Varela and Contemporary Psychoanalysis,an Epistemological Gesture: From Representations to Co-emergence

This paper intends to articulate common epistemological elements between Francisco Varela’s and Contemporary psychoanalytic relational-intersubjective theories. These shared elements could be described as a common epistemological gesture, the overcome of a reductionist and dualist paradigm, instead giving away to a paradigm of complexity. In both perspectives, a phenomenological and close to experience philosophical reflection is incorporated, which can account the human experience as an irreducible and valid source of knowledge. In Varela’s theory, the notion of embodiment permit to conceive the mind as natural endowment of the body. In Contemporary psychoanalytic theories, nature of human experience is conceive as intrisically social, proposing a “two person” psychology and the intersubjective model. Finally, in line with both currents and in a preliminary way, I propose the notion of co-emergency, seeking to overcome different forms of dualisms like internal/external, subject/world, I/Other, etc. From a clinical perspective, co-emergency can be conceived a s the coupling of two subjectivities, as a particular experiential mode of being with others, intending to overcome dualism regarding transference and represented mental states.     

Emergent Subjectivity: The Parallel Temporalities of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory

Kirsten Lentz uses Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013) as an occasion to explore the rivalry between psychoanalysis and social theory in their attempts to account for human subjectivity. Although a commonsense view holds that the 2 fields have completely different relationships to temporality—psychoanalysts fix their gaze to the past, whereas social theorists imagine radical futures—the distinction is more complex than it appears. The analyst does not lead the patient toward the past but holds and guards the place of futurity so that new experiences of subjectivity eventually become available. Like “theory,” then, psychoanalysis tries to make room for “emergent subjectivity,” for ways of being in the world that have not yet been imagined or formulated, that have not yet been born in the mind of culture. Lentz thus insists that the radical critique of gender can and should be understood as fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis.     

Francisco Varela,Relational Psychoanalysis,and the Post-Phenomenological

Taking the work of Francisco Varela beyond his own phenomenological approach to neurobiology explored by Simón Guendelman, Sebastián Medeiros, and Ricardo Pulido, I turn to what in the last year of Varela’s life he proposed about the body when writing on organ transplantation and technology. I link this to the recent elaboration of a post-phenomenological phenomenology in critical theory, philosophy, and media studies and indicate the implications for a relational psychoanalysis. I also speculate on what direction we might take Varela’s engagement with Buddhism.     

Memento Mori: The Book as a Cut

Despite Testo Junkie’s overt criticisms of psychoanalysis, this essay attempts to read the formal aspect of the work—as a process of mourning, a body-essay, an experimental protocol of intoxication—through the lens of the everyday practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Looking at the way soma erupts in the consulting room, the conundrums of agency and identity, Preciado’s (2013) work on the biopolitics of the psychopharamacopornographic era is shown to be critical to any unraveling of a symptom. On a more personal scale, Preciado’s own stated intention that the writing of the book should function as a cut, as a Memento Mori, is read in this essay as a depiction of the extreme limits one must traverse to locate an experience of desire, beneath or beyond the apparatuses of the state—something that Preciado shows as penetrating further into our lives and bodies than many of us are prepared to acknowledge.     

Desire,death and wonder: Reading Simone de Beauvoir's narratives of travel

Abstract

This article draws upon the work of contemporary French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray in developing a post‐structuralist analysis of travel within the autobiographies of the second wave feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Travel and the experience of wonder at the otherness of the world figure as important self shaping experiences within the four volumes of Beauvoir's life narrative (1958, 1960, 1963, 1972). Travel has a metonymic relation to the passage of Beauvoir's life, in which the existential extremes of anguish and ecstasy are played out in a (feminine) quest for self knowledge. Through a close reading of Beauvoir's writing I analyse the different formations of desire that structure the experience of wonder in relation to the otherness of the world and death. I also draw upon debates within feminist philosophy about the nature of subjectivity and knowledge that were, in Beauvoir's time, ordered around an Hegelian opposition between immanence and transcendence. I take up Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental to explore another way of conceptualising the feminine subject's desire to know and value the world differently.     

To Whom Does the Subject Speak? Between the Relational and Lacanian Schools of Psychoanalysis: A Conversation With Adrienne Harris and David Lichtenstein,Moderated by Chris Christian

Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new but increasingly present school in contemporary psychoanalysis. Lacanian psychoanalysis is a dominant presence in France and South America but far less so in the English-speaking clinical world. And there is little contact between them. Adrienne Harris, one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, and David Lichtenstein, a prominent New York-based Lacanian-influenced psychoanalyst, came together in the spring of 2012 for a rare conversation about the differences, similarities, and potential meeting points between these two psychoanalytic movements. The conversation spanned a wide psychoanalytic landscape from the origins and influences of these two movements to their conceptualization of basic psychoanalytic notions such as the unconscious, the self, the process and purpose of the psychoanalytic project, the nature of trauma, the work of interpretation, and the role of the analytic relationship. Ferenczi, Winnicott, and Bromberg offered common theoretical ground for this comparative conversation.     

