Division|Review Issue # 16

DIVISION REVIEW DIVISION A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

NO.4 SUMMER 2012

A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

NO.16 SPRING 2017

ME AGAIN

FREUD’S DESK

DEAN | Lunbeck | Schechter

MATHES | Spankie

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K

PERVERSIONS

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THE ENIGMA ARIEL-GALOR | Atlas

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THE POLITICAL SELF

PUBLIC WRITING

SWALES | Benvenuto

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OYER | CHEVIGNY | Tweedy

AXELROD | Grosz | Ryerson

REMINISCENCE

APPREY | A GLIMPSE INTO THE FOLD

THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

MAR-A-LOGOS

The 2017 Schillinger Prize | CHRISTOFF | SUFFERING AND THE OTHER

STEINKOLER

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WILD ANALYSIS FRIED

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IDENTITIES

MOORE | THEATRE OF THE HOLE

P O E T R Y

P H O T O G R A P H Y

That irrational choices, conflicting desires, and inexplicable judgments bedevil the political realm has never been in doubt.

It follows that psychoanalysis as the science of parapraxis might be a good source of insight into why people have so much trouble getting it right. More than ever, politics seem to be a stage where the players represent the range of human folly and failure. Ideals are proclaimed and immediately

Y REISNER

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Identity and Murder in Kansas

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SPIELREIN’S ABSENCE

LAZAR

PERFORMANCE SEIDEN | A SONNET

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BECKLEY

David Lichtenstein

betrayed. Do we psychoanalysts have anything to offer the world for the mitigation of what looks like an inexorable march toward destruction resulting from our collective political failures?

If errors in political judgment are not simply the inevitable expressions of the flawed human character, but instead symptoms shaped by the social experience of the human subject, symptoms that can be

the portal to insight and new possibilities, might the recognition and treatment of these symptoms have a salutary effect not only on the individual subject but on the body politic itself? That this quaintly utopian dream survives the dystopian history we are witnessing may either be admirable resilience or naïve optimism. Time will tell.

In February 2017, there was a shooting in a bar in Olathe, Kansas. Srinivas

Official publication of Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association

CONTENTS EDITOR

David Lichtenstein

BOOK REVIEWS 4

J. Todd Dean

Some Uses of Narcissism

11

Bettina Mathes

Sigmund Freud’s Desk: An Anecdoted Guide

by Ro Spankie

12

Noga Ariel-Galor

15

Stephanie Swales

18

Steven Axelrod

20

Matthew Oyer

22

Blue Chevigny

SENIOR EDITORS

Steven David Axelrod, J. Todd Dean, William Fried, William MacGillivray, Marian Margulies, Bettina Mathes, Henry Seiden, Manya Steinkoler CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis

by Galit Atlas What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis

by Sergio Benvenuto The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

by Stephen Grosz Couch: NY Times Opinionator edited by James Ryerson The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness

by Roderick Tweedy (Ed.) The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness

by Roderick Tweedy (Ed.) REMINISCENCE

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Maurice Apprey

A Gimpse into the Fold

Maria M. Christoff

Suffering, the Other, and a Vote for Trump

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Manya Steinkoler

Trump’s Madness: Mar-a-Logos

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William Fried

Where the Wild Things Are

38

Flora E. Lazar

Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, and the New Politics of Otherness

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Gavriel Reisner

Kerry Moore

The Absent Feminine: Overlooking the Fusion of Love and Death in Sabina Spielrein’s “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being”

Theatre of the Hole: Encounter and its Psychic (K)nots ON POETRY

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Loren Dean BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Brian Smith PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Bill Beckley

IMAGES EDITOR

Tim Maul

DESIGN BY

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COMMENTARY 27

Ricardo Ainslie, Christina Biedermann, Chris Bonovitz, Steven Botticelli, Ghislaine Boulanger, Muriel Dimen, Patricia Gherovici, Peter Goldberg, Adrienne Harris, Elliott Jurist, Jane Kupersmidt, Paola Mieli, Donald Moss, Ronald Naso, Donna Orange, Robert Prince, Allan Schore, Robert Stolorow, Nina Thomas, Usha Tummala, Jamieson Webster, Lynne Zeavin

Henry M. Seiden “That time of year….”, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73”

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Identity and Murder in Kansas from page 1 Kuchibhotla died and his friend, Alok Madasani, was badly wounded. They were engineers from India who worked for Garmin Ltd. in Kansas, and had been in the United States for over 10 years.

Although they were regulars at the bar, their assailant, a local Kansas man, had reportedly been harassing the two men as foreigners, had questioned their right to be there, and had shouted at the two to “get out of my country.”

In early March, a few weeks after the Kansas shooting, Deep Rai, an American citizen living in a Seattle suburb, was shot while standing in his own driveway. The assailant had apparently told Mr. Rai to “go back to your own country.”

Nationalism, its distorted idea of a purified identity, its confusion of ethnos and citizenship, and the peculiar and violent passions that arise around these distortions all seem to draw from unconscious ideas about the subject and the other, ideas that

are also at the heart of clinical psychoanalytic work. For the normal neurotic subject, thoughts and feelings that seem to make no sense, indeed that do not seem to belong to the subject’s being, nevertheless intrude and take up residence there. Their unwanted alien status makes them candidates for banishment even as their persistence renders such efforts futile. The analyst of course enters the fray on the side of inclusion, a liberal bias, recommending listening to what the intruder has to say. The analyst represents the belief that the purified self that would exclude the intruder is an illusion, that the alien presence is not something to be banished, but to be welcomed, that the stranger within leads to a more robust freedom rather than a weakened fortress.

The nationalist stance—“Get out of my country”—conveys a threatened domain with no room for what the alien may have to offer. For the individual subject to accept and benefit from psychoanalytic treatment, there must be a recognition of the alien presence and a belief that the analyst can help reveal its character and its intention.

As in the symptom, the nationalist impulse toward banishing the alien simultaneously expresses both a complaint and a wish. Through psychoanalysis, the neurotic subject may come to know that neither the complaint nor the wish is what it seems.

They are both in fact caused by some other loss or imagined threat. Can we expect the same realization for the citizenry? Can we expect some insight, some new knowledge, to take the place of the distorted complaints and idealized wishes of nationalism?

And who will be the interlocutor, in the place of the analyst, who supports the pursuit of that new knowledge if political leaders instead amplify the complaint as real and promise to fulfill the idealized wish? z

animals, rainbows, and nature juxtaposed with neutrally intoned erotic musings and noirish observations. Learning on the job, Beckley out-distanced the pack by adopting the most advanced imaging technologies available, specifically the print material Cibachrome, which had a glossy surface that could replicate the depth of painting, a medium bereft of big ideas in at least the first half of that transitional decade. When encountering Beckley’s ambitiously scaled multi-paneled units (derived from Jasper Johns), the blasé gallery goer re-engaged as reader, narrator, and implicated witness.

Beckley’s Wooster Street studio (I assisted Bill at that time) was neither the encrusted painter’s cave nor the conceptualist’s “office,” but a hybrid of the photo laboratory and the in-house advertising agency.

Beckley’s art then (or now) does not easily fit into the staid historical account of “fine art” photography, which barely acknowledges the role photo-based “conceptualism” played in the otherwise tepid 1970s photography market. The art of Richard Prince and the late Sarah Charlesworth, both habitués of the John Gibson Gallery, where most of the narrative group exhibited, certainly took notice of Beckley’s crisply installed assemblages of words and vivid pictures that enlisted the camera into service to the idea. Beckley and a few other producers of photo/objects, such as John Baldessari in Los Angeles, preceded the

photograph’s current spectacularization by decades. While acutely aware of the local critical momentum gathering around “pictures” in the late 1970s, Beckley was not enchanted by what he termed the “puritanical” language aligned with the rapid embrace of the highly principled mélange of philosophy and criticism in what is generically labeled “Theory.”

Beckley’s tenacious work ethic evolved from a rural Berks County childhood, recalling other industrious Pennsylvanians such as his former student Keith Haring and Jeff Koons, an admirer and collector. A restless intellect, Beckley edited the influential essay collection Uncontrollable Beauty (1998) and argued for the guilt-free pleasures of the sublime in all its manifestations. The art continues; poppies spin like dervishes, floral stems arc in graceful pliés, and most recently, roses explode in apocalyptic slomo like in the final moments of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). Bill Beckley’s collaborations with publications are rare; let’s see what images he shares with The Proletariat, a series chosen from a recent stroll through Naples…the readers of DIVISION/Review may assist in their decoding. z

Tim Maul

Note: Many of the pieces in this issue of DIVISION/Review reflect upon recent political events. Maria Christoff ’s essay “Suffering, the Other, and a Vote for Trump” (p.27) won the 2017 Schillinger Essay Competition on “The Political Implications of Unconscious Thought.”

The Art of Bill Beckley Rose color glasses tint any recent overview of the grimy 1970s “Downtown” Manhattan art world. Bill Beckley (http://www. billbeckley.com) was one of the few (perhaps only) Romantics that emerged from a socially enmeshed but competitive milieu that flourished below Houston Street.

Beckley’s circle included the various media-nomadic artists showing at 112 Greene Street, whose art was acknowledged by an international network of frugally operated contexts through exposure in publications like Avalanche (NY), Flash Art (Milan), and Interfunktionen (Cologne). Beckley’s early work involved performances and installations that, like those of his older peer Dennis Oppenheim and close friend Gordon Matta-Clark, were dependent upon the photograph to document and commodify the event or temporal physical intervention. In post-minimal lingo, photographs were sometime referred to as “bi-products” and were generally black and white, accompanied by typewritten texts or urgent handwritten descriptions situated below the images. Beckley and others (this period in art is an era of “lists”) opted to employ these display strategies as a means of introducing content other than reportage, that is the story or tale. “Narrative Art” identified itself as a warmer offshoot of conceptual, land, or body art. Beckley’s self-authored stories were physically compact but referentially broad, incorporating images of

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REFERENCES Beckley, B. (Ed.). (1998). Uncontrollable beauty: Toward a new aesthetics. New York, NY: Allworth.

Ponti, P. (producer) and Antonioni, M. (director). (1970).

Zabriskie Point [motion picture]. United States: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer.

BOOK REVIEWS

Some Uses of Narcissism Everybody knows what narcissism is. It is a term everybody uses to describe bosses and coworkers, unpleasant neighbors, and certain politicians. From this, one could be The Americanization of Narcissism

by Elizabeth Lunbeck Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press 384 pp., $35.00, 2014 Illusions of a Future: Psychoanalysis and the Biopolitics of Desire

by Kate Schechter Durham, NC: Duke University Press 288 pp., $25.95, 2014 forgiven for assuming the definition of the term is clear: if journalists and television anchors feel free to use it regularly, then it must be generally understood. But note that in a debate over the behavior of the recently elected 45th POTUS, experts in the field of mental health, including a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard and an editor of the DSM (Dodes, 2017; Frances, 2017), could not even agree that there was pathology present. This does suggest that there is less clarity than one might expect.

But perhaps not. Consider what historian Elizabeth Lunbeck has to say about the nature of narcissism in the introduction to her book The Americanization of Narcissism: Generations of commentators, lamenting narcissism’s paradoxes and capaciousness, have tried to narrow its referents and settle, once and for all, its meaning.

Narcissism’s protean nature, however, has proven as much a resource as a liability, and the concept has become too ubiquitous, and culturally and clinically useful, to submit to assiduous boundary policing….Narcissism has always been simultaneously pathological and normal, and debates over selfishness, hedonism, and vanity have not arisen out of the idea of narcissism but, rather, are among the oldest questions we have asked ourselves.

(2014, pp.6-7).

So, at least as Lunbeck sees it (without giving references to those generations of commentators), narcissism is a concept that gets used in lots of different ways. Today, it is used almost constantly to attack Donald Trump. As we will see, the term is used quite differently again in Lunbeck’s history of 1970s social criticism, in the work of Christopher Lasch (1979/1991; 1984), and again in Kate Schechter’s study of developments in the history of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Illusions of a Future (2014).

Why narcissism would be used in so many different ways is an interesting question—one I hope to address in what follows. Before doing

J. Todd DEAN

so, however, I would like to revisit the source of the confusion, Narcissus himself.

As described in Book 3 of The Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8 AD/2004), Narcissus is a hunter who wants all the people who chase after him to leave him alone—something inconceivable for Trump. It is not until he sees his own reflection that he does the same thing Echo and his myriad other admirers have done, becoming completely infatuated with an image.

Like Echo, he dies for love of what he sees but can never touch (and why can’t he touch himself, we may reasonably ask—everybody else can). It will be remembered that Narcissus’s mother, Liriope, consulted the blind seer Tiresias to ask if her son, “already adorable” as he was being born (Ovid, 8 AD/2004, p.109, l.345), would have a long life. She was told he would, so long as he never knows himself (p.109, l.348). Later, a frustrated wouldbe lover prays that “Narcissus may fall in love and never obtain his desire!” (p.112, ll.405-6).

“His prayer was just,” we are told, “and Nemesis heard it.” When the beautiful boy finally stumbles on his own image and realizes that he cannot have what he sees, he cries, “I know you now and I know myself. Yes, I am the cause of the fire inside me, the fuel that burns and the flame that lights it./What can I do? Must I woo or be wooed? What else can I plead for?/All I desire I have. My wealth has left me a pauper.”(p.115, ll.463-6).

It is clear that Ovid’s Narcissus is nothing like Donald Trump. Furthermore, it would be a stretch to say he meets any of the criteria of the DSM personality disorder that bears his name, which is rather strange.

Thus, Narcissus is not at all what the DSM-5 tells us a narcissist is today (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p.327), with a “grandiose sense of self-importance” and a requirement for “excessive admiration”; rather, he is completely unaware of himself, even to the point of not recognizing his image as his own. He knows what moves him and what he wants, but does not see it as relating to him in any way; consequently, he has all he desires, but he can’t enjoy any of it. Christopher Lasch observes (1984, p.19) that “it is this confusion of the self and the not-self—not ‘egoism’—that distinguishes the plight of Narcissus.” So Lasch, at least, has some sense of how the myth works. We are still left with the question: what brought the story of Narcissus to be associated with the egoistic epithet that is so ubiquitous in the pages of The New York Times, at least since November 2016?

This confusion of Narcissus and the self-satisfied egoist is not a recent phenomenon, dating back at least to the later 19th century: Näcke, as reported by Freud, first uses the term “narcissism” in a psychiatric context 4

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to “denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated— who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities” (Freud, 1914/1957, p.73). This is striking because this is precisely what did not happen for Narcissus—he could never even figure out that the image he saw in the water corresponded to his own person; besides which, he never got sexual gratification at all, contra Näcke’s narcissist.

It does not help clarify matters that in this text, Freud uses “narcissism” to describe different types of people in very different ways: does the narcissism of the psychotic, for example, relate to the narcissism of a woman or a homosexual, a person suffering from toothache (p.82), or a parent (p.91)?

However, given all the confusion that surrounds the definition of narcissism, perhaps Freud’s lack of clarity is the most judicious way to approach the problem.

Well before Freud developed a theory of narcissism, he was dealing with something very similar to the problem of Ovid’s Narcissus, I believe: a tension between how aware one is of oneself and what the subject of psychoanalysis is. Simply by labeling the conscious part of the subject “the I” (das Ich), he was making the point that “I” experience myself as what “I” am, even though there is a great deal more to the human subject than that self-awareness.

Just as Ovid was making light of the Greek injunction to “know thyself” in describing the seer’s prediction to Liriope, Freud recognizes the problematics of self-knowledge at least from the time of his Project, where he first refers to the conscious self as “the I.” But again, this was not a particularly new idea by the time Freud was writing to Fliess. To take only one example of the questioning of self-awareness, there is one of Freud’s favorite writers, Nietzsche, for whom self-knowledge is an endlessly problematic idea: hardly a passage of The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 1887/1974) does not at least elliptically address the issue. Or consider the other father of modernity, Marx, who early in his career confronts the problematics of the subject. Eagleton summarizes an element of Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach: “…to know yourself in a new way is to alter yourself in that very act; so we have here a peculiar form of cognition in which the act of knowing alters what it contemplates. In trying to understand myself and my condition, I can never remain quite identical with myself, since the self which is doing the understanding, as well as the self understood, are now different from what they were before.” (1999, p.4). Marx, like Nietzsche, Freud, and Lasch,

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understands that self-knowledge is always problematic, and it is problematic in ways that, at least since the 19th century, we have come to think of as narcissistic.

I would suggest that one of Freud’s most attentive readers, Jean Laplanche, captures most succinctly the problem of narcissism for psychoanalysis: “What is at stake here, in Freud’s hesitations”—the various starts and stops Freud applies to this notion of narcissism—Laplanche (1970/1976, p.74) notes, in a chapter on “The Ego and Narcissism,” “is, in fact, the actually ambiguous status of the ego: the ego, even though it is a reservoir of the libido cathecting it, can appear to be a source; it is not the subject of desire or wishes, nor even the site in which the drive originates… but it can pass itself off as such.” Like Narcissus, Freud’s ego thinks it has everything figured out: it is simply a matter of what one (correction: one’s ego) knows. Then something else happens and the certainty is lost.

So why don’t we call the study of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche “Narcissism Studies”?

Had I never read The Americanization of Narcissism (Lunbeck, 2014) and Illusions of a Future (Schechter, 2014), I might never have asked myself that question. Reading Lunbeck and Schechter’s works, however, I found myself returning several times to questions of how and why we use the concept of narcissism in the way we do.

Elizabeth Lunbeck’s The Americanization of Narcissism (2014) was widely reviewed when first published in non-academic journals like Bookforum, The New Yorker, Boston Review and others (Accocella, 2014; Camp, 2014; Gornick, 2014; Scialabba, 2014; Tumber, 2014). The author was interviewed in The New Republic (Robb, 2014), and also released a YouTube video in which she discusses the book. I was struck by this, because there is no other academic monograph focused on psychoanalysis I know of that has achieved such public recognition outside the academy. The book also won a prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the 2015 Courage to Dream award.

Lunbeck approaches the topic of narcissism from a very specific perspective: a critique of the way American social critics in the 1970s used the concept as it was being reworked by psychoanalysts, especially Kohut and Kernberg. She introduces her book by first describing the way she perceives those social critics: It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists. Greedy, selfish, and self-absorbed, we narcissists are thriving, the critics tell us, in the culture of abundance that is modern, late-capitalist America. The disciplined, patriarchal Victorianism under which our stalwart

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forebears were raised has purportedly given way to a culture that asks nothing of us while at the same time promising to satisfy our every desire. (p.1) and then explains the relationship of these critics to developments in psychoanalytic thinking in the American Psychoanalytic Association: Critics might never have latched on to the term and its meanings if not for the appearance of path breaking works on narcissism, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the Viennese émigré analysts Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, which generated both excitement and fierce controversy among psychoanalysts. Celebrating what others condemned, Kohut boldly reframed narcissism as a desirable, even healthy, dimension of mature selfhood. He consistently underscored narcissism’s positive aspects, arguing that it fueled individuals’ ambitions, creativity, and fellow-feeling…(p.3) As noted above, Lunbeck comments that narcissism means too many different things, in too many different contexts, to have a clear and clearly agreed-upon meaning. At the same time, it is too important to not be a focus of a great deal of attention. This seems to me a very striking observation, but it is also one that Lunbeck never develops further, so

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that we are left with the question, why should this be so? Also, from the beginning of her book it is clear that Lunbeck is raising another question: is narcissism a problem for society, or is it something more problematic than pathological, and, therefore, merely misunderstood by the social critics who decry it, rather than being a source of difficulty for the culture at large? From the ways she talks about the various approaches to narcissism of the social critics she is concerned with, especially Christopher Lasch, and the rethinking of narcissism she attributes to Kohut and Kernberg, it would appear that she sees narcissism more as a good thing than otherwise.

But that doesn’t really address the paradoxes she describes at the beginning and at various points throughout her monograph: what makes narcissism impossible both to define and to ignore? And is it a real problem, or just a question of one’s perspective?

Related, I believe, to these questions, is another one: what made it important to write this book now? It is a very pointed study of a trend in criticism of American society that became most prominent during the presidency of Jimmy Carter (described by Lunbeck as “part culture critic, part preacher-in-chief” [ p.13] because of his “malaise” speech), juxtaposed with a very detailed report on some developments in theorizing within the American Psychoanalytic Association that were going on in the same decade. Both of these have long since become old news: the influence of Lasch’s thought on public discourse since the appearance of his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism (1979) is close to nil, as one reviewer of this book noted (Camp, 2014); furthermore, it is hard to imagine that many people outside the world of clinical psychoanalysis have an interest in developments in the field, especially almost forty years after the fact. So why even go there?

Reading with these questions in mind, I found myself thinking of how the concept of narcissism is used by the various players in the book. In this regard, Lunbeck’s description of Freud’s use of the term troubled me. For him, the author states, a healthy self was one “without needs” (p.114), while psychoanalysis began as “a severe science of man” ( p.49). In fact, per Lunbeck, “Psychoanalysis at its inception had valorized independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom from needs, the same values Lasch was promoting in the 1970s” (p.114). I confess to being surprised to learn that that is what early psychoanalysis valorized. More surprisingly, I was struck by Lunbeck’s accusation that Freud, in his conceptualization of “primary narcissism,” did not recognize a distinction between fantasy and reality in his depiction of “the infant as omnipotent in its majestic independence, its narcissism expressed in its autoerotic love of self….Construing infancy as a state of sovereignty, [analysts] consistently

blurred lines between fantasy (the infant as independent) and social relations (the infant as perforce dependent)...” (p.114). She contrasts this with Kohut and Kernberg, who both make this distinction.

This all has to come as a surprise to anyone who has studied the texts in question, because there is no doubt that Freud understood that primary narcissism was a fantasy of power, not a claim of fact, and that even among the dimmest of his followers, then or now, whatever controversies there were concerning the nature of primary narcissism—after all, the infans is not telling us how powerful she feels——nobody was making the claim that the child is or should really be “without needs,” though Lunbeck goes on to express incredulity at this misconception for a few more pages. Further, it is confusing how Lunbeck understands this: on the one hand, Freud, she says, is making the category mistake of treating a fantasy of omnipotence as a reality.

At the same time, she seems to be saying, as noted above, that Freud “valorizes” this independence. It is entirely unclear from this what she is conveying that Freud is saying about primary narcissism: is it a fantasy of independence that he wishes were true but really is not, or is it a reality that he “valorizes”?

Throughout this section, the author ties Lasch and those 70s social critics to these “classical” analytical positions. On the very next page, after making these confusing claims about what Freud said about primary narcissism, she asserts that

On the other side are “consumer society,” Heinz Kohut, and Otto Kernberg. At no point in her text does Lunbeck clarify how the socialist critique of late capitalism as presented

by Lasch, or any other of the social critics she discusses, is also a denial of “desire and fantasy, wants and needs.”

The way Lunbeck uses the concept of narcissism here is worth looking at in some detail. Per her reading, it is either a “Victorian” denigration of contemporary society or a healthy expression of “desire and fantasy, wants and needs.” I.e., there is nothing in the concept of narcissism that is inherently a problem, except that thinking makes it so.

She has made the entire issue of consumerism merely a matter of point of view: to Victorians like Freud and Lasch, consumerism is morally opprobrious; to the more enlightened, for whom narcissism is not an inherently bad thing, it is the means to freedom.

Consider the way in which, in the chapter on “gratification” (Lunbeck, 2014, pp.164-201), she links a certain technical recommendation and developmental argument in Kohut’s work to the social criticism of Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979/1991). After going in great detail through a reading of issues related to the clinical theory of narcissism, she moves on to a discussion of Kohut’s developmental theory of “optimal frustration” and the developmental and clinical theory of gratification that arose from that work. Immediately afterwards, she relates her summary of Kohut with the main theme of her book:

Lasch and his fellow social critics adopted this Freudian fantasy of the self without needs to condemn what they argued was a ubiquitous, feminized dependency threatening the body politic. The critics’ indictment gained force as they joined it to a critique of consumer society structured around a profound distrust of desire and fantasy, wants and needs (p.115).

Me-Decade cultural critics associated narcissism with bottomless greed and blissful gratification, largely unaware that asceticism figured importantly in Freudian orthodoxy. Philip Rieff, Daniel Bell, and others lamented that asceticism as a cultural ideal had disappeared… (p.194)

Here, as in her introduction to the text, Lunbeck links the critique of narcissism to the economic structure of contemporary society.

But here, as also in her introduction, she does not address that link: what does “consumer society” or “late-capitalist America” have to do with narcissism?

I would like to suggest that here we start to get an answer to at least one of the questions I raised earlier: why write this book now? Lunbeck is lining up opposing sides in a conflict that has not really been defined: on the one side are “classical” analysts—chief among them Freud—who are committed to a way of seeing healthy people as totally “independent,” which would seem to mean even in infancy, strange as that seems. Aligned with this position are the social critics of the 1970s who, per Lunbeck, share these views.

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She quickly makes the point that Lasch, who references Kohut in his own work, gets him completely wrong, radically misunderstanding the whole point of the theory of “optimal frustration.” She footnotes her argument by stating, “Lasch’s tendentiousness can be glimpsed in his confident assertion that love of the child ‘came to be regarded not as a danger but as a positive duty’” (Lunbeck, 2014, p.330). This would indeed appear to be an obnoxious and wrong-headed take on the concept of “optimal frustration.” However, in looking up the reference in Lasch’s book, it is hard not to see Lunbeck’s use of it here as misleading. The line she quotes, which is 10 pages from the closest reference to Kohut, is part of a discussion of the development of “experts” in childrearing in the early decades of the twentieth century. As Lasch describes it, the growth of the “science” of childrearing was a consequence of the growing force of

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capitalism. The movement from an effort to remove parents from the picture entirely to one that favored “permissiveness” was his focus in this comment. Further, he explains his arguments in terms of the work of Hilde Baruch, a child analyst, pointing out that she grasped the social and cultural transformation that has made science the handmaiden of industry—in this case, psychiatry the handmaiden of advertising, which enlists psychiatry in the attempt to exploit “parents’ desires to do right by their children.” By keeping parents in a state of chronic anxiety, psychiatry thus frustrates desires that advertising can then claim to satisfy. (Lasch, 1979/1991, p.164) What is most striking in this is not simply that Lunbeck has misrepresented Lasch’s point, but she has done so in a way that completely ignores his larger argument: the problem with narcissism is not simply a matter of the definition of the concept or of tolerance of difference—how “ascetic” or “Victorian” one expects normal people to be—but is intimately connected to social issues. Also, he is tying narcissism to the question of what one knows: in this example, psychiatry has disturbed the self-understanding of parents, so that they are drawn to buy things to help them learn how to be better parents.

More striking still is the argument Lunbeck makes regarding the relation of gratification and capitalism immediately after she has introduced the Me-Decade social critics in this. In particular, when she juxtaposes a critique by Daniel Bell (“’The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification,’ he wrote” [Lunbeck, 2014, p.195]) with the argument of “the adman Ernest Dichter”: Dichter had, in 1960, made much the same point, arguing that the “economy would literally collapse overnight” were people to restrict themselves to fulfilling “immediate and necessary needs.” Dichter updated Thorstein Veblen’s work, suggesting that the gratification, thrill, and enjoyment to be found in using products ranging from cars to golf clubs to dictating machines, not their value as status symbols, accounted for their irresistible attraction to consumers. Where else but the marketplace would individuals experience satisfactions as intense as those afforded by the “first few minutes” with your new television and the first ten minutes driving your new car? Such pleasures, he argued, were unequaled, never again to be duplicated in the course of life. (Lunbeck, 2014, p.195) I found this argument confusing, but also relevant to two questions I raised earlier. First,

it seems clear that Bell and Lasch, as reported by Lunbeck, are making a claim for a kind of problem that they are calling by the name “narcissism” that involves the consumption of goods that are not necessary for life, but which support this economy; by way of contrast, Lunbeck is arguing, with the help of the adman Ernest Dichter, that the pursuit of satisfaction through the enjoyment of consumer goods is not really a problem at all. (Except that the satisfaction does not seem to last very long—a matter of minutes, in these examples. But that is a problem for the consumer, per Dichter, not capitalism; indeed, the brevity of the enjoyment ensures that the consumer will soon buy more cars and televisions.) Veblen’s theory of planned obsolescence—which is not elaborated further in Lunbeck’s discussion—assumed that the goal of the leisure class was to enhance prestige with ever-newer Things (Veblen, 1899/1994); Dichter makes the point that this isn’t really the case, per Lunbeck: it’s not prestige people are after, it’s enjoyment. This would appear to mean, then, that the problem is not consumerism, but the idea that enjoyment, as opposed to prestige, is morally opprobrious. To Bell, keeping capitalism going as it was in the 1970s would appear to be a bad thing; to Dichter, it is best for the commonweal that we all enjoy life as unselfconscious consumers, because that is how capitalism is maintained: there is no problem in pursuing an enjoyment, as opposed to a prestige. So we are back to the question I raised earlier: is there a problem in the world, regardless of what we name it, or is the problem that Bell and Lasch and the other social critics Lunbeck presents in her book. are just looking at things from an antiquated perspective? Lunbeck and Dichter’s argument here is based on the self-image of the consumer: I’m excited not because I have prestige, but because I’m enjoying myself. Here, again, the focus is entirely on how one sees the image of the happy consumer; there is no sense of anything beyond the question of the image.

Indeed, reading Lunbeck, one could be forgiven for assuming the social critics she is describing were political and social conservatives of the highest order. She does mention that their critique is related to concerns about capitalism, but she does not say anything about what, specifically, that concern is. She goes to great lengths to critique Lasch’s arguments about authority in the family, for example, but never relates these to his larger point regarding capital, as outlined in the discussion of family planning I describe above. One could easily imagine that the most likely place to find these guys in the 1970s, after reading Lunbeck, would be standing next to Phyllis Schlafly at an anti-Equal Rights Amendment rally or at a Reagan fundraiser. The fact that social conservatism is not the point of the critiques presented—that Lasch even refers to socialism as a positive force (1979/1991, 7

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pp.205-6; 232ff.)—is never mentioned.

It is striking that Lunbeck sets up the contrast between Lasch and psychoanalytic authority for another reason: American psychoanalysis in the 1970s was a medical subspecialty. For a cultural critic like Lasch to hold forth on narcissism—a medical diagnosis—was tantamount to a physical education teacher diagnosing heart failure. This brings in an entire medical focus that is not obviously relevant when one reads Lasch. For example, Lunbeck makes the point that “Kernberg rejected the Laschian notion that society could produce narcissism…” (2014, p.69), and does not really address the issue of cultural influence again. Not only might there be a lot more to say on the question of the influence of culture on the personality, but the point driven home is that such influence is irrelevant. Even in what she quotes from Kernberg, there is not a wholesale rejection of the idea that cultural forces may influence the expression of a psychiatric problem; rather, the psychiatrist makes the claim that cultural influence cannot cause the problem that would not have existed otherwise. Since Lunbeck does not reference a response to that claim

by Lasch, we do not know if he would have argued this point.

