On Identity and the Political in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Weaving subjective musings with theoretical speculation, this paper explores various themes on the question of identity. I consider identity as identification with a social location, where that social location is a function of groups. As such, identity is inherently contingent, a relational affair, a soft assembly. Though not a particularly psychoanalytic concept, identity is currently being tasked with considerable work in psychoanalysis: functioning as a hinge between the dual registers of the personal and social unconscious. Like any symptom, the term identity both obscures and indexes, signaling the urgent need for a radical revision of theory. The more we use the contingency of identity—how we find ourselves identified (by others as much as by ourselves) in this place and time, whatever this might be—rather than its fixity, thought to transcend place and time, the more that the concept of identity can be used in a specifically psychoanalytic way to help us explore the terrain of the political, which I distinguish from the terrain of politics proper. These ideas are employed to consider the current moment in psychoanalytic organizational life, which takes place under the sign of a fundamental paradigm shift (that is to say: catastrophic change).