Analytic Engagement Research Articles

:Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia

In the decade after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Soviet musicians “understood that music's influence on the emotions made it a powerful mobilizing device” (p. 104), but they discovered that it was extraordinarily difficult to harness music to revolutionary ideology both because of music's abstract nature and the high level of musical expertise that was an essential prerequisite for this task. As a result, Soviet political authorities neglected music in comparison to art and literature, and, until now, historians of Soviet culture have generally followed suit. Amy Nelson's important monograph tackles the Soviet musical establishment head-on, however, and is an innovative model of sustained analytical engagement with music as a historical source. Not only has Nelson scoured the archives and the contemporary periodical literature to document the key debates about Soviet music between 1917 and 1932, but she also provides musical examples of important trends and clearly explains their significance, making both musicians and their music central to her arguments.

Democracy, pluralization, and voice

This article explores different theoretical and political dimensions of voice in democratic theory. Drawing on recent developments in political theory, ranging form James Bohman's work on the movement from demos to demoi in transnational politics, to William Connolly's writings on pluralization, it develops a critical account of the emphasis within conventional pluralism on the representation of extant identities. Instead, it foregrounds the need to engage with emerging identities, demands, and claims that fall outside the parameters of dominant discursive orders. Building on the works of Rancière and Cavell, it highlights the importance of an analytical engagement with the emergence and articulation of new struggles and voices—the processes through which inchoate demands are given political expression—so as to counter the ongoing possibilities of domination, understood here as a ‘deprivation of voice.’ The article develops an account of the centrality of the category of responsiveness to such claims and demands for democratic theory, especially in relation to a range of democratic struggles in our contemporary world. In so doing, it contributes to a growing body of work that questions the taken for granted character and status of the institutional forms of liberal democaracy.

The Militiaman Icon: Cinema, Memory, and the Lebanese Civil Wars

The Militiaman IconCinema, Memory, and the Lebanese Civil Wars Najib Hourani (bio) Much has been made of the existence of amnesia amongst the Lebanese regarding the 1975–1990 civil wars, and the threat this forgetting poses to the reconstitution of the nation in the post-war era (Khalaf 2006; Young 2000; Hogbaulle 2005). Yet as Barak (2007), notes, the amnesia thesis, which holds that the Lebanese people hold a deep desire to forget “the scars and scares of almost two decades of cruel and senseless violence” (Khalaf 2006, 34), stands in marked contrast to a reality in which debates about the war implicitly or explicitly inform political struggles over the post-conflict social order. In fields as diverse as education and economic policy, the war is an entity, an event to be known if its reoccurrence is to be resisted and the unity and health of the nation restored. Nowhere has the conflict been a more central concern than in the arts. Architects and urbanists have debated the role of architecture, urban design, and heritage preservation in healing the wounds of war (Khalaf 1991, 2006; [End Page 287] Tabet 1996). Performance art, too, such as WalidRaad’s “Missing Lebanese Wars” (1999), has interrogated the limits of violence as political project and those of conventional history as a means by which to understand such undertakings. Lebanese cinema, too, has been a domain within which the trauma of war has received attention. How have Lebanese filmmakers dealt with the wars? How have their works narrated the conflict and, through such narration, contoured the post-war nation? In what follows I hope to answer these questions through an examination of three films that have dealt explicitly with the war and have, through either their notoriety or acclaim, helped contour the wars’ remembrance. Together, the docudramas—Samir Habchi’s The Tornado (1992), Jean Chamoun’s In the Shadows of the City (2000), and Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut (1998)—constitute a fictive archive of the wars through which we might read memories of war as they coexist, compete, or play off one another. Indeed, memory is not produced on a level playing field, and which memories dominate has important material effects (Drexler 2008; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007). In what follows, I argue that the generation of narrative memories is more than a process of working through or providing closure to a difficult and traumatic past (Sturkin 1997), though they are indeed that. They are about the narrative constitution of a nation. More specifically, they are part of a larger set of processes that Mitchell (2002, 183) calls the “performative making of the nation.” In this process, the nation is not to be taken as the author of narrative memory. Rather, it is the unstable product of multiple and sometimes contradictory narratives that cohere through a process of “making-other”—defining which groups, behaviors, and beliefs belong to the nation and which are excluded, marginalized, or to be guarded against. It is only by establishing otherness—a constitutive outside—that the modern nation comes into being. What can be learned about the nation through reading docudramas about the war? Protagonist as National Potential Regardless of genre, filmic representations of historical events are more or less self-conscious, analytic engagements with the past. They put forward [End Page 288] social diagrams, divide peoples into typologies, suggest correlations, wed social processes to causal factors, and it should be noted, hide others from view. In producing and reproducing images and narratives of the civil war, filmic treatments not only interact with more conventional histories—often rooted in western theoretical constructs—put forward by journalists and academics but draw their truth value from them, as well (White 1988). Thus filmic narrations of the civil war are always already hybrid documents, or to borrow Schwenkel’s phrase, “recombinant histories” that weave together “diverse transnational memories, knowledge formations, and logics of representation” (2006, 5). Reading these films through the lens of and beside conventional histories throws into relief resonances that help us trace the consolidation of an increasingly dominant narrative of the civil wars. The films considered here can be read as reflections on what Lebanon could have...