Time and again, the “Me-Decade social critics” she is writing about are dismissed in this way. Again, if they are so hopeless, why talk about them at all? And if they have some substance, even if there is something debatable in what they write, why not flesh it out more? In this example, of course, to dismiss the role of culture in the expression of narcissism is to dismiss the critique of capitalism on which the argument is based. But it is clear throughout the book that Lasch has no chance: the whole point of the book is that Lasch is irrelevant.

By the time we get to the concluding chapter of the book, it is not hard to make a case for how Lunbeck (2014) is using narcissism when she quotes The New York Times columnist David Brooks, who lamented “that ‘grandiosity is out of style’”: Collectively chastened by a financial crisis that was “fueled by people who got too big for their britches,” Brooks argues that we have traded boldness for caution, and calls for “a grandiosity rebound” to encourage the unpleasant, “ridiculously ambitious” people who can revive the nation’s once-formidable prosperity. “Most of all,” he writes in a challenge to the Laschians still among us, “there has to be a culture that gives two cheers to grandiosity,” even as he highlights the character flaws and limitations of the grandiose. Bold and creative, ruthless and soulless: Brooks’ cultural ideal, the entrepreneurial wizard as twenty-first-century narcissist, “has the vices of his virtues”. (Lunbeck, 2014, p.253)

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Brooks (2012) was of course lamenting the aftereffects of the global recession of 20072008. This is the only place in her argument where Lunbeck mentions the financial crisis, but the existence of the financial crisis does offer an answer to my earlier question, why this book would be written now. She goes on to praise as model narcissists specifically Steve Jobs and Jack Welch. Here at the end, again, the point seems to be mostly that something can be thought of as a problem by people like Lasch, but really not be a problem at all. The “narcissistic” pursuit of pleasure is inextricably bound up in Lunbeck and Brooks’ reading with extreme wealth—but is it a problem, or is it just progress? “Progress is a moral judgement by a creature that loves to regard itself in the mirror” observes Paul Verhaeghe (2012/2014, p.60), and one may infinitely rethink one’s judgments.

But this is also a great example of how one may “use” narcissism. In this sense, Lunbeck’s book is an example of what Lasch and Ovid would call narcissistic, precisely because it is entirely focused on image. There is no problem addressed in the book that is not simply a matter of how one looks at it: that the “grandiosity,” as Brooks calls it, of the wealthy and ruthless may have played a part in the Great Recession is not relevant to Lunbeck’s argument. In the end, Lunbeck simply assumes that “healthy narcissism” is a characteristic of those who are most successful in the neoliberal economy simply because they are the most successful. Several times she makes the claim that Steve Jobs and Jack Welsh et al., the “ridiculously grand,” as Brooks (Lunbeck, 2014, quoted p.254) called them, “are necessary,” without questioning why that is so. It is the image of the wildly successful that proves their necessity for the rest of us. However, Paul Verhaeghe, in his own recent study of narcissism and late capitalism (again, it is striking how these two topics seem to come together these days), discusses research that provides evidence that “[t]oo much economic inequality leads to a loss of respect, including self-respect—and, in psychosocial terms, this is about the worst thing that can happen to anyone” (2012/2014, p.198). So, it would seem that there really is a problem at some level. Image is not everything.

Kate Schechter’s Illusions of a Future (2014), published in the same year as Lunbeck’s book, also won the Courage to Dream prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, though her work did not elicit the interest of the non-specialist media that Lunbeck’s received. Even in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, where it was reviewed in tandem with Lunbeck (Munich, 2016), Schechter’s book was cursorily dismissed (Carlson, 2016), while Lunbeck’s was viewed much more favorably. While Illusions of a Future is not a study of narcissism as

such, it is very much concerned with the ways that psychoanalytic theory, and especially the theory of narcissism, is used. Schechter, a medical anthropologist by training, was a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where this research was centered. While her focus is quite different from Lunbeck’s, a subtext of both books is the way theorizing and conceptualizing narcissism influences, and is influenced by, the larger issues raised in their respective works, be it the history of the 1970s in the USA or the fortunes of a large and storied psychoanalytic institute.

The ways in which this motif is developed, however, could hardly be more different.

Schechter announces the thesis of her work thus: This book examines the development of the analyst-patient relationship as an occult object, a professional artifact that psychoanalysts at once disavow and espouse. I suggest that today’s psychoanalysts, in their effort to transcend their fears of irrelevance, play on the real relationship in a way that ends up heightening that very irrelevance. In effect, I argue, in seeking to resolve a conundrum that is central to their practice, in seeking to maintain themselves as psychoanalysts when they cannot practice what they define as psychoanalysis, they trade the real relationship against disciplinary failure.

(Schechter, 2014, p.2) As I understand her point, Schechter is arguing that clinical psychoanalytic theory is molded in large part by the cultural context in which the practice occurs—specifically, a context in which psychoanalysis is increasingly seen as irrelevant—rather than by the progressive development of a science that more typically informs the narrative of how psychoanalytic theory has developed over the years.

Schechter also makes a claim for the specificity of psychoanalysis that seems to address observations about its ambiguity, such as Lunbeck’s description of how narcissism is defined, discussed above, or Kravis’s (2013) discussion of the analyst’s hatred of the ambiguity of analysis. Here, Schechter seems almost to be directly addressing Lunbeck’s observations on the ambiguous nature of narcissism a few pages on in her introduction, when she makes a note of “the intensification under neoliberalism of psychoanalysis’s problematic undecidability” (p.8). For Lunbeck, the ambiguity of narcissism is a timeless feature of its existence; for Schechter, the “undecidability” of psychoanalysis is a product of its place in contemporary culture, not something inherent in psychoanalysis itself. She goes on to argue, in contrast to many critics of psychoanalysis, like Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose, but also and for entirely different reasons in contrast to Lunbeck, that 8

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the rationalization of psychoanalysis over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century presents a unique biopolitical trajectory precisely because of the centrality of forces and forms of disruption, both psychic and social, to the Freudian problematic: the negative, the death drive, ambivalence, the unconscious id, the repetition compulsion, the uncanny, the “beyond” (as in beyond the pleasure principle). It is the reflexive, disruptive tendency of psychoanalysis that distinguishes its rationalization from those processes of rationalization in other professions caught up in the shifts in governance characteristic of postmodernity. (pp.9-10) This is the most central point of the book. For Schechter, psychoanalysis is a legitimate discourse because it is disruptive of the “shifts of governance” characteristic of other discourses in our time. Further, this speaks to the disruptive nature of Ovid’s Narcissus story. It is a story about the failure of knowledge, which was also Lasch’s point when writing about narcissism. Ovid turns Plato’s injunction to “know thyself ” on its head. Importantly, this is a very different kind of ambiguity from that proposed by Lunbeck. The psychoanalytic project, per Schechter, is specifically about the problematics of self-knowledge.

And this is something that the neoliberal order would rather go away.

Consider, as one rather obvious example, the idea of defining emotional suffering by a series of “yes/no” answers to questions about symptoms—that is, by using the DSM as it exists today. This approach to mental health privileges a strategy for dealing with and understanding this emotional suffering in a way that inevitably satisfies the requirements of late capitalism: anything that gets in the way of the efficient workings of consumerism can be disposed of simply by changing a few answers on a checklist of symptoms.

Verhaeghe’s discussion of the logic behind the symptom checklist model of the DSM (2012/2014, pp.183-196), with its brilliant use of an analogy between the DSM model of diagnostics and the idea of diagnosing medical problems entirely as symptoms (e.g., “high fever” and “excessive sweating” as symptoms on a checklist), shows how the dominant model of psychiatric diagnosis obviates any awareness of a more complicated problem, be it the impact of extreme income inequality on mental health or the vicissitudes of life experience and unconscious fantasy in creating the symptom. In other words, the DSM is conceptually much more in the service of the economic status quo than it is in the service of any meaningful concept of mental health. As a psychiatric intern in the late 1980s, I was assigned a patient on the geriatric psychiatric ward whose symptom of loss of pleasure, or “anhedonia”—one of

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the cardinal features of the DSM-III-R diagnosis of major depression—was that, after years of sitting in the living room and doing nothing but watching television, she had stopped turning on the television. The fact that watching television was all this person had done for years, or other possible implications of her failure (sic) to continue doing so, was irrelevant to the assessment of this person’s condition. It also made a solution to her problem straightforward: we just had to get her to turn the TV on again.

From this perspective, the very idea of fitting in with the medical and scientific world as it exists today is highly problematic for a field that depends on its capacity to be disruptive—of the governance of society or of the individual ego—such as psychoanalysis at its inception undoubtedly was. So how can one be both a mental health professional, compelled by the rules of the profession to use the nosology and theoretical bases of our time, and a psychoanalyst? “How and why,” Schechter asks (p.21), “in the face of a broad corporate-state-consumer demand for rationalization and accountability in health care [i.e., in the face of the demand for “evidence-based practice”] does a community of psychoanalytic practice and argumentation inhabit and expand on its own contrary demands, desires, fantasies and fetishes?” As Schechter shows us, in her several interviews with practicing psychoanalysts, it ain’t easy.

Schechter’s book is organized around these interviews. Each of her interlocutors acknowledges that there is a “crisis” in the profession, a crisis that has only grown since the 1970s—which fact makes for an interesting temporal connection to Lunbeck’s book. But, while everybody is agreed that there is a crisis, both of medical/scientific/cultural relevance and of financial viability for practitioners, there is a very wide range of ideas about what the crisis actually is. Thus, for some, it is the de-medicalization of psychoanalysis as a consequence of the lawsuit against the American Psychoanalytic Association that forced the issue of training non-physicians that led to the crisis; for others, it is the failure of psychoanalysis as a profession to provide empirical evidence of its validity that is the problem.

The main focus of Schechter’s attention is a questioning of these various arguments for why the crisis exists, and how they have been used by the clinicians who make them, emphasizing the ways in which the theorizing of psychoanalysis responds to the crisis in analytic practice.

After describing the distinction between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that was formulated by the ego psychologists who were dominant in the CIP in the 1970s (pp.41-46), Schechter observes that “it began to appear during that era as though the medical monopoly that underwrote

psychoanalytic exclusivity was, in effect, putting psychoanalysis out of business” (p.48).

This happened, she argues, because analysis had a very precise (if completely circular) definition: it was the purely interpretive treatment of patients who were defined as analyzable. Further, this definition was very compatible with a “hierarchical” division of mental health labor, with psychiatrists at the top of the hierarchy. As Jonathan Lear has observed (1998, p.18), “In the short run, this

with the increasing scarcity of analytic patients. This in turn created a new problem for the theory of analysis, as it went from rigidly defined to something else—a something else that became increasingly “undecidable”.

Talking with one of her interviewees who describes herself as relationalist in her theoretical orientation, Schechter asks “In terms of how you think about analysis… what is not analysis?” (p.69). “That’s a good question” is the response, followed by “I guess if you put

Bubble Guy

[division of labor] allowed the psychoanalytic profession to take advantage of the powerful positive transference which the American public extended to doctors through most of [the twentieth] century.” Over time, the definition of who was analyzable and what was an appropriate analytic intervention became much less straightforward, pari passu 9

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it that way I can’t think of anything.” Like Lunbeck’s description of narcissism as completely amorphous, analysis itself becomes infinitely malleable. It can be anything. And, of course, a given analysis can last forever, as long as the analysand comes to at least four sessions per week. But in the process, what Schechter sees as the “specificity” of

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psychoanalysis, its role as a disruptive discourse, is completely lost.

It is important to note that Schechter is not arguing for the superiority of the pre-1970s model of clinical practice at the Chicago Institute. In noting, for example, that “In the era of the success of psychoanalysis, top psychoanalysts like [Maxwell] Gitelson had not needed the patient, either economically or (they believed) psychically” (p.177), she points out another “pitfall of the business of getting a living”, a phrase she quotes from the anthropologist Edward Sapir (p.69). The Chicago Institute was set up to maximize an idealization of the master analyst, a procedure that was highly favorable to pecuniary gain, at least for said masters, but one that was also not obviously more relevant to the “specifics” of the psychoanalytic enterprise than were subsequent theoretical developments. At the same time, the fact of the organizational hierarchy had enormous and unexamined effects on the process of psychoanalysis itself. The implications of this for analytic practice as described in Schechter’s work were profound.

Schechter concludes her book with a chapter entitled “On Narcissism,” in which she describes a trajectory of psychoanalytic theory from ego psychology to relationalism that maps onto a trajectory of analytic practice from social prestige and financial success to cultural irrelevance and less obvious material success. In the process, the analyst’s view of himself is the hidden motivation, she argues, for how practices develop: so long as the patient needs the analyst, the analyst is sufficient unto himself, with no need for the patient; when the patient does not need the analyst—and has to be “converted”, no less, to participate in an analysis—the analyst’s self is much more vulnerable. It is in the context of the fall in prestige of psychoanalysis that more than one of Schechter’s interlocutors describes their own sense of narcissistic injury.

This analytic self has, over time, become minimal, to borrow from a Christopher Lasch title (1984). In the process, the analyst has had to abandon more and more of the specificity of psychoanalysis, until finally he has had to practice in a way that merges more and more with the dominant market culture—exactly what Lasch argued happens to minimal selves under consumerism, as a matter of fact.

Schechter sums up her work thus: As a means of governing risk up close, the real relationship is an indigenous insurance policy that makes the analyst’s vulnerability seem manageable, calculable; it is a way of spreading risk and doing so on the analyst’s own theoretical terms. If neoliberal subjectivation blends distinctions between love, work, politics, and life itself, it is through such intimate, risky relationships that psychoanalysts, dreaming of security,

come to imagine their world as one of uncommodified “real” care, their affective labor as a form of sociality that is prudentially able to calculate quasi-familial, “real” dependencies. I have suggested, then, that this charged relationship emerges into view in a compensatory embrace of the very neoliberal logics of accountability that lead the desiring professional to remove the sexual, the drive, the unconscious, and the paternal law of desire from psychoanalysis, mutating it in a series of self-referential, self-authorizing labors of coordination with audit culture’s ideology of the preferred provider. (2014, pp.185-186) It’s not a pretty picture. If this is how psychoanalysis goes, then maybe it is an illusion to imagine it has a future. That being said, it seems implicit in her entire discussion that there is a way forward that is not so illusory: to simply do the “specific” work of psychoanalysis in a way that is cognizant of and consciously resistant to the forces that have decimated psychoanalysis since the 1970s.

This would be a bold and challenging move, but it would be consistent with the role that psychoanalysis had (and continues to have, in some situations) as a creative and disruptive force in the lives of our patients and in the culture at large.

Schechter ends her book by quoting one of her interview subjects in a way that is both more hopeful for a future and more specific to what psychoanalysis is: “‘It is reasonable,’ he said, ‘to expect that the fact that we are discussing the vicissitudes of narcissism will be most helpful in working through the narcissistic issues involved in the process of discussion’” (p.187).

Liriope was told that Narcissus would have a long life so long as he did not know himself. More than Ovid taking a crack at Plato, this speaks to a profound truth exemplified in both The Americanization of Narcissism and Illusions of a Future: narcissism becomes a problem when the world, including our place in it, does not meet our (narcissistic) expectations. Both books address periods of uncertainty in self-understanding, whether at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis or in the larger world of 1970s America. In both situations, how people understand themselves and their world has reached a crisis, as also happened in a different way after the Great Recession, when these books were being written. The differences in the way the two authors address the problematics of knowing oneself are instructive. I would suggest that the distinction between the “ambiguous” nature of Lunbeck’s narcissism and the “specificity” of Schechter’s psychoanalytic focus defines the distinction in the way these authors use the concept. For Lunbeck, narcissism pushes the neoliberal economy forward, as did Jobs and Welch: it’s just a question of how 10

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we look at it. For Schechter, it is the mark of our hopeless lack of self-awareness. Where does psychoanalysis as a clinical establishment stand between these two perspectives?

As Robert Creeley (1991) has it: God knows nothing is competent nothing is all there is. The unsure egoist is not good for himself.

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REFERENCES Accocella, J. (2014, May 12). Selfie. The New Yorker, 77-81.

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Brooks, D. (2012, September 21). Temerity at the to p.The New York Times, p.A29.

Camp, J. (2014). The Americanization of narcissism by Elizabeth Lunbeck. Bookforum. Retrieved from http://www. bookforum.com/review/13398 Carlson, D. (2016). Review: Illusions of a future: Psychoanalysis and the biopolitics of desire. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 64/1, 245-249.

Creeley, R. (1991). The immoral proposition. In Selected Poems. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Dodes, L. (2017, February 13). Mental health professionals warn about Trump. The New York Times, p.A26.

Eagleton, T. (1999). Marx. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2003). “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (David Macey, Trans.). New York, NY: Picador. (Original work published 1976) Frances, A. (2017, February 14). An eminent psychiatrist demurs on Trump’s mental state. The New York Times, p.A26.

Freud, S. (1957). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 14, pp.67-102).

London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914) Gornick, V. (2014). In defense of narcissism. Retrieved from https://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/vivian -gornick-defense-narcissism-elizabeth-lunbeck-christopher-lasch-feminism Kravis, N. (2013). The analyst’s hatred of analysis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXXII, 89-114.

Laplanche, J. (1976). Life and death in psychoanalysis (Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. (Original work published 1970) Lasch, C. (1991). The culture of narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations. New York, NY: Norton.

(Original work published 1979) Lasch, C. (1984). The minimal self: Psychic survival in troubled times. New York, NY: Norton.

Lear, J. (1998). Open minded: Working out the logic of the soul.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Lunbeck, E. (2014). The Americanization of narcissism.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Munich, R. L. (2016). Review: The Americanization of narcissism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 64/1, 250-252.

Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1887) Ovid. (2004). Metamorphoses: A new verse translation (David Raeburn, Trans.). London, UK: Penguin Books. (Original work published 8 AD) Robb, A. (2014, February 25). A little narcissism is good for you. New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic. com/article/116748/americanization-narcissism-author-elizabeth-lunbeck-interview Schechter, K. (2014). Illusions of a future: psychoanalysis and the biopolitics of desire. Durham, NC: Duke.

Scialabba, G. (2014). The weak self: Christopher Lasch on narcissism. Retrieved from https://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/george -scialabba-vivian -gornick-christopher-lasch-narcissism Tumber, C. (2014, May 14). Dispatch from the narcissism wars. The Baffler. Retrieved from http://thebaffler.com/blog/ dispatch-from-the-narcissism-wars Veblen, T. (1994). The theory of the leisure class. N. Chelmsford, MA: Courier. (Original work published 1899) Verhaeghe, P. (2014). What about me?: The struggle for identity in a market-based economy (Jane Hedley-Prole, Trans.).

Brunswick, Australia: Scribe. (Original work published 2012)

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Talk to Me

Bettina MATHES

A delight to receive the book in mail: the muted yet bright red color, handsome format (17 x 24 cm) and velvety softness of the hard (but not

the the the too

Sigmund Freud’s Desk: An Anecdoted Guide

By Ro Spankie London, UK: Freud Museum, 176pp., £15, 2015 ISBN 978-0-948-687-36-5. hard) cover appeal to the touch and the eye. Pleasure! The clean modernist design and the high quality photographic reproductions appeal to the art historian in me.

Satisfaction! I am grateful that the Freud Museum reconsidered its initial offer to send a PDF of the book for review. That much is certain; Ro Spankie’s book is a beautiful object to place on my desk.

This book about one of the most famous desks of the 20th century and the 65 individual objects placed on it immediately arouses interest—not only among psychoanalysts. Freud’s Desk offers spectacular close-ups of the items most visitors to the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, UK have only seen in passing, or from afar: the family of antique figurines (39 of them), his ashtrays, matchholder, nail file, toothbrush, magnifying glass, pen, penbox, notepad, and spectacles. Each object occupies a double page spread with the right page featuring a photograph of the object against a white backdrop and the left page offering cataloguing information (size, material, age) and a map indicating the object’s location on the desk as well as anecdotes about the object’s provenance and usage.

In this, Freud’s Desk is an art catalogue like any other, advertising the Freud Museum’s possession of valuable objects.

But Spankie, who is a designer and researcher at the University of Westminster in London, aims for more. Her book is intended as “a guide” helping us “to disentangle the dreamlike montage of associations and ideas that Freud surrounded himself with as he wrote” (p.11), and as a collection of stories: “the objects, though silent, have stories to tell,” the author repeatedly states in the introduction. “Each object [has] a story to tell—both about the character they assume and about Freud, his life and his work. This guide tells their story” (back cover; emphasis mine). Referring to Freud’s topographical method, where “one idea is explained in relation to another” (p.10), Spankie suggests that “the arrangement of the pieces might evoke alternative narratives to the individual stories” (p.12; emphasis mine) as well as “associations and characteristics often multiple and interconnected” (p.11).

A book filled with stories told by objects! I am thrilled. But I am also skeptical.

The isolation of each object, locked into an otherwise empty white page, frozen in time, presented from one angle only, dissociated from the objects that surround it on the desk (the equivalent of the white cube in any western museum); the emphasis on facts and documentation; and the lack of a narrative structure seem to subvert the stated aim to both present the pieces as story-tellers and to tell their stories. An impression that my perusal of the book confirms. The figurines do not speak, and they certainly don’t tell stories. Spankie herself does not give stories to us either. The stories the author announces in the introduction—almost as if the promise of a story could substitute for it—are not told. There is a plethora of very short anecdotes gleaned from letters, Freud’s writings, and those of his patients (the poet H.D., of course) and illustrious contemporaries (Virginia Woolf ).

Marilyn Monroe makes a brief appearance as well. Not because she came into contact with Freud or the objects on his desk, but because she was in analysis with Marianne Rie, who was Ernst Kris’s wife and a childhood friend of Anna Freud.

As interesting as these anecdotes may be, we have to distinguish between an anecdote and a story. What is this difference?

The anecdote is something I place vis-a-vis the object—to describe it, to make it seem interesting, to create a context or a situation that may (or may not) explain something about the object. In its juxtaposition to the object (say the Osiris figurine), the anecdote (H.D. recalling Freud putting it in her hands) can function as an invitation to tell a story (true or invented), but in itself this juxtaposition is not the (or a) story of Osiris as he sits on Freud’s desk. Stories have to be told; they require a storyteller, a mind and a body that make meaning and create movement in time. Stories have a beginning and an end (though not necessarily in that order). The storyteller creates connections and causal relationships. Objects may stir up a story in me; they may move me to tell a story. But the object itself, speechless, immobile unless I move it, cannot tell its story (if it has one).

The book’s predicament points to a deeper problem: what about this wish that a still and silent object on a desk could tell its story all by itself? What is the relationship between language and the object world? And what is the relationship between the stillness of an object and the time-based flow of a story? These are difficult questions to answer, for sure. Which is why they should not be raised casually, especially not in a book about psychoanalysis. Despite the many differences among psychoanalytic schools, I believe 11

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that most analysts would agree that part of what we do with the patient is trying to put words to wounds, to use a phrase by Adam Phillips, all the while paying attention to the ways in which the words create stories about who we are in relation to objects (internal and external ones). A book that promises to make famous and fetishized objects talk to us, but does not make an attempt to explore the relationship between objects and words, ultimately disappoints.

A book that promises to make famous and fetishized objects talk to us, but does not make an attempt to explore the relationship between objects and words, ultimately disappoints.

Perhaps someday someone will have the courage, the imagination, and the freedom to write down the stories of the objects on Freud’s desk. In the meantime, an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s fearless masterpiece Tender Buttons may remind us that at the heart of the modernist project, of which Freud’s work forms an important part, lies a double commitment: to consider the object world from more than one perspective simultaneously (the relational and dynamic aspect of our experience of reality) and to take seriously the dilemma that defines us as speaking beings—that the language that connects us also separates us. I can never say exactly what I want to say. My words (the words that have been given to me) are an approximation, an ongoing and sometimes painful struggle towards meaning. A struggle that the objects on Freud’s desk know nothing of—unless I make them tell me about it.

A BOX. Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again. (Stein, 1914/1997, p.4) z

REFERENCES Spankie, R. (2015). Sigmund Freud’s desk: An anecdoted guide. London, UK: Freud Museum.

Stein, G. (1997). Tender buttons: Objects, food, rooms. New York, NY: Dover Publications. (Original work published 1914)

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The Enigma of Desire Our mothers were our first unrequited loves, our first relational gain and loss. In a rich and vivid way, Galit Atlas describes how our first physical and emotional connection, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis

By Galit Atlas New York, NY: Routledge Press, 173pp., $50.95 (Hardcover), 2016 our bond to our mothers, can be traced in our mature desires and longing for others.

As infants we longed for the mother’s touch and for her body. When we were in her arms, we felt whole. When she was away, we longed to be reunited with her. Yet this constant longing creates anxious tension— what if she doesn’t feel the same way toward us? Atlas uses Meltzer’s formulation on how the tension between the mother’s tangible, loving arms and her enigmatic, tacit aspects— her unknown thoughts and often puzzling actions—provokes anxiety. She further elaborates how the baby is therefore left with an aching fear of being dropped, neglected, or left alone, yet at the same time achingly and dreadfully longs for the maternal touch.

This aching fear and desire derived from the encounter with the “Enigmatic Mother,” a term Atlas uses following Laplanche and Stein, and her enigmatic messages. These enigmatic messages refer to both the implicit messages and enigmatic signifiers from the mother’s unconscious, which are imprinted in the baby’s body and mind. These imprints, Atlas contends, are connected with mature sexuality patterns, and especially their existential aspects.

In many ways, the mother and her infant were never truly symbiotic—the mother’s enigmatic aspects highlighted her separateness, her otherness. Yet they were still connected, enigmatically and pragmatically, through the pragmatic aspects of the mother—her touch, gaze and mirroring. And so, sexual longing presupposes a sense of loss, and a hope of re-finding what has been lost.

This loss is inevitable, yet painful nonetheless.

The book explores the diachronic axis from birth to death, combines a personal and cultural view, and contains autobiographical aspects which accord with the Relational perspective on the analyst’s subjectivity. In this review I will not follow the sections of the book as Atlas has ordered them, but rather will present some of its richly treated themes.

The Enigmatic and Pragmatic Aspects of the Mother Atlas defines the pragmatic aspects of subjectivity and intersubjectivity to be what

Noga ARIEL-GALOR

we can measure, observe, and rationally explain. The enigmatic aspects, on the other hand, are what we can only feel or listen to but can never truly know. The tension thus created between these two concepts, according to Atlas, is similar to the tension between darkness and light—opposites complementing each other, each being necessary for the other’s existence. Therefore the pairing is not a binary opposition; rather, the terms possess a simultaneous existence that manifests its own dialectical movement. Sexuality is constructed of both the pragmatic and the enigmatic elements.

Research on sexuality and attachment patterns addresses intimacy problems, but not adult sexual patterns. Into this lacuna, Atlas inserts the idea that sexual excitement, or the lack of it, is present in the early infant-mother relationship.

Lust is the state of consciousness that connects these two levels of experience and existence. The known body is the agent to confront what is inaccessible and unknown, both in infancy and in adult sexual life.

Through the erotic we come into contact with parts of ourselves that aren’t always accessible or are, in other ways, too excessive. There are things we will never know about ourselves and about others, and this inaccessible aspect of the unrepresentable mother becomes the basis for longing.

There are many levels of desiring and longing for the other, and they are aroused in the most intimate dyadic settings, where the other’s mind and body are simultaneously known and unknown. Sexual desire is therefore immersed in hope and dread.

Atlas’s patients struggle with the vulnerability their sexual longing exposes them to.

We meet some of these patients in the first section, entitled “Enigmatic and Pragmatic,” as they struggle with nameless longing and loss. This section is based in part on current infant research, which emphasizes the (m)other’s role as regulator of emotional and bodily experiences alike.

(Atlas, 2016, p.13) Ella, for example, needs the other in order to regulate her restlessness and longing through sex, and only after she learns to self-regulate can she achieve a more mature, fulfilling sexuality. Ben and Leo each struggle to regulate themselves, and so block out the other in order not to feel the “too muchness” of their own desire, and the fear that they will be tricked into being “an excited idiot,” standing there with an erection—longing to be held, yet dreading being dropped, they opt to avoid emotional intimacy. For Danny, the dybbuk (ghost) was a dissociated, “not-me” part of himself that 12

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enabled him to experience his sexuality, while in his “me” part, sexuality was something he cast aside, because wanting something, anything, was far too intimidating.

In these adult patients, sex has become a way to regulate emotional needs. Since the way we have sex represents parts of ourselves, shifting sexual patterns symbolize development in the self. And so, through these patients’ treatments, we watch how sex, once a way for them to self-regulate, becomes a pathway for expression and a fuller experience of the self.

The book’s first section addressed infants, but then, at the beginning of the second section, entitled “Enigmatic Knowing,” (p.59) we meet Celine, the mother. Celine is a character from Richard Linklater’s movie trilogy, which includes Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). Atlas chose her character because she regards it to be an archetype of the “female experience,” as Atlas so aptly puts it, regarding sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. This chapter is an extremely enlightening account of a sort that is much needed in the psychoanalytic field. Through Celine, we encounter mothers who are broken, penetrated from both the inside and outside. We get to know their caesuras, their Breaks in Unity, and their fear of disintegration. It’s as if Atlas is showing us why it’s so difficult for mothers to assume the role of the regulator: they are so often dysregulated themselves. The intersubjective movement back and forth from the infant to the mother, and later back to the infant, touches upon an existential pain, a tragic component of human birth: a mother is required to take on the role of her most “together” self when she feels the most fragmented.

This drama, between the weak, dysregulated mother and the baby who longs to be held, is later described in Karen’s tale.

Karen is the infant who fears abandonment for being too difficult, who fears she will destroy the parent. What she longs for is the feeling that the parent/therapist shares her drama, that it is not she alone who is to blame for the collapse of the therapeutic couple, that there was also a parent there who did not manage to survive.

Last but not least, this section ends with the story of Galit (Atlas) herself, another way of letting in the analyst’s subjectivity. In this sense, Atlas is the mother who wishes to be known. Yet much like with her patients, the more we know, the more the Enigmatic is revealed; paradoxically, as we stare into that realm we realize we know less and less.