The Flayed and Exquisite Self of Travelers: Managing Face and Emotions in Strange Places

Travelers who cross cultural and linguistic borders encounter recurrent failures of social competence. People routinely violate the linguistic and nonlinguistic normative order, and have few means at their disposal for repair work. These episodes lead to the experience of a flayed self: a temporary, painful identity born of one's inability to display competence, combined with heightened, exquisite self‐consciousness. Using interactionist scaffolding and travelers' accounts, I examine this self, its commitments, and resources. I examine four techniques used to avoid flayed and exquisite selfhood: denying negative experience, externalizing the causes of that experience, engaging in the mind cure, and doing time work.     

Reconceptualizing the Self Phenomenon: Toward an Emic Conception of the Self

In sociology, the self has been conceptualized as either self‐concept or the process of self‐reflectivity. Both notions of the self have been traced to the early thinkers—William James, Charles H. Cooley, and George H. Mead—who laid the foundation for the scientific study of the self phenomenon. In this article, I propose a revised conception of the self based on a re‐reading of the classics. I argue that the self is related to but not the same as self‐concept or the process of self‐reflectivity. The self is an emic object, that is, the entity that one takes oneself to be. More specifically, the self is the empirical existence of an individual perceived by the individual to be his or her own. As the identity the individual finds in his or her existence in a world shared with others, the self is a product of both self‐reflection and self‐enactment. Implications of this reconceptualization for some broad issues related to the self phenomenon are also discussed.     

Beyond Repair: Interpretation,Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play-Technique

This article puts clinical child psychoanalysis into conversation with recent debates about critical method in order to question the turn toward so-called “reparative reading” in feminist and queer theory. While Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original call for a new kind of reparative method culled its key terms (“reparative” and “paranoid”) from child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the scholars who have adopted reparativity in critical theory pay little attention to Klein’s work. In this article, I take up Klein’s theory of the depressive position and reparativity as she elaborated them in her clinical work with children, particularly her wartime analysis of “Richard” in 1941. Klein interpreted Richard’s play—his clinical “war games”—through her idiomatic vocabulary of “attack” and “repair.” By situating this case and Klein’s larger theory of psychic reparations in the political climate of wartime Europe, I argue that Klein’s writings point to the ethico-political dangers inherent in reparative endeavors, which name the object and narrate its injury and repair according only to the perimeters of one’s own self. From this reading, I propose that there might be a benefit to foregoing the injury/repair framework implicit in reparative agendas—both critical and clinical alike. By returning reparativity to Klein, I therefore aim not to offer a corrective to Sedgwick or to the scholars following her, but rather to interrogate the ethical stakes of all reparative endeavors, be they political, intellectual, or clinical. At the most basic level, then, this article argues that the space of the clinic is an important (and often undervalued) object for the consideration of critical method.     

The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn

What would or could a psychoanalysis beyond the human be? And who—and how—might we who call ourselves human be or become in turn? In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1916–1917) famously declared psychoanalysis to be the third great blow to human self-love delivered at the hands of science. First, the Copernican revolution revealed that the earth was not the center of the universe “but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness.” Then Darwin and his contemporaries undermined the ground upon which “the human” had asserted a fundamental difference from “the animal.” And now, psychological research has tripled down, giving “human megalomania” its “third and most wounding blow.” “The ego,” Freud wrote, “is not even master in its own house.” In passages like this, we get a glimpse of a psychoanalysis beyond the human–animal boundary. Nevertheless, the force of anthropocentrism returns again and again in Freud’s body of work, as when he consigned human animality to a prehistoric past or linked it to the baser instincts that human civilization needs to overcome. But what if, instead of running away from the animal in us, we were to dwell with and alongside the nonhuman? Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and cultural theorist Nicholas Ray, this essay traces the sounds and scents of the nonhuman animal in and for psychoanalytic theory.     

Self‐Employment as a Strategy for Dealing with the Competing Demands of Work and Family? The Importance of Family/Lifestyle Motives

In this paper, we test the argument that self‐employment may be a strategy for dealing with competing demands of work and family. We do this by comparing work–family conflict experienced by self‐employed and employed men and women. By examining to what extent the self‐employed versus regularly employed value time for themselves and their family — i.e., whether they are driven by family/lifestyle motives in their working life — we examine whether self‐employment can help reduce work–family conflict among those guided by family/lifestyle motives. Using data from a 2011 Swedish survey of 2483 self‐employed and 2642 regularly employed, the analyses indicate that experiences of work–family conflict differ between self‐employed and employees. Self‐employed men and women, especially those with employees, generally experience more work–family conflict than do employees. However, self‐employment can sometimes be a strategy for dealing with competing demands of work and family life. The presence of family/lifestyle motives generally decreases the probability of experiencing work–family conflict, particularly among self‐employed women with employees.     

