at Spring Meetings: “Do you want to join my reading group?” (I am afraid nobody will show up and never get around to it.) “What about this new text—have you considered it?” “Let me tell you about what I’ve read, my politics, and what I think.” I’ve tried my hand at publishing, given some mediocre papers at Spring Meetings, and entertained a quasi-leadership role in one of the Sections. There were times when I had something to say, and I tried.

With nearly every attempt at having a voice or agency in psychoanalysis over the past 15 years, I’ve been corrected, had things explained to me, or been told that I didn’t understand something. I was apparently doing it all wrong. Our SEX call for proposals generated ample negative responses that may now be the crown jewel in this collection of hand slaps. Did I have nothing to say because these experiences had silenced me? I concluded that I hadn’t been discouraged by the friction or entertained doubts about my understanding of psychoanalysis. (The exception perhaps being Lacanian psychoanalysis, which I can humbly accept.)

I think the problem is that I have given up the idea that psychoanalytic knowledge production can transform the conditions of our and our patients’ lives. Psychoanalytic theory and scholarship—the politicized psychoanalysis I love and the apolitical psychoanalysis I let in cautiously with my gaze askance—have shaped me as a therapist, parent, and political subject. Still, I feel there are enough words for me to work with. My bookshelf runneth over, and living a life enriched by psychoanalysis is more important to me than producing psychoanalytic thought.

These reflections brought to mind Catherine Clement’s 1978 characterization of knowledge production among psychoanalysts: “Everyone holds his own meeting, talks and talks […] For talking and talking, when you have to listen all day, must be like a strong need, as unstoppable as the urgent need to pee when you’ve held it in for a long time” (p. 17).

It’s not the same as needing to pee, however. Peeing is a vital function. We all do it, and if this were the case, our thoughts would be flushed down the same toilet. The economy of psychoanalytic knowledge production drives the urge to promise something special for those chosen. We live in what Jodi Dean (2012) calls communicative capitalism , an economic arrangement wherein common communications (e.g., our thoughts, observations, images, and memories) are subsumed by capital to extract profit. Communicative capitalism involves network exploitation or a form of exploitation that encourages creative production among a large number of unpaid producers who compete for remuneration—a prize becomes the substitute for a prize (Dean, 2012, p. 138). In academic publishing, remuneration is even more removed from the labor of writing because academic publishers do not pay authors for their work, and the prize becomes an abstract promise of prestige, professional opportunities, or job security in academia. Rather than eviscerating our papers, journals, and conferences, I think that examining our intellectual engagement in this way names an important truth, not in the service of obliterating the network of relationships and ideas that feed it, but to move forward with a fuller knowledge of this system and our roles in it. We should be willing to tread through our intellectual lives with the same appreciation of ambivalence we might expect from our patients. If one can accept that ambivalence about one’s parents, partner, or even life itself is expected, then we should be able to do the same in our relationship with psychoanalytic knowledge production. Yet, we seem to take ourselves so seriously.

When I gave my opening remarks at the Spring Meeting, I reflected on how I had been looking outside psychoanalysis for knowledge and inspiration. I talked about how my mentor, friend, and colleague Leilani Crane remarked to me years ago, when I was still in my “subject-supposed-to-saysomething” phase, that she had not been reading any psychoanalytic theory lately and that she came to the Spring Meeting to play. This was one of the most inspiring things a mentor in psychoanalysis has said to me thus far because so few people had let down their guard and embraced just being here to play.

In the spirit of play, I shared one source of inspiration from Will Hermes’s biography of Lou Reed. Hermes describes the Velvet Underground’s first public appearance in 1966. The gig was at a Hotel on Park Avenue, at the 43 rd Annual blacktie Dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. In one of those stranger-than-fiction moments, Gerard Malanga danced with the band, wielding his signature bullwhip while the band played Venus in Furs to an audience of psychiatrists. Musing about what it must have been like for Lou Reed, infamously given ECT during his psychiatric hospitalization in what he had at times characterized as an effort to quash his transgressive sexuality, Hermes imagines that Lou Reed was:

maybe thinking about being a teenager, electrodes on his skull, bit in his mouth, and maybe he aimed the electricity of his guitar into the darkened ballroom at the candle-lit skulls of the doctors and their dates in their tuxes and ballgowns, to share a small taste of what New York psychiatry had done for him (Hermes, 2023, p. 108).

Needless to say, the psychiatrists did not respond well to the grimy noise that was the Velvet Underground’s immersive sonic presence. In a headline, the New York Times described the scene as: “Shock treatment for psychiatrists,” and psychiatrists in attendance were quoted calling the show “a short-lived torture of cacophony,” “ridiculous, outrageous, painful,” and “a spontaneous eruption of the id” (Hermes, 2023, p. 109). “I wanted to vomit,” one attendee remarked (ibid.).

This scene in the New York ballroom amused and inspired me. What the band had done to the audience of psychiatrists, the attendees’ comments even echoing some reactionary comments made about our and other recent Spring Meetings, is an act of what Avgi Saketopoulou (2023) might call exigent sadism. I had hoped our conference, SEX, might have a similar effect on the Division. Rather than having something to say, we wanted to create an aesthetic experience, play, and move our attendees. Indeed, what the participants brought to the conference, I believe, lived up to this hope. At every session I attended, I cried, laughed, or alternated between the two states. The lasting moments I took home with me were not those in which a new theory was hatched or a new citation was shared, but those of learning more about my colleagues—about their lives, their experiences with their patients, and what they think about this unruly network we call psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychology.

References

Clement, C. (1987). The Weary Sons of Freud (N. Ball, Trans.). Verso. (1978)

Dean, J. (2012). The Communist Horizon. Verso.

Hermes, W. (2023). Lou Reed: The king of New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, race, and traumatophilia. New York University Press.

Contributor

Jessica Chavez, Ph.D is a psychologist and Steering Committee Co-Chair for the 2024 Spring Meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association.