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Enigmatic and Pragmatic Language: Psychoanalytic Writing as Enactment In poetry, paradoxically, the use of words brings us in closer touch with the ineffable. Atlas writes that the tension between vessel and content, between theory and poetics, is what allows the enigmatic to surface. We immediately recognize the Enigmatic when we are in its realm: the air is thicker, the words read slower, the eyes wander away from the page and the breath turns heavier. The pragmatic gives us order and shape, while the Enigmatic connects us to the feeling of not-knowing, of certain helplessness and vulnerability. I could feel myself shifting between these levels of consciousness while reading Atlas’s book.

This experience makes Atlas’s words and writing style an experience in itself. Her writing combines theoretical, dramatic, and poetic language and thus creates a strong enactment that she is very much aware of.

Most chapters are titled after her patients, and we are introduced to each particular dyad, and its therapeutic tale, at a very dramatic, defining moment. As readers we experience moments of sexual arousal, tension, horror, breakdown, and humor, all regulated and balanced through the cooling effect of “experience far,” theoretical discourse.

This structure allows the theory to be the Pragmatic container through which we can

connect to the unknown Enigmatic pieces, without dreading being over-stimulated.

This is what Atlas believes happens in therapy—and this is the unique “psychoanalytic touch,” which manifests itself in her writing.

With each chapter we come to “know” Atlas better and, like the infant who learns her mother’s reactions, we learn about her soft touch and her toughness, and find that there are aspects of her Pragmatic care that are more familiar to us. But then we notice that it isn’t us she is touching, but rather the patients in the book. This feeling resonates with the primal scene—the reader becomes the toddler, watching his mother touching and knowing someone else. This feeling reconnects with the reader’s own longing, making the reading process experiential rather than merely intellectual.

Talking as Touching—The Embodiment of Language Atlas talks about the psychoanalytic touch bestowed upon patients, custom-made for each of them, using our choice of words, their music, our gestures, and our use of humor. The specific touch she reserves for each patient is yet another form of co-regulation.

Her cases raise questions of how to touch, when to touch, and where.

With Ella, by using straightforward, sexually charged words and phrases such

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as “blow job,” both she and Atlas enacted the brute, raw sexuality that Ella sought in her sexual encounters with strangers. Yet, through the process of co-regulation, Atlas succeeded in becoming “a tough mother with a soft touch,” helping Ella move from an identification with her father to the acceptance of a softer, sensual maternal touch, which helped her discover her own subjective sexuality.

With Tomaz, Atlas used the language of tenderness, softness, creativity, and playfulness, replete with much humor. Their touching was elusive, taking place on the surface without being superficial. They colluded to avoid other sorts of languages, which might have been too hard to bear, for these would have been experienced as penetrative and aggressive. The tender language they used was also experienced as an Attack on Linking, for pain, aggression, and abandonment were lingering under the surface, waiting for a time to emerge.

Another question that arose was when to touch and when not to. When Danny spoke about the dybbuk, the ghost that possessed his psyche, Atlas chose not to engage in interpretation. And so the language remained senseless yet full of affect, and she could feel his mind and be touched herself. This point leads to the idea that when we touch too soon we

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might in fact push the other person away, and that often our not interpreting can form a space for transformation. Here this was enabled, again and again, through the process of translation, deconstruction, and reconstruction.

Reclaiming Female Desire Atlas is a feminist writer. Yet she writes not only as a woman, but as a female psychoanalyst whose biological mothers were born “East of Freud,” as an American-Israeli Jew, with roots in Iran and Syria. Professionally, she was birthed by a Kleinian mother and nursed by relational ones, and so inherited the many tongues they have bequeathed her. The unique encounter with our maternal voices is yet another original way of observing the present self—we are the sum of our multiple mothers, but as a whole we are greater than that.

In her quest to crack the code of female desire, she finds herself back in the kitchen, not only in the patriarchal sense, but mining it as a source for understanding a certain feminine realm, where Enigmatic aspects of feminine sexuality take form, assuming a smell and a taste. This is in accordance with the underlying notion that runs throughout the book: whether one is male or female, sex is related to the paternal, while sensuality is something

we learn from our mothers. By asking not only how women desire, but also what are we allowed to desire and how much, and whether we are permitted to express such desire, she combines psychoanalysis, politics, and history, and thus widens our perception of the Enigmatic messages we receive, this time including also the cultural and political.

Her reclaiming of female desire also involves a strong emphasis on the female body and bodily functions (such as pregnancy and giving birth), autoeroticism, homoerotic desire for other women, and more. She considers the conscious and unconscious fantasies women have towards each other, towards each other’s bodies, and not only in a strictly sexual way, but also regarding their pregnancies. Atlas shares the tale of Jo and Simone and the way their therapeutic relationships changed following their parallel pregnancies with Atlas, and the unknown psychic materials they concealed.

The metaphor of the kitchen returns with Sophie and Sarah’s tale, this time used as a metaphor for the therapeutic space, which opens up an opportunity for patient and analyst to “cook together” an analytic process.

The metaphor of “preparing a dish” is yet another original way of viewing the psychoanalytic process, since it relates not only to the further digestion of things that have

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happened in the past, but also to a “progressive function,” a term Aron and Atlas (2015) used following Jung, a construction of the future, enabled through the therapeutic process.

In conclusion, Atlas’s book is overflowing with beautiful ideas, carefully articulated, and told in a vivid, enticing, and stimulating way. It observes psychoanalysis from many angles and offers criticism of its inherent binaries, while also creatively addressing some of its lacunas and offering both useful and beautiful insights. Yet it also seems that alongside her critical thinking toward psychoanalysis, Atlas is one of its most fascinated (Govrin, 2016) advocates, since her focus on the unknown and Enigmatic aspects of our psyche is an unequivocal response to those who believe evidence-based theories are sufficient for practicing therapy. Those are related to the Pragmatic mother, while psychoanalysis complements our knowledge of the Enigmatic, of our deepest and unknown aspects of being. z REFERENCES Aron, L. & Atlas, G. (2015). Generative enactment: Memories from the future. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25(3), 309-324.

Govrin, A. (2016). Conservative and radical perspectives on psychoanalytic knowledge: The fascinated and the disenchanted. New-York, NY: Routledge.

Linklater, R. (Director). (1995, 2004, 2013). The Before Trilogy. [Motion Picture]. Unitied States: Sony Pictures Classics.

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What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis Although perversion as a psychoanalytic diagnosis is almost as old as the field itself, the comparatively few books devoted to the topic each renew the same fundamental question: What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis

By Sergio Benvenuto.

London, UK: Karnac. 210pp., $42.95, 2016 what is perversion? There are two basic ways to define perversion: behaviorally and structurally (i.e., via the personality). When perversion is defined by actions, those actions are perverse insofar as they violate a social norm.

Despite Freud’s observation that we are all originally polymorphously perverse (insofar as we enjoy bodily acts other than heterosexual vaginal penetration) and that some of us somehow manage to grow up to become sexually “normal”—a development that clearly depends on the child’s socialization—some 20th and even 21st century psychoanalysts continue to define perverse behaviors against the backdrop of what was considered abnormal in the early 20th century. Homosexuality, for example, is now widely considered to be a socially acceptable form of sexuality, and yet some psychoanalysts who define perversion on the basis of abnormal behaviors continue to consider homosexuality to be a form of perversion. In Sergio Benvenuto’s book, What Are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis (2016), Benvenuto shows how the behaviorally-based definition of perversion falls short. Using behavioral nosology, not only are we faced with difficult questions of where to draw the line between abnormal and normal, ethical and unethical, but we leave out the sense that the behaviors have for the subject. In other words, according to Benvenuto, depending on the meanings that a homosexual act has for an individual, she or he can engage in primarily homosexual acts and be either neurotic or perverse. Indeed, Benvenuto’s book is reflective of the second approach to defining perversion insofar as he argues for ways in which we can understand a perversely structured person—rather than someone who behaves in a way that society would deem perverse—as engaging in acts which reflect a certain relation to the Law, to language, and to the agency of other people.

Benvenuto’s approach to perversion is influenced by the work of Masud Khan, Jacques Lacan, and Robert Stoller.

The behavioral versus structural approach to diagnosing perversion is one reason for the continuation of the question of “What is perversion?” What is more, we expect the answers to reflect disagreements between psychoanalytic schools. But the muddy waters related to the definition of perversion

reach beyond theoretical differences. I take as my guide to this quandary a remark of Jacques Lacan from his twentieth seminar: “the perversions, such as we believe we discern them in neurosis, are not that at all. Neurosis consists in dreaming, not perverse acts. Neurotics have none of the characteristics of perverts.

They simply dream of being perverts, which is quite natural, for how else could they attain their partner?” (Lacan, 1975/1998, p.80).

With these words, Lacan suggested that a crucial difference between neurotics and perverts is that perverts act freely in the pursuit of jouissance, whereas neurotics are inhibited in putting into action what they typically only dream or fantasize about. Importantly, Lacan also pointed out that a neurotic perspective shapes how we see the perversions. (Lacan, of course, and I myself, take a structural or personality-based approach to diagnosing perversion, and so what follows should be understood in that light.) In Benvenuto’s words, “[g]ood psychoanalysis has a strong propensity not so much to “normalize” perversions as to “perversify” normality” (2016, p.19)—normality often relating to a neurotic viewpoint.

Our tendency to perceive perversion through the lens of neurosis might be further magnified given the absence of more than a few (typically brief ) clinical case studies of perversion. This means that we lack firm evidential grounds upon which to build our theories. Benvenuto’s book adds a few short clinical vignettes to the literature and it comments on already published cases. His commentary includes, for example, the late Serge André’s (1993) account of his work with a masochist—Serge André having contributed considerably to French psychoanalytic conceptions of perversion in his book, L’imposture perverse, which unfortunately has not been translated into English. Benvenuto, however, relies most heavily on examples of perversion from literature, film, and journalism, such as the writing of Jun’ichirô Tanizaki, David Fincher’s (1995) film Seven, and the case of Jack the Ripper.

Owing to the lack of published accounts of clinical work with perverts, Benvenuto, like other authors of books on perversion (including myself ), draws upon non-clinical sources out of necessity.

One reason for this lack in the literature is that perversely structured individuals—rather than neurotics with perverse traits—rarely end up in psychoanalytic consultation rooms.

This may be because there are relatively few perverts compared to neurotics and psychotics. Or it may be that the pervert does not believe a psychoanalyst can help him or her and perhaps believes instead in a behaviorist’s methods. Another possibility is that the 15

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pervert gets too much jouissance from his or her symptom to want to enter into analysis in order to relinquish it. Alternatively, psychoanalysts may not be situated in the clinical milieu in which perverts typically present themselves for treatment such as prisons. I gained the majority of my experience with perverts working at an outpatient forensic psychotherapy clinic. My (2012) book, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject, includes a chapter-length case study of my work in a forensic context with an exhibitionist as well as brief clinical vignettes of work with individuals with exhibitionistic or sadistic substructures. (For Lacan, the substructures of the general structure of perversion include fetishism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism, and masochism).

In the absence, then, of numerous and substantive clinical case studies (which optimally provide some of the analysand’s dreams, fantasies, and speech), we theorize by making do with what we have and supplementing it with examples from literature and film. But how much of our theories are clouded by the neurotic dreams of being perverts found in literature and film? We, as a culture, are fascinated by the figure of the psychopath (or, in psychoanalytic terminology, the sadistic pervert, or someone with an antisocial tendency). This fascination is reflected in the plethora of accounts in literature and on the screen of psychopaths. In recent years, psychopaths have of course continued to be depicted in much of the horror movie genre and as the villains in James Bond and superhero movies, but have also appeared in films such as Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Ramsay, 2011), and No Country for Old Men (Coen & Coen, 2007)—to name but a few.

Our question as psychoanalysts should not be “What can we learn about perversion from these films?” but rather “What can we learn from these fictional accounts of psychopaths about neurotic fantasies of perversion?” With this question, it is not so much that we need to learn more about neurotic fantasy but that we would do well to recognize that our conceptions of perversion are shaped by accounts of perversion that are rooted in a neurotic perspective.

Taking these three films as exemplary of recent film depictions of the pervert as psychopath, we immediately notice that the pervert plots, schemes, and murders without inhibition or remorse. It is also clear that he derives jouissance from his perverse acts and seems immune to psychological suffering except when the world gets in his way (e.g., when he is incarcerated). In terms of the latter, the neurotic fantasizes, by way of the figure of

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the pervert, the possibility of a limitless jouissance. Whether in the form of unbridled aggression or sexuality, the neurotic imagines the pervert has all the fun and—by virtue of his lack of remorse—does not suffer for it. This portrayal of the pervert is ostensibly reflective of neurotic fantasy. Neurotics are the ones who would like access to limitless jouissance without that pesky guilt or doubt that plagues them even for the minor crimes of never living up to their interpretation of the Other’s desire. With the background of our superego’s harsh condemnation for something like the aggression behind procrastination, the fantasied figure of the pervert appears all the more compelling. In identifying with a pervert on film, neurotics allow themselves to indulge in a fantasy of uninhibited aggression or sexuality without having to feel guilty about it, reasoning that, after all, it is the pervert’s responsibility and not theirs. But is it?

In contrast, Lacan and others have highlighted the suffering inherent in the perverse subject position. Neurotics might fantasize that perverts have all the fun, but they are slaves to their fun, and perhaps their fun is not so fun after all. Jouissance is the most appropriate term here since it indicates a kind of pleasurable pain. According to Lacan, the pervert is stuck to the apron strings of the Other—“identif[ying] with the imaginary object of [the mother’s] desire insofar as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus” (Lacan, 1959/2006a, p.554)—while the neurotic has more breathing room. For example, while we might think the pervert is uninhibited in his pursuit of sexual enjoyment, in fact, his sexuality is restricted, to take the fetishist as an example, to conditions under which a certain type of shoe is attached to the body of the woman. What is more, Lacan shows how the perverse act is in fact a way to prop up the pervert’s fragile paternal function or inadequate lawgiving Other (or a way to avert a kind of madness). In the absence of this bolstering of the lawgiving Other, the pervert typically suffers from an excess of jouissance in the form of anxiety. And the pervert must repeat his perverse act again and again in order to gain relief from his inadequate paternal function since his solution is only temporary.

The sadist, for instance, tries “to complete the Other by removing speech from him and by imposing his own voice, but in general this misfires” (Lacan, 2006b, pp.258-259).

Literature and film portrayals of perverts also tend to depict certain types of perverse individuals—especially the psychopath, but also the child molester, exhibitionist, and so on—as someone lacking in empathy. But what do we really mean when we say that perverse individuals do not experience empathy?

If we are referring to empathy as “vicarious introspection,” as Heinz Kohut (2013, p.82) defined it (using Lacan’s terminology, this

would be imaginary order empathy), or the ability to put oneself into another’s shoes, then we are claiming that the pervert is not quite human. Perhaps neurotics do so to reassure themselves that they are not even capable of such transgressions of morality because it is empathy that separates monsters from humans. Perverts, as neurotics imagine them on the screen, are those who murder and derive jouissance from so doing only because they are not able to empathize with their victims.

They fantasize that if only they could instill in perverts a moral code (the title character in the television series Dexter [2006-2013] is a good example of this fantasy) they could be taught to stop murdering or at least start using their aggression for the Good. Of course, given all of the violent crimes committed by neurotic individuals, it is ostensibly fallacious reasoning to imagine that if perverts were able to empathize, as neurotics are, that they would cease to hurt others. After all, aggression toward the other is a complex phenomenon with a huge variety of causes of both an unconscious and conscious, individual and societal nature.

But perhaps perverts do not lack the ability to empathize. While it may be that the sadist or the exhibitionist desires through his perverse act to incite the Other’s jouissance, and he may very well not regret his act from a moral standpoint, what is the pervert’s notorious ability for capitalizing on the other’s position, which involves knowing something about what matters to the other (in the way of love, money, career, etc.), if not empathy?

As long as the pervert compares and contrasts himself with others, as in situations of jealousy and competition, he is also able by the same mechanism to imagine what the other thinks, feels, and is motivated by. (And in Lacanian theory this is similar to saying that all human beings experience the world by way of the imaginary order and as such are capable of that particular kind of empathy.) Empathy can be used in nefarious ways; it does not always translate to a caring concern for the well-being of the other. At face value, it can seem paradoxical that the sadist is, in a strange way, making use of empathy when he enjoys contemplating the suffering (which involves thoughts and feelings) he is inflicting upon his victim. What the pervert lacks is not empathy, it is a firmly internalized moral code.

Even without the Law being firmly instantiated, perverse individuals often take up certain versions of normative morality, and they can act “morally” and even use empathy to be kind to others just as often as can neurotic individuals. It is fallacious reasoning to think that because a voyeur, for example, is not acting kindly to the woman on whom he is spying, that he does not have the ability or the desire to be kind in general. When 16

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a neurotic person steals, we do not assume from that behavior—even if it is repeated numerous times—that he cannot also be compassionate. In other words, we conflate empathy with kindness and the inability to empathize in general with the absence of kindness in a perverse act.

To take a deeper look into a recent popular example of a psychopath on the screen, consider the case of the television series Dexter (Cerone, 2006-2013). Dexter became a psychopath when, as a young child, he witnessed his mother being brutally murdered.

This psychobiographical tidbit reflects a fantasy that it is only some horrific trauma that could cause someone to become perverse— something that is unlikely to happen to us or to our children. His father figure, a police officer, spotted young Dexter’s psychopathic traits early on and trained him to follow a rigid moral code allowing him to harness his aggressive tendencies for the good of society.

The show chronicles adult Dexter as he stalks and murders serial killers.

Dexter’s ritual of killing other psychopaths involves sedating them, transporting them to a remote place—often one of the places where they themselves committed murder—wrapping them up in plastic as well as covering the walls, floor, and furniture with plastic (so when he kills them by piercing their hearts with a knife there will be no blood left as a trace). When the killer awakens, he sees pictures Dexter has brought of his victims.

Dexter has removed the plastic around the mouth of the killer, and so the killer is free to speak. Whose desire fuels ironically killing the killer at the site of his kill? Rubbing his nose in his mess via the victims’ pictures? Whose desire is behind asking the killer to speak? To explain himself? To beg for his life?

In this fantasied situation, Dexter is the mouthpiece for the neurotic viewer who gets to enjoy both feeling morally superior to the serial killer, and watching him squirm as a violent version of justice is delivered. The neurotic viewer, not another serial killer, is the one who wants to know the whys and wherefores of his crimes. The answer invariably is jouissance. Because he wanted to kill.

The neurotic voyeurs are fascinated by the sadistic jouissance in themselves and by their own violent fantasies but can only tolerate their jouissance if it is disavowed, split off into the figure of the psychopath, that conglomeration of aggressive drives without empathy.

Although Benvenuto speaks about a number of major forms of perversion in his book, he focuses on masochism and sadism.

And even though, as I have mentioned, this is reflective of a contemporary focus on, and fascination with, these substructures of perversion (interest in masochism, for instance, manifested in the enormous popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey [James, 2011] books and

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movies), it is by no means the case that other substructures of perversion are lacking presence in film, literature, and clinical vignettes.

In these contemporary times in which we are commanded to be empathic and kind, repressed thoughts and desires often relate to aggression. No wonder, then, that instead of attending to the fetishist or the voyeur, our society is fascinated by the violence of the sadist and the masochist—a violence which is made all the more compelling when it is sexualized.

Reflecting these cultural tensions, Benvenuto generalizes to all forms of perversion what he calls “the lack of care for the other as the subject of desire and enjoyment” such that, conversely, “the non-perverse sexual act is one wherein one has caritas towards the other” (2016, p.10, emphasis in the original).

Benvenuto’s structural approach to perversion has a few key components worth mentioning. First, he makes use of the mechanism of disavowal or Verleugnung, which Freud used to explain the fetish. Benvenuto calls attention, on the one hand, to the “knowledge necessary for enjoyment,” and, on the other hand, to the “disavowed knowledge” (p.9). The exhibitionist, for example, avows the knowledge necessary for enjoyment that “the person who watches my genitals enjoys it,” and denies the knowledge that the “person who watches my genitals is disgusted” (p.9). In my view, apart from the idea that disgust indicates jouissance just as much as enjoyment does—Freud having pointed out that the hysteric’s disgust in relation to das Ding is an indication of her jouissance or libidinal response—this account of what is disavowed is overly restricted to the victim’s experience. Correspondingly, a central claim Benvenuto makes is that the “subjectivity of the other is an essential component of perverse acts” (p.3, emphasis in the original). Benvenuto thus says that a pervert is defined as someone who uses the partner “as a tool for pleasure rather than being the aim of pleasure” (p.110). The pervert is a person who does not try to enact what will be enjoyable for the partner and enjoy the partner’s enjoyment.

Etiologically speaking, Benvenuto comments that “the matrix of every perversion is precisely the exclusion of the third party, who was, originally, the subject itself as the witness of a couple’s love” (p.34, emphasis in the original). While this may highlight something important about perversion, it occludes other aspects of the function of the perverse act or of the fetish. A focus on the subjectivity of the other excludes, for example, Freud’s emphasis on the disavowal of castration as manifested in the fetish. So too, I wonder what theorizing may have resulted if Benvenuto had focused on other types of perversion than sadism and masochism. (Gay Talese recently published The Voyeur’s Motel [2016], which would make for an interesting case study.)

Overall, Benvenuto’s treatment of the subject of perversion is a much-needed contribution to the field. In his book, Benvenuto takes up many important and difficult questions: Why has perversion been considered to be a predominantly male domain? How do we, as psychoanalytic practitioners, diagnose perversion, especially in the face of perverse traits in typically neurotic individuals? Can perversion be defined with reference to normality? Is there a cure? Is a different direction of the treatment warranted for perverts versus neurotics? What does perversion have to do with neurosis?

How are neurotics implicated? We must keep asking these questions about our theories, our analysands, our culture, and our selves. z REFERENCES André, S. (1993). L’imposture perverse. Paris, France: Seuil.

Cerone, D. (Producer). (2006-2013). Dexter [Television series]. United States: Showtime.

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Coen, J. & Coen, E. (Directors). (2007). No country for old men [Motion picture]. United States: Miramax Films.

Fincher, D. (Director). (1995). Seven [Motion picture].

United States: New Line Cinema.

Gilroy, D. (Director). (2014). Nightcrawler [Motion picture]. United States: Open Road Films.

James, E. (2011). Fifty shades of grey. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Kohut, H. (2013). How does analysis cure? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XX: On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge: Encore, 1972-1973. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; B. Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co. (Original work published 1975) Lacan, J. (2006a). On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis. In B. Fink (Trans.), Écrits: The first complete edition in English (pp.445-488). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co. (Original work published 1959) Lacan, J. (2006b). Le séminaire livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968-1969. Paris, France: Seuil.

Ramsay, L. (Director). (2011). We need to talk about Kevin [Motion picture]. United Kingdom: BBC Films.

Swales, S. (2012). Perversion: A Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to the subject. New York, NY & London, UK: Routledge.

Talese, G. (2016). The Voyeur’s Motel. New York, NY: Grove Press.

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Public Writing

Steven AXELROD

Stephen Grosz is an American-born psychoanalyst who practices and teaches psychoanalysis in London. Grosz’s book, consisting of some 38 case histories, are as The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

By Stephen Grosz New York, NY:W. W. Norton & Company, 225pp., $24.95, 2013 Couch: NY Times Opinionator (2014-2016) Edited by James Ryerson Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/column/couch much short stories as clinical studies. Reading them, we feel our own connection to the essentials of good literature – careful observation, good narrative, and compelling accounts of human needs and motives.

The book is remarkably non-technical and free of jargon—it demonstrates the analyst at work as detective, storyteller, and healer Grosz has a way of using case material to explain how the mind works without being didactic or simplistic. Puzzling behavior, irrational fears, and fantasies become the departure points for consideration of hidden motives, needs, and feelings. For example, he shows how one patient’s platonic relationship with a prostitute was linked to his feelings of loneliness and jealousy after the birth of his first child. Another man’s loss of his wallet reveals anxieties triggered by the good news of a career advancement.

A young woman’s fear that her apartment was booby-trapped by terrorists leads to a consideration of how, in some instances, paranoid fantasies defend against feelings of isolation and others’ indifference.

Grosz looks carefully at how people fear change, both in therapy and, more generally, in their lives. A television interview with a 9/11 survivor leads the author to zero in on how our fear of loss (including the loss of our everyday routines) can set up the denial of danger, and ultimately, disastrous losses. Grosz, working with a patient who is both stuck in a bad relationship and unable to accept the loss of her father, suggests that we need to mourn the futures that won’t come to pass in order to more fully live in the future. Indeed, the centrality of loss, sadness, and grief run, through Grosz’s tales from the couch.

Grosz himself is an important, if relatively unobtrusive, character, in these “tales.” He reacts and reveals himself in a considered, non-gratuitous way that helps move the treatment and the narrative forward. This is done most movingly in the final chapter, where Grosz uses his own feelings of fear and desperation in relation to his sick 4-year-old as a portal into reflection

on the patients he has lost or been unable to help. The reader comes away with an understanding that the emotional makeup and personal voice of the analyst are inseparable from the effectiveness of the treatment.

What is most effective about Grosz’s book, and I believe important for our profession, is the way he conveys the richness and depth of the analytic encounter. Shorn of the theoretical baggage we are so fond of, psychoanalysis, in Grosz’s book, is primarily a point of view—a way of listening and understanding in an intimate encounter with another person. The reader of Grosz’s book absorbs some of this way of thinking by participating with, rather than being explained to by, the author. The reader experiences psychoanalysis as a radical enterprise that diverges sharply from the quick-paced, reductive instrumentality of our everyday lives.

Grosz’s book received some very favorable reviews. Reading what the critics wrote is revealing, even encouraging, for our profession. In the Guardian, January 27, 2013, the reviewer, after referencing Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives (1984) (“one of the few modern writers able to explain the Freudian method in clear, uncluttered prose”) made the following point: Thirty years later, the medical reputation of psychoanalysis has deteriorated, even from that modest appraisal of its value. Particularly in Britain, it has been superseded by simpler, shorter, more research-friendly cognitive therapies. The psychoanalytic profession has, in the meantime, done surprisingly little to defend itself. Once the dominant psychological system of the 20th century, it has since tended to retreat into private practice, or obscure theoretical factionalism (emphasis mine).

The reviewer stated that Grosz “does not act as advocate for psychoanalysis. He makes his larger case by showing, not telling.” Indeed, I think that this book’s appeal is based on the modesty of its claims and the humility of the author—his willingness to acknowledge that he doesn’t know and doesn’t have all the answers, but wants to understand.

The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani chose Grosz’s book as one of the ten best of 2013. In her review on July 8, 2013, Kakutani linked the author’s story-telling to Freud, whose “methodology and insights also have a lot in common with literary criticism and novelistic architecture.” The value of psychoanalysis, in this critic’s view, lies at 18

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the nexus of literature and therapeutic procedure—how “people’s efforts to connect the past, present and future reflect their capacity to change.” Kakutani was struck by Grosz’s stance vis-a-vis his patients—a sharp contrast to the stereotype of the all-knowing, insight-dispensing, and aloof analyst: He writes with enormous empathy for his patients, gently encouraging them to recognize patterns in their lives, while hearing out their own theories and concerns. He reassures one patient that he will face all her problems with her, and he promises a seriously ill patient that he will visit him in the hospital for his regular sessions, five times a week.

In a 2014 Brooklyn Quarterly interview with Grosz (Gross, 2014), the interviewer says I’ve run into many intelligent, educated people who don’t just say ‘Oh Psychoanalysis is well and good but not for me’—they say ‘Psychoanalysis has been discredited.’

Grosz responds Yes, and I think analysts are to blame, too. Analysts for a long time behaved as know-it-alls and didn’t engage in the kind of discussions that we are having right now.

The Examined Life helped inspire the New York Times’s Couch column, which ran from 2014 to 2016. The editor of Couch, James Ryerson, told me earlier this year that Grosz’s book had showed him how the therapeutic encounter could be described in a compressed way. In some 70 columns, therapists, and in some cases, patients, recounted some aspects of a therapeutic encounter or the therapeutic process more generally. Some of the best entries resembled Grosz’s “tales.” Indeed, Ryerson believes that the narrative tradition is one of the strengths of our field.

In our conversation, Ryerson discussed the column’s inception. He felt that psychoanalysis had largely faded from the public’s thinking and conversation. Books on psychoanalytic ideas were no longer essential elements of the educated person’s library.

The value of psychoanalytic therapy is now considered questionable at best and the process is viewed as indulgent, expensive, and too introspective. And, according to Ryerson, we psychoanalysts don’t do a good job explaining the value of psychoanalysis to the public. For instance, he noted that

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the favorable outcome data for therapy and analysis is not widely known.

For Ryerson, the pleasure of reading about psychotherapy is in the case studies, not in the more theoretical works—“it’s

through the cases that you get the hang of it; it’s like learning a language.” He observed that each contributor to Couch has his or her own language and style. Their tone and temperament come through in the stories.

Many are warm and engaging. Like Grosz, they involve the reader in how the experience unfolds for them.

Ryerson originally wanted to have therapists and patients contributing equally to the column, perhaps even giving parallel experiences of the therapeutic encounter.

However, it turned out to be much easier to get therapist than patient contributions.

He had also hoped to get contributions from a range of therapeutic orientations, but it turned out that psychodynamic approaches predominated. Whether this was attributable to the robust narrative tradition of psychoanalysis as Ryerson posited, or to the specific characteristics of the New York Times readership, is not clear.

Ryerson was surprised that more of the contributions did not revolve around conflict between therapist and patient and that so many of the best pieces were positive, successful encounters. I would add that, as with Grosz’s book, the best essays revolve around how both therapist and patient learn and change through the encounter.

What appears mysterious or puzzling becomes clarified and better understood; in the process both parties grow.

I would conclude from this brief survey that there is a widely perceived gap between the value of the therapeutic work we do and our descriptions of it for the general public. Both The Examined Life and Couch helped bridge that gap, and we are fortunate that Grosz and Ryerson did so much to help communicate the value of psychoanalytic therapy as an intimately human endeavor, with all its promise and frustration. I believe that if we draw on our strong links to the humanistic and narrative traditions, and approach our task with humility and open-mindedness, we may find more receptivity than we often assume. What we offer is both an effective therapeutic method and an essential way of looking at the world and at other people. It is within our power to help our profession advance while contributing to the broader public conversation about important contemporary issues. z REFERENCES Gross, J. (2014, October 17). Two people not knowing together. The Brooklyn Quarterly, Retrieved from http:// brooklynquarterly.org/interview-psychoanalyst-ste phen-grosz/ Kakutani, M. (2013, July 8). Listening for clues to mind’s mysteries: ‘The Examined Life’ describes psychoanalysis’s power. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www. nytimes.com/2013/07/09/books/the-examined-life-bystephen-grosz.html Linklater, A. (2013, January 27). The Examined Life

by Stephen Grosz–review. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/27/examined-life-stephen-grosz-review Malcolm, J. (1984). In the Freud archives. New York, NY: A.A. Knopf, Inc.