Stupid Pleasures

Stupid Pleasures Graham Hammill (bio) Review of: Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2008. We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it's difficult not to think of happiness as a form of indoctrination. Shiny happy people are, first and foremost, unthinking rubes who watch reality TV, shop at outlets, vacation at Disneyworld (or, worse, Las Vegas), and generally enjoy vapid forms of cultural entertainment. Happily engaging in these activities simply proves the lack of capacity for critical reflection. Perhaps this is why academics who have dedicated their lives to criticism have such a difficult time presenting themselves as generally optimistic. Consider how often academics in the humanities convey genuinely good news as a complaint. News about receiving tenure (which rewards scholarly accomplishment with a job for life) is followed by something like, "Now I'm stuck here forever." News about receiving a major fellowship (finally the time to do the work one really wants to do) is followed by, "Now I'm obliged to finish this book." It's as if we have to cast good news within a broader, pessimistic view of the world lest we appear to be happy and, therefore, stupid. Once optimism is unmasked as naïveté, it seems to produce a backlash in which, among the smart set at least, in order to prove oneself as sophisticated and subversive, one has to be generally unhappy and perhaps a little depressed. It's this dynamic that Michael Snediker seeks to displace for queer studies. How, Snediker asks, can queer theory conceive of optimism as a useful and interesting site for critical investigation? How can one develop a queer understanding of optimism that doesn't simply reinforce its opposite, pessimism? One way into these questions might be to explore the centrality of camp in queer culture, but Snediker doesn't go that route. More ambitiously, his study uses optimism as a conceptual wedge to overturn queer theory as we currently know it. Snediker begins Queer Optimism with the astute observation that optimism is a centrally unthought term among the writing of the most well-known queer theorists of the past twenty or so years. Since its invention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer theory (and here, Snediker means theoretical work by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman) has inadvertently produced a situation in which queer sexuality is equated with melancholia, self-shattering, shame, or the death drive-all negative, destructive, and, for Snediker, essential pessimistic concepts that foreclose analytic engagement with positive affect. Engaging with optimism reverses that situation by putting the question of queer identity back on the table. The generative movement in early queer studies was the critique of identity as the site of psychological and political normalization. Important as that critique was in the early 1990s for reimagining political agency, it also tended to idealize the destabilization of identity and the affirmation of incoherency in oneself. As Snediker puts it, Dissatisfaction with a given regime of coherence [e.g. heteronormativity] might sponsor a critical commitment to dismantling coherence tout court. Such a dissatisfaction, however, might likewise productively sponsor a reconfiguration of coherence-the cultivation of a vocabulary of coherence that more precisely does justice to the ways in which coherence isn't expansively, unilaterally destructive, reductive, or ideological. (25-6) Snediker uses queer optimism in order to mobilize the second possibility against the first. At his most ambitious, Snediker asks how a critical investigation of optimism might lead to a new understanding of some fundamental categories: queer desire, queer ontology, and queer representation. So what exactly is queer optimism? This isn't an easy question to answer, and not just because queering concepts tends to make them difficult to pin down. In his discussions of what queer optimism might be, Snediker is much clearer about what it's not rather than about what it is. Snediker is very careful not to equate queer optimism with the kind of hopefulness that Lee Edelman aggressively dismantles in No Future: Queer Theory...

