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.     

Why Dora Left: Freud and the Master Discourse

The question of why Dora left her treatment before it was brought to a satisfactory end and the equally important question of why Freud chose to publish this problematic and fragmentary story have both been dealt with at great length by Freud’s successors. Dora has been read by analysts, literary critics, and not least by feminists.

The aim of this paper is to point out the position Freud took toward his patient. Dora stands out as the one case among Freud’s 5 great case stories that has a female protagonist, and reading the case it becomes clear that Freud stumbled because of an unresolved problem toward femininity, both Dora’s and his own. In Dora, it is argued, Freud took a new stance toward the object of his investigation, speaking from the position of the master. Freud presents himself as the one who knows, in great contrast to the position he takes when unraveling the dream. Here he is the humble scholar giving evidence of a great tolerance for not-knowing. These 2 positions run through Freud’s writings from “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900b) to “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937a). From the Dora case a line can be drawn to Freud’s metaphor of the bedrock of castration, the unsurpassable barrier to both analytical work and the theory of sex and gender.     

The New Landform's Here! The New Landform's Here! We're Somebody Now!! The Role of Discursive Practices on Place Identity*

Abstract On the border of western Iowa, a new landform—the “Loess Hills,” is being created. While scientific discourse surrounding the landform has been on going for a century, “discovery” of the landform by local residents is a recent occurrence, stimulated by socioeconomic changes resulting from the “farm crisis.” As this case study shows, the initial scientific discourse and claims, as presented in a series of publications, established the uniqueness and rarity of the hills in scientific terms. Through a complexity of discursive practices, this internalized scientific community discussion was brought into broader public conversations. Aspects of the discursive practices have been taken on by residents at the local level and appropriation of the “Loess Hills” name and facts attributed to the landform has resulted in reshaping place identity among rural residents and altering the traditional power position within the region, with “hill people” now becoming “Loess Hills People.”     

Lacan Meets Freud? Patho-Analytic Reflections on the Status of the Perversions in Lacanian Metapsychology

This article analyzes the first edition of Freud’s (1905b) “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” and more particularly the status of the perversions as it appears in that book, demonstrating how this seminal text contains a radical critique of a “psychiatric style of reasoning” (Davidson, 2001a) that turns the perversions into a separate identity fundamentally different from other ?identities?. Freud’s insights are then confronted with the Lacanian idea of a “perverse structure.” It is argued that Lacan’s theories on perversion remain deeply influenced by the French psychiatric tradition on the topic (Dupré, 1925) and that they imply a return to the “psychiatric style of reasoning” that Freud tried to overcome. Finally, I formulate some suggestions with regard to a re-thinking of sexuality in psychoanalytic metapsychology.     

Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling

In this paper the modern ideal of “autonomous” or “pure” gambling is put forward in an analysis of Dostoevsky's gambling behavior, his novel The Gambler (1866) and Freud's psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky. The significance of The Gambler lies in the way conceptions of gambling are related to the social conditions of gamblers. Furthermore, the author demonstrates that Dostoevsky and Freud express contradictory views on gambling addiction. While Dostoevsky primarily appreciated roulette as a means of making money, Freud mistakenly interpreted this as a “pathological passion”. In different ways, however, both approaches toward excessive gambling presuppose and reinforce “gambling‐for‐its‐own‐sake” – Le jeu pour le jeu.     

Inside the Revolution: Power,Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

ABSTRACT

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.     

A Typology of Families - Five Family Systems

This typology of families is composed of five family systems named “Two Against the World”, “Children Come First”, “Share and Share Alike”, “Every Man for Himself”, and “Until Death Do Us Part”. Each may occur as a pure form but mixtures are common. Variables such as purity of the system, timing of the emergence of a system and the family's flexibility in shifting from one system to another determine outcomes for sickness or health. The therapist's ability to recognise these systems gives coherence to family therapy and improves its effectiveness.     

On Moralism and Ethics: Associations to Henry Abelove’s “Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans”

Henry Abelove (1986) writes that Freud was troubled by what he saw as moralistic leanings pervading the theory and practice of early American psychoanalysis. Drawing on Erikson’s (1976) distinction between moralism and ethics, my associations to Abelove’s still very timely paper explore the psychological “deals” we all tend to make between moralism and ethics. I begin with Freud’s less than progressive views of female homosexuality. I then focus on the way that what I have called normative unconscious processes enter contemporary theory and practice. I draw attention to a continued presence in our theories of a straight/gay binary (which, according to Abelove, Freud contested), and I give an example of the effects of an unconscious adherence to neoliberal cultural norms. I conclude with the suggestion that, although fraught, it is nonetheless crucial to think about what is “the good.”     