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In Search of a Minor Place How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, or metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p.27) The alleged irresponsibility of the philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s endorsement of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential election has been The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness

By Roderick Tweedy (Ed.), London, UK: Karnac Books, 223pp., $46.95, 2017 largely panned, but there does seem to be some truth to Žižek’s claim that Trump’s election would force each of us to confront our complicity in the current state of affairs.

As much as we try to throw ourselves into the superiority-jouissance of reading and watching the news and the trolling and being trolled of social media, we cannot help but be tossed back into “I have done nothing,” to the horror of “what now?” Žižek (2017) noted how the Left and Right alike are engaged in politics of Fear, which leads to efforts to destroy the external object, and that what is needed is a shift to politics of Angst, that we might be compelled to transform ourselves.

For psychologists and psychoanalysts confronting this Angst, the appearance of the Karnac collection The Political Self, edited by Rod Tweedy and released at the beginning of 2017, is a welcome arrival. As psychoanalysts, what little we do know is that Žižek is quite right in this regard; if we are to change, if the world is to change, Angst rather than fear can show us the way.

Even the form of this book is apropos. One wishes for the heterogeneity of a collection: the dissent that forces us into thought, and towards, one can only pray, the act.

Such heterogeneity is, of course, circumscribed by any collection’s editor, but Tweedy, himself, seems to cut a rather idiosyncratic figure: attracted, on the one hand, to inimitable Romantic figures, the likes of William Blake, Nick Cave, and R. D. Laing; and on the other, to contemporary research on neuroscience and brain lateralization.

Tweedy (2013) synthesized these interests in an earlier book on Blake’s Urizen as the god of the left hemisphere. I will speak more of this synthesizing tendency later.

Matthew OYER

For now, I will only repeat that it is less synthesis and more conflict and heterogeneity that interest me.

From this position, it is one of the strengths of the collection that it almost immediately evokes an old but still profound and, ultimately, timely historical debate.

David Smail, the book’s inspiration, and whose chapter on a “social-materialist” psychology inaugurates it, levels a pugnacious, if often uninformed, critique of psychoanalysis and Freudian-Marxism as developed by the Frankfurt School and represented within the collection by Joel Kovel’s reading of psychotherapy in late capitalism. In some respects, the differences embodied in Smail’s and Kovel’s chapters rehash a debate within the Frankfurt School between Erich Fromm, whose disappearance from the psychological canon Smail bemoans, and Herbert Marcuse. And behind this debate, if we are convinced by Jacoby’s (1997) persuasive account, lies a yet earlier schism: that between Adler and Freud.

Smail is critical of psychoanalysis’s elision of the social context in its overly “internal” view of psychic life. The figures he speaks of approvingly in this respect—Adler, Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, and Laing and Cooper—are precisely those figures Jacoby targets for trading “the revolutionary core of psychoanalysis for common sense” (p.19). Smail argues that there has been a massive repression of social-cultural “interests” within psychoanalytic theory and their replacement with internal concepts like the unconscious and the drive, which are then subject to the influence of the psychoanalyst and justify his existence in the place of political or economic activism.

Smail declares, “I find it puzzling—even paradoxical—that so many of the Frankfurt writers, in order to theorise the influence of material, societal conditions on personal subjectivity, felt it necessary to turn for help to psychoanalysis” (p.49). For Kovel’s Marcusian-inflected reading, psychoanalysis is necessary precisely to avoid lapsing into a simplistic, mechanical model of a subject buffeted and controlled by external forces. A theory is needed that can elucidate the mediating processes by which external oppression is internalized, by which phylogenesis repeats in ontogenesis: the primal father eaten by the brother clan; the identifications that sediment in the ego; Oedipus and the installation of the superego; the reality principle’s imprint on the drives themselves. It is just such a simplistic, mechanical, and common-sense model that Smail proposes. Jacoby’s (1997) critique, that all of the modernizers of the 20

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20th century ridiculed Freud’s 19th century mechanical biologism, but that “there is nothing new or novel about the idea of the individual as an autonomous monad which is affected by outer forces” (Tweedy, 2017, p.33), could just as well have been directed at Smail.

For Smail, psychology and psychoanalysis ultimately disappear behind a social-materialist reading of history and political praxis.

The crucial theoretical point I’m trying to make is that by conceiving of “drives” as “interests” we turn traditional psychology inside out, so that rather than seeing individuals pushed from within by various urges and desires for which, ultimately, they are personally responsible, they are pulled from without by the social manipulation of, in the last analysis, inescapable biological factors of being human. (p.42) Without any theory of mediation or any awareness that such a theory is necessary, what role or function could either psychology or psychoanalysis play?

Psychology is instead entirely explained by political and economic theory.

Smail’s application of political and economic categories to psychological analysis is, of course, far less common than the opposite approach: psychologism. Recently, this has been most evident, and most impotent, in the constant debates and discussions about Trump’s mental health and his psychiatric diagnosis. Diagnosing Trump is not only delusional (a misplaced certainty that we are the masters of what is normative at a time when he has much more power to determine the normative than any psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst [Reisner, 2017]); at best, it distracts us from real political engagement, and, at worst, narcotizes us with superiority and a sense of engagement when, in fact, we are retreating into quietism. The Political Self thankfully forgoes discussion of Trump’s narcissism, psychosis, dementia, or perversion, but it is not without contributions that rely on this kind of direct application of psychological categories to political analysis. Most notably, Jonathan Rowson’s interview with Iain McGilchrist, whose book The Master and His Emissary (McGilchrist, 2009) popularized the discussion of hemispheric differences and conflict, summarizes some of the implications of his application of neuropsychological research to a sweeping reading of cultural history.

McGilchrist explains his formulation of brain lateralization: “it is not about what each hemisphere does, as we used to think,

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because it is clear that each is involved with literally everything. It is about how it is done— an approach, a stance, a disposition towards things” (Tweedy 2017, p.88). He suggests that we should have thought of the brain, not in the metaphoric terms of a machine, but, rather, in terms of the person (“What’s he or she like?”). If we would have begun with these questions, it is argued, we would have seen much more clearly the differences and relationship between the hemispheres: a left hemisphere that uses a decontextualized, abstract, instrumentalized rationality, impervious to challenges to its position, that is colonizing a right hemisphere that utilizes a contextualized, concrete, synthetic, and affectively-nuanced reason receptive to challenges to its position. There is no question that this evokes images of good and bad angels sitting on shoulders, or at least two homunculi with distinct, if caricatural, personalities jousting across the corpus callosum.

If Adler, Fromm, and nearly all schools of neo- and post-Freudianism sought to correct Freud’s mechanical psyche with a concept of the self, McGilchrist is not content to stop there and must even “self ” the hemispheres of the brain. But, as the Frankfurt School theorists pointed out regarding the culturalist neo-Freudians (as did Lacan of the ego psychologists), with this “selving” comes the loss of the critical decentering that Freud accomplished with his discovery of the unconscious,

and with this selving, there is a return to a general psychology of synthesis. We have made our way to the self of The Political Self and to the tendency of self and text alike towards synthesis.

Pluralism is a common feature of late capitalism: to accept and legitimize all differences and variations but only by flattening them out (Benvenuto, 2016). Exchange requires this flattening synthesis. This tendency is very evident in The Political Self: a bit of neuroscience; a smattering of Marx; a dash of attachment theory; a little twelve-step between Freud and Jung on our way to the neo-Freudians and anti-psychiatrists. If we can just add a little something new, it may all work, the self and the system alike. Above all, that is what capitalism demands: it must appear to work.

Lacan said, “What distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this: the Verwerfung, the rejection, the throwing outside all symbolic fields…of what? Of castration” (Holland, 2015, p.8). Thus, an idealized synthesis undermines the discursive heterogeneity that first seemed promised by the book.

There is no doubt that psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts look the most ridiculous of all when clawing and cloying for respectability and a place in the major discourse: medicalization; randomized controlled trials; acronyms; psychotherapy integration; neuropsychoanalysis; media campaigns; wine and cheese open houses… Psychoanalysis:

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the discovery of a knowledge-in-failure; of a method of thinking with and through castration. Indeed, the moment it works, it is not.

We have moved well beyond The Political Self, but perhaps to the questions that inspired me to read and write about it. For, like many others, I am lost. I would like to think about how to develop a political practice, and what role psychoanalysis might have within that practice. I don’t have any answers, but I do know that whatever contribution psychoanalysis is to make, it will not be that of an addition, but of a supplement. And if it is to act as supplement, it must remember and remain what it is: ever a becoming minor. z REFERENCES Benvenuto, S. (2016). What are perversions?: Sexuality, ethics, psychoanalysis. London, UK: Karnac.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a minor literature. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Holland, J. (2015). Capitalism and psychoanalysis [Editorial]. S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 8, 1-5.

Jacoby, R. (1997). Social amnesia: A critique of contemporary psychology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Reisner, S. (2017). Crazy like a fox: Evil is not a psychiatric illness. [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Ty1HhODKVaI&feature=youtu.be.

Tweedy, R. (2013). The god of the left hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the myth of creation. London, UK: Karnac.

Tweedy, R. (Ed.). (2017). The political self: Understanding the social context for mental illness. London, UK: Karnac. Žižek, S. (2017). Donald Trump’s topsy-turvy world.

The Philosophical Salon: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel. Retrieved from http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/ donald-trumps-topsy-turvy-world/.

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Talking Politics in the Therapy Room Over the last year, politics and social justice are moving to the front of the discussion in my exchanges with friends, family, acquaintances, the personal and professional groups The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness

By Roderick Tweedy (Ed.), London, UK: Karnac Books, 223pp., $46.95, 2017 in which I participate (both online and in person), and the conversations I am having with my patients in my work as a psychotherapist.

The topics my patients want to talk about have changed. They feel that they are living in a new context since the election.

None of my patients support the Trump administration. They often want to talk about politics during sessions, and I have dispensed with whatever illusion of neutrality there may have been previously, sometimes commiserating when it comes to these topics. Many of my patients are now struggling more than they were before with questions of balance: how to tolerate the constant flow of new information, much of it distressing; how to take action on issues that seem urgent; and meanwhile, how to go about the business of being alive and being their “old selves” at the same time. In some cases these needs seem at odds. I find many of my patients to be swooping dramatically back and forth between the

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feelings of anger, fear, and helplessness associated with following the events in our government, and daily life activities like preparing meals for themselves and, in some cases, their families, getting enough sleep, and completing whatever tasks are demanded by jobs or other pursuits. For many who had not been as politically tuned in or outraged previously, these two poles seem utterly unintegrated. It is almost as if each of us is two people, and we are allotting great effort to the job of being each of these two people, exhausting ourselves. My hope is that, over time, a more integrated sense of ourselves grows out of the current crisis, where an idea of ourselves as both grocery-shoppers and protesters can co-exist in our minds.

If you go by what is happening in my practice, people have become politicized.

Some already were, and those that weren’t are now. We are involved. This essential fact, observed widely, is remarkable, and has helped energize me since the first day back at work after the election. This engagement has developed and grown rather than waned since November, and I continue to feel quite hopeful in my work. Based on this experience, I suspect that the election outcome may, in fact, be making people less myopic and self-involved.

People who were comfortable in the belief that progress was happening without too

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much of a fight, and that we could just sit back and more or less let it march forward, were rudely awakened. While some in my office do feel at times hopeless and overwhelmed, there are other moments in which they feel more resilient and clearer of purpose than they have in the past. There is a new awareness of the larger world and a sense that “now, it really matters what I do.” This is giving some who were not previously able to focus their attention on much, something to focus on. The Political Self, a collection of essays on the “social context for mental illness” edited by Rod Tweedy (2017), thus arrives in a timely manner.

In Sue Gerhardt’s chapter, “The Selfish Society: the Current State of Things,” she writes about the erosion of empathy in individuals, and the rise of narcissism and self-interest (p.69). Gerhardt points out that for those with depression and some character pathologies “the bottom line is that they have difficulties with the quality of their attachments to other people and often find it a struggle to think of others’ needs” (p.84). Gerhardt argues that selfishness or unselfishness within a society is cultural—and that selfishness is connected to social isolation, impulsiveness, addiction, et cetera (pp.81-82). She is drawn to a feminist “ethic of care” in which we become aware of and deliberate about the ways in which we care for, and are cared for by, others all day long. It

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promotes an openness to the ways in which others are different and experience things differently from ourselves (p.76). Around me, in my practice and beyond, I see people forming community groups, gathering with others to talk and process what is happening, and strategizing actions and protests. Many have more of a connection to their neighbors and larger community than they did a few months ago.

I really wonder whether this current Trumpresisting climate of raised consciousness, protest, and urgency, if sustained, could lead to a greater collective empathy and the ability to look beyond one’s self toward the interests of others. Perhaps this moment in history is an opportunity to change the culture.

But how does the shift on the cultural level translate into the work in the office? This leads to a point that has sharpened for me in these last weeks: my sense that actually being “in this together” with my patients has created something of a therapeutic opportunity. The experience of learning about extraordinary developments in politics, and processing them simultaneously with my patients, having something momentous happen to us together, has been an equalizing force in the therapy room.

The principle that we are collaborators in the work of therapy, that I don’t hold the answers or possess any great wisdom to hand down to a patient about themselves, has guided my work as a central belief since long before the election. Believing in that principle, however, doesn’t by itself erase the power dynamic between therapist and patient. As Nick Totten explains in the chapter, “Power in the Therapeutic Relationship,” my role in the relationship with my patients automatically confers on me some authority, and some of the ability to convince that goes with authority, whether we like it or not. To pretend otherwise is to willfully deny reality, and Totten writes that for therapists “it’s bad practice to pretend that we are not operating from a set of beliefs” (p.36). He posits that we can work to repair this imbalance by not being seduced by the part of us that wants “to assert our authority as expert and healer” and by bringing “awareness, the magic ingredient, to the situation” (p.39).

A positive byproduct, then, of this experience of our political climate, in which I am quite openly as perplexed as anyone else, is that it moves my idea of being my patient’s collaborator from principle into practice. Any perceived authority is diminished by my clear lack of expertise in at least the area of the current crisis. Now, in conversations with my patients, I feel as though there is a freer way between us than there used to be, and that when I “throw an idea out there,” my patients are more likely to genuinely regard it as what I say it is: a trial balloon. This feeling now often pervades sessions. Whether we are speaking about the latest news out of Washington or about their grandmother’s possible motivation

for commenting negatively on their appearance, I feel as if several of my patients are giving my words a little less weight. Because of the frequent reviewing of our social context, we are in the “conversation zone” more safely than we used to be, and I consider this an improvement over what, in retrospect, seems like it was at times a somewhat manufactured

psychotherapeutic processes. It turns out that when it comes to their own lives and choices, patients hold the keys, and our job is to be able to be present, listening, and deepening the understanding on both sides, when the answers emerge. Totten compares this process to creating a new, unique language, a mixture of the languages with which the patient and

Football

“therapy zone,” which was more stilted, and at times awkward. This zone feels more creative and spontaneous. It feels as if, now, we are thinking together, rather than you, the patient, thinking over there in your chair, and me, the therapist, thinking over here in mine.

The idea that we, as therapists, think we are meant to be the source of insights is deeply flawed and always has been. It must be questioned repeatedly as we engage in 23

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therapist entered the treatment (p.40). When it comes to larger questions of how to come back from the current crisis as a country, this small-scale creative action between two people may be transferable. The act of listening more carefully to one another, and acknowledging all the moments and all the ways in which we each don’t hold the answers, but are groping along together in the dark, is more essential than ever. z

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A Glimpse into the Fold Reminiscences of learning by identification and from precepts: A glimpse into the fold between private pain and psychologically charged external fields of reference.

The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.

(Deleuze, 1986/1988, pp.96-97) I write about internal and external structures of experience upon which I have cultivated a catalogue of cognitive and experiential funds of knowledge. In this piece I foreground mostly the latter. In a recent piece for the inaugural issue of the e-journal of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalysis.today (www.Psychoanalysis. today), I did emphasize part of my cognitive ancestry. Now, one may ask, “Who am I and from where have I come?”

I was born in Ghana, West Africa, a place filled with many ordinary and extraordinary personal narratives. I look back with surprise when I notice how these otherwise ordinary and quotidian narratives alternate with extraordinary moments of learning about myself in multiple environments. Let me start with what seemed like a very ordinary activity in my earliest childhood. It was a frequent Saturday morning activity. My next older brother, Tony, and our friends would play around my family’s cemetery.

We would sit on these marble stones and tell stories about people in our lives and about our grandparents while we explored their lineage. “Oh, this is James whose father was Joshua; this is grandfather Barkers who came after James,” and so on, and so forth. By the time I was ten, I felt comfortable with what I knew about five generations in my family. So rooted and so blessed, I had a good sense of who I was and from where I came. I had an intuitive sense that such a blessing was priceless. I have many interesting memories from that period. Two of them stand out.

In the first, if I may use the present tense, I can feel it as though it were happening today. So, I am about six years old at this time.

It is Easter; an occasion for christening little babies in the Methodist Church. My maternal grandmother sees what one of her granddaughters is wearing for her christening. With consternation and mild contempt, she asks, “Is this what you are putting on my grandchild for her christening? Oh no! Effie [my mother], go to the Box Room [the room where family valuables are kept] and you will find some lace fabric to sew something

Maurice Apprey

decent for my grandchild. There is still time to get her ready for the service.” My mother complies. I see this material. I ask my sister, “What is this? What is going on here?” She answers, “Oh, you did not know! Your grandmother used to send her lace and other material to London for dry cleaning until the war (World War II) broke out and, this time, she sent one box too many, and none of it came back.” I could not resist asking this question: “You mean the British did her laundry?” And yes, they did for many years.

In my younger days, when I felt mischievous I would say that I knew where my de-idealization of the British and EuroAmericans came from. They did my grandmother’s laundry. So I could respect many of them as individuals and not be dazzled by them. In my adult years, the lesson I like to derive from this story is that there is an essential place for politeness, mannerliness, and propriety without ostentation. Or, more properly, when I know where I come from and whose seed I am, there is no sense of dazzle, no need for idealization of self or other. I become just who I am.

In the second story, I am about the same age. This time it is Saturday morning and grandfather is “chilling out” with his many children and grandchildren who have come home for a weekend visit. He gets an unplanned visit from a young man. Grandfather takes a moment to visit with him in his study. This visit with the young man ends very badly. Our grandfather of otherwise mild disposition comes out furious and quite beside himself. He gathers us all at his feet and warns, “No one from this home must ever go into politics! You see the young man going downstairs who could not get out of here fast enough? He wants to break away from the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) and form his own political party.” The party would come to be known as the Convention People’s Party. “He will fail,” my grandfather concludes.

UGCC leaders, magistrates, businessmen, and others sought counsel from my grandfather. In addition, my grandfather was the treasurer for UGCC and counseled them on how to overthrow British rule in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). In the short run, my grandfather was wrong; the young activists succeeded. The young man that I now know as Kwame Nkrumah became the first Prime Minister of Ghana on March 6, 1957. In the long run Grandfather was right. Within three years Nkrumah had become the Life President of Ghana, which was declared a republic on July 1, 1960. The rest is history.

Over the years I have learned the importance of discretion, the value of fostering high 24

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impact change behind closed doors without anyone knowing who helped whom to do what. A corollary precept of my own appropriation of Grandfather’s teachings remains as follows: enduring change in society requires both the vitality of youth and the wisdom of old.

I left Saltpond, Ghana, the town of my birth, and headed to Cape Coast, eighteen miles away, to attend boarding school at the age of 12. Mfantsipim Secondary School, founded by the Methodists in 1876, was then called Richmond College. It was renamed Wesleyan Boys High School to match its sister school, Wesleyan Girls High School, before it assumed its current name. At Mfantsipim, I was introduced to indigenous Ghanaian teachers and international expatriates. We called our boarding school teachers Masters in those days. We had a Latin Master, an Attic Greek Master, a French Master, et cetera, as did British and colonial boarding schools. Some teachers were English, some French, some members of the American Peace Corps program, and many others from home and other parts of the world. We studied broadly and deeply: seven years of Latin, six years of French, three years of Greek. Others had three years of calculus even before entering university. One outcome of such depth and breadth in learning was that twenty-six years later, and after six years of high school French, I could translate into English Georges Politzer’s Critique of the Foundations of Psychology: the Psychology of Psychoanalysis for Duquesne University Press in 1994 (1928/1994). Written in 1928, it was the first serious critique of Freud’s structural theory as an exercise in abstraction and formalism that abandoned the first person singular, the “I” in the psychoanalytic narrative.

For Politzer, the manifest content is but a scenic montage and the latent content the only intrapsychic story where the agency of the “I” has the pride of place. I am very grateful to the American phenomenologist, Amedeo Giorgi (Andy), for asking me to translate Politzer, who had until then been translated into at least six major languages but not English. For Andy, one cannot and must not try to read Jacques Lacan or any French psychoanalyst without having read Politzer.

And, how right he is!

Now, back to high school. At the end of every term, we dressed up either in suits or ceremonial Kente cloths to spend a day receiving and approving reports from student council, Saturday night entertainment committee, athletics, dining hall committee, et cetera. Looking back, we were being introduced to parliamentary procedures with all the rules and protocols attendant to them every trimester. I look back now and think, “Oh

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my, our formation was something else, something out of this world, as it were. It seemed unique, enjoyable, and of high excellence.” If you know of Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, he was one of our “old boys,” as we call our boarding school alumni.

By the time I left Ghana as a 21-yearold, to go to the Connaissance de la France international youth program in Lyon, France, I felt like my internal, experiential world was congruent with the external, international ethos I came to inhabit. The physical geography had changed. Wherever I went, I had a relative inner sense of calm certainty in the face of external turbulence.

Unruffled by issues of race and unfairness, I soldiered on, almost always knowing, more or less, what I wanted in life. In London I became a psychoanalyst, treating children and adolescents and working with parents to protect the integrity of the treatment.

Later on, in Washington, D.C. and New York, through the Contemporary Freudian Society, I became a psychoanalyst for adults; still quietly changing lives behind closed doors, like my grandfather.

Now, back to London. To demonstrate how underwhelmed I was with being in an international world, let us consider this: I was trained by Anna Freud and her colleagues, most of whom came from Vienna; my training analyst was a Hungarian Jew; my supervisors were English and German; I was married to an African-American woman; and my son, named after my grandfather, was born while I was training in London. When I threw a party in my home on a Sunday afternoon, guests from at least fifteen countries attended. Now, an international catalogue of influences is so normal and so customary for me that it does not even occur to me as being strange when I am giving a paper in Russia, Turkey, Finland, United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, or anywhere in the United States, and I happen to be the only Black person in the room. I once travelled to Peru to give a paper on one working day and departed that night in order to teach a class in the US the next working day, much to the consternation of my colleagues who stayed behind to visit friends and museums. Because I feel relatively grounded, the international drama is decisively a psychogeography in my head; only the physical terrain changes.

The result is that my domestic and global funds of knowledge alternate quite comfortably. So, I teach undergraduate medical students, residents of psychiatry, fellows of child psychiatry, hospital chaplains and undergraduate students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, using material from different continents and different disciplines. With a penchant for emphasizing the need to study both broadly and deeply,

disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies are indispensable for me. As a result, I enjoy looking at classical German phenomenology and seeing what the French are doing with it from various interdisciplinary angles. The world is just too complex for any one discipline to optimally answer any question. Intra-racial and inter-racial issues, however, present negotiable challenges for me. Sometimes I succeed. I am from Africa; I see snakes from far away and I know how to kill them. Sometimes I fear more intra-racial than inter-racial venom, and at other times, the reverse. I often marvel at how I can be overlooked, dark as I am, in a setting of Caucasians that I can assist but who are so busy flirting with their own limited perspectives that I have to patiently wait for a time to give an answer to a question with which they struggle to grasp.

This, then, is a partial story from a Ghanaian-born psychoanalyst, a professor, and now, the Dean of African-American Affairs in a university that has a deep and peculiar history of legal segregation on the one hand; on the other, a university with an excellent academic reputation and still making serious efforts to make a difference in the world. I have been part of this effort for thirty-six years.

So, let us try to answer a question that was recently put to me: “What does it mean to you to be Black at the University of Virginia, the United States, or globally?”

I remain the self-same person; my internal psychogeography does not shift very much, but my physical world does. How do other people come across to me at the university, in the United States, in psychoanalytic institutes, or globally? In a change of function, the motor remains the same; but the license plate changes, as it were.

Humans can be gracious and good, envious and hateful, progressive and conservative. Ambitendent qualities, or shifting dispositions, show themselves in various proportions in different people. These and other qualities are sometimes frightfully located in the same person, sometimes dispersed and distributed among others. This exigency calls for circumspection, humility, and courage.

Vicissitudes of change and development call for circumspection. The complexities of being human call for humility because there are some situations one cannot change, at least not easily in one’s lifetime. Courage is called for when an unjust limit is posed and options appear to be limited. Finally, in whatever situation I find myself, I am most successful when I remember that the name of the game is anticipation, or when I perceive that one kind of adaptation or another is called for.

These considerations of anticipation and/or appropriate adaptation allow me to act accordingly and decisively.

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However, a private pain like loneliness, even in a crowd, can become activated from time to time, human as I am, imperfect as our world is.

It is the morning of 9/11. Terrorists have hit New York City and other sites with hijacked planes.

A patient walks in for her adult psychoanalytic session and bemoans, “Have you heard what has happened to our country?” I have not. She tells me the story of the morning upon settling down on the couch. Before long, she uses the 9/11 incident to sort through internal and external world issues and on and on we go.

A second patient who had inadvertently killed a friend in childhood walks in. He is immobilized. He can hardly sit or lie on the couch. I ask, “What is new about what human beings are capable of doing to one another?” He is released from his temporary paralysis, goes to the couch, and almost immediately says the following, but in a somber tone: “My arrogant sister-in-law lives in Scarsdale, New York, and many of those killed are from there. I am glad.” Before long, internal and external world materials come together to foster a new phase in his analysis.

In the afternoon I go to the medical school to co-teach interviewing skills with an internist in a small class of six first-year medical students. On this occasion we are supposed to go to a medical unit to interview live patients.

The 9/11 attacks have caused so much turmoil that students and others are standing around talking to each other or trying to reach relatives by phone in New York or New Jersey even though there are no open circuits.

My internist co-mentor and I invite the students to come together to decide if they want to proceed with the day’s planned activities.

My co-mentor is open to either cancelling or proceeding with activities as planned. I am quietly certain we must proceed. We do. One student is patently furious with me. There will be time to process his fury. Two students are assigned to one patient at a time. They must tag-team to elicit a particular fund of information in taking histories. Two of the three pairs easily find their patients. The last pair of students is met at the door by the patient’s spouse to deny them entry. “He is sleeping. He is too tired to speak to medical students.” The patient overhears her and tells them to come in, saying, “I have been waiting all day for an opportunity to speak with the students.” He is a physician newly diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The students spend an hour interviewing him, a lot more time than originally allotted to them.

They come to debrief in our small group. It has been an exceedingly memorable experience. The dying patient teaches them a whole lot more than they could ever have

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imagined. The others have had good experiences, but nothing like what the physician patient afforded his apprentice interviewers.

In the final debriefing, the student I had made angry by asking that we not cancel class asks why I was clear about meeting when so many classes had been cancelled.

My answer: “In order to be a good clinician one must learn how to stay alive for others and to do one’s best work in times of crisis.” What a crisis! What an opportunity!

Some students are quite taken by my answer, others cynical about its authenticity.

So I decide to illustrate my model of doing one’s best work in times of crisis. I go into the immediate past to tell them about a momentous event in my own life.

On February 24, 2001, my own wife had been killed in a hit-and-run automobile incident in Memphis, Tennessee, where she had gone to take care of her mother after open heart surgery. Her mother survived.

She did not. How did I manage to stay alive for my patients, teach students, and still survive? It was not easy. I would muster all the energy I could gather to get to work, and in the evening literally “crash” for some six months or so before beginning to see the end of this.

She died on a Saturday morning. After the initial shock, I started making preliminary arrangements. I had to consider that my late wife was well-known and loved by so many in a number of local churches where she had served as their pianist. The news would resonate through town like an earthquake. How would I manage this? On the following Monday and Tuesday, I saw patients and let them know that I would be away the rest of the week to take care of an unplanned family situation. I would fly to Memphis from Charlottesville, Virginia, on Wednesday to complete arrangements for burial that next Saturday. On the intervening Thursday, the obituary would be published in both Charlottesville, Virginia, where we lived and in Memphis, Tennessee, where her mother lived.

On Monday, one patient would say, “I saw somebody in a car the other day. I think it was your wife waiting for you. She is very beautiful. I cannot compete with her.” My response: “what if you discover in time that you had no physical competition?” Her response? “We won’t go there.

By the way, there are still laws in the books that a Black man cannot marry a White woman in the state of Virginia, unless I take you to California.”

Another comes in on Tuesday and says, “You have been away on Fridays a few times.

I think you have a son at the University of Nebraska. He is probably sitting in the dean’s office having committed one mischief too many.” My response: “What if you discover

in time that it is more serious than that?”

Her conscious and preconscious fantasies open doors for more serious work with her unconscious fantasies.

Upon my return, patients could both express their sympathy and yet not lose sight of the continuity of their potentially fragmentary intrapsychic processes I had sutured, as it were, with my cryptic questions before I left town.

A third, a former patient this time, comes in after the burial to offer her condolences and to supply a dream for clarifying and making new meaning of an activated Oedipal episode in her hitherto formally completed analysis. “I dreamt that I had come to cook for you in your house. While I was preparing the meal you were laying the table. Then you came behind me and put your arms around me from behind in the affectionate way I can imagine you doing. Then I woke up.”

Upon hearing vignettes like these, the students were resolved that they were very glad they met for class. They were grateful both for the precept and for the clinical experiences they had had that day.

Another shoe, however, was yet to drop.

The students did not know about it. The spouse who had attempted to keep the pancreatic cancer physician patient from talking to the students, wrote a letter to the dean of the medical school several months later to ask that my internist co-mentor be dismissed from the faculty. His crime(s)? “He brought a Black doctor with him [moi]; my husband was too tired to talk with students; and he brought a Black medical student with him as well. I was a nurse; in my day, Black people were not allowed to come to the floor.” As an associate dean myself, who worked with the dean of the medical school, as a co-mentor who participated in the “crime,” and as a psychoanalyst, I was able to assign a hospital chaplain, whom I had taught, to assist the grieving spouse with her rage and the work of mourning.