Surprise and Listening Ahead: Analytic Engagements with Musical Tendencies

Roughly fifty years ago, Leonard Meyer made the intuitively appealing proposal that music engages the listener by generating expectations that can be fulfilled or avoided for aesthetic effect. Yet in the intellectual climate then prevalent, the mind was conceptualized as a black box. Given the changes in intellectual milieu over the past half century, including significant ventures into the mental black box not only in cognitive science but also in music theory, now seems a particularly suitable time for picking up some of the strands of Meyer's visionary theory of tendency and suggestion in music. This paper aims to extend some of the hints he offers on the mental phenomenon of expectation and to develop them into explicit tools amenable to use in analysis. This endeavor starts with a general categorization of the experiential correlates of musical tendency into types of listening ahead and types of surprise.

The Imprisonment and Liberation of Love: The Dangers and Possibilities of Love in the Psychoanalytic Relationship

Is the analyst's love essential to liberating the patient's ability to love? Or might it represent a lurking reimprisonment in a stultifying and repetitive dead end? These questions are considered in the context of a reexamination of three seminal papers by Freud, Loewald and Benjamin and in discussion of detailed clinical case. The paper suggests that in order to fully accomplish the task of freeing patients to be able to love more fully and authentically in their real lives, the analytic relationship must be able to contain and embrace both the imprisoning and the liberating potential of love as real possibilities in the analytic engagement.

Dead Bodies in Nigerian Jurisprudence

AbstractRecent events and a few judicial decisions in Nigeria show the need for a serious analytical engagement with the law relating to dead bodies. Topical issues from these cases focus on jurisdiction, the right to control the disposition of remains, and remedies available for the infringement of a burial right. While the meaning and content of sepulchral rights remain the same in Nigeria as in many industrialized nations, its prioritization is markedly different. In contrast to the highly individualized nature of burial rights in many Western legal systems, the control of sepulchral right in Nigeria is familial in character. In some circumstances, however, recourse may be had to statutory provisions that import English priority rules. While a range of remedies is available for an interference with a burial right, injunctions and declarations are the most sought after by Nigerian litigants. An expedited hearing is preferable to an interlocutory order of injunction.

Fordham, feeling, and countertransference: reflections on defences of the self

This is a paper about the difficulties we as analysts get into when we find that a patient has activated something in our unconscious which we cannot resolve in our work with them. Fordham described at the end of his life, in a number of papers, his difficulties and discomfort at not being able to resolve an impasse with one of his patients. From the conversations we had about this situation I knew this caused them both a lot of pain. After Fordham's death his former patient consulted me. Arising from these consultations I describe how I have understood the impasse to have arisen between Fordham and his patient. This paper links character and clinical interests, personality and impasse, developmental failures and defences of the self. It is a personal statement in which I have struggled to represent the meaning in the pain these two men suffered during their analytic engagement, which lasted more than ten years. The theme of fathers and sons was central to the problem.

Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr's The Mai and Portia Coughlan

