Reflections emerging from dis-possession

Lara SHEEHI

I immediately felt the bubbling energy when I stepped into the Washington, DC, hotel at which our most recent Spring Meeting, SEX (co-chaired by Jessica Joseph and Jessica Chavez), was being held. It was a familiar energy, a buzzing one that communicated excitement, anticipation, and even some trepidation as distant colleagues and dear friends gathered to perform this yearly ritual. The feeling had etched itself into me for a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, making it impossible for us to meet in person for many consecutive years.

And yet, I was aware of a distinctly new vector of affect present this year. I wondered internally and then later had my hunch confirmed by many members who spoke to me throughout our time together at the conference: being in Washington, DC, only a few blocks from the White House during a live-televised genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza felt unnerving. After all, it was this Democrat-led White House that had been funding, aiding, and supporting the genocide; the same White House that had allowed Roe v. Wade to be overturned; the same White House that stood idly by as countless civil liberties had been stripped from US citizens, let alone the continued atrocities against immigrants and asylee seekers; the same White House that seemed to care very little about trans children and their futures, despite the Party’s rainbow pins.

What, if anything, could our profession at large, Psychoanalysis in specific or our SPPP have to offer against this bleak backdrop? While many possible answers to these questions emerged at the conference, based on the request from this Special Issue’s co-editors, I will focus my thoughts as an engagement with Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou’s much anticipated and densely attended keynote, entitled, Sadisms: The Risk and the Ruse This feels appropriate, as her rousing call was to lean into a psychoanalysis of which we demand a lot more and which, in turn, demands a lot more of us.

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I have been thinking a lot lately about psychic intrusions and the various ways one can refuse them—how to conceptualize the arduous yet life-sustaining struggle that allows for this refusal to happen just as consistently as the intrusion insists on making itself felt. As I think through this, I am aware that I must lean on what Dr. Saketopoulou calls a “theory with teeth,” one that does not disavow the necessity for what she terms exigent sadism. A theory that apprehends the power of exigent sadism is, in my mind, one that is antagonistic to the normative hum of a deathscape, whether that is in our institutes or our training programs in so-called Washington, DC, Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, or the Congo; or in any other space where people under otherwise insurmountable conditions of oppression are insistent on sustaining life.

In considering the sharpness and precision of the teeth of such a theory, I have chewed on the ways that power and its mechanisms of abuse demand that affect is excised as a precondition to engagement. This is the type of asphyxiatory power that Dr. Saketopoulou kept in sharp focus for us all, one that was de/centered and struggled through as a fixture of the conference. In refusing the ruse of power, in refusing to fully excise affect (or its disorganizing potentials), I witnessed first-hand how members heeded Dr. Saketopoulou’s call, attempting to resist the wager constitutive of the hollow theoretical repair that she grippingly warned us about. That is, attendees attempted to refuse the ruse of a repair that is/was merely a pro forma stamp, one that only registers that the aggressor is ready for the spectacle of an audience, one that relies on the magnanimity of the most vulnerable, at the expense of structural change; one in which, especially in our current moment, to borrow from Dr. Saketopoulou, the commitment of “never again” has potential to collapse into a narrow vs. a robust enough portal to sustain the powerfully transformational “never again for anybody.”

Here, she propels us into a complex matrix of rigorous theoretical stops, expounding on the intricacies of exigent sadism. The exigent sadist exacts their impact by refusing engagement—in my reading, refusing the terms of psychic intrusion not out of recalcitrance but rather as an ethical imperative that guides the possibility of another mode of being and staying in (or importantly, opting out of) relation. She reminds us: “In refusing repair, exigent sadism is not indifferent to the other’s gesture: what the exigent sadist seeks to do, rather, is to stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which the relationship proceeds.”

With the many terrifyingly familiar repetitions of fascism at our doorstep, this message—and its precision—feels urgent. I wonder about how the mere presence of someone could be enough to stage that encounter. The presence of a Palestinian, a trans child, a Black or Indigenous Stop Cop City protestor, a masked disabled colleague—let alone their willful subjectivity, as Sara Ahmed (2014) reminds us—can “stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which [a] relationship proceeds.”