How is it possible to have the resilience to do one’s best work in the face of crisis, personal or otherwise? A number of answers offer themselves. When I was in mourning, I told myself I would carry on with the functions my late wife and I undertook at the university and in the community of Charlottesville, Virginia. When a Polish-Jewish friend from Brooklyn heard me say this, he answered, “She is dead; she is not coming back!” I knew what he was doing by being so blunt, and so I received it as a good enough gesture. Most graciously, an elderly Ghanaian friend said, “Our elders say that when a person dies so young, she is needed elsewhere.” I had not heard that saying before. That, however, was the most comforting statement of all that I heard 26

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during the period of mourning. I could begin to let her go.

Behind all that can be said about resilience and the work of mourning, it is the conversation with my team of ancestors in my representational world that clinches it for me. I learned from my inside mother that “when your job is large (sic) you must do it all.” My grandfather taught strategy and discretion behind closed doors. My grandmother taught mental strength and tenacity in the conduct of handling one’s business affairs.

My father lent a smile in the face of adversity.

Put these stories that bespeak mental representations, precepts, and learning by identification together and we have something that approximates “grit,” or, simply, that which enables us to stay alive for ourselves and for our patients, or even better, our fellow seekers.

I hope I have given accounts of my story in which the events of history alternate with the sense of history, reminiscences where interior fields of reference fold into external fields of reference, with outcomes that compel me to rekindle a precept or to reconfigure another so that I can move on.

In these peristaltic movements, as it were, between inside and outside, I have concurrently worked as an analyst and a practitioner scholar of social change management for nearly four decades.

Finally, or in place of a conclusion, there is a fitting ending to this part of my story.

The poem “Description without Place” by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1945/1955) can be paraphrased as follows: we live in the oneiric description of a place but not in the concrete place itself. In other words, description installs functionality that displaces the material world just as a richly reconfigured psychoanalytic story ultimately displaces the events of history and renders those past events gossip. I physically live in Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson, who means different things to different people. My Charlottesville, however, is the place where for some thirty years, I had been on the verge of leaving. Yet, every time I had a job offer somewhere else, something good happened to me and so I stayed.

This dance of leaving and staying continued until, after seven years of mourning, my second wife, Cheryl, entered my life. I stayed, and have stayed, and will remain until the end of my academic and administrative career at the University of Virginia. z REFERENCES Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault (Sean Hand, Trans.).

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

(Original work published 1986) Politzer, G. (1994). Critique of the foundations of psychology: The psychology of psychoanalysis (Maurice Apprey, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1928) Stevens, W. (1955). Description without place. In The collected poems of Wallace Stevens (pp.339-346). New York, NY: Alfred P. Knopf. (Original work published 1945)

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Suffering, the Other, and a Vote for Trump As the current political environment in the United States swings towards a totalitarian orientation (Arendt, 1948/2004; Ellenberger, 1970; Sullivan, 2016; Z. Williams, 2017; R. Williams, 2016), it is important to critically examine the dialectic between politics and psychoanalysis.

Goggin and Goggin (2001) were correct to point out that the relevant question is not only how political should psychoanalysis be in practice, if at all, but also, “What conditions in a society or political system nurture and support the profession and practice of psychoanalysis, and what conditions hinder it?” They and others, such as Danto (2005), demonstrate that psychoanalysis thrived in liberal to socialist-leaning environments, where it was free to offer its services to all, regardless of race, religion, and economic status; where academic environments were inclusive and accessible; and where healthcare, including mental healthcare, was widely available. On the flip side, it suffered in fascist and authoritarian regimes (Goggin & Goggin, 2001; Kuriloff, 2013). Regardless of the challenges psychoanalysis might face in coming years, the unconscious mind cannot now be un-thought. The idea of internal motivational forces contained within but beyond the control of the body, whether an individual body or a societal body, will persist into an uncertain future.

Psychoanalysis for Peace Regarding what effect the discovery of the unconscious mind would have upon human nature and politics, early psychoanalysts were quite hopeful. They imagined a world in which drives were recognized and provided with appropriate outlets, allowing creativity and harmony to flourish (Goggin & Goggin, 2001; Danto, 2005), in addition to simply creating a political body capable of loving and working without neurotic misery. Curiously, in the 1932 correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud titled “Why War?” (Einstein, Freud, & Gilbert, 1939), Freud seemed to sell his own theories short. He seemed to forget the assertions he had made in “Future of an Illusion” (1927/1961) and “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930/1961) regarding the constant tension between drives and civilization, and to settle instead into a comfortable notion of inevitable evolutionary progress. Einstein wrote to ask Freud what the study of psychoanalysis could offer towards world peace. In his words, “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?” (Einstein et al., 1939, p.4).

Maria M. CHRISTOFF

In his response, Freud begins by asserting the existence of two constant, interactive, and unavoidable drives, libido and aggression. He goes on to situate the instincts and will of the individual in opposition to civilization, as he described in “Totem and Taboo” (1913/1955). To deal with this, a different form of violence, called law, evolved with human societies to keep individuals in check. However, an opposing force of identification, love, and a sense of community also works to hold nations together. It is a Romantic notion; the same innate forces that struggle for primacy within the individual also duel at the societal level.

Fear of violent retaliation by the law, as well as genuine affection, work in tandem to inhibit destructive libidinal and violent impulses of both the individual and the masses. Freud writes, “There is no use in trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations,” but “[a]nything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war,” (Einstein et al., 1939, p.11). Freud did not often speak of empathy (Christoff & Dauphin, 2018; Agosta, 2014), and neither did he in this correspondence.

Talk of empathy has played a prominent role, on the other hand, in current political discussions. In this letter, Freud focused on identification as the source of emotional ties. The warm feelings of similarity he alludes to resemble a form of nationalism. If words were put to this form of identification, they might run, “You are like me. I am good, so you are good. It’s good for us to be good together, and our goodness together is better than even our separate goodnesses.” This self-centered emotional closeness is quite distinct from the reaching-into practice of empathy. I will return to the discourse of empathy in current politics below.

Continuing with Freud’s response to Einstein, at the moment when a reader of Freud might expect a fresh idea that would illuminate the topic, he asks, “Why do you and I and so many other people rebel so violently against war?” (Einstein et al., 1939, p.12). This flies in the face of his previous assertion that on both an individual and a societal level, the aggressive drive is inescapable.

Manageable and capable of sublimation, perhaps, but nomothetically present. Freud’s question to Einstein introduces the idea that while some people reject war, others thrive on it, and that there is an innate difference between these types of people. Alternatively, perhaps Freud suggests that although some people must still struggle with violent impulses, their impulses could not result in war, whereas the impulses of others may. It is puzzling and unclear. Freud explains, 27

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For incalculable ages, mankind has been passing through a process of evolution of culture. (Some people, I know, prefer to use the term “civilization.”) We owe to that process the best part of what we have become, as well as a good part of what we suffer from…The psychical modifications…consist in a progressive displacement of instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual impulses…Of the psychological characteristics of civilization two appear to be the most important: a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and perils. Now war is in the crassest opposition to the psychical attitude imposed on us by the process of civilization, and for that reason we are bound to rebel against it; we simply cannot any longer put up with it…And how long shall we have to wait before the rest of mankind becomes pacifists too? There is no telling. But it may not be Utopian to hope that these two factors, the cultural attitude and the justified dread of the consequences of a future war, may result within a measurable time in putting an end to the waging of war. (Einstein et al., 1939, pp.13-14) Freud forgets to ask himself where those aggressive impulses go, once internalized. He pays lip service to, but quickly forgets, the perils of internalized aggression.

Surely, according to his own theory, these internalized impulses will present as symptoms of anxiety. He ends by reiterating the comforting note that anything that would increase a sense of identification might prevent war—“what fosters the growth of a civilization works at the same time against war,” (Einstein et al., 1939, p.13)—but leaves his future readers to puzzle out how humans might become pacifists without relying on a passive notion of cultural evolution to account for such a fundamental shift.

Analyzing the Moment I have taken care to set the stage for my treatment of current American politics due to the many parallels between the European inter-war period and the present-day United States. There are periods in American history whose recognition is also necessary to understanding the current moment, including the post-civil war era (1865-1900) and the civil rights era (19501963) (Library of Congress, 2017; Gilder Lehrman Institute, 2017). One common thread among these various periods is the preoccupation with race and high levels of white nationalism. During the interwar period in Europe, centuries of anti-Semitic discrimination and persecution were rapidly coming to an apex (Arendt, 1948/2004).

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Similarly, in current United States politics, centuries of anti-Black discrimination and persecution, and post 9-11 anti-Muslim prejudice, are rapidly becoming prominent (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016; Row, 2016). Another similarity between Freud’s 1932 letter on the role of the unconscious mind in politics and the pre-election period of 2016 is the mood of complacent optimism felt by much of the American public prior to November 8, 2016 (Shahani, 2016; Scharmer, 2016). Everyone, even Donald Trump’s supporters, woke on November 9 to a different world, and felt shock (Stanage, 2016). Countless websites and news articles since have scrambled to excavate and dissect the turbulent campaign season leading to the election, and to answer the question, “How did this happen?” Not only how, but also “Why?” (Tyson & Maniam, 2016).

How can psychoanalytic thought be brought to bear on understanding this political moment? The election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States was a surprising unknown, and was accomplished with the votes of a mere 27% of the eligible voting population (“If ‘Did Not Vote’ Had Been a Candidate”, 2016). In this sense, his potential victory was, like an impulse arising from the dynamic unconscious, obscured from conscious recognition until it broke through in the form of an undeniable symptom. Upon recognition of the symptom, reflection of the time preceding its arrival ensues, and signs become apparent in hindsight. Also like a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, it was, in actuality, enacted by the ego, the self. Whether ego-dystonically or ego-syntonically, despite falling short of winning the popular vote, Trump was voted into office by the American body politic. His opposition bears responsibility for his election in the same way Ernst Lanzer opened his door nightly to allow the ghost of his father to enter (Freud, 1909/1955). In the same way that a dissociated aspect of self is nevertheless responsible for the actions of the individual, so is it incumbent on the political body to allow entry to its disavowed aspects, in order to know itself (Sullivan, 1953; Stolorow, 1992; Bromberg, 1998).

An invitation to reach into and understand the motivations of Trump voters as well as those who opposed him, and how this interaction resulted in his election, need not equate to providing a platform for hate, although careful attention to the distinction is essential. Taking a critical approach to exploring current politics, authors may imagine themselves in the role of the psychoanalyst during a psychoanalytic treatment, creating a space of reflective self-curiosity in the analysand (Winnicott, 1971).

In the process, it would be wise to follow

Kohut’s (1971) advice, and to align oneself with the ego of the analysand, rather than the split-off aspect of the self. The purpose of analysis, after all, is to fortify the ego, to lead the analysand towards an honest encounter with negative affect and disavowed self-states, without becoming subsumed by the id or dissolving into psychosis. In Winnicottian terms, a critical approach to the outcome of the 2016 election would provide a holding space in which to process previously dissociated affect, while refusing to allow the analyst to be destroyed in the process (Winnicott, 1969). In this case, the ego of the United States is its reasonableness, its better nature, its hopefulness, its Statue of Liberty, its American Dream. The ego with which to align is the assertion that the country will not fall from its state of democratic grace to dangerous authoritarianism, fascism, or oligarchy. These values are shared by those in all major political parties, and by those individuals who voted for any of the presidential candidates.

Deep-Rooted Malaise A model for such an endeavor is to be found in the joint effort of the Frankfurt School and the American Jewish Committee in their five-volume Studies in Prejudice series (1949-1950), edited by Horkheimer and Flowerman. The project was led primarily

by Jewish intellectuals who, having been forced to flee Europe during the Holocaust, turned a critical eye to their new residence, the United States. The volumes included contributions from Adorno, Bettelheim, Lowenthal, and Marcuse, among others.

Recognizing that eugenics and anti-Semitism were far from localized to World War II Germany, and were instead global trends, they sought to study various aspects of these trends in American culture (Stern, 2005; Vasquez, 2016, 2017). Notable contributions of these volumes include “the f-scale,” a personality scale measuring a subject’s propensity towards authoritarian or fascist ideas and values. While the scale presented serious psychometric concerns, it is meaningful that the authors explored the personalities of the population for the origins of authoritarian regimes, rather than focusing solely on top-down power structures. This theme of looking into the suffering and frustration of the people to explain the rise of populist leaders continued into the fifth volume, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (Lowenthal & Guterman, 1949/1970).

An in-depth analysis of the similarities between Prophets of Deceit and the rise of Donald Trump following the announcement of his candidacy would be a timely endeavor, for which there is not room in this essay. A few points of Lowenthal and 28

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Guterman’s analysis, however, are key to this discussion. The agitator aligns himself with the “deep rooted malaise” of the struggling, unsatisfied people (Marcuse, introduction to Lowenthal & Guterman, 1970, p.viii). “The agitator’s themes are a distorted version of genuine social problems” (p.139). The agitator gains the trust of the people by positioning them as part of an ingroup, “like someone arising from its midst to express its innermost thoughts,” (p.5) which requires the creation of a threatening enemy out-group. He presents as an “indefatigable businessman” (p.117). The agitator refers to his enemies as vermin, especially rats. In dehumanizing and setting out to destroy the out-group, the agitator says publicly what others think privately (p.124), and has every intention of making good on his promises to go after the enemy. In the end, however, “for all his emphasis on and expression of discontent, the agitator functions objectively to perpetuate the conditions which give rise to that discontent” (p.140). Lowenthal and Guterman recognized that, despite being an accurate and informative study, their volume offered no solutions to resisting an agitator, should one arise.

There are various levels of malaise and genuine social problems that contributed to Trump’s rise to power. Among his core voting constituency, “the Forgotten People,” (Gage, 2016), there is a specific and deep suffering. Rural white communities with the highest drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality rates, as well as high unemployment rates, were the biggest supporters of Trump in the 2016 election (Monnat, 2016). Monnat (2016) likens the complex picture of economics, drug dependence, and death rate to a measure of “despair,” and notes that the communities with the highest level of “deaths of despair” were also the strongest supporters of Trump nationwide. Some of these same communities have seen a sharp increase in newborns with neonatal opioid addiction (Mostafavi, 2016), which is increasing at a rate 80% higher than that in urban areas. But poor whites were not the only Trump supporters. He found support in all geographic areas, among all income brackets and all levels of education, including 53% of all white women (Lett, 2016; Sasson, 2016). Rather than the white women’s vote being a response to a specific suffering, it seemed to seek to negate the suffering of Black women and other women of color (LaSha, 2016; McDonough, 2016). Women of color felt betrayed by the white women who voted for Trump (Obie, 2017), seeing their votes as both a refusal to stand up for their civil rights and a willful ignorance of issues of race in feminism that have been long discussed by

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Black and Latinx feminists (Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldua, 2015). White women who voted for Trump identified with his call to “make America great again” and responded to the sense of personal deprivation implicit in the slogan. Responding to suggestion, they unconsciously imagined themselves as the real Americans who had lost something they deserved (Kurtzleben, 2017; Gurr, 1970). Lowenthal

of the categories of the enemy. His elite or in-group is essentially negative; it depends for definition on those in the out group” (p.108). In the context of the 2016 election and victory period, Trump’s forgotten people were non-Black, non-Latinx, non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-Jewish, non-women, non-LGBTQ, and non-immigrant. The negation of difference was celebrated with giant Christmas trees (Sharp, 2016; Birnbaum

Baby man

and Guterman (1949/1970) identified the psychology in this positive identification as simple Americans, real Americans, or forgotten people: “In the characterization real Americans the abstract adjective real barely conceals the negative meaning of non-real.

What the agitator implies is that his adherents are all those who do not fall under any

& Liptak, 2016). Christian male whiteness was reinstated as the invisible standard against which all difference was thrown in sharp relief (Hall, 1992; Haraway, 1988).

This is reflected in Trump’s choice of cabinet members and appointed officials (McCarthy, 2017). White suffering, in this context, took precedence over current and 29

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historical Black suffering (DuVernay, 2016; Black Lives Matter, 2016). Trump invited the assertion and voicing of white suffering, which included a silencing and whitewashing of Black suffering, immigrant suffering, and Native American suffering (Donnella, 2016; Sammon, 2016). In this election cycle, racism trumped the outward elements of progress towards inclusivity.

Shaun King, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist and historian, situates Trump’s rise and election as the response of a historically racist country to its first Black president (University of Michigan, 2017).

Like a reaction formation, having allowed love for a Black father figure to surface to consciousness, and this affection being so anxiety provoking, a surge of reactionary fear and hatred overcompensated. Reporter Van Jones, on election night, referred to this reaction formation-like phenomenon as “whitelash” (Cama, 2016). Following a period of expansion of civil rights to LGBTQ people, increased access to healthcare for low-income people and minorities, and increasing discourse surrounding gender and racial inequality during the Obama administration, the country elected a leader who is explicitly racist (O’Connor & Marans, 2016), sexist (Cohen, 2017), xenophobic (Sargent, 2016), and ableist (Baer, 2016). As though global atrocities following the first world war, from the Holocaust to the genocide in Syria, were not enough to disprove Freud’s optimism regarding a natural evolution of civilization (Einstein et al., 1939), the election of Trump as the 45th president of the United States can be described as a national return of the repressed (Freud, 1933/1964). The 2016 election shows that, contrary to a passive evolutionary process, dynamic forces continue to operate and influence the course of history, despite the efforts of methods such as psychoanalysis and activist movements to shape history in the direction of progress (Coates, 2015; Davis, 2016). Moving from an exploration of the psychology of a nation to an individual, a case example demonstrates how dynamic unconscious forces can influence political acts.

Case Material Aidan is a 20-year-old white college student majoring in mechanical engineering. He attends a four-year commuter university in the Midwest. His parents, with whom he lives, are very religious Baptists of lower-middle income. Aidan presented for treatment to address moderate selfharm and suicidal ideation. He started cutting during high school, and it has persisted through his two and a half years of college. Aidan is conscientious, agreeable, and thoughtful. In the course of therapy,

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Aidan has identified that his urges to selfharm arise from feelings of unbearable guilt when he fears he may have emotionally hurt his friends. The cutting, when it occurs, provides relief, but generates more guilt, as he is letting down those who he has promised he would stop cutting, those who care about him most. Aidan’s care for his loved others is ego-syntonic and a source of pride. He has a special non-sexual relationship with a woman his age whom he has known since childhood, Ramona. Ramona is the first person Aidan reaches out to in his emotional suffering. His commitment to continuing to live when he felt actively suicidal, before starting treatment, emerged with her invitation to be used as his source of primary identification. She said, “Imagine if I was the one telling you I felt this way.

That’s how I feel when you tell me you want to die.” Through empathic mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988), Aidan developed a semi-internalized good introject (Klein, 1975), which he has slowly learned to rely upon except for in his most guilty and fragmented states, when he reaches out to Ramona for support. Reaching out to Ramona always works, and the urge to self-harm is diminished.

Throughout the course of the therapy, Aidan has expressed only liberal political views and opinions. He has expressed his support for same-sex marriage, for women’s reproductive healthcare rights, for religious diversity, and for race equality. He supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary race. For this reason, I was surprised when, on November 9, Aidan revealed to me, “I’m a pretty good liar.”

What did Aidan mean? He was sometimes insincere. He would sometimes read people’s expectations and respond accordingly, instead of honestly. This ranged from the standard “Good,” in response to “How are you?” in casual conversation, to allowing his parents and others in his community to go on thinking he believes in God, although he identifies as atheist. In this case, he had withheld the truth from Ramona about his having voted for Trump.

Like most liberals, Aidan felt that Hillary Clinton would surely win the election. Like most Democratic party voters, he viewed Trump’s candidacy as a bizarre endeavor doomed to failure. Of course the country would not elect such a person as its president. Comedian Roseanne Barr, interviewed on Marc Maron’s podcast, might have articulated even the most cynical liberal perspective with her assertion about Clinton’s impending win, “She already has the receipt” (Maron, 2016). Aidan confessed he had voted for Trump, “as a joke, because it would be ironic if he won. I never really thought it could happen, though! The good

thing is my county went to Clinton, so it didn’t matter anyway.” Aidan and his guy friends hung out in a group chat through the night of the election, watching history unfold like satire. The guilt did not come on until Aidan spoke to Ramona the next day.

She was distraught, like so many others, worrying about the future of the country, especially the marginalized groups Trump had promised to target (Wang, 2016; Merica, 2017). Aidan empathized with her grief, consoled her, and kept the knowledge of his vote to himself. After his confession that session, the issue of Aidan’s vote for Trump did not come up in therapy again.

The salient material, after all, was the mutual empathy between him and Ramona, and his identification with her.

helped hand the election to Bush, but, like Aidan, my county went to Gore anyway.

On closer inspection, however, my naiveté had the flavor of a bubble of optimism, where Aidan’s had a cynical negativism. In both cases, the explanation is more complex than my initial impressions, and both votes contain meaningful dynamic considerations.

Aidan’s vote was a negating disidentification with the very order he consciously identified with, and expected to take precedence, regardless of his political action. It was, from that perspective, a self-negating political act. Following a similar pattern to Aidan’s self-harm, aggressive impulses were so unmanageable, they had to be denied and redirected. Encountering Ramona’s perspective brought him into uncomfortable contact

Clown

In my reveries of Aidan following that session, I chalked his vote up to a youthful naiveté, to a lack of the context that comes from years of participation in American politics. I reflected that I had also thrown away my first presidential vote, having voted for Ralph Nader. That vote, in theory, may have 30

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with a disavowed emotional state, namely anger, which generated guilt. In a sense, she talked him back into his own morality, reminding him, through his empathy for her, to stretch his empathy further outward into identification with the marginalized others who may suffer as a result of the election.

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Having taken these steps, he was able to undo his guilt and move on.

Aidan’s vote for Trump falls under the umbrella of a projective identification (Bion, 1959, 1983; Ogden, 1977; Bollas, 1987). His aggression, detached from consciousness entirely ego-dystonic, was thrown outward into the political sphere, a mere joke. This joke, however, does not fit the description of humor as a taboo impulse disguised and transformed into a shared sense of pleasure (Freud, 1905/1960, 1928; Christoff & Dauphin, 2018). Instead, it tells a lie about Aidan. It tells the story of a disaffected young man who values dominance, competition, and similarity. This is neither how Aidan identifies nor who I know him to be. He is a good person who values difference, equal rights, and caring for others. I am also not suggesting that Aidan harbors unconscious hatred for the marginalized groups who are already being negatively affected by Trump’s presidency (Hersher, 2017; Santos, 2017; Lewin, 2017), or that he unconsciously believes in Trump’s message, while finding this stance simultaneously unacceptable to consciousness. Rather, I am suggesting that Aidan’s banishing of his own aggression from consciousness, especially aggressive impulses towards cared-for others, prevented him from taking a political action that accurately represented his values. On the social political level, projective identification takes on the form of false projection, or pathological projection, as described by Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002).

False Projection The “Elements of Anti-Semitism” described by Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002), although specific to the perspective of German Jewish refugees during World War II, are also applicable to current American trends in hate. It was Adorno and Horkheimer’s clearly identified desire to use their historical placement to understand more general emergent themes in the dialectic of history. False projection, like projective identification, situates disavowed impulses or self-aspects into a fabricated other, created for the purpose of this projection. The group (in the case of false projection) or person (in the case of projective identification) exists in its own right, but the perception of that other is skewed in the eyes of the projector, due to the disavowal of self-aspects. Writing during World War II, they focused on the most prominent example of false projection of their time, anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism, they wrote, arose from “the urge to make everyone the same” (p.139). Like projective identification, “if mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself ” (p.154). As part of this projection, “[i]mpulses which are

not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object: the prospective victim” (p.154). The “Bad Hombre” that Trump sees in Mexican immigrants, then, is a disidentified mimetic projection of himself.

Divorced from the self, it must then be destroyed. Walls must be built. Borders must be enforced. Law and order, that form of violence dressed in civilization, must prevail. This process, however, consistently fails to cure the world. Instead, those who enact false projection “transform the world into the hell they have always taken it to be” ( p.165). Trump’s supporters and those that fail to oppose him, in turn, must participate in the pathological projection, in order to carry it through to concrete action. The manner of participation is manifold. From Aidan’s repressed aggression that usually surfaces as self-loathing (Freud, 1917/1957), to the most explicit forms of malignant hatred (Domonoske, 2016), false projection depends upon the complicity of the people.

False projection’s opposite, freedom from oppression, celebration of difference, neither mimesis nor domination, “would depend on whether the ruled, in face of absolute madness, could master themselves and hold the madness back. Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea that has been unrealized until now: that the Jew”—the Black person, the Muslim refugee, the Mexican immigrant, the disabled person, the LGBTQ person, the woman—“is a human being,” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/2002, p.165). Such a step, Horkheimer and Adorno assert, “would indeed prove the turning point of history” (p.165). In contrast to Freud’s evolutionary process of civilization as passive (Einstein et al., 1939), what is suggested here is active and arduous. True empathic realization of the humanity of others is difficult, and often comes at a personal cost. While systems of power larger than the individual shunt us into pathways of pathological projection and complicity, only an intentional and persistent process of self-exploration, followed by ego-syntonic political action, can lead to the end of violence. The exploration is shadowy and threatening. Like Aidan’s psychotherapy process, it will require encountering affects and complexes we would prefer to repress. Once they have been encountered again and again and recognized, however, we might have more flexibility regarding our choice of action, more control over the course of history.

Unconscious processes on individual and social scales will always affect the political environment. The solution to their eruption in unexpected and dangerous directions, arrived at with the help of Freud (Einstein et al., 1939) and the Frankfurt 31

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School, suggests that perhaps the vision of a better world where things are done on purpose and in keeping with the ego-syntonic American ethos can one day come to fruition. If so, however, the unconscious forces to be acknowledged and examined are formidable. The work required will be grueling, but meaningful. z REFERENCES Agosta, L. (2014). A rumor of empathy: Rewriting empathy in the context of philosophy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465344 Arendt, H. (2004). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Schocken Books. (Original work published 1948) Baer, D. (2016, October 17). Let’s talk about Trump’s ableism. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag. com/scienceofus/2016/10/lets-talk-about-trumps-ableism. html Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

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Mostafavi, B. (2016, December 12). Study: Rural communities see steep increase in babies born with opioid withdrawal [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://labblog.uofmhealth.org/ industry-dx/study-rural-communities-see-steep-increase-babies-born-opioid-withdrawal Obie, B. (2017, January 23). Woman in viral photo from Women’s March to white female allies: ‘Listen to a Black woman.’ Retrieved from http://www.theroot.com/ woman-in-viral-photo-from-women-s-march-to-white-female-1791524613 O’Connor, L. & Marans, D. (2016, February 29). Here are 13 examples of Donald Trump being racist. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-examples_us_56d47177e4b03260bf777e83 Ogden, T. H. (1977). Projective identification and psychotherapeutic technique. New York, NY: Jason Aronson, Incorporated.

Row, J. (2016, November 23). A safe space for racism: Clashes at sports stadiums between white crowds and Black Lives Matter. New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/138990/safe-space-racism Sammon, A. (2016, September 9). A history of Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. Mother Jones. Retrieved from http://www.motherjones.com/envi-

Retrieved from http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index. ssf/2016/12/mobile_chief_of_staff_apologiz.html Southern Poverty Law Center. (2016, November). Ten days after: Harassment and intimidation in the aftermath of the election. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/ sites/default/files/com_hate_incidents_report_final.pdf Stanage, N. (2016, November 9). Trump shocks the world with White House win. Retrieved from http://thehill.com/ homenews/campaign/305034-trump-wins-white-house-delivering-shock-to-political-system Stern, A. M. (2005). Eugenic nation: Faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Stolorow, R. D. (1992). Contexts of being: The intersubjective foundations of psychological life (George E. Atwood, Ed.). Hilldale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Sullivan, A. (2016, May 1). Democracies end when they are too democratic. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry.

New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

Tyson, A. & Maniam, S. (2016, November 9). Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/ behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/ University of Michigan. (2017, January 23). Shaun King: A talk on activism and movement building [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/

Baglioni detail nails to cross ronment/2016/09/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-timelinesioux-standing-rock-jill-stein Santos, F. (2017, February 8). She showed up yearly to meet immigration agents. Now they’ve deported her. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2017/02/08/us/phoenix-guadalupe-garcia-de-rayos. html?_r=0 Sargent, G. (2016, September 1). Trump returns to his old standbys: Xenophobia, hate, lies, and yes, mass deportations. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/09/01/ trump-returns-to-his-old-standbys-xenophobia-hate-lies-andyes-mass-deportations/?utm_term=.d38d495a3ce6 Sasson, E. (2016, November 15). Blame Trump’s victory on college-educated whites, not the working class. New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/138754/blame-trumps-victory-college-educated-whitesnot-working-class Scharmer, O. (2016, November 11). On the making of Trump—The blind spot that created him. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-the-makingof-trumpthe-blind-spot-that-created_us_58264d03e4b02b1f5257a1ca?timestamp=1478908400601 Shahani, A. (2016, November 10). An app saw Trump winning swing states when polls didn’t. Retrieved from http://www. npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/10/501613521/ an-app-saw-trump-winning-swing-states-when-polls-didnt Sharp, J. (2016, December 18). Mobile official apologizes for Christmas tree at Trump rally removed from public park.

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watch?v=wPYG93CGME4 Vasquez, T. (2016, May 27). White Southern girlhood and eugenics: A talk with historian Karin Zipf. Retrieved from https://rewire.news/article/2016/05/27/ white-southern-girlhood-eugenics-talk-historian-karin-zipf/ Vasquez, T. (2017, January 30). ‘State of Eugenics’ film sheds light on North Carolina’s sterilization abuse program.

Retrieved from https://rewire.news/article/2017/01/30/ state-eugenics-sheds-light-north-carolinas-sterilization-abuse/ Wang, A. B. (2016, November 4). Donald Trump plans to immediately deport 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/13/donald-trump-plans-to-immediately-deport-2-to-3-million-undocumented-immigrants/?utm_term=.b8e8d3b2b5a6 Williams, R. (2016, March 18). The rise of authoritarianism: The popularity of and opposition to authoritarian leaders is rising. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https:// www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201603/ the-rise-authoritarianism-in-america Williams, Z. (2017, February 1). Totalitarianism in the age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-trump-lessons-from-hannah-arendt-protests Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50, 711-716.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. New York, NY: Routledge Classics.

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Trump’s Madness: Mar-a-Logos Liberty’s light has dimmed as the Trump cloud descends upon us, a tweeting frenzy of racist bombast, atavistic authoritarianism, bellicose posturing, and xenophobic nationalism as the madness at the core becomes our own.