Dead Center:Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr’s The Mai and Portia Coughlan Maria Doyle (bio) If, as Martin Esslin argues, the actor's body is the "iconic sign par excellence: a real human being who has become a sign for a human being" (56), what happens to an audience's experience of the theatrical event when the central such sign of the drama, the body of the hero, "dies" in the middle of the play? "A corpse on stage" quite obviously "demands attention" (Swander 139), much more so when the corpse in question is that of the title character. Yet a dead body on stage, which is, after all, not in fact dead, can be reanimated, and doing so, either through a disruption of linearity or through the dramatic presentation of an afterlife, testifies to the vitality and malleability of the theatrical experience. In attempting to represent "death," the bodily sign implies a chronological endpoint, a culminating stillness that provokes analytical engagement: like the conclusion of any motion, "the stillness thus draws […] the attention of the spectator […] and calls for some effort either of aesthetic appreciation or interpretation" (McAuley 106–07). Stillness and motion define one another, and later motions of the "revived" body must always be read though the audience's remembrance of the character's ultimate conclusion, as if the theatrically animated figure becomes a trace of its own imaginatively extinguished self. It is precisely this approach that the Irish dramatist Marina Carr makes use of in her early tragedies. Both of the plays that solidified her reputation – The Mai (1994) and Portia Coughlan (1996) – display their heroines' corpses at the midpoint of the action, only to break with linearity in the latter portion of the play by retracing the steps that led to that demise. Carr's goal in crafting these plays was to "write a classical tragedy [imbued with] the Greek idea of destiny and fate and little escape" (Clarity), and, while displaying the body mid-action certainly forecloses escape as an option, it also circumvents traditional tragic structure by defining the nature of the disaster, not as prophecy or potentiality but as a given, before we have a clear understanding of the [End Page 41] motives and circumstances that generate that catastrophic event. Carr's resistance in these plays to making death a literal endpoint prevents both pieces from providing the emotional release that generally accompanies our witnessing of the hero's final downfall and his commemoration by the community: heroic destruction, followed by communal lament, traditionally provides the resolution of an "absolute close" (Langer 351), a wholeness that is muddied here by the refusal of the body to stay "dead." Carr's strategy not only forces the audience to contend more directly with the heroine's efforts to stave off her own catastrophe, "undo[ing] suspense," as Clare Wallace puts it, and "focus[ing] attention on the factors contributing to the characters' destinies" (88), but, by so doing, also throws into focus the imaginative divergence in an audience's perception of male and female tragic figures. Aware of the potentially melodramatic reading of emotionally driven, selfdestructive women, Carr argues that her decision to break with linearity is an effort to avoid the lesser dramatic label: "If you had the ending of Portia Coughlan at the end, it wouldn't work. It would be too melodramatic" (qtd. in Murphy 53). Understanding the process of the central figure's demise is essential to reading the significance of that event, for as Fiona Macintosh notes, tragedy, unique among the genres in dealing with questions of human mortality, places its emphasis on the essential "ante mortem stages" of the hero's movement into death (39, 42–43), an idea echoed in Carr's own thinking: "I have always thought that death is just a moment, like two seconds," she argues, explaining that what "is so important [is] how one dies" (qtd. in Sihra 57, 56). While Carr's later plays return to a seemingly more traditional linear model, the meaning of these earlier pieces radiates from the sign of the dead female body, forcing the audience to reorient itself in relation to the event...

Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr’s The Mai and Portia Coughlan

If, as Martin Esslin argues, the actor’s body is the “iconic sign par excellence:a real human being who has become a sign for a human being” (56), what happens to an audience’s experience of the theatrical event when the central such sign of the drama, the body of the hero, “dies” in the middle of the play? “A corpse on stage” quite obviously “demands attention” (Swander 139), much more so when the corpse in question is that of the title character. Yet a dead body on stage, which is, after all, not in fact dead, can be reanimated, and doing so, either through a disruption of linearity or through the dramatic presentation of an afterlife, testifies to the vitality and malleability of the theatrical experience. In attempting to represent “death,” the bodily sign implies a chronological endpoint, a culminating stillness that provokes analytical engagement: like the conclusion of any motion, “the stillness thus draws […] the attention of the spectator […] and calls for some effort either of aesthetic appreciation or interpretation” (McAuley 106–07). Stillness and motion define one another, and later motions of the “revived” body must always be read though the audience’s remembrance of the character’s ultimate conclusion, as if the theatrically animated figure becomes a trace of its own imaginatively extinguished self.

Modernity and Modernization Revisited: Responses to Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff, “Defending Modernity? High Politics, Feminist Anti-Modernism, and the Place of Gender”

In their essay “Defending Modernity” (Politics & Gender 1 (March), 2005), Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff took gender and politics scholars to task for the ways in which they (we) engage gender and “high politics.” They call for a “more serious analytical engagement between gendered and mainstream students of politics,” with particular attention to “the relationship between gendered representations of war and actual military campaigns” (p. 179). Ultimately, they argue, scholars must consider that logics of masculine protection and domination “arise out of properly political sources that need to be better understood and incorporated into gender studies” (p. 179).

Global Television Distribution

This article focuses on the sale and purchase of TV programs and formats at international trade fairs and its implications for our understanding of global television audiences, fans, and texts. Through analytic engagement with the core concept of flow, the authors explore three related issues: (a) how viewers and fans are positioned in distribution practices, (b) the ease through which various televisual elements travel through the distribution process, and (c) the limitations of a conceptual reliance on“traveling”discourses to our understanding of global TV trade.