Women's self‐presentation and the transition from classroom to workplace

Organizations place context‐specific appearance demands on women — demands that often echo wider inequalities, require adaptation of self‐presentation and impact on women's careers. Despite this, the effect of life and career stage transition on women's self‐presentation and embodied identities remains largely unexplored. Drawing on a qualitative study of young British women's body modification, this article examines what impact transitioning from education into the world of work has on women's self‐presentation and body modification regimes and their embodied identities. Body modification here refers to all methods women use to alter their physical body and appearance (e.g., invasive or non‐invasive; self‐administered or other‐administered; permanent or temporary), provided the intention of their use is primarily to alter the user's physical appearance. Expectations of transition, the impact of entering the workplace and of career establishment are considered as well as the significance of career stage and vulnerability for resistance and negotiation of organizational expectations. Transition of life stage is found to be a catalyst for self‐presentation change. The transition from education to work is identified as having a significant impact on body modification practices across workplaces.     

Living history,undoing linearity: memory‐work as a research method in the social sciences

If we accept that social research is not simply a matter of representation, but involves actively intervening in and constructing our current social and political conditions, we are then presented with a set of problems about representation and intervention. The methodology, memory‐work, is introduced here as one specifically developed for the purposes of undertaking politically engaged social research. In this paper, I describe the rationale and method of memory‐work, emphasizing the ways in which it involves undoing the subject of linear, causal, biographical narratives and a notion of the subject as collectively constituted. I elucidate the method by drawing on an example from research about HIV subjectification in which the notion of individual responsibility arose as a problem for memory‐workers—it simultaneously enables and constrains actively working on oneself and one's world. Discussing this research leads to a consideration of the ways in which the methodology needs to be adapted to reflect the specific concerns of one's time and place. I conclude with a discussion of the important but limited notion of history entailed in the original conception of memory‐work.     

Testo Junkie Notes for a Psychoanalytic Forum

Starting with an autobiographical account of my own involvement within psychoanalytic practices, this paper opposes psychoanalysis to a new set of “somatopolitical” techniques of intervention. The paper studies psychoanalysis as a technology of the body, a verification apparatus, and a technology of government and asks how psychoanalysis can (or can’t) work as a critical technique of production of subjectivity within the neoliberal pharmacopornographic regime.     

Body-States,Body Image and Dissociation: When Not-Me is ‘Not Body’

The relationship between dissociation, eating disorders and disordered eating is key as it relates to dissociative disruptions to body image. It undermines normal integration of appearance-relevant information and cuts off access to subjective experience and feeling states necessary to form an internal representation of one’s self and body. This vulnerability contributes to body image distortions and the uncritical internalization of society’s notion of the thin ideal—which is an unrealistic standard, that leads, in turn, to body dissatisfaction. Patients with eating disorders live under the assumption that if they feel their sensations and feelings these will overwhelm them ‘forever’. The fear of being consumed by these terrible feelings, leads them to believe that ‘not feeling’-or even not existing-is the only answer. Being able to tolerate one’s subjective, affective experience is part of being able to internally represent one’s states, including body-states and to develop a stable experience of body image.     

The social worker as psychoanalyst

This paper examines the development of social workers as psychoanalysts to determine whether psychoanalysis is a legitimate function of social work. Historically, social work has found psychoanalytic theory helpful. However, it is generally understood that for the caseworker to competently practice psychoanalytic psychotherapy, advanced training is necessary. Although many social workers have availed themselves of this opportunity, the profession continues to believe that the practice of psychoanalysis is incompatible with social work. This is based upon an inaccurate conception of psychoanalysis. Since the social work psychoanalyst is concerned with the client's adaptation to the environment, his or her practice can easily be defined as clinical social work.     

Fathers Don’t Cry: On Gender,Kinship, and the Death Drive

ABSTRACT

A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, because this particular view solves for psychoanalysis some basic problems that it does not have the conceptual repertoire to address. This article goes on a journey through the story of boys, Samson from the Hebrew bible, a young New York boy who falls of his bike, Freud’s three sons and his theoretically adoptive son Karl Abraham, and one of my patients. It is a journey through the civilization-long prohibition on parents and boys to attach, a prohibition that I argue serves the arch-value of sacrifice by which patriarchy is driven. I also trace in this journey the story of the controversial and powerful analytic concept of the death drive. And I argue that this concept, born during and after World War I, bears the mark of the frightened, homo-attachment-phobic impulse that has taken over a psychoanalysis unable to cope with the madness of a world war without blaming the victim. I offer toward the end a glimpse of an alternative.     

The Redeemed Old Head: Articulating a Sense of Public Self and Social Purpose

The notion of the “old head” has emerged as a formidable social type in studies of African American, low‐income, urban communities. The term refers to men who have had stable work histories and who reflect “mainstream” values concerning work ethic and social conduct. This analysis broadens the category of old head by exploring the views of men whose life courses have taken different turns than have traditional old heads. Through an analysis of the view of two African American men on their life experiences and efforts to serve as mentors to younger people in their lives, this article delivers an argument about the redeemed old head. This figure is defined in partial contrast to sociological depictions of traditional old heads in that the redeemed old head has led a life of profligate activity as a youth, but now has on his mind the interests and prospects of younger people, some of whom are involved in such profligate activity themselves. Elements of symbolic interactionist theory are employed to make sense of how the redeemed old head conceives of his public self and argues for the limits and possibilities for service as a mentor.