Anxious and uncertain about not only the future, but about being trapped in an eternal present as we witness—protesting, phoning, and letter writing—continued political and diplomatic disasters in a ceaseless current of catastrophes, anxious about our daily safety and freedoms, Americans “sleep no more,” worried sick about the “sea incarnadine” resulting from Trump’s having his hand in it, as it turns far “redder” than we could have imagined. We live in a knot of impotence, anxiety, and fatigue, in what one articulate journalist has called “the new criminogenic culture.”

Indeed, the marked decline in civility, the increase in public displays of aggression, and the disappearance of metaphor have migrated directly from the body of the president to the social and political body of the people. You may recall that Trump talked about his penis directly. He had “no problem down there,” he repeatedly claimed. Contrarily, the female “down there” has “blood coming out of it!” Wounded, “less than,” the female clearly has a “problem.” But even if that is something of the psychoanalytic gist of it, that is also the very least of it. The wall, the immigrant ban, indeed, almost all the flurry of frenzied “executive orders” concern a failure of metaphor.

One does need a wall when one does not have a word.

The Twitter Principle dictates that there is no “yes” because there is no “no.” The only “no” that is encountered—indeed, that must ceaselessly be encountered—is the other’s “no” that is met, at each and every instance, with a full-on assault. The assault on reality is incessant insofar as reality is limited. Let’s face it: reality is not “great” and it can’t be “great again,” since it was never that great in the first place. This helps us fathom something of the function of “trumped up truths,” also known as “alternative facts” or, even more simply, “lies,” but in a style that is particular to Trump: brash certainty, cartoonish storytelling, shameless slander, and aggressive impudence; Obama was not born in the United States; the inauguration crowd was “the biggest ever in Presidential history”; his speech was “the greatest speech ever, as great as Abe Lincoln’s!”; protesters against any of his policies are “criminals paid by democrats”; he “won” the popular vote by two million votes; there is a conspiracy against him which is why it “seemed as if ” there were more votes for Hilary Clinton; global warming is a Chinese hoax; General Flynn was never in contact with the Russians; the

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murder rate in this country is the highest it has been in 47 years; he watched Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center came down; the unemployment rate is 42%; there is no system to vet refugees; torture works; Mexico is sending us their bad people, their rapists; autism is caused by vaccines; Mexico will pay for the wall; the judicial system is a threat to national security.

Surely, you might rightly argue, there is an “ethics of the lie.” The lie has a noble history. “Nescit vivere qui nescit dissimulare, perire melius” holds the old Latin maxim. Machiavelli opined that it was in the expressed interest of the ruler to lie. Mark Twain bewailed the decay of the art of lying and the “‘growing prevalence of the brutal truth.” Alfred Hitchcock told us that romantic love is dependent on deceit. Trump’s, however, is not the same sort of lie. And this is precisely where the discussions of Trump’s “madness” run up against the wall—no pun intended.

Trump’s lies are different; they are direct refutations of reality. He responds to corrections or challenges with rage and vengeance and the lies are countered with double lies and vicious attacks. Reality itself seems to be what must be denied, ceaselessly, ferociously, madly. This is because reality has the “no” in it that Trump is fighting against. This “battle” allows him to continue fighting without end.

This fight itself, in a manner akin to Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Richard or Iago, although infinitely less articulate than these potential Trump forebearers, is the sum total of his “claim to power.” The difference from them in terms of language, however, should not be ignored. Trump “makes deals” through force by bullying and intimidating. He fired the top tier of the State Department upon his first days in office and decreed that “all federal employees can be fired by the President.”

And further, the Freudian notion of the group psychology teaches us that his “supporters,” the “rust belt” workers, identify narcissistically with the limitless billionaire. He doesn’t, like Milton or Shakespeare, have Cicero on his back; ever so slightly closer to a Nero or a Caligula, he is more suited to his namesakes, Agent Orange and Hair Hitler. He fired several government employees for having published articles criticizing him. His promise to lift the ban on torture is just one of the many “bad guy attributes” of the Trump action figure’s savagery. His lair of militarists, corporate ideologues, and science-deniers are poised to destroy all vestiges of social contract and basic trust. He has the support of the Philippine, Turkish, Egyptian, and Russian dictators.

Mental health professionals have not been silent. They have written group letters to senators, congressmen, justices; they have 33

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invoked the use of the press; they have petitioned and regularly, publically diagnosed and debated. Vanity Fair ran an article on it.

The Atlantic ran a full feature during the campaign. And a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist went on the record with a much-touted diagnosis.

John Gartner’s petition has received 29,000 signatures of licensed mental health professionals. Citizen Therapists Against Trump issued a manifesto warning against Trump’s “psychosis.” A senior State Department official under Bush was quoted as saying, “I do not think we have a mentally able president.”

All this despite the famous “Goldwater Rule,” adapted into the American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics following the 1964 presidential race, when a group of psychiatrists came out against Barry Goldwater’s mental fitness to serve as president.

The Cold War heightened the psychiatrists’ concern; the President has his finger on the nuclear button. They felt a sense of responsibility. Goldwater lost and the psychiatrists came under fire for announcing their opinion publically, having swayed voters. The Goldwater Rule prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing someone whom they have not treated.

The paradox of course is that a psychiatrist is even more strictly forbidden from discussing a case that she has seen due to confidentiality agreements. When Dr. Gartner of Johns Hopkins came out with this recent public petition, the psychiatrists announced that they were transgressing the Goldwater Rule since their responsibility to warn people about Trump was of far greater ethical urgency.

The diagnoses, and the debate about them, and even the debate about whether this debate has any relevance at all, is a constant hum accompanying the diarrhea of executive orders from the White House. Trump has been described as “paranoid,” “splitting,” “a traumatizing narcissist,” as sustaining a “delusion of omnipotence that suffers no challenges,” as a “pathological liar,” as displaying a “marked inability to display basic cognition, rudimentary judgment and exercise impulse control.” He shows “repeated satisfaction insulting others,” and an “inability to be less than anyone.” He “cannot tolerate the slightest psychological pain or discomfort and must immediately tweet his anger.” He “has no frustration tolerance.”

Others have argued that the emphasis on madness helps Trump forward his agenda, and that he cunningly “appears mad,” although this argument seems less fashionable after his first month in office. My favorite of the diagnoses is not a diagnosis at all. Mark Singer remarked in 1997 in his New Yorker article, “Trump Solo,” that “his unique talent for being Trump, looming

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ubiquitous by reducing himself to a persona, exempted [Donald] from introspection.”

Trump leads “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

There are those who argue that being mentally ill in no way means he cannot be president; that indeed, it might allow him to be president.

At the same time, the “madness of the mental health profession,” steeped in the very ego love that the president embodies, makes itself heard. We read regarding the allegation of Mr. Trump’s supposed mental illness that “[it] is not a disorder unless it does not provide a benefit,” and further, the fact that he “gets pleasure rather than distress at vengeance and tweeting therefore [means that it] cannot be said to be a mental disorder.”

One of the great achievements of a democratic society is that it grants its citizenry the possibility not to think about politics.

Democracy affords citizens certain leisures: an unconscious; a symptom; and even a psychoanalyst; not to mention the time for all of those. In other words, democracy allows its citizens to be mad, to be “mad” with and in civilization. And psychoanalysis allows its citizens the very integrity and dignity of that madness in an age where the reality and materiality of the market is supposed to be the only one that counts.

The tyrant is something quite different. Historians have long noted the marked decline of mental illness under fascist and authoritarian governments.

Small wonder: the tyrant takes our time, our money, and even deprives us of our own particular madness since we have to concern ourselves only with his. The argument is not that the tyrant is mad, but rather that by ousting the tyrant, we are protecting our own right to madness.

The relation between madness and democracy is not new. In the Hebrew Bible, the word for madness is from the root that means “to go astray.” In the religious context, to be mad is to stray from God’s path. We might recall today that Saul’s madness was a result of ruling rather than being ruled, and madness in the Bible is relatively rare. In Greek epic, madness is not much of an issue either. Homer is more concerned with the hero’s savoir faire with anger, spells, and curses; even witches turning men into swine can be controlled by binding oaths. It is with the birth of tragedy that madness found center stage. Democracy concerns civic independence. In her classic study, Edith Hamilton reminded us that the tragic hero has (like the analysand) to find his own way with “no right answer.”

Tragedy emerges at the moment that master discourses were changing and the absence of the Other to guarantee any choice

became the very subject matter of the plays.

The attenuated power of the gods, the necessity of making judgments here and now, the absence of “one” ruler or “one” policy and the necessity of speech to convince and to aver make man more vulnerable to the Other: Orestes, Electra, Phaedra, Herakles, Hippolytus, Medea, the Bacchae.

Michael Moore is one of the only public figures who accurately predicted the election results. He correctly diagnosed the social and economic suffering of the neglected Rust Belt and the disenfranchised dismissal of the working class, dubbing Trump’s victory “The triumph of Neo-Fascism.” Cornell West, Carl Bernstein, and Henry Giroux, to name a few, have made extensive use of the term. West sees Trump as the adverse and unfortunate outgrowth of neoliberal rule dealing in privatization and militarization. In his newest book, Thank You For Being Late (2016), Thomas Friedman argues that the exponential growth of climate change, globalization, and, most importantly, technology are responsible for our current political situation, having made the world unfamiliar to us. In 2007, the iPhone, the Kindle, and the Android appeared and just as instantly, our sense of time was radically altered as we entered what Jonathan Crary called “late Capitalism and the ends of sleep.” Trump’s electorate dreams of a strong man to make meaning great again, an imaginary wish of “winning” just when the very idea of “winning” has lost. They voted for an atomic mushroom cloud of an ego in the era that had steadily been requiring increased tolerance and subjective complexity. Trump is the president for the era without time, in the infantile era before time and death existed.

One of my patients made a repeated Freudian slip; she meant to say “when Trump became president” and said instead “when Trump became pregnant.” She associated: “he is not a father; he is the representative of the all powerful Other. This is more a primitive mother than a father,” she said, “where fake and true were not opposites.”

Historians like to tell us that precedents can be found for the supposedly “un-presidented.” They have looked to Coolidge’s Immigration Act of 1924—which was explicitly passed for its racial restrictions—for the origins of Trump’s xenophobia: fewer Jews, Asians, Slavs, and Africans. The aim of the Coolidge legislation was to “keep American stock up,” for example, to keep it Protestant, or “great.”

Most people are unaware that these quotas remained in place until 1965. Steve Bannon is poised to resuscitate that legislation.

Hannah Arendt told us that the “protean origins of fascism” remain alive and well in American culture. Most people similarly ignored the buzzing undercurrent of fascism in American history. The Christian Domin34

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ionists, sexual fundamentalists, and white nationalists today are often the descendants— sometimes, the literal blood descendants—of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early ‘50s, joined the John Birch society in the ‘60s, signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

Historians have further seen Trump’s exceptionalism as originating in the cult of reinvigorated masculinity found in earlier, more imperialist, American ideology. From Theodore Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” to John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” to George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished,” presidents have “manned it up” and urged the nation to do the same.

I would still argue that Trump is different. He is not masculine; he is only phallic in the most infantile manner, as evident in his concern with size. And if he was affected by the histories the historians alert us to, he is surely ignorant of them. He doesn’t have much in the way of words, except his name of course. It is the only word he has, and he has put it to work all over the world, Trumping all other suits, by those golden letters, in a magical exceptionalism worthy of the Titans. z REFERENCES Friedman, T. (2016). Thank you for being late. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Singer, M. (1997, May 19). Trump solo. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/05/19/trump-solo

The Waiter

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Where the Wild Things Are The Observations Freud’s “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis” (1910/ 1957) is about what constitutes psychoanalytic practice, and who may call herself a psychoanalyst. The paper was published in 1910, the same year in which the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) was founded. This coincidence underscores the links between practice, malpractice, and regulation, as Freud states in the last paragraph of the paper that he founded the IPA to separate the true psychoanalysts from the wild ones.

If my German were at all serviceable, I’d know whether wilde has the same connotations as the English wild, but since it is not, I’ll risk speculating that antonyms of the word, as Freud used it, might be controlled, orderly, or disciplined. Freud first takes to task a physician whose treatment of a patient included errors in diagnosis, theory, and technique. These errors were committed in the name and under the rubric of psychoanalysis. Freud’s purpose is to discriminate between this practitioner and his practices, on the one hand, and psychoanalysts and their practices, on the other; to disavow the former and endorse the latter.

The doctor’s diagnostic error consisted of interpreting a patient’s anxiety as a symptom of actual neurosis when it was more likely a symptom of psychoneurosis. To explain, an actual neurosis is defined as a condition in which anxiety results from present day sexual deprivation or abstinence rather than from the repression of sexual impulses due to events in childhood or infancy.

The doctor’s theoretical error (Freud calls it a scientific error) consisted of his failure to consider the effects of repression, defense, and resistance in producing the anxiety; his technical or procedural errors were that he did not exercise the tact and consideration that would conduce to the development of the positive transference necessary to the patient’s tolerance of interpretations, or do the preparatory work of bringing the repressed contents to the surface.

For Freud, a correct diagnosis would require consideration of whether the problem was one for which psychoanalysis was an appropriate treatment. He would have ruled out problems of organic origin, as well as situational ones caused by contemporary circumstances or ignorance, such as were exemplified by the actual neurosis. He would also have disallowed the entire class of disorders to which he gave the name “narcissistic neuroses” or “paraphrenias,” conditions that current nosology would place under the rubric of psychosis. In fact, at this stage of his career, he tended to regard psychoanalysis as the treatment of choice for the so-called transference neuroses only, a narrow category

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containing two members: obsessional neurosis and hysterical neurosis. His scope widened somewhat later to include character neuroses, but it remained for his heirs to experiment with the application of psychoanalysis to a far more varied and notably severe range of psychopathology.

Now, had the doctor of whom I’ve been speaking made a correct diagnosis, that is, identified a condition for which Freud felt psychoanalysis to be an appropriate treatment, the probability of his theoretical error would have been all but eliminated. For the recognition that the patient was suffering from one of the transference neuroses would have presupposed an acquaintance with the concepts of repression, defense, and transference, and their necessary functions in the patient’s psyche.

Further, had the doctor diagnosed a transference neurosis and taken account of the unconscious processes inevitably at work in its formation and maintenance, it is doubtful whether his treatment would have deviated significantly from that which Freud deemed necessary; i.e., he’d have shown the tact and consideration that would conduce to the development of the positive transference necessary for the patient to tolerate interpretations and done the preparatory work of bringing the repressed contents to the surface.

Contemporary Implications I’d like to try to apply the principles from which Freud developed his argument to some current psychoanalytic perspectives in an attempt to speculate as to where on the continuum of wild vs. controlled (and I choose the latter term deliberately, aware of its applications in the training of analysts) they might lie.

To begin, the scope of analyzability has so widened in the century since Freud wrote his paper, that patients presenting with almost any type of mental disorder, or with no disorder at all, might be considered candidates for analytic treatment. As a result, it is currently almost impossible to commit the kind of diagnostic error made by the doctor. This, because regardless of whether a patient has situational or medical problems, s/he would, in addition, be assumed to have one of the myriad conditions for which psychoanalysis may now be applied. Moreover, diagnosis at the inception of a course of analytic treatment has fallen into disuse, in part because it has sometimes been discouraged by leading analysts of diverse persuasions. Other than in student exercises conducted in the clinics of analytic institutes, and despite the existence of a number of sophisticated texts expressly devoted to the subject of psychoanalytic diagnosis, one rarely hears of it, though it is given lip service in the standards 35

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of training promulgated by several official organizations, and is epitomized in those of the Psychoanalytic Consortium accepted by Division 39. Parenthetically, the practice of asking a patient who has been accepted for psychoanalytic treatment to have a complete physical examination before the treatment begins seems also to be implemented only rarely.

Though it is risky to speculate about what Freud might have thought either of the decline of diagnosis or of its ever widening scope, it is possible that he would have deplored both, and exercised his founder’s privilege of declaring those responsible for these developments either wild analysts, or not analysts at all. We, however, must try to understand their implications in the light of all that has transpired since 1910. That a patient may be seen for a consultation and accepted for treatment without benefit (or deficit) of diagnosis says nothing about the qualifications of the practitioner, who may as easily be welltrained and disciplined as poorly trained and wild. Diagnosis, then, is not an effective shibboleth for discriminating one from the other.

Moving from diagnosis to theory, we may ask whether the practitioner is familiar with and respects the concepts of which the doctor in Freud’s paper was ignorant: repression, defense, and resistance. I think it highly likely that anyone who claims the title and functions of a psychoanalyst, no matter her theoretical orientation, would accept the relative importance of these concepts, while possibly according them the different weights and patterns of emphasis that render them consistent with her own theoretical variant.

Finally, in the matter of technique, we would have to inquire as to whether the practitioner accepts the need for tact and consideration in establishing a positive transference, the pre-requisite for the patient’s toleration of interpretations, as well as of the preparatory work of bringing the repressed contents to the surface. I am sure that, no matter the official positions taken with regard to recovered memories, reconstruction, co-construction, enactment, re-enactment, derivatives, dissociation, trauma, parataxis, splitting, not-me, trauma, etc., by the various orientations, and regardless of the range of meanings attributed to the word “repressed,” there would be more agreement than disagreement on the usefulness of reflection on a past or a narrative that may have happened, not happened, sort of happened, or can be made to appear to have happened. That this process, however it is construed, may require preparatory work is also a point that must be acceptable to all analysts, either explicitly or implicitly.

So, what have I demonstrated with these remarks? I hope I have shown that, applying

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Freud’s criteria to the problem of wild vs. controlled or disciplined analysis throws some light on what is necessary and/or sufficient in psychoanalysis. What it definitely does not do is provide any workable system for discriminating wild from controlled contemporary analysts. Perhaps that is why, when the issue became uncomfortably sharp and contentious some years ago, the focus shifted from the conceptual to the numerical domain.

Variable Criteria It was argued that the standards that demarcated psychoanalysts from psychoanalytic psychotherapists included the requirements that the applicant for candidacy be interviewed at least twice by representatives of an accredited institute, and that at one of these two interviews, s/he must present clinical material. Further, the candidate had to have a degree in one of the mental health professions and be eligible for licensing. Third, the candidate should be aware of organic pathology and pharmacological regimens, as well as diagnosis and psychodynamics. The numerical parameters included the requirement that the candidate’s training analysis be conducted for three or more sessions per week, 40 weeks per year, for a minimum of 300 hours. Similar numerical prescriptions applied to the candidate’s work with patients, supervision, and didactic experience.

These standards were first put forth by a sub-group of those who founded Division 39, which eventually became Section 1, and, from 1982 to 1990, were the Division’s definition of psychoanalysis. In 1990, responding to the position set forth by the group of analysts who eventually formed Section V, the Division altered its definition: The problematic issue of frequency as a standard, that is, the thrice-weekly frequency requirement, was set aside and psychoanalysis was defined without reference to controversial numbers. The tripartite model was retained and defined as requiring “a substantial personal analysis,” “intensive supervision,” of “two patients, each carried two years in psychoanalysis,” and didactic work that is “the equivalent of 12 courses in a traditional two-semester program.” (Lane, & Meisels, 1994, p.17) More recently, the Division and virtually its entire membership signed a petition addressed to the New York State Education department, recommending regulations to insure that: z “personal analysis” of the licensee is conducted at a minimum frequency of three (3) sessions per week; z “supervised analysis” be defined as supervision of psychoanalysis conducted at a

minimum frequency of three (3) sessions per week; z “personal analysis” of the licensee be performed by either a licensed psychoanalyst or a psychoanalyst who is licensed in an exempt profession with at least five years of experience after completion of analytic training; z “supervised analysis” be conducted by either a licensed psychoanalyst or a psychoanalyst who is licensed in an exempt profession with at least five (5) years of experience after completion of analytic training; z “supervised clinical experience” include clinical experience in conduct of psychoanalysis conducted at a minimum frequency of three (3) times per week; z “supervised clinical experience” include at least two (2) analyses conducted at a minimum frequency of at least three (3) sessions per week which have been carried for a minimum of one and two years, respectively, the second of which having been carried to completion even if this has gone beyond graduation from the institute; z “supervised clinical experience” shall be supervised by an analyst with at least five (5) years of experience after the completion of analytic training; z case narratives submitted to the State Board for examination for licensure be narratives of cases conducted at a minimum frequency of three (3) sessions per week; z rules pertaining to alternative requirements for licensing…shall include 300 clock hours of personal analysis conducted at a minimum frequency of three (3) sessions per week.

That the provisions of this petition are in essence identical with those originally proposed by Section I and subsequently disavowed, only to appear again as the Division’s definition of psychoanalysis, is a testament to the power of an outside threat to dissolve differences and cement alliances between previously irreconcilable opponents. I am referring to the enactment by the New York State legislature of a law establishing the licensure of psychoanalysts by a set of requirements that all previously established psychoanalytic constituencies regard as woefully inadequate.

The crux of the argument between the advocates and opponents of quantitative standards is over which are necessary, and which sufficient.

The Section I position is that, though not sufficient, they are necessary; whereas the Section V position has been that quantitative standards are not necessary because they do not insure competence, knowledge, or fitness to be an analyst. However unsatisfying it may be to have two mutually exclusive notions of what is necessary, I submit that it is far more unsatisfying to have no idea at all as to what is sufficient.

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The Unanswered Question The question that remains unanswered amid the complex ratiocination that characterized this debate is, if quantitative standards are not used, and qualitative standards are exceedingly difficult to implement in practical terms, how are we to decide who the real, disciplined, and qualified analysts are as opposed to the not-real, wild, or unqualified analysts?

One possibility is that the question does not admit of a viable answer. Another would be to accept the fragile consensus reflected in the apparent unanimity among the diverse signatories of the petition I quoted above. These solutions would, in my opinion, do little more than gloss over the inherent difficulties of a critical substantive issue.

Earlier, I pointed out that one of the antonyms to the term “wild,” as applied to analytic practice, is the word “controlled.” I also commented on the use of its cognate, “control,” to describe the process by which an apprentice analyst’s work is supervised or overseen.

Although it has largely been replaced by the term “supervision,” perhaps in recognition of its rather draconian connotations, it survives in the terminology of some institutes both as a symbol of rigor and as a way of preserving the past. In preparation for writing this paper, I spent several hours trying to trace the earliest psychoanalytic use of the term, and the ur-psychoanalyst who first adapted it to the use we are discussing. I thought it would tell us a lot about him/her, and those who then embraced the term as most appropriate for the process; however, I was not successful.

My lack of success notwithstanding, we can still speculate that the intent of those who originated and used the term was to control or curb tendencies that were assumed to be wild and unruly in analytic candidates. What, we may ask, was the nature of these tendencies, and why were they thought to be so ubiquitous as to require institutionalized regulation?

Taking a “wild,” or perhaps an “educated,” guess, I conjecture that the earliest psychoanalytic educators imputed to their students a powerful force that had to be tamed to effect the transformation from candidate to psychoanalyst. I think they recognized, unconsciously, that every petitioner for training brought along a set of beliefs that was all but unalterably opposed to those of the new theory: that these beliefs were themselves, unconscious and of primordial origin; that is, their roots were in earliest infancy. I refer to the implicit theory of personality (and hence, of therapy), that all human beings develop throughout childhood, and that they apply, for the most part without awareness, a set of expectations, predictions, and procedures to render their own behavior and that of other people both intelligible and manageable.

The educators must have assumed that, if such implicit theories were left unmodified,

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“uncontrolled,” they, and not the sound principles of psychoanalysis, would determine the candidates’ understanding of and interventions in the clinical situation. Applying this notion to the scenario Freud describes in “’Wild’ PsychoAnalysis” (1910/1957), we may hypothesize that the doctor had some unconscious reason for promulgating the diagnosis of actual neurosis, and prescribing, as the cure, the resumption of sexual activity. Perhaps a central tenet of his implicit theory of personality was that health and well-being are ineluctably linked to activities that produce sexual pleasure or, more primitively, that anything that justifies the pursuit of sexual pleasure is worthy of belief.

Unable to claim ownership of so dangerous an idea due to repression, the necessity for decorousness, and the respectability demanded by his profession, he disavowed authorship, and attributed the entire sleazy business to that dirty old neurologist, Freud. Were I in an even more daring, “wild,” state of mind, I might even consider that the doctor was using the consultation to enact his unique version of the Oedipal conflict.

One of the odd features of the whole affair is Freud’s failure to perceive and analyze the doctor’s motives along some of the same lines that I have. Instead, he sat down and composed a cautionary tale directed to all those whose similarly wild behavior might sully the new theory and its legitimate practitioners, and to read them out of the ranks. If I may be permitted an additional interpretation, this one of the founder’s behavior, I’d say that this was Freud’s declaration of allegiance to an educational system akin to indoctrination, as opposed to exploration. For, had he applied his own method to the understanding of the doctor’s behavior, he might have opted to enlighten rather than ostracize him. At the same time, he would have discovered that the most effective method of education requires the repeated confrontation of the received theory with the implicit one, to insure that what is learned is integrated into the student’s mind as knowledge, and not mere information, that it becomes engaged with the person’s true self rather than layered on as a persona or a role.

Conclusions I am now ready to return to the question of which analysts are wild and which controlled, which unruly and which tame, which disciplined and which impulsive. I think the real psychoanalyst is one who was inevitably wild when she started her training, because she came to it with her own cherished beliefs as a more or less full-blown theory of personality, some of it explicit, but most of it implicit.

To the extent her training was successful, it facilitated an atmosphere in which she was able to confront a highly significant portion of this belief system with the components of the system offered by her teachers and supervisors.

That is, she became a real psychoanalyst by struggling to find the conjunctions and disjunctions between the psychoanalysis she was being taught and the already extant structure of her own soul, and to form a new and viable entity from that struggle.

Her less successful counterparts, not wild but counterfeit analysts, were students who were able to keep their implicit theories out of reach of the new ideas, while accumulating the information, skills, and attitudes that satisfied the teachers, supervisors, and training committees of their institutes. After graduation, in the privacy of their own consulting rooms and absent the “controls” of supervisors, they were able to respond with impunity to the stirrings of their long suppressed beliefs, by trying them out on patients. By this initiative, they now became wild analysts.

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So it is not quantitative measures that increase the chances of a candidate’s becoming a real analyst, nor is it qualitative generalizations. What it is, is an atmosphere in which wildness may be metamorphosed into authenticity. I submit that such an atmosphere can be both created and verified in the experiences of both candidates and faculty of a given institute, so that knowing where the wild things are can make them relevant and useful in the complex evolution of psychoanalytic identity. z REFERENCES Freud, S. (1957). ‘Wild’ psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 11, pp. 219-220). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1910) Lane, R., & Meisels, M. (Eds.) (1994). A history of the division of psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association.

Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, & the New Politics of Otherness Flora E. LAZAR

I, like many of us, feel chronically behind in my reading not just with my New Yorkers, which I mercifully don’t see in stacks any longer thanks to my iPad e-subscriptions, but even with the New York Times. As someone who entered the clinical world after a long career in research and public policy, the pressure to “master the professional literature” is especially acute. So when my eye caught a small New York Times article about the seemingly effete topic of who gets to write novels about whom, I was surprised that I did not simply leave it to the literati. But I was intrigued that it had reached the top 20 on the Times Most Popular List, so I checked out this dispatch from this year’s celebrated Brisbane conference.

The article, it turns out, concerned the keynote speech by novelist Lionel Shriver about what she and others have referred to as identity politics gone mad, or to be more specific, the increasingly popular idea that writing about people who do not share one’s “identity” is an act of cultural appropriation akin to identity theft. In her speech, Shriver complained that the increasingly shrill critiques about writers with one identity writing about characters with another would ultimately produce characters “so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with” (Shriver, 2016). Not long into the speech several of Shriver’s colleagues stood up and walked out, setting in motion a literary conflagration that spread to the pages of newspapers around the world and prompted the hasty organization of “counter-programming” to express the literary world’s consternation over her remarks.

Why should we, as psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapists, be concerned about this dust-up among writers at a literary enclave in a far corner of the world?

Because if differences of identity proscribe us from gaining an intimate understanding of the experiences of others, we are stripped of what psychoanalysts from Freud’s time have regarded as one of our most potent tools for helping those who seek our assistance. The singular importance that psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut attached to empathic understanding, which Kohut’s biographer Charles Strozier (2001) says he defined alternately as “vicarious introspection” and “feeling one’s way into the experience of another,” is by now well known.

But as psychoanalyst Steven T. Levy has pointed out, the importance of empathic understanding in psychoanalysis is not new

to Kohut, even if theorists have questioned its relative importance. Freud, himself, underscored the importance of empathy as a form of identification, calling it “the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life” and “the process…which plays the largest part in our understanding of what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people” (Freud, 1912/1959).

fundamental question raised by the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1979) about whether it is possible, ultimately, to know “the other.” It is a question that goes to the heart of the promise of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. Certainly some psychoanalysts have questioned the limits of empathic understanding, and they have done so in terrains less contentious than those that are

The Apartment

Indeed, we are often called upon as psychotherapists to address—whether in our own minds or directly to our patients—the 38

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part of the cultural appropriation debate.

Intersubjective theorist Robert Stolorow (2011) has questioned the extent to which

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the trauma of one can be fully grasped by another. Russell Bryant Carr (2014) argues, from his work with combat veterans, that clinical effectiveness does not simply call into question the limits of our ability to understand certain experiences such as combat violence—it virtually demands that we admit it.

In the contemporary cultural appropriation debate that turned white hot in Brisbane, this question is posed far more narrowly. If we do not share a gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, social class or other identity, can we truly know or identify with someone who carries that identity? And what is the price of this supposed blindness?

For decades such differences were assumed a priori to interfere with psychotherapy rather than to be an arena for dynamic exploration. As Kimberlyn Leary (2000), who has helped advance our thinking considerably on the psychoanalytic exploration of race, has noted, the relational turn in psychoanalysis has immeasurably enhanced our ability to work with the varied meanings of dimensions such as race in treatment.

Underscoring Cheryl Thompson’s (1996) contention that “black is never simply black” and that racial content can have multiple meanings, even simultaneously, Leary perhaps unintentionally calls into question whether one has to possess an identity to understand that identity in another.

Over the years, a mushrooming scientific literature has examined what impact factors such as racial or gender matching have on the effectiveness of treatment. A meta-analytic review by Cabral & Smith (2011) of preferences, perceptions, and outcomes around racial/ethnic matching in mental health services provides compelling evidence that while patients may have a modest preference for such matching, it is hardly decisive in the impact of treatment. The study concluded that “across 53 studies of client outcomes in mental health treatment, the average effect size was 0.09, indicating almost no benefit to treatment outcomes from racial/ethnic matching of clients with therapists.” (Cabral & Smith, 2011, p.537).

