Psychoanalytic Sense Research Articles

The Bourdieusian Unconscious: The Scientific and Political Significance of the Sociological Treatment of a Psychoanalytic Concept

ABSTRACTFrom the very beginning of Pierre Bourdieu's oeuvre, but with increasing intensity, one can find expressions that are either explicitly taken from psychoanalysis, or at least have a psychoanalytic meaning. This paper aims to contribute to the existing discourse on Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis by examining the meaning of Bourdieu's most frequently used term, unconscious, which is also a key one in psychoanalysis, in Bourdieu's writings. In a brief introduction, I outline Bourdieu's relationship to psychoanalysis based on the literature and Bourdieu's texts, and argue that although Bourdieu's relationship with psychoanalysis remained controversial over the years, there is a growing integrative tendency, with psychoanalysis playing an increasingly important—even if sometimes hidden—role in his texts. In the main body of the paper, I argue that this tendency does not fully cover Bourdieu's approach to the unconscious, and that although his approach to the unconscious is not independent of the tendency discussed in the previous section, a dichotomy can be observed from the beginning to the end of the oeuvre, namely the parallel use of the unconscious in the sociological and psychoanalytic sense, and the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the two. Finally, in the last section, I point out that socioanalysis, as an emancipatory project, should have clarified its position on the unconscious, because it marks the limits of the actors' potential for self‐reflexivity, which can also shape political strategies.

The Shadows of Sovereignty: A Visual Genealogy of Dark Knight Archetypes

Abstract This paper investigates the role of the dark knight archetype in the theory of sovereignty. The dark knight archetype has repeatedly emerged in popular culture, but has never been fully explored in jurisprudence and political theory. The aim is to develop a new visual method to bridge the distance between the theory and the tropes that have historically been used to create and justify the notion of sovereignty. Sovereignty is understood here not only as a founding concept of modern legal theory, but also as a trope: a special kind of narrative, illustrated, capable of being modernized, and yet maintaining its initial trends; one that is foundational and colonial, and capable of institutionalizing subjects and sovereigns. Strategically following the works of Agamben, Benjamin, Jung and Warburg, this paper analyses – in a psychoanalytical sense – the unconscious dimensions of sovereignty from evidence collected in popular culture and political history. From fallen medieval knights to Zorro; from fascist Blackshirts to Darth Vader, this paper examines the pervasive repetition of dark knight figures in Western tropes of sovereignty and its consequences.

The missing: Exploring the use of photographs in “working through” the natal body with transgender youth

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on how for some young people who identify as transgender, the anticipation, and/or the actual process, of transitioning represents a movement away from something in themselves that feels wrong, painful, or traumatic and that has not yet been consciously recognised as such. This becomes a ‘missing’ part of the self’s experience, locked into the body. I suggest that the process of identifying and restitution of ‘the missing’ part requires working through the natal body in its metaphorical and literal senses, in the service of expanding autonomous choice about how to find a hospitable home in the body. Building on Money-Kyrle’s three ‘facts of life’, I propose a fourth one, namely the inescapable fact of our embodied nature, to underscore that our personal history always includes our embodied history, hence the importance of working through what the natal body unconsciously represents. I describe the use of photographs during psychoanalytic psychotherapy with young people who have commenced social transitioning, to work through visual representations of the natal body in the service of facilitating the working through, in its psychoanalytic sense, of the natal body’s unconscious narrative. I suggest that deploying this visual mode may be especially helpful in engaging young people on the autistic spectrum who nowadays comprise a significant minority of transgender young people.

What is affect?

In this article, the relationship between affect and becoming in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is explored. It is argued that affects and becoming are closely linked, and where there is becoming, there is also affect. Conversely, the absence of becoming implies the absence of affect. The concept of becoming is described as a process of desubjectification, where the ego loses its boundaries and transforms into the unbounded entity known as the schizo. Various identities or names can be assumed by the schizo, each representing a zone of intensity that the schizo moves through and derives value from. These identities should not be interpreted as permanent identifications in the psychoanalytic sense, but instead as temporary markers that the schizo transitions through like a nomad. The fact that the schizo's state of being is pathological is emphasized, and it requires a novel analytical approach called schizoanalysis, which aims to comprehend the specific logic of becoming that defines the schizo experience. Overall, crucial concepts in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, such as the correlation between affect and becoming and the significance of desubjectification in understanding the schizo experience, are introduced in this article. It also highlights the importance of innovative analytical approaches that consider the fluid and boundless nature of the schizo's identity. Key words: Deleuze, Guattari, affect, desubjectification, schizoanalysis, identity