Fame and Disability

Fame and Disability

Modernizing Mansaf: The Consuming Contexts of Jordan's National Dish

Mansaf is the national feast dish of Jordan. As such, it is commonly associated with a traditional culture based on an agro-pastoral lifestyle in which meat and yogurt were readily available and hosts had ample time to attend to the needs of guests. This nostalgic ideal is not representative of contemporary Jordanian experience, yet mansaf remains—especially for those of Bedouin origin—the most appropriate measure of a host's respect for “his” guests. The relationship between mansaf as a domestic product and mansaf as a national icon are examined here in historical and contemporary contexts. Utilizing diverse source materials, I analyze the reactions of Jordanian Bedouin to general efforts to commodify, rationalize, and nationalize the meaning, making, and political utility of mansaf. This process sheds light on current analytical engagements with modernity, public culture, tourism, and the performance of national identity.

Psychoanalytic Goals, Therapeutic Action, and The Analyst’s Tension

The author draws a distinction between the goals of psychoanalysis and its therapeutic action. Goals are consciously (or at least preconsciously) held by the analyst, and can be clearly articulated. Ideas about the mechanism of therapeutic action, in contrast, are hypothetical constructs, and cannot be completely spelled out. This is bound to leave analysts in a state of tension; we are certain about what we are trying to do, but what we are actually accomplishing is elusive. This tension may be optimal for the analyst, because attention must be paid simultaneously to the idiosyncratic relationship in the dyad and to the broader purposes of the analytic engagement.

Narcissistic adolescents' object relations.

This article describes how narcissistic adolescent's needs for admiration and fusion are driven by primitive fears of annihilation and dependency. Freudian, British object relations, and interpersonal views of extreme adolescent narcissism are compared, and a case vignette is presented to emphasize the importance of an active analytic engagement with narcissistic adolescent patients. These adolescents unknowingly fear and seek being held in awe in the analytic relationship. Family psychopathology perpetuates the narcissistic adolescent's defensive reliance on grandiosity, entitlement, and the addiction to being admired. In contrast to the less disturbed adolescent, the severely disturbed narcissistic adolescent uses the admirer to sustain grandiosity and to maintain body image cohesion and ego integrity.

Some images of the analyst's participation in the analytic process

This paper was originally presented at a workshop (with G. Atwood and S. Parks) on The analyst's participation in the analytic process’. The analyst's ‘vulnerability’ is highlighted, with specific reference to the ideas of Winnicott, Searles and Jung. Some personal metaphors for the nature of the analytic engagement are offered, as is the image of the ‘troubled analyst’ from a patient's dream. The burden and necessity of the analyst's participation are emphasized.

Touching Limits in the Analytic Dyad

The matter of limits and boundary violations by both parties in the analytic dyad remains an unsettled technical and ethical concern, whether touching has to do with actual physical contact or is expanded in its meaning to include its psychic equivalents. Touching, probing, and breaching of the idiosyncratic perimeters of the private self of one by the other in the dyadic intimacy are necessary components of the healing contact but pose an inevitable liability for violation, disruption, and damage. Clinical data remind the analyst of the near-physical impact of words. And the data sometimes speak for the legitimate place of restrained forms of physical contact, as nonverbal necessities of analytic communication, in critical instances in which a viable analytic engagement could not otherwise be sustained.

Culture, Character, and the Analytic Engagement

Culture, Character, and the Analytic Engagement

The subversive mission of psychoanalysis

Abstract The potential of psychoanalysis as social criticism is explored in the context of the major social divides of gender, sexual orientation, race, social class, and ethnicity. It is argued that these divides play central roles in constructing individual psyches, and that their influence is inseparable from other social/ familial forces. Further, analyst and patient alike, inevitably enact the imperatives of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the analytic dyad. It is crucial that psychoanalytic theory be extended to account for the formative power of these cultural categories both in the construction of individual identity, and on the course of analytic work. Further, individual psychoanalysts must be aware of cultural countertransference in the analytic engagement. Finally, as a profession we have an obligation publicly to oppose the destructive imperatives of our economic, political, and social systems in the interest of individual and community psychic well-being.