All of this makes me wonder if we are not rolling back the clock by dividing ourselves between “me” and “not me.” Have not advances in understanding gender identity and sexual preference made us more circumspect about the idea of binaries? So far, the psychotherapy community has remained remarkably silent on the broader implications of the identity and cultural appropriation debates for our profession.

The consequences of this debate over identity, even if construed somewhat more narrowly, have historically had a profound,

if not always acknowledged, effect not just on psychotherapy, but on many of the human services that are informed by our theories. Such questions have, for example, undergirded the preference for religious matching that dominated child welfare decisions until this system was successfully challenged in the Wilder case, only to return, somewhat ironically, in the debate over the impact of transracial adoption (Bernstein, 2011; Samuels, 2009).

As a recent graduate of the University of Chicago social work school and survivor of the widely-reported campus identity debates—often conducted in the name of mental health—I have had a ring-side seat to these discussions and what they mean for psychotherapists. Those a bit more removed would do well to keep an eye on the latest incarnation of this debate, Brisbane’s literary spectacle, and its aftermath. It has both implicitly and explicitly invoked mental health as an outcome, but will almost certainly spill into our world as a question of method.

The Indian journalist and novelist Hari Kunzru, whose most recent book was about the American Southwest, could have been writing for a psychoanalytic publication when he wrote in The Guardian in the aftermath of Brisbane, “Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities, other experiences, is an

Sound a bit like psychoanalysis? One of Lionel Shriver’s fiercest critics, Yassmin Abdel-Magied (2016), notably claimed in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, “Difficult conversations will make us all uncomfortable. Good. That discomfort is how we improve.” I think I have heard that said of psychoanalysis. z REFERENCES Abdel-Magied, Y. (2016, October 5). A call for difficult conversations, not censorship. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/opinion/a-call-for-difficult-conversations-not-censorship.html Bernstein, N. (2011). The lost children of Wilder: The epic struggle to change foster care. New York, NY: Vintage.

Cabral, R. & Smith, T. (2011). Racial/ethnic matching of clients and therapists in mental health services: a meta-analytic review of preferences, perceptions, and outcomes. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 58(4), 537-554.

Carr, R. B. (2014). Authentic solicitude: What the madness of combat can teach us about authentically being-with our patients. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9(2), 115-130.

Freud, S. (1959). Recommendations for physicians on the psycho-analytic method of treatment. In (Joan Riviere, Trans.) Collected papers (Vol. 2, pp. 323-333). New York, NY: Basic Books. (Original work published 1912) Kunzru, H. (2016, October 1). Whose life is it anyway?

Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/oct/01/novelists-cultural-appropriation-literature-lionel-shriver Leary, K. (2000). Racial enactments in dynamic treatment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4), 639-653.

Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media.

Samuels, G. M. (2009). “Being raised by White people”: Navigating racial difference among adopted multiracial adults. Journal of Marriage and Family,71(1), 80-94.

Shriver, L. (2016, September 8). Fiction and Identity Politics. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-

Duster

act of ethical urgency.” He went on to argue that “good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know.

They treat their own experience of the world as provisional. They do not presume. They respect people, not by leaving them alone in the inviolability of their cultural authenticity, but by becoming involved with them” (Kunzru, 2016).

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shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad Stolorow, R. D. (2011). World, affectivity, trauma: Heidegger and post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge.

Strozier, C. B. (2001). Heinz Kohut: The making of a psychoanalyst. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Thompson, C. L. (1996). The African-American patient in psychodynamic treatment. In RoseMarie P rez Foster & Michael Moskowitz (Eds.), Reaching across boundaries of culture and class: Widening the scope of psychotherapy (pp.115-142). New York, NY: Jason Aronson, Incorporated.

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The Absent Feminine Biographical Note Sigmund Freud first heard Sabina Spielrein express ideas from her provocative essay, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” on November 15, 1911. She spoke at the end of a long and “very animated” discussion on death and love during a psychoanalytic meeting at Freud’s home.

Almost everyone else spoke before Spielrein was “finally recognized” (Kerr, 1993, p.363).

Nor were her ideas referred to subsequently. This resembles, on the discursive level, Spielrein’s absence from a photograph of “The Third Psychoanalytic Congress…at Weimar in 1911.” For social theorist Avery Gordon, Spielrein’s non-appearance at Weimer rendered her a “ghost” of feminine erasure. (1997, p.32). In a corroborative action, Spielrein hid her face in a photograph of her family. But making herself disappear reached its tragic apogee when, having decided years earlier to leave Europe and return to her native Russia, Spielrein was murdered by the Nazis in Rostov-on-Don in 1941.

Stalin had turned violently against psychoanalysis in 1936, forcing Spielrein to work in altruistic obscurity. When the war began, she refused to believe the civilized Germans were capable of the atrocities that had been attributed to them. This sounds like a not uncommon form of denial among a certain level of educated European Jew, but psychoanalysis might find deeper motives when self-disappearance culminates in self-destruction. In any event, Spielrein was thus expunged from the living, but not entirely from psychoanalytic history (Collins & Jervis, 2008, p.148).

Jung, Freud, and the problem of insufficient acknowledgement “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” was published in the Psychoanalytic Yearbook in 1912. The acceptance was diminished when Freud, as one of the editors of the Jahrbuch, wrote to inform her of a forthcoming negative review. According to John Kerr, the review, by Paul Federn, was not only dismissive but uncomprehending (1993, p.448). Freud’s comments regarding her “last great contribution,” which will be criticized “freely,” yet counseling her to, please, not “be angry,” but rather “read it through with indulgence,” assume a condescending tone toward a much younger, female colleague (p.448). Probably Freud’s knowing far more than he wanted about the improper relations between Spielrein and Jung influenced the timbre of his words.

In a letter to Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, then editor-in-chief of the Jahrbuch,

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described Spielrein’s submission through a feminine icon: “What is at the top a lovely woman ends below as a fish” (Kerr, 1993, p.406). It is not immediately clear whether Jung is talking about the essay, its author, or both. Jung, a student of the unconscious, who was wary of the deleterious power of the feminine, of getting lost “in the realm of the mothers,” revealed more irony than he knew by identifying Spielrein with a mythic mermaid. The comments of both men indicate a sexist, politely dismissive approach toward Spielrein, despite her gifted originality. She made a favorable impression at scientific meetings, but Spielrein’s reception by the Freudian “society” suggests that men had difficulty treating attractive, articulate young women as their intellectual equals.

Previous to becoming a colleague, Sabina Spielrein was first Carl Jung’s patient, then his spiritual, and probably physical, lover. Thereafter, she became Freud’s would-be patient, student, and colleague.

All this occurred from 1906–1912, when Freud and Jung’s relationship began in reciprocal awe and ended in powerful acrimony. Spielrein was remarkably central to their relationship, Jung turning to Freud about Spielrein as “a difficult case” as early as October 23, 1906 (McGuire, 1974, p.6), though he long kept the impropriety of their transferential/counter-transferential intimacy hidden from Freud, a secret that made the whole triangular relationship “uncanny” from its inception (Collins & Jervis, 2008, p.147). Finally, the alliance between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, among the most significant in the history of psychoanalysis, and which ultimately failed because of irreconcilable critical and personal differences, began to sour, as Jung prevaricated about his relationship to Spielrein.

For example, an awkward, off-putting style in Jung’s letter to Freud of March 7, 1909 emerges as he complains: The last and worst straw is that a complex is playing Old Harry with me: a woman patient, whom years ago I pulled out of a very sticky neurosis with unstinting devotion, has violated my confidence and my friendship in the most mortifying way imaginable. She has kicked up a vile scandal solely because I denied myself the pleasure of giving her a child. I have always acted the gentleman toward her (McGuire, 1974, p.99).

On March 11 he adds, “Now and then the devil does strike a chill into my—on the whole—blameless heart” (p.102), and, on June 4, after the lady in question has been 40

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identified as Spielrein, he concludes, “She was, of course, planning my seduction” (p.110). All this is like something out of a Victorian melodrama, perhaps by Wilkie Collins, but Freud said nothing at the time.

One can only imagine what was going through his mind as his revered colleague shilly-shallied about sleeping with a borderline patient.

Yet beyond the scandalous personal element, Spielrein’s complex thinking, not always felicitously expressed, together with her impulsive, contradictory personality, aroused strong ambivalence in the two men.

What is most important is the shared reluctance of Freud and Jung to recognize the striking, if uneven, intellectual achievement of “Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being.” Unable to ignore Spielrein’s thought, each of the men found a way to diminish her contribution. This complex way of acknowledging while minimizing Spielrein is demonstrated by the comparatively minor attributions she received in respective major works by Freud and Jung, each arguably more influenced by Spielrein than either writer acknowledged.

Jung perhaps gives more credit to Spielrein in his Symbols of Transformation (second title of his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, published in 1912, translated as Psychology of the Unconscious, appearing in 1916, revised in 1952, and translated again in 1956) than Freud does in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955).

But Jung mentions her sporadically so that her influence appears, if not slight, at least marginal. He refers only to her thesis on schizophrenia (unavailable in English), and not at all to her brilliant, if somewhat obscure, “Destruction” essay, nor to other works. Yet he was completing and preparing his Symbols of Transformation at the same time he was publishing Spielrein’s essay in the Jahrbuch. (Is it by chance that the fated Spielrein wrote about “Destruction,” while Jung, becoming a non-Freudian, always surviving and thriving, wrote about “Transformation?”) Moreover, in a very large book, he gives her only two seemingly minor substantive/scholarly footnotes, each referencing the Native American folk myths connected to the figure of Hiawatha.

Jung does several times show the potency of the collective unconscious by referring to the fantasies of an unnamed female “patient of Spielrein.” There are several references and notes to this patient, who emerges as a significant case-study for a fundamental Jungian theory (Jung, 1912/1967, p.140, passim). He takes the images in her dreams as indications of a universal

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image-bank (often spiritual), which interested Jung as coming from a deeper source, a collective unconscious, than the personal dream-images (often sexual) emerging from the personal unconscious that interested Freud. This of course is the conceptual disagreement that shattered the hitherto fruitful collaboration of Freud and Jung.

As Jung writes several times about Spielrein’s anonymous patient, one cannot say he denies Spielrein’s influence. Yet the citations easily disappear into this massive tome, while the “Destruction” essay, its themes actually theoretically capable of reconciling the sexual and the universal, remains excluded from Jung’s study. (Nor is her essay mentioned by name by Freud.)

Furthermore, in a reading of the Symbols of Transformation, a central, major Jungian work (1912/1967), we are struck by the way his rather diffuse cataloguing of innumerable mythic, literary, and biblical sources (the quintessential Jungian style) becomes more focused, more intellectually rooted, when he references Spielrein. At one point, for example, Jung writes an exceptionally powerful sentence, strengthening his beyond-the-sexual-principle case: “The loss of the reality function in schizophrenia does not produce a heightening of sexuality: it produces a world of fantasy with marked archaic features,” but we are impressed by the discovery that the idea is taken from Spielrein’s doctoral thesis (Jung, p.139). She can discuss symbolism in an exceptionally cogent remark that reinforces the Jungian universalism: “a symbol…owe[s] its origin to the striving of a complex for dissolution in the common totality of thought” (p.141).

Several similar moments in the text clarify that, even if we have a limited knowledge of her creative role, Spielrein surely influenced the development of the very idea of the collective unconscious in a reciprocal way, for it is undeniable that the emergence of Jung’s fundamental conceptualization—not coincidentally connected to the Wagnerian Siegfried myth—coincided with his intimate relationship with Spielrein.

The more significant footnote he does grant her, like Freud’s famous half-hearted, single footnote to Spielrein in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955), manages to resonate loudly. This occurs as Jung describes Hiawatha’s struggles with mythic enemies to conclude, “they can be interpreted as the Terrible Mother who devours and destroys, and thus symbolizes death itself.”

He then cites his student/colleague: “This fact led my pupil Dr. Spielrein to develop her idea of the death-instinct, which was then taken up by Freud. In my opinion it is not so much a question of a death-instinct as of that ‘other’ instinct (Goethe) which signifies spiritual life” (Jung, 1912/1967, p.328, n1). These are rather large ideas

to dismiss in a footnote in mini-font, and Jung’s response, his allusion to Goethe, sounds lame. So much for Spielrein’s theory, and so much for Freud.

Still, it is of considerable interest that Freud, who says so little about the maternal feminine, appears to have taken the idea for the death-drive from a woman who was connected in her writing and in her own career with a kind of mythic feminine being; Spielrein emerges from pre-

monumental theorist’s oeuvre. But Freud, like Jung, manages to at once recognize and minimize his new colleague by means of a reluctant acknowledgment: “A considerable portion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein (1912/1994) in an instructive and interesting paper which, however, is unfortunately not entirely clear to me. She there describes the sadistic components of the sexual instinct as ‘destructive’” (1920/1955, p.55, n1).

Bansky in Napoli

cisely that “dark continent” which Freud found so discomfiting.

Thus, there is no hint of the magna mater in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955), a work, like Jung’s Symbols of Transformation (1912/1967), that marks a seminal achievement in the context of a 41

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Aside from the ambivalent feelings that come through in the reference—Freud’s damning Spielrein with faint praise—it is simply inaccurate. Freud has, like many an academic writer, recast the thought of the person cited in the terms of the person citing. Yet we need to look at the precise

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point where Freud cites her. It is when he introduces the idea of primary masochism as both exemplifying the internal death instinct in the individual and transitioning into the biological germ-cell discussion designed to prove the existence of such an instinct. But, as with Jung, we need to focus on exactly what is being said as he cites her.

“The account that was formerly given of masochism requires emendation as being too sweeping in one respect: there might be such a thing as primary masochism—a possibility I had contested at that time” (the note on p.55 comes at the word “time”).

In other words, it was hard for Freud to grant masochism its fundamental status as a primary force, something he finally does accomplish in The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924/1961a), yet we know that it was generally easier, as in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930/1961b), for Freud to write about outward-turning sadism than it was for him to focus on inward-turning masochism.

Taking a bit of a leap, and referencing an important discussion by Peter Gay, this recalls the way Freud almost always found it easier to write about fathers, rather than mothers, men, rather than women, while woman remained his enigma, causing the Father of Psychoanalysis to ask more than once: “Was will das Weib”—“what does woman want?” (Gay, 1988, pp.501-522). Is it the Spielrein connection, then, that causes Freud to pause here and move on to his deep inner death-drive, itself such a controversial concept, but which he would develop, largely as aggression, in later works? It is difficult to say, but we know that Spielrein, in her paper, connects primary masochism to the Great Mother, a subject Freud shies away from not only because it is so Jungian, but because the maternal-feminine was always so troubling a subject for Sigmund Freud. Gay makes what now looks like a classic statement about Freud and his mother (or, The Mother): “[Freud writes] ‘Above all a man looks for the memory picture of his mother as it had dominated him since the beginning of his childhood.’ Yet, almost deliberately evading this insight, Freud exiled mothers to the margins of his case histories” (1988, p.505). We might add that Freud did not just marginalize the Mother in his case histories, but in his entire theoretical construct.

Nor does he gives Sabina Spielrein sufficient credit for the range of her influences on Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920/1955). Freud works in a complex fashion with the dualistic instincts, figuring and refiguring them. Yet it is only late in his essay that he engages in the examination of the way the two instincts come together, to unify and to disunify. Here is where

masochism and sadism play an essential theoretical role. In this context, Freud writes of the “fusion” and “defusion” of instincts, a concept that would become increasingly significant in later theorizing. Laplanche and Pontalis understand the later dualistic theory of the instincts precisely in these terms: “the more aggressiveness predominates, the more the instinctual fusion tends to disintegrate, while, conversely, the more the libido prevails, the more effective the fusion” (1967/1973, p.182). Freud comes to this fusionary idea late in his revolutionary

exclusively sexual, but a general notion of human creative energy. Spielrein, like Jung, learning from him but also together with him, saw the complexity of the psyche as topographical, with its conscious, individual unconscious, and collective unconscious energized by the unified economic principle of libido. However, there is no lack of dynamism in her concept where sexual energy fuses life and death, destruction and creation, into a single complex force. Thus she achieves a theoretical fusion between Freudian dualism and Jungian monism.

Naples The Keeper

essay of 1920. In more ways than one, it was a somewhat belated discovery and examination, for it was preceded by Spielrein, whose entire article is dedicated to the contradictory union of clashing forces joined together in a single drive.

Reclaiming The Absent Feminine Freud admits his obsessional focus on the dualistic theory of the instincts in Civilization and Its Discontents: “In the course of time [these dualistic views] have gained such a hold on me that I can no longer think in any other way” (1930/1961b, p.119). The dynamic clash of opposing drives replaces the superseded pleasure principle as Freud’s fundamental and cohering idea. He maintains this metapsychological hypothesis as a way of explaining the conflicts of energy within the human psyche. But he attributes to Jung a single explanatory principle, the force of libido, which Freud rejects as monistic, not only confusing but one-dimensional, and, thus, inadequate to explain the dynamic psyche (1920/1955, pp.52-53). We need to remember that the Jungian libido is not 42

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Accordingly, she begins her original essay, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” (Spielrein, 1912/1994) by talking about a fusion of affects as she wonders why love arouses emotions as ambivalent as they are powerful. She adduces the “anxiety and disgust” that must be overcome in front of the reproductive drive, citing Victorian mores that caused turn-of-the-century parents to teach their children that sex was “dirty and forbidden.” The physical proximity of sexuality and excretion, Yeats’ “But love has pitched its mansion in/The place of excrement,” is duly noted. She also quotes Wilhelm Stekel’s point that “sexual wishes are associated with imagery of death because death is often associated with moral failure” (1912/1994, p.155). This is a curiously dull assertion, one of those moments where the essay falls flat. Her writing is frequently abstruse, and hardly organized. Today we would see it as no more than a promising draft. With all this, it makes a forceful impact, the content redeeming the style. Of the two English translations of Spielrein’s

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paper, “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being (1912/1994) and “Destruction as Cause of Becoming” (1912/1995), I prefer the earlier translation.

Stekel’s point provides a lead-in to the two motifs that will distinguish Spielrein’s paper, a composition that remains a rhetorical excursion, as powerful as it is uneven.

The two strands in her writing that make the strongest impression are, first, a deep sense of the feminine point-of-view in experience, a kind of female reality. This is the angle-of-vision often absent in Freud, with its presence in Jung being part of the reason for the alienation that overtook their cooperation. All the more interesting, then, that this cogent aspect of Spielrein’s narrative begins with a sort of feminine disarray, a disorder-within-the-female-psyche. Thus, she can write of “young women” afraid of “the enemy within” to suggest a physical fear of penetration rather than a spiritual concern with self-betrayal (1912/1994, p.156). Or, using her symbolic method (the signifier is experience while the signified resides deep in the archetypal unconscious), she claims, “a patient said, ‘The earth became dirtied with urine’ instead of ‘I became dirtied by the sexual act’” (p.161).

Spielrein talks about a female desire for self-dissolution: “a normal young woman… imagines herself vanishing in the beloved” (p.166). (Jung was fascinated and terrified by the collective unconscious with its feminine dimensions, the anima, and the Great Mother; we know that he felt devoured by an inner maternal force when he had such difficulties finishing part two of his Symbols of Transformation [Kerr, 1993, p.331], while Carotenuto credits Jung’s discovery of the anima to his relationship with Spielrein [Carotenuto, 1982, p.xiv, passim]). Yet Spielrein can conflate Eros and Thanatos within women, tracking such feelings within a patient who can fantasize, for example, that “death is a handsome man.”

However, then comes a biological turn, as if Spielrein wanted to get to the infrastructure of instinctual experience, and she refers to the fundamental significances of the cellular processes of reproduction, precisely the proof-test Freud would employ some eight years later. What she says about cellular reproduction is succinct, dramatic, and paradoxical: that as the cell regenerates in a uniting of male and female, “the unity of each cell is destroyed and from the product of this destruction, new life originates” (Spielrein, 1912/1994, p.156). Here is a point that Freud never does make, or even imply, because he delineates dualistic process, the two forces where a cell will either die in isolation or live in union. Freud never yokes the two together to say, the isolated dying cell produces a living unified

cell. Nor does he see that such a dynamic process in a single dramatic moment of fruition may achieve a unified purpose.

Rather, Freud elaborates his two different forces, two different processes, two different drives, in an intricate, impressive, theoretical working-through. Spielrein, of course, has no such edifice to present and yet, because her idea is at once simpler and clearer (following the Occam’s razor principle), her argument is more condensed and, thus, compelling.

At the same time, as with Jung’s thought, Spielrein’s paper is pervaded with the sense of the levels of the psyche: the surface, individual psyche, including both consciousness and the individual unconscious; and the deeper collective unconscious of archetypes and complexes. The deeper we go the more undifferentiated we are as we journey from “I” to “we.” The desire for pleasure derives from the surface self with its self-preservative instincts, and the mixed desire for pleasure and pain derives from the deeper self with its species-preservative instincts, “which must dissolve the old to create the new” (p.174).

For the sake of the species, we destroy and are destroyed while the pleasure-ego overseeing individual experience resists the deeper force of the species.

dissertation, “On the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia [Dementia Praecox],” which has not been translated from the German), show the patient withdrawing into the universal welter, or mine, of past racial knowledge. This entails the total loss of the comparatively superficial individual personality, a loss with a gain.

Here, the feminine dimension has perhaps the deepest echoes, recalling the Faustian “realm of the mothers,” culminating in the Wagnerian recasting of old Germanic myth.

Thus the archetypal unconscious with its depths recalls the sea, the Freudian “oceanic” (1930/1961b, pp.64-65), so the symbol for the unconscious becomes the sea while the metaphor-within-the-metaphor is the Mother who held us in infancy and still contains us in the collective unconscious.

(Ernst Neumann [1972] presents the definitive study of Great Mother mythology and its psychic dimensions.) The Mother within turns a spiritual journey into an incestuous descent. On the one hand, this is about self-annihilation in the figure of the mother: “‘I am dead’ means ‘I have attained the desired regression to the parent and I am disappearing there’” (Speilrein, 1912/1994, p.173).

But going further, erotic love, entailing both self-discovery and discovery-of-the-other, will be the creative benefit of incest; we can

Skull

It is the deeper experience that matters the most, for the happenings of the individual are but “passing things” (p.157), a surface “allegory.” The contours of specific individual occurrences attain resonance as they connect to the deeper universal experience.

This clearly parallels Freudian transference, but with a Jungian dimension that can be seen, alternatively, as a profound supplement or a mystical obfuscation. Spielrein’s striking ideas about schizophrenia (much of this material was developed in her PhD 43

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only love from the innermost place where the archaic object resides. Love is creative and destructive at once when we lose ourselves in incestuous merger to find ourselves in a passionate embrace.

Not always lucid, but ultimately coherent, Spielrein brings together incest and art, love and death. Art, like love, emerges from the plummeting to the archetypes. Communication is “de-differentiation,” the ego is merely individual and incapable of a profound image, or even the

COMMENTARY

most intense form of information-transmission. A dissolution of self is necessary to become an artist: “Dissolution and assimilation transform…personal experience into a collective experience in the form of works of art, dreams, or pathological symbolisms, making a ‘We’ from the ‘I’” (p.174). Love requires a similar submersion to escape the ego that administers the surface of the individuated self. The separate ego is about the single self (the ego Spielrein disparages has a good deal in common with the ego leading toward death in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Freud, 1920/1955]). The single self wishes to survive, but as we plumb more deeply into the self in love or art, or dreams or psychosis, we discover the destructive forces that are inseparable from a creative “coming into being.” The species-preservation instinct is willing to sacrifice the self with its limited focus on pleasure and survival: “The instinct for self-preservation is a simple drive that originates exclusively from a positive component; the instinct for preservation of the species, which must dissolve the old to create the new, arises from both positive and negative components” (p.175). Here there are clear connections to the earlier dualistic theory of Freud, as presented in “Two Principles of Mental Functioning”(1911/1958), so there is clearly, as with Jung, a reciprocal influence. Yet Spielrein is more Jungian than Freudian when she combines the principles but divides the unconscious psyche.

But the culmination of Spielrein’s thinking is found in literary and musical explorations, Shakespeare and Wagner.

Romeo and Juliet directly poses hate against love, showing how each is the creative force behind the other. The libidos of Shakespeare’s young lovers increase with the obstacles they face. Love and hate have the same final purpose of releasing “previously unavailable images” from the archetypal unconscious. It hardly matters whether it is love or hate when either may culminate in the “white-hot passion” that frees the hidden inner self. Spielrein describes opposed yet complementary passions building vertiginously in a kind of drive-dialectic. Yet this intensifying cycle cannot fulfill itself within life, for “no impediment is great enough to satisfy their passion, which finds peace only with complete annihilation, with the death of the personality” (Spielrein, 1912/1994, p.173).

In the Nordic legend of Siegfried, as retold in Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), Spielrein finds the privileged rendering of her ideas in art.

Siegfried’s significance lies in being the greatest of sacrificial heroes, and sacrifice is entailed upon us as we yield our individual

selves to the greater good of the species.

Relevant here is the privileged status of the name Siegfried (the name means something like “salute to happiness) in the hidden relationship of Jung and Spielrein. “Siegfried” was a kind of shibboleth for them—a secret story and private password. Aside from the suggestion of a profound connection to Nordic myth and the Wagnerian expression of German legend in his Operas, Siegfried was the code word for their secret relationship and its meaning, and there was a hint of a mutual desire for Spielrein to carry Jung’s child, a “Siegfried,” in both a symbolic and actual sense (Kerr, 1993, pp.322-326; Carotenuto, 1982, pp.86-90, passim).

That greater good for the species, as found in the collective unconscious, expresses itself in passionate love and transcendent art. (If we substitute the word “race” for “species” we realize there are uncomfortable parallels to this kind of thinking.) When we look at some of the poetry Spielrein quotes, and think in terms of the legendary and Wagnerian imagery used at climactic points in the myth, we note that fire replaces water as a controlling symbol as death replaces life and incest replaces love as its controlling ideas.

In Spielrein’s reading, the love affair between Siegfried and Brünhilde is incestuous because Brünhilde is the sister of Siegfried’s mother Sieglinde. (According to some synopses of Der Ring it is not literally correct that Brünhilde and Sieglinde are sisters. Perhaps we would have to see Brünhilde and Sieglinde as spiritual sisters because of their love for one another and shared love for Siegfried.) The Ring of Fire that surrounds the sleeping Valkerie (there are elements of “Sleeping Beauty” in the legend) renders itself as the incest prohibition. Our passionate wish is to enter the fire of forbidden love which we undertake as a sacrifice. After Siegfried awakens her, Brünhilde nevertheless dies in the fire (while riding on her steed). Among her final words, we have: “Feel my breast, / How it burns; / Brilliant fire / Holds fast my heart. / It twists within / And surrounds me” (Speilrein, 1912/1994, p.176). We find our desire for the unattainable at the cost of our mortal existence; the forces of love and death merge as one. Finding their highest expression in a Wagnerian aria, the germ-cells of Freudian/Spielreinian psychobiology fulfill themselves in Liebestod or the erotic transcendence in death. This is a union of Eros and Thanatos that not only precedes, but in a sense supersedes, Sigmund Freud’s probing meditations on the death drive.

Bringing together Wagnerian Music-Drama, Jungian psychosymbolism, and Freudian metapsychology, Spielrein artic44

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ulates a rich and sometimes obscure discourse. Yet it all holds together if one understands her intricate sources. It is, above all, a feminist discourse, one that some very distinguished male writers have furthered—not only Jung, but Robert Graves, in The White Goddess (1966), and D. H. Lawrence, in Women in Love (1920/1921), come to mind.

Incest is a desire of both men and women, and the return is both to The Mother and The Father; yet The Mother is the goal of both partners, and The Father the goal of only one. The desire to return to the Mother, then, dominates the incestuous force that unifies Love and Death in a way that challenges, if it can hardly displace, the Freudian dualism. This recentralizing of the feminine is also a return to Jungian thinking. I am certainly not suggesting that we put aside Freud’s brilliant meditations, which are far more intricate and organized than Spielrein’s Messianic meditation. But her ideas are, and always were, worth a lot more than a footnote. z REFERENCES Carotenuto, A. (1982). A secret symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud (Aldo Pomerans, John Shepley, & Krishna Winston, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon.

Collins, J. & Jervis, J. (2008). Uncanny modernity: cultural theories, modern anxieties. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Freud, S (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 18, pp.

1-64). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920) Freud, S. (1958). Formulations on the two principles of mental function. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 12, pp. 213-226). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1911) Freud, S. (1961a). The economic problem of masochism. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 19, pp. 157-170). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1924) Freud, S. (1961b). Civilization and its discontents. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 21, pp.

59-148). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1930) Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York, NY: Norton.

Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Graves, R. (1966). The white goddess. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Jung, C. G. (1967). Symbols of transformation: An analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.).

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1912) Kerr, J. (1993). A most dangerous method: The story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein. New York, NY: Random House.

Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J. B. (1973). The language of psycho-analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Norton. (Original work published 1967) Lawrence, D. H. (1921). Women in love. London, England: Martin Secker. (Original work privately published 1920) McGuire, W. (1974). The Freud-Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (Ralph Manheim & R. F. C. Hull, Trans., & Alan McGlashan, Abr.).

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Neumann, E. (1972). The great mother: An analysis of the archetype (Ralph Manheim, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Spielrein, S. (1994). Destruction as the cause of coming into being. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, 155-186.

(Original work published 1912) Spielrein, S. (1995). Destruction as cause of becoming.

Psychoanalysis and. Contemporary Thought 18, 85-118. (Original work published 1912) Wagner, R. (1876). Der Ring des Nibelungen [Opera].

Germany.

PERFORMANCE

Theatre of the Hole: Encounter and its Psychic (K)nots

Billie Whitelaw, as Mouth, in Beckett’s Not I (1972).

Ann Hamilton, aleph (1992-93). Detail of video installation.

…out…into this world…this world…tiny little thing…before its time… in a godfor–…what?...girl?...yes…tiny little girl…into this…out into this…before her time…godforsaken hole called…called…no matter…parents unknown…unheard of… he having vanished…thin air…no sooner buttoned up his breeches…she similarly… eight months later…almost to the tick…so no love…spared that…no love such as normally vented on the…speechless infant…in the home…no…nor indeed for that matter of any kind…no love of any kind…

—Samuel Beckett, Not I

moving, as if churning silence into speech.

Potential speech is nothing but garbled sound, merely embryonic possibility. It is as though words have become weighty things, grown substantive, solid—the playthings of the acrobatic tongue (Cheng and Cody, 2016, p.4). And what about this tongue? Let us not overlook it and the work it does to animate these lifeless things. (The video is Ann Hamilton’s aleph, 1992/1993). The tongue is our “first major scanner” (Bonnard, 1960, p.304); within “the primal cavity”, as Spitz (1955) describes the mouth, it brings the child her first experience of space:

Encounter is a mystery. Being in the presence of an other is difficult. As Bion has described it, the meeting between two people produces an “emotional storm” (Bion, 1979/1987).