Freud s Sisters A Fantasia on a Photograph

This psychoanalytically based imaginative inquiry into the role of Freud's sisters in shaping the meanings of Femaleness and gender difference for Freud starts from the author's study of a photograph in the Library of Congress Freud exhibit, “Portrait of the Jakob Freud Family ca. 1876,” which shows Sigmund Freud, age 20, with his live then adolescent sisters. Freud's Dream of the Botanical monograph, especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu, is used as a window into Freud's early childhood relations with his sisters and the registration of gender difference in his psychic reality. A peculiarity in the photograph in the presentation of Freud's half-brother, Emmanuel, leads the author's reverie to another dream of Freud's, the “nonvixit dream.” especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu and by Max Schur. The non-vixit dream is thought to bear traces of Freud's experience of the death of his infant brother Julius. New suggestions are made with regard to Freud's difficulties with depressive-position anxieties in relation to his mother; it is suggested that these difficulties led to his concept of girls' genitals as “castrated” becoming dominant over another stratum of psychic experience in which girls' genitals, and femininity, were viewed with erotic wonder as intact in their own right. This idea is linked with Freud's difficulties in construing woman as subject.     

Animal Unconscious: Three Questions

“Animal Unconscious” begins with Freud’s claim, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1965), that psychoanalysis proposes “nothing animal is alien to us.” By drawing on recent scholarship in feminist, queer, new materialist, and posthumanist theory, the essay posits that the unconscious is something “animal,” not something uniquely human in order to inquire what this postulate would mean for thinking about 3 problems: the place of animality in institutions of analysis and (higher) learning, the animality of language, and the invention of new modes of kinship. Throughout, the essay speculates on what it means to recast “human” psychoanalysis as an animal practice while simultaneously opening it toward including nonhuman animals in its purview.     

The Formative Power of Metony#metoo

ABSTRACT

What can we learn about #MeToo starting with a formal analysis of its structure? What does the linguistic affirmation of adding one “me” to another “me” ad infinitum create in its powerful drift? This metonymical structure, moving part by part, creates the wildfire spread of the movement, adding to its volatility, including its power against institutional structures that trade more in identity, the stability of an “I,” and the self-preservation of metaphor. This little fragment that we name in this regard “metony#metoo” aims to point to and name a primal scene that is both the open secret of misogynistic violence and the pain and impossibility of sexual relationships. Putting these two together, this volatile structure that points to and exposes structural violence, we ask in this essay—where will we land? What further invention beyond the vent of venting is necessary to help lend this movement an ethical dimension?     

Sociological perspectives on artificial intelligence: A typological reading

Interest in applying sociological tools to analysing the social nature, antecedents and consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) has been rekindled in recent years. However, for researchers new to this field of enquiry, navigating the expansive literature can be challenging. This paper presents a practical way to help these researchers to think about, search and read the literature more effectively. It divides the literature into three categories. Research in each category is informed by one analytic perspective and analyses one “type” of AI. Research informed by the “scientific AI” perspective analyses “AI” as a science or scientific research field. Research underlain by the “technical AI” perspective studies “AI” as a meta-technology and analyses its various applications and subtechnologies. Research informed by the “cultural AI” perspective views AI development as a social phenomenon and examines its interactions with the wider social, cultural, economic and political conditions in which it develops and by which it is shaped. These analytic perspectives reflect the evolution of “AI” from chiefly a scientific research subject during the twentieth century to a widely commercialised innovation in recent decades and increasingly to a distinctive socio-cultural phenomenon today.     

Freud and Developmental Theory A 21st-Century Look at the Origin Myth or Psychoanalysis

This article traces both Freud's contribution to developmental theory and the major trends in developmental theory since Freud. Although Freud's developmental theorizing has been criticized as outdated scientism, a close examination of his writings reveals a more radical “21st-century” Freud, whose, theoretical approach, to some extent, anticipated the deconstructive and postmodern perspectives of the current psychoanalytic scene. Freud's self-subversive analytic process has been lost in the developmental writings of his classical followers and in the writings of the alternative schools of psychoanalysis that have arisen since. In place of a psychoanalysis of inquiry, these theorists have reinstated a psychoanalysis of “truths,” universalist models of normal and pathological development, ostensibly allied to confirmatory infant observation. Such models can best be understood as psychoanalytic “origin myths,” selected and codified to support the belief system, meanings, and customs immanent in the school of thought they purport to validate.     

Does excellence matter?

The term excellence is the key concept of the European science policy. The research funding is supposed to focus on the strengthening of excellence as well as on its integration into networks and clusters. However, one seems to presuppose the criteria of excellence as self-explanatory. Studies show that scientific reputation not only grounds on outstanding achievements in research and teaching but also on social capital. This raises the question, whether networks and clusters of excellence really integrate the scientifically best scientists. It is also possible that groups with a remarkable amount of social capital reproduce themselves underthe cover “excellence”. Hence, scientific excellence would be nothing more than a metaphor.     