A subject in presence becomes the register by which repair is refused. A subjectivity that engages in exigent sadism that, as Dr. Saketopoulou highlights, aids us in “refus[ing] the degradation of psychoanalysis into a form of instrumental reason.” Maintaining and sustaining presence in the face of erasure, subjugation, intrusion, and coercion could be enough to stage the encounter in which she speaks. The promise of this potential mounts a libidinal excitation that, in my mind, just might withstand the pressures of the deathscape that threatens to subsume us all.

Dr. Saketopoulou reaches into Fred Moten to extend his notion of fugitivity into the realm of psychoanalysis. Namely, the ways in which we may break free of, or exist otherwise to, to crib Gail Lewis (2020), the regressive, oppressive tendencies within our field. Especially the ones that seduce us into the ruse of repair. In using presence, I am myself pushing on what indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2020) calls the method of “embodied making and doing” or “presencing.”

Perhaps one of the key takeaways from our conference, then, might be the ways that exigent sadism alerts us to the processes by which a presence is maintained through enacted presencing. That can certainly look like a 700+ person attendance at a psychoanalytic conference in the imperial belly of Washington, DC; or it can look like theorizing against an oeuvre that insists on disciplining intellectual discourse and technical implications; or it can look like refusing not to be disappeared, to remain grounded or landed, whether as an individual, or an entire people.

Here is where I see the immensely important utility of Dr. Saketopoulou’s invitation into states of psychoanalytic dis-possession. Precisely owing to Dr. Saketopoulou’s (2023) own intimate knowledge with dispossession as a Cypriot, I was struck by the ways in which she transmuted the concept into an action to which we must all commit if we are to take our psychoanalytic process, method, and praxis, let alone its future, seriously. I join her in thinking with dispossession, otherwise. Dis-possess as in not to possess; to not consume; as in divestment, which means to practice a different type of discipline that disrupts a social and political order in which we are implicated as psychoanalytic clinicians, theoreticians, and researchers. Another version of presencing that exists in tension with the well-worn channels of foreclosed possibilities that contour the always-already hegemonic norms that inscribe our being.

This is the sociogenic, to borrow from Frantz Fanon, importance of Dr. Saketopoulou’s theorizing and her challenge to us all. She insists that we take up and forward an actual theoretical, practical impact that does not eschew the attendant material and political realities in which people live and create worlds, both internal and social. A theorizing that animates Audre Lorde’s (1978) commitment to “speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”

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Leaning into Laplanchean theory, in which she is a foremost expert in our field, Dr. Saketopoulou reminds us of the work necessary to make translational movement. In Laplanchean (2017) vernacular, “the indivisible double movement of the “being carried forward” and of “referring back””.

A theory with teeth that allows us to, as she movingly described in her keynote, make the leap to grasp onto the vine that is both not yet there and only able to materialize with the propelling motion of the risk we take to bring it into presence.

As we all left the conference that weekend, the piercing question of translation and dis-posession saturated conversations: Are we ready for that type of psychoanalysis?

References

Ahmed, S. (2014). Wilful Subjects. Duke University Press: Durham.

Laplanche, J. (2017). Après-coup: Problématiques VI. The Unconscious in Translation: New York.

Lewis, G. (2020). Once more, with my sistren: black feminism and the challenge of object use. Feminist Review, 126, 1-18.

Lorde, A. (1978). “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”. Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978.

Saketopoulou, A. “On the Ethics of Violence: From Palestine to Cyprus,” Counterpunch, November 5, 2023. Found at: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/05/on-the-ethics-of-violence-palestine-and-cyprus/

Simpson, L. B. (2020). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Contributor

Lara Sheehi, Psy.D, is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Doha Institute, co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation's Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network.​​ Lara's work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book.