I begin with a soundless letter—aleph.

The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, it has no sound of its own. It is a silent letter, unless combined with a vowel, as it usually is. Aleph also indicates a link between the one and only God and the sacred name (and number) YHVH, which God reveals to Moses in Exodus 3:14-15 (King James Version) as “I am that I am.” (One of the movements of the encounter I am staging will be from “I am that I am” to Not I.) To be heard, then, requires two. This is something apparent to psychoanalysts—the transformative intimate relationship of subject and other.

Awareness of separateness is inseparable from awareness of space and brings with it awareness of outsides and insides. It seems feasible that inside the mouth is the primary experience of inside the body. Until awareness of ‘insides’ has been achieved, inner life is not possible. (Tustin, 1972, p.116)

……………………………………

Cut to: a video screen. On the screen appears a tightly framed mouth. As if looking into a funhouse mirror, the viewer is transported. The mouth opens onto the haptic revealing something of an odd circus.

Inside, its open cavity is strangely stuffed with stone marbles of slightly varying sizes.

A deft tongue sets these inchoate masses

Kerry MOORE

We are taken into this cavity, slipping like one of the round marbles that threatens to tumble and escape from the border of the lips’ parameters, outside to inside, inside to outside, back and forth again. Primitive sensation, feeling, and emotion have become haptic presence: What appears to me significant in this phenomenon is that the inside of the mouth, the oral cavity, fulfills the conditions of partaking for perceptive purposes both of the inside and of the outside. It is simultaneously an interoceptor and exteroceptor. It is here that all perception will begin; in this role, the oral cavity fulfills the function of a bridge from internal reception to external perception. (Spitz, 1955, p.220).

Sensation has the capacity to invite new relationships between subject and object, inside and outside, through condensation 45

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and displacement—stones rolling around in the mouth, where we usually expect one to chew on words. The mutability of the stones rolling on the tongue suggests the ways in which language itself can roll off of one’s tongue…and even slips of the tongue.

Stones, like letters of the alphabet, the building blocks of speech, but also round and silent like an ellipsis, positioned in relation to speech and language, although silent of voice…

Mouth…cavity…cave…cavern… cavernous…hole…womb…tomb… stone…ovary…vowel… letter… word… sign…signifier…sound…voice…echo…

My associations lead from the copious ellipses dotting (not-ing/knotting?) the text of Beckett’s Not I to Ann Hamilton’s stone marbles, and back again, as if ellipses were made of round stones and/or the stone marbles have fallen from Hamilton’s mouth to become the ellipses in Beckett’s play text, and to reappear in Mouth’s signifiers, splitting as she speaks. On the written page, Not I is littered with ellipses, dominated by them. In a text covering less than nine pages, there are 746 ellipses. What has been skipped? Skipping stones...As Mieke Bal explains: a real ellipsis cannot be perceived….

That which has been omitted—the content of the ellipsis—need not be unimportant; on the contrary, the event about which nothing is said may have been so painful that it is precisely for that reason that it is being elided. Or the event is so difficult to put into words that it is preferable to remain in complete silence about it. Another possibility...is the situation in which though the event has taken place, the actor wants to deny that fact. By keeping silent about it, he attempts to undo it. (Bal, 1985, p.74)

PERFORMANCE

In Not I, the repeated ellipses fragment the text. In an ellipsis, the chain of language, and of linear time, stops. If memory is related to the future as lost, the chain stops. Linear time needs a chain. This opens up the question of traumatic space. “The more you turn away from the damaged object, the louder its screams become in the inner world (Klein, 1935) and the more introspection has to be avoided by splitting and by manic defences” (Sodré, 2014, p.180).

Not I inundates the audience with sensory experience, intensifying the experience of encounter by drowning the theatre in darkness. The effects of this darkness are immense—demanding, disorienting, disturbing, perhaps dreamlike. Reflecting on the inaugural performance of Not I at the Royal Court Theatre in 1973, Billie Whitelaw noted the effects on the audience of the theatre being submerged in darkness: There was no escape because we killed all the lights. We broke all the rules and took all of the light bulbs out of the exit lights… and out of the ladies’ loo lights because people tried to escape into the loo. They had to get away from this relentless mouth that wouldn’t let go. (Whitelaw, 1990) We do not find our bearings easily.

Space collapses in darkness. To take the experience in, we must be able to tolerate our feelings of confusion and resistance sufficiently. In performance, Mouth is spotlighted, framed in light, given a border beyond which is darkness. The mouth functions as a stage within a stage: it is shown to be a border. Bion’s metaphor of the “penetrating beam of darkness” helps us to appreciate the possibilities inherent in this darkness and in the fundamental and most primitive parts of the human mind (Bion, 1990, p.20):

whole body, but is always focused on fragments. These parts of the body are thresholds between inside and outside, the points of interaction with the outside world: the genitalia, anus, mouth, eye, ear, and nose—together with the attendant activities of penetrating/ receiving, sucking, looking, listening, and smelling. Vocality comes to constitute that frail supporting membrane within, or upon which, the work of splitting, fragmentation, and disavowal is permitted to occur—“a voice which provides the one who emits it with that sonorous envelope with which it has failed to be surrounded, a voice as precious to be heard as a birth in the pharynx” (Anzieu, 1983, p.84).

What does this Mouth do? It speaks.

It pierces and punctuates the darkness. It does not let up. It is, indeed, relentless. The darkness works to illuminate the ways in which the voice can never been seen. It escapes from the interior of the body as breath is brought inside, crossing the vocal cords.

The activity of the mouth betrays nothing of these deeper inner workings. Its aperture is the stage (…hole…void…cave…) on and through which this enigmatic object appears, disappears, and falls.

An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from “its” voice. The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at work; it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks “by itself,” through him. (Žižek, 2001, p.58)

Instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light to bear on obscure problems, I suggest we bring to bear a diminution of the “light”—a penetrating beam of darkness: a reciprocal of the searchlight. The peculiarity of this penetrating ray is that it could be directed towards the object of our curiosity, and this object would absorb whatever light already existed, leaving the area of examination exhausted of any light that it possessed. The darkness would be so absolute that it would achieve a luminous, absolute vacuum. So that, if any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly. Thus, a very faint light would become visible in maximum conditions of darkness. (Bion, 1990, p.20)

The Mouth in Not I is an orifice without a body, yet one that references a body— particularly the vaginal hole and the anus.

Words rush out of it in a flood, like a wretched case of diarrhea, from the unceremonious birth to looking for cowslips to aging to sins, punishment, and court, repeated in fragmented bursts.

Consider Theodore Reik’s discussion of the conversation with his son Arthur, in which the eight-year-old boy describes figuring out what an “inner voice” is when it says to him, “You mustn’t play with your gambi [the name the boy had used for his penis since earliest childhood].” Arthur insightfully adds that an inner voice is “a feeling in yourself and the voice of someone else [emphasis in original]” (Reik, 1924, p.439). I want to call attention to Arthur’s intuitive situating of the voice as both an inner phenomenon and an outer one—it is both inside and outside, both self and other. How do we tell the difference between the external voice and the voice inside the head? The voice

In psychoanalysis, we recognize the border area between the body and the psyche as the drive. The drive never works on the

appears in the void from which it is supposed to stem but which it does not fit….it points to a bodily interior, an 46

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intimate partition of the body which cannot be disclosed—as if the voice were the very principle of division into interior and exterior. (Dolar, 2006, p.70) and the object voice emerges in counterpoint with the visible and the visual, it cannot be disentangled from the gaze which offers its framework, so that both the gaze and the voice appear as objects in the gaps as a result of which they will never quite match. (Dolar, 2006, p.67) Why these insistent fragmentary bits of language? And what of the forceful insistence of their importance and its effect upon us? Our internal sense that they need to be completed, that we are somehow needed for their completion…that they concern us? Listening is an act. We are specta(c)tors with our own roles of looking and listening to perform. In our silent seeing, we bear witness to these encrypted communications where something missing, what is elided in the ellipses, might have the opportunity to emerge. J. L. Mitrani’s work on unmentalized experience (1994) and her enlightening work with the “encapsulated ‘happenings’” of primitive mental states and the analyst’s capacity “to be aware of and to bear the awareness of what is missing, and to be able to digest that awareness such that it becomes food for thought” (2011) is relevant to the kind of process that I am eliciting.

How might we get our bearings—in the dark, with this accosting voice? “Emotional storm is real and ought not to be obliterated because we don’t know what to do with it,” observes Michael Eigen (2005). In Not I, the act of listening is made present and concrete with the role of the Auditor, who remains silent, “downstage audience left…sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba with hood, fully faintly lit” (Beckett, 1972/2006, p.405), just enough for us to make out another presence—a stand-in or double for us, likewise engaged in the act of listening. (See the beginning of the Rome Discourse: “all speech calls for a response…. there is no speech without a response, even if speech is met only with silence, provided it has an auditor, and this is the heart of its function in analysis [Lacan, 1966/2006, p.206, emphasis added].) These characters are without proper names; instead, their names identify who they are by what they do: the Mouth mouths and the Auditor listens. “If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition…one is dependent on the ‘outside’ to lay claim to what is one’s own” (Butler, 2004, p.7).

Psychoanalysis is a practice of encounter structured on speech. “[T]he function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke.

PERFORMANCE

What I seek in speech is a response from the other” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p.247). At the core of psychoanalysis is the dimension of the uncanny, a paradoxical word in German, das Unheimliche, which like its English counterpart is a negation of canny (heimlich) and supposed to be its opposite. Heimlich, which means familiar, comfortable, intimate, “arousing a state of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house” is also unheimlich, “concealed, kept from sight… withheld from others…as though there was something to conceal” (Freud 1919/1955, pp.221-22). As in the unconscious and the language of dreams, there is a point where the two meanings coincide, “where heimlich is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet very different,” and the negation does not count (Freud, 1919/1955, p.224). Lacking an equivalent in French, Lacan invented one, extimité (extimate), to address this interior-exterior, to designate that the exterior is present in the interior (Miller, 2008), the Real in the Symbolic. With this term, Lacan aims directly at what is an essential dimension of psychoanalysis. While conventional thought bears on either/or distinctions, and philosophy has been preoccupied with binary pairs—mind/ body, spirit/matter, self/other, essence/appearance—we can hear in these divisions the primitive confusion between interiority and exteriority. Extimité blurs this distinction, inscribing an “and,” which is pregnant with intimate exteriority.

Confusions between “inside” and “outside” are part of infantile experience. Spitz describes this as a period of nondifferentiation.

The term nondifferentiation should be understood in a global, total sense: on one hand, the infant does not distinguish what is “I” from what is “non-I,” the self from the non-self, let alone the constituent elements of his environment. On the other hand, his own faculties, be they modalities of feeling, of sensation, of emotion, are not differentiated from one another; finally, no differentiation within the psychic system or even between the psyche and soma can be demonstrated. (Spitz, 1955, p.217) Preverbal experiences are inscribed on the body in one way or another. Because they are preverbal, they are necessarily inscribed differently than verbal memory. Inner and outer play a central role in the primitive psychic apparatus, which aims to find the same perceptual identity in the outside world as that represented by the inner thing-presentation (Freud 1915/1957, p.201). This search is motivated by inner pressure, which is relieved by an external intervention that comes from the other. The final developmental step produces thought, that is to say, thing-presentations are

linked to word-presentations, i.e., signifiers.

This introduces psychic reality—and the ego as a composite of these word-presentations.

Along the way, some of the earlier memory traces are left behind in the non-verbal (primary repression) system. In other words, the unconscious contains the first inscriptions of the drive. The drive itself is silent; verbalization of the drive comes from the other, through how the other interprets, responds, and gives meaning to the cry. Winnicott writes of psychotic depression that the loss might be that of certain aspects of the mouth which disappear from the infant’s point of view along with the mother…when there is separation at a date earlier than that at which the infant had reached a stage of emotional development which could provide the equipment for dealing with loss…without this added element of loss of part of the subject.

(Winnicott, 1958, p.222) The infant takes up the words from the caregiver as her own. As the drive transitions into crying and speaking, something gets lost; the original drive cannot be fully expressed in language—neither in the words of the other, nor in the subject’s own words later on. The voice is this remainder beyond meaning. This failure of word-presentations to offer a complete translation is the functional definition of trauma for Freud. As Fletcher, following Laplanche (1999), observes, [e]very act of translation produces two results: first something is successfully carried across and incorporated, bound into the ego and its internal objects, and this partially successful binding identifies with sublimation.

The second result, the correlative of every act of translation/sublimation, is the resistant, untranslated remainder of the implanted adult message that is repressed. (Fletcher, 2007, p.1257) Through the process of repression, these remainders “lose their semiotic function, assuming a congealed thing-like status in the unconscious” (Fletcher, 2007, 12561257). Thus, the repetition compulsion is the never-ending attempt to master this flux. In this way, every chance or accidental trauma will always return to the structural trauma.

It is in this relation to the other, and through Mouth’s insistence on this “speechless infant” (herself ) that we come upon the mother tongue. Pause…return for a moment…wander back inside…to that other tongue...the tongue engaged with its stone marbles…turning…returning…Return to that labor—and, through condensation and displacement, from mouth to womb…as if it 47

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were a nest of babies…embryonic… dark… formless…threatening…impossible-to-comprehend masses…(The concept of the “nest of babies” comes from Francis Tustin [1972].

See also Houzel [2001] for an extended elaboration of primitive sibling rivalry, which I am unable to develop here.) Silent of words, yet full, pregnant, threatening to fall out (…before its time…before her time…) of this laden hole.

Failing to deliver on the promise of the due date and prematurely falling into clumsy meaning. Is speaking going into labor, giving birth to a disorder of sense effects…when the holding gives way to a falling out into the air? Is a mouth, like silence, a womb of masterful signifiers?

When I open my mouth, accepting air, have I sacrificed womb[-]tomb equivalence, the oneness of sensory…immersion?

Have I relinquished my master, my comfort, my umbilical guarantee?...Is it more free to be safe and fed in the home of the womb, or more free to be out and about, subjected to the whimsy of others and to conditions on the street…? (Wu, 2016) Relating to the other is necessary to avoid premature foreclosure, which turns into a rigid, frightened, persecuted and paranoid, fixed identity: I know who I am, not I. This Not I, fixed in her fragments, calls to us from the darkness. Unable to know itself—no itself—beyond these fragmented limits that knot/not it together.

In this radically creative theatre, we are brought to the borderline of this imagined identity and its terrors. The ellipses whose holes (now like darkened eyes) litter the page, haunting the scene/seen, recall Bion’s metaphor of watching a game of tennis as the light fades: gradually increas[ing] the darkness until only the net itself is visible. If we can do this, it is possible to see that the only important thing visible to us is a lot of holes which are collected together in a net….

[T]is kind of patient has a visual capacity which is different, making him able to see what I cannot see. As psycho-analysts we must be able to see that it is…a game of tennis, and at the same time be able to turn down the light, turn off the brilliant intuition, and see these holes, including the fact that they are knitted, or netted together. (Bion, 1990, p.22) They are knitted or netted, but also, as I am suggesting, knotted and not-ed together. This casts another light on Freud’s observations on the schizophrenic’s mode of thought: “he treats concrete things as though they were abstract” (Freud, 1915 /1957, p.204).

PERFORMANCE

Consider the ways in which the voice, like music, is able to traverse through walls— the walls of the uterus (through which pass the first exchanges between the mother and developing infant), defensive walls (the fantasied space in which we are protected from dangers both external and internal), as well as concrete physical walls (as when a neighbor plays their stereo too loudly, sex becomes audible for those outside the scene, an argument increases in volume, an excited cry of delight escapes the immediate enclosure…). (See Laplanche [2011] for a formalization of the experiences of permeability, through which the enigmatic enjoyment of the other and its translation raises questions of one’s own enjoyment.) Silence plays its part here—one speaks, the other is silent. “If everyone spoke, and spoke at once, the silence of the others would no longer form the background necessary to highlight or outline the words of…one” (Irigaray, 1985, p.257, emphasis in original).

Mouth is literally “not I,” a nameless subject, a subject without love. “What?... who?...no!…she!” occurs five times in the text, along with buzzing in her ears, seemingly a reaction to an unseen other, an unheard voice. This suggests that even though Mouth speaks on her own, the structure of dialogue is still present. Recent studies in infant development have shown how dialogue with the mother begins in utero.

See, for example, Deliège and Sloboda’s Musical Beginnings (1996), whose study shows the importance of sound for fetal activity. Evidence also suggests that the infant is able to single out sounds heard in utero after birth. Trevarthen’s “Descriptive Analyses of Infant Communicative Behaviour” (1977) provides fascinating insight around the exchanges between mother and infant, particularly as concerns their interacting patterns of activity, wherein each takes a turn, resting and resuming in tune with the other’s call and response. And well before Lacan, Isakower’s study of the auditory sphere demonstrated not only the nucleus of the superego, but also the ways in which the child’s speech is constructed of linguistic material that is ready-made through the incorporation of the voice of the other (Isakower, 1939, p.345). But perhaps more than dialogue is at stake; are these not rather moments in which Mouth has the sense of something or someone calling, addressing, or worse, persecuting her? In his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan demonstrates that when the signifier is not functioning, it starts to talk, to sing on its own—murmuring, whispering, buzzing (Lacan, 1981/1993, p.294). Take away the meaning that occurs when foreclosure is present, when the speech of the other is not inscribed in the unconscious, and the

buzzing releases a continuous current, the infinity of minor paths (… … …). It speaks to the subject all the time. “The way that speech is punctuated always involves an implicit placing and supposition of the listener’s presence, and, more generally, of the supposition of being addressed” (Leader, emphasis added). A person’s speech, their verbal style and rhythm, may be organized to “blot”—or elliptically dot…dot…dot—out the possibility of being addressed. Our patients come to us to be heard, to make us into their hearers.

Throughout this paper, I have been tracing fragments of an encounter through which an individual “I” is able to emerge— an emergence that depends upon the help and mediation of an other. It is a truth we are all faced with. This is a task at the heart of psychoanalysis, and one that resounds as Mouth proclaims with all the vital, if limited, means at her disposal. “[S]o no love… spared that…no love such as normally vented on the…speechless infant…in the home…no…nor indeed for that matter of any kind…no love of any kind…” (Beckett, 1972/2006). Psychoanalysis, Freud wrote (in a letter to Carl Jung [1906], as quoted in Bettelheim [1984]), is “a cure through love.”

What springs from the active request is the need to be taken into a type of vulnerable, dependable relating with an other. It is a request that elicits recognition and response, through which the “I” can first come into being, and can then transform itself and be transformed through that other in the course of their encounters. The history of dark shadows, pleasures, pains, and vicissitudes of this requesting is what Lacan exquisitely captures in his elaboration of the future anterior, the tense of healing: What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming. (Lacan, 1966/2006, p.247).

What emerges is neither a private self nor a private language, but is delivered through language…out into the world…a subject in and of the speaking world. z REFERENCES Anzieu, D. (1983). Un Soi disjoint, une voix liante: l’écriture narrative de Samuel Beckett. Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 28, 71-85.

Artaud, A. (1958). The theatre and its double (Mary Caroline Richards, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press.

Bal, M. (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Beckett, S. (2006). Not I. In P. Auster (Ed.), The complete dramatic works of Samuel Beckett (Vol. 3). New York, NY: Grove Press. (Original work published 1972).

Bettelheim, B. (1984). Freud and man’s soul. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Bion, W. R. (1987). Making the best of a bad job. In F. Bion 48

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(Ed.), Clinical seminars and four papers. Abingdon, England: Fleetwood Press. (Original work published 1979) Bion, W. R. (1990). Brazilian lectures. London, England: Karnac.

Bonnard, A. (1960). The primal significance of the tongue.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 301-307.

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York, NY and London, England: Routledge.

Cheng, M. & Cody G. (2016). Reading performance: A physiognomy. In Cheng, M. & Cody G. (Eds.), Reading contemporary performance: Theatricality across genres (pp.3-7) Abingdon, Oxon, England and New York: NY: Routledge.

Deliège, I., & Sloboda, J. (1996). Musical beginnings: Origins and development of musical competence. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Dolar, M. (2006). A voice and nothing more. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eigen, M. (2005). Emotional storm. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Fletcher, J. (2007). Seduction and the vicissitudes of translation: The work of Jean Laplanche. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXVI, 1241-1291.

Freud, S. (1957). The unconscious. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 14, pp.159-215). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915) Freud, S. (1955). The uncanny. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 17, p p.219-256). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1919) Hamilton, A. (1992/1993). aleph. Cambridge: List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved from http://annhamiltonstudio.com/videosound/aleph_video.html Houzel, D. (2001). The ‘nest of babies’ fantasy. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 27(2), 125-138.

Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the other woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Isakower, O. (1939). On the exceptional position of the auditory sphere. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20, 340-348.

Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16, 145-174.

Lacan, J. (1993). The psychoses (Jacques-Alain Miller, Ed., & Russell Grigg, Trans.). London, England: Routledge. (Original work published 1981) Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co. (Original work published 1966) Laplanche, J. (1989). New foundations for psychoanalysis (David Macey, Trans.). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.

(Original work published 1987) Laplanche, J. (1999). The drive and its source-object: Its fate in the transference. In J. Fletcher (Ed.) & L. Thurston (Trans.), Essays on otherness (p p.117-132). London, England and New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1992) Laplanche, J. (2011). Failures of translation. In J. House, J. Fletcher, & N. Ray (Trans.), Freud and the Sexual. New York, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books – The Unconscious in Translation.

Leader, D. (n.d.). The pervert’s guide to cinema. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.thepervertsguide. com/extras_leader_regulation.html Miller, J.-A. (2008). Extimity. The Symptom, 9. Retrieved from http://lacan.com/symptom/?p=36 Mitrani, J. L. (1994). Toward an understanding of unmentalized experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64, 68-112.

Mitrani, J. L. (2011). Trying to enter the long black branches: Some technical extensions of the work of Frances Tustin for the analysis of autistic states in adults. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 92(1), 21-42.

Reik, T. (1924). Psycho-analysis of the unconscious sense of guilt. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, 439-450.

Sodré, I. (2014). Imaginary existences: A psychoanalytic exploration of phantasy, fiction, dreams and daydreams (Priscilla Roth, Ed.). Sussex, England and New York, NY: Routledge.

Spitz, R. A. (1955). The primal cavity – a contribution to the genesis of perception and its role for psychoanalytic theory. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 10, 215-240.

Trevarthen, C. (1977). Descriptive analyses of infant communicative behaviour. In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.), Studies in mother-infant interaction (pp.227-270). London, England: Academic Press.

Tustin, F. (1972). Autism and childhood psychoses. New York, NY: Science House Inc. Whitelaw, B. (1990, February 7). A wake for Sam. BBC Two England. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=M4LDwfKxr-M Winnicott, D. (1958). Collected papers. London, England: Tavistock.

Wu, C. (2016, January 10). Re: Silence [Electronic mailing list message]. Žižek, S. (2001). On belief. London, England: Routledge.

ON POETRY

“That time of year….,” Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” That time of year thou may'st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by-and-by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare, W. (1609). Sonnet 73. The Sonnets (Lit2Go Edition). Retrieved March 26, 2017, from http://etc.usf.edu/ lit2go/179/the-sonnets/3774/sonnet-73/

Shakespeare’s sonnets have ever set the standard for high poetic art. Every lover of English poetry has meditated on them and many serious scholars have had something—often much—to say. But I do think that a contemporary psychoanalytic view of thought process can add something to both the meditation and the appreciation.

Above is his great “Sonnet 73”.

In structure, “Sonnet 73” is a classical sonnet (perhaps the classical sonnet): three rhyming quatrains; iambic pentameter; a decisive volta or conceptual turn; a resolving couplet; fourteen lines—a well-practiced form, Shakespeare himself wrote some 154 of them. The Romantic poets added a vast library. And probably there is no serious Western poet since who hasn’t tried at least a couple in the course of his or her own development.

Yet “Sonnet 73” stands out. First, for the progression of rich, organically related metaphors that run through the first twelve lines: old age; the time of year, of course; shaking trees; wind-blown boughs; the unwelcome cold; bare ruined choirs; sweet birds no longer singing; twilight, the sunset fading; black night; sleep as death’s second self, “sealing up all in rest”; the glowing of a youth-consuming fire (the same fire that nourished youth!); the ashes of the death bed.

How amazing! Image leading to image, each capturing our deepest and most universal—and it might be said, our ultimate concern. And done within the space of a dozen lines! And then the concise and resolving summing up: that to perceive all this is to make “more strong” the love of the life that “thou must leave ere long.”

And the language itself! To take just one of his images (my own favorite), “when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang” Because “none” precedes “few,” it breaks up the logical progression from many to none and one sees the leaves. The image is lifted out of what might easily be a substance-less cliché. Simple, elegant, musical—genius!

The progression of metaphors is fascinating—one might think counterintuitive—in imagining death; the images move from cold to hot! The turn is to a fiery embrace.

More, the diction stresses beholding, perceiving, seeing. There is an invitation to a subject-object split, to engagement and a conversation here. Some critics have argued that Shakespeare is addressing a younger lover; others have argued that he is addressing himself. But, is it one or the other? And, must it be one or the other?

Let’s look more closely at the nature of the conversational invitation. In particular, what (psychic) part of speech is it when 49

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you refer to yourself as an intimate “you” (a thou) not “I”?

Some examples from an ordinary and less exalted realm: “I said to myself, ‘you better go home’”; or, “Hey, you never know,” which seems to invite the rest of the world, the collective you, into the I/you intimacy; or, “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day,” which identifies and distinguishes the intimate you from the collective other.

These everyday locutions are a common way of thinking and talking— implicitly addressing oneself as other, self-distancing in some way, reflective and self-conscious even as intimate and engaging. Or a way of inviting some implicit other self into one’s consciousness—a way of talking to oneself.

Well, we are familiar with dialogically based thinking from our clinical work and know to be alert to it from generations of teachers. (Projection, projective identification, intersubjective experiencing, to name a few of our concepts, are all familiar to readers of D/R—each theoretical construct with its own nuance and implication.) One function of such a dialogue, the one particularly relevant here, is that we can find a way of stepping back from what is difficult, or confounding, or painful to contemplate, like the fact that we die (it has been said) of living.

In “Sonnet 73,” I think “I” engages “you” in the struggle to come to terms with this truth—a process which is at once intimate and dissociative.

And to think about this poem illuminates a still bigger question. Can we ever say “I” without imagining a “you,” or for that matter, say “you” without imagining an “I”?

Can we ever speak at all—even as we think we’re speaking only to ourselves—without speaking to some implicit other? Great poems from great poets like Shakespeare illuminate the complex dialogical nature of our experience of ourselves—and deepen our understanding of what it means to be human, and, of course, here, what it means to contemplate our own mortality.

But high art or low, no ordinary conversation, no clinical exchange, will ever manage to avoid the dialogue. Living, loving, dying, we are both “I” and “you”. *This introduction profited from discussion with psychoanalyst colleagues and from the comments of many English scholar friends—notable among these, Tim Doherty, Victoria Olsen, and Mark Seiden. I thank them all. z

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Maurice Apprey is a professor of psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia and the School of Medicine’s former associate dean for diversity. He was appointed on July 31, 2006 as interim dean of the Office of African-American Affairs, and then dean in June 2007.

Noga Ariel-Galor is a doctoral student at the department of Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics in Bar-Ilan University, Israel and has a private practice in Tel Aviv.

Steven D. Axelrod, PhD practices psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as well as organizational consultation in New York City.

He is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He initiated the Practice Survey in 2008, has been active in a number of division-wide efforts to advance the profession, and is a Contributing Editor to DIVISION/ Review.

Blue Chevigny, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City and a writer. For more information on her practice go to www.bluechevigny.com.

Maria Christoff is a doctoral candidate at the University of Detroit Mercy and an assistant editor for The Psychoanalytic Activist, the online newsletter for Division 39, section IX, psychoanalysts for social responsibility.

J. Todd Dean is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in St. Louis, MO, and a founding member of the St. Louis Lacan Study Group. He is a Senior Editor and frequent contributor to DIVISION/Review.

Flora Lazar, PhD, is a social worker and writer working with adults and children at Formative Psychological Services. She completed a psychotherapy fellowship at Live Oak, a group psychotherapy practice specializing in LGBTQ affirmative, trauma informed, and multicultural practice. She was a Fellow at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and has worked closely in and with schools.

Bettina Mathes, PhD, is a Manhattan-based writer and culture critic and a regular contributor to this review. She is the author of numerous books and essays including most recently Psychoanalysis Interruptus (Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 2011); her book Verschleierte Wirklichkeit (Veiled Reality) won the Prize “Best Book in the Humanities” in 2008. She teaches at The School of Visual Arts. bettina631@zoho.com Kerry Moore, PhD, is a candidate at the Contemporary Freudian Society, a member of Das Unbehagen, and former member of the London Circle of the European School of Psychoanalysis. She received her MA in the History of Art and PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Drama Review and Women & Performance. Her forthcoming book looks at mourning and the object from a Lacanian perspective.

Matthew Oyer is a psychologist and psychoanalyst-in-formation in New York. He completed his doctoral training at the City University of New York and his predoctoral internship at New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Mount Sinai Medical Center. He is on the editorial board of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

William Fried, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in addition to being a photographer. He served as Associate Director of Psychiatry Residency Training at Maimonides Medical Center. In 2000, he received the Teacher of the Year Award from the Association for Academic Psychiatry, the first non-physician to be so honored. He practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Manhattan. He is a contributing editor of DIVISION/Review. billfried@hotmail.com

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Gavriel Reisner (Ben-Ephraim), PhD, is completing his psychoanalytic training at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2015, he won the CORST Prize for the best interdisciplinary essay of the year from the American Psychoanalytic Association for “On Ghosted and Ancestral Selves in Hamlet: Loewald’s ‘Present Life’ and Winnicott’s ‘Potential Space’ in Shakespeare’s Play.”

Henry Seiden, PhD, is a Senior Editor at D/R and maintains a private practice in Queens, NY. He is the author of The Motive for Metaphor (Karnac, 2016).

Manya Steinkoler, PhD, has done analytic training and clinical work in Paris. She is a professor of literature at BMCC, an analyst in formation at Apres Coup, and is in private practice in New York City.

Stephanie Swales, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a candidate psychoanalyst (with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis) in private practice in Dallas, TX. She is the founder of the Dallas/Fort-Worth area Lacan study group and the President-Elect for the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.

Her first book, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject, was published by Routledge in 2012.