Yoshida Theory: Its Structure,Criticism and Advancement

Tamito Yoshida, a giant of theoretical sociology, passed away in 2009. Here, I give a concise review of his theoretical achievements, called “Yoshida Theory”, and foresee the future. The main features of Yoshida Theory are the following: information controls resources; there was evolution from the stage of only materials to that of materials controlled by generic information and also to that of materials controlled by symbolic information; the process of information procedures is divided into “to cognize,”“to evaluate” and “to order,” which are distinguished from one another, and from the theoretical standpoint called the “Information Processing Resources Paradigm”; i nformation is maintained as long as it is useful, and when it becomes useless it is selected or expected to be changed. There was much criticism against the theory. The most unrelenting opposition was that it was not a system of explanation in the conventional sense of scientific methodology. It was claimed not to be positive scientific theory because of the logical inconsistency. Yoshida's counter‐criticism was, contrary to his opposites' expectations, that sociological theory ought not to fulfill the criteria to be science. It seemed to support his evolutionalist assertion that the synchronically inconsistent theory will be corrected diachronically and achieve some consistency. The criteria of science themselves should be re‐constructed to thematize the fact that information or program‐controlling society has evolution, he thought. He called it “New Science”; however, the attempt was never completed. It is still our task to clarify whether sociological theory can remain in science or not.     

“I Will Have Lacked”: Rethinking Sexual Difference and Sexed Subjectivity Through Psychoanalytic Temporal Relationality

ABSTRACT

Sexual difference, as understood by contemporary Lacanian scholars, is the Real that marks a constitutive gap or discord beneath the construction of sexual identity, but in what way does the Real relate to the Symbolic in a process of becoming a sexed subject? This article explores the possibility of sexual differentiation through a psychoanalytic conceptualization of temporal organization and rearrangement. Taking the moment of the “primal view” in Freud’s text as its point of departure, this article demonstrates that the origin of sexual difference in psychoanalysis is actually a temporal difference between two processes of becoming, explained by Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s future anterior, respectively. In comparison with women’s time, it is argued that the Lacanian temporal relationality promotes a new epistemology of sexed subjectivity that permits an expanded understanding of the lived experience of being sexed.     

The public relations paradox of erasure: Damnatio memoriae as public relations strategy and tactic

Public relations scholars study how organizations co-create meaning with engaged stakeholders. Not well understood is how and why such co-creation modifies shared meaning, amplifies change, and even “erases” some piece of memory from the public record with the purpose of redirecting and redefining societal narratives. To help establish erasure as a concept for studying public relations, we draw from Freud’s theory of memory to establish a foundation upon which to critique strategic erasure. We adapt Freud’s theory of memory into the intersecting critique of visual rhetoric as public relations by analyzing, via narrative inquiry, remnants of Imperial Rome that have been modified, amplified, but even erased to present Rome’s modern identity. For centuries, even during Imperial Rome, leaders practiced damnatio memoriae —a modern Latin phrase that means “condemnation of memory.” We use this concept to interrogate the public relations identity process Rome’s leaders have used to modify for emphasis and even obliterate Roman elites’ names and images from the texts of public records by destroying, mutilating and modifying statues and monuments as a means for co-creating new public memory. Such analysis reveals how damnatio memoriae helps elites to redefine the “memory” of the Eternal City.     

The Context of Correctness: A Comment on Rushton1

According to Philippe Rushton, the “equalitarian fiction,” a “scientific hoax” that races are genetically equal in cognitive ability, underlies the “Politically correct” objections to his research on racial differences. He maintains that there is a taboo against race unequaled by the Inquisition. I show that while Rushton has been publicly harassed, he has had continuous opportunities to present his findings in diverse, widely available, respectable journals, and no general suppression within academic psychology is evident. Similarly, Henry Garrett and his associates in the L4AEE, dedicated to preserving segregation and preventing “race suicide,” disseminated their ideas widely, although Garrett complained of the “equalitarian fiction” in 1961. Examination of the intertwined history of Mankind Quarterly, German Rassenhygiene, far right politics, and the work of Roger Pearson suggests that some cries of “political correctness” must be viewed with great caution.     

Accounting for surveillance

This contribution discusses the ways people hold themselves and others accountable for everyday practices of surveillance. It analyses three examples: (1) the “breeching experiments” of the video artist “Surveillance Camera Man,” (2) a “stop and frisk” incident involving a 17‐year‐old boy in Harlem, and (3) the pop‐up windows on websites that ask for users’ consent to use “cookies.” Understanding the relationship between language and securitization, it is argued, requires that we pay attention to the interactional basis of surveillance and the ways rights and responsibilities are negotiated, ratified, challenged, or ignored in the moment‐by‐moment unfolding of communication.     

“Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans” Revisited: A Brief Contribution to the History of Psychoanalysis

Henry Abelove summarizes the main arguments of “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans,” a paper he wrote in the early 1980s. He also says that in writing it he aimed chiefly to challenge American moralism, which then was, and still is, both destructive and immensely influential.