Desire-Aware Translation: From Ethics to Erotics

Desire-Aware Translation:From Ethics to Erotics David M. Smith (bio) I In Clayton Eshleman's "A Translation Memoir," an afterword to his translations of César Vallejo, we find an extraordinary account of the role desire played in one man's life as a translator. "For nearly 50 years," Eshleman wrote, Vallejo "has become the keelson in the ship of poetry I have attempted to construct." As a college student and aspiring poet in the early sixties, Eshleman came to translation because he thought translating poetry might facilitate the writing of his own poems. This aim would be radically disrupted when he discovered Vallejo, however, in whom he found "a whole wailing cathedral of desires, half-desires, mad-desires, anti-desires, all of which … seemed caught on the edge of no-desire." Eshleman decided he had to try and translate Vallejo's Poemas humanos, a project he approached with some trepidation, as it would involve "an awesome commitment of psyche as well as time." His anxiety would prove to be well-founded: Both in translating and in working on my own poems, I felt a terrific resistance, as if every attempt I made to advance was met by a force that pushed me back. It was as if through Vallejo I had made contact with a negative impaction in my being, a nebulous depth charge that I had been carrying around with me for many years. … I also began to have violent and morbid fantasies that seemed provoked by the combination of translating and writing. More and more I felt that I was struggling with a man as well as a text, and that this struggle was a matter of my becoming or failing to become a poet. For Eshleman, this translation brought about nothing less than the dissolution—the death—of his old identity. Out rose a new way of being: "I envisioned myself as a kind of angel-less Jacob wrestling with a figure who possessed a language the meaning of which I was attempting to wrest away." This did not only mean he was wrestling with Vallejo to wrench away the meaning of the poems; rather, Eshleman also came to realize: I had ceased to be what I was … that I now had a glimpse of another life, a life I was to create for myself, and that this other man I was struggling with was also the old Clayton who was resisting change. The old Clayton wanted to continue living in his white Presbyterian world of "light"—where man is associated with day/clarity/good and woman with night/opaqueness/bad. The darkness that was [End Page 157] beginning to spread through my sensibility could be viewed as the breaking up of the belief in male supremacy that had generated much of that "light." Eshleman's statement is radically different from most translators' prefaces and afterwords. Typically, these statements start with respectful deference to previous translations, before announcing why a new translation is needed or justified. The stability of the translator's identity, and their ability to transparently render the original author's meaning, is rarely questioned. Eshleman, however, shows us with wrenching honesty how the translator can be radically transformed by the experience, by opening the self to the translation as fully as possible. I am moved by Eshleman's honesty, and at times have been tempted to write, if not a full autobiography of my own coming-to-be as a translator, then a similar account of the desires, the resistances that have shaped my identity as a translator and my translational practice thus far. I take as a starting point my translation of the short story that complements this essay: "Den slappe farskapsdingsen," or in my rendering, "The Limp Fatherpizzle," by the Norwegian writer Kristian Klausen. I say "complements" since neither translation nor essay should be read either as prior or subordinate to the other. Rather, translation and essay become two sides of the same project of working through, in the psychoanalytic sense, of working through resistances in order to free up my translational desire. Through this analytical work, I hope to move away from certain distorting tendencies inherent to translation as...

I Stink, Therefore I Mink: A Manifesto

The recent mass culling of mink in Denmark and elsewhere, following the animals’ contamination by a COVID-19 variant, is taken as a re-entry point into Derrida and Lacan’s mink-mediated conversation in The Beast and the Sovereign. Out of the etymological ‘stink’ attached to the mink emerges an animot gifted with (unlimited) ink, with a potential to disturb philosophies of language, to write back or strike back, as it has recently done in the form of alignments of dead yet resurfacing animals. In the wake of Derrida’s verbal disseminations around the vison, and of Lacan’s attribution of a ‘sort of language’ to the animal in The Formations of the Unconscious, this essay follows an animal pack with includes the 17 million mink programmed for (double) extinction by inhumation and cremation. A hauntology follows, adumbrated by Lacan’s interest in the ‘secretion’ of fur, mink oil and (psychoanalytic) sense, and by Derrida’s encounter with the neoliberal, crypto-vison Alain Minc in 1994.

Clinical Commentary 43

British Journal of PsychotherapyVolume 37, Issue 4 p. 550-564 Clinical Commentary Clinical Commentary 43 Katya Orrell, Corresponding Author Katya Orrell katya.orrell@gmail.com Address for correspondence: [katya.orrell@gmail.com]Search for more papers by this author Katya Orrell, Corresponding Author Katya Orrell katya.orrell@gmail.com Address for correspondence: [katya.orrell@gmail.com]Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 October 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12673 An index offence is the patient's criminal act for which a sentence was passed by law, or in a psychoanalytic sense, it could be the external enactment of an earlier trauma, the equivalence of a neurotic symptom, a manic defence or a means of concealing a deeper perversion. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume37, Issue4November 2021Pages 550-564 RelatedInformation

Theorizing race, marginalization, and language in the digital media

Digitization of the communication medium has transformed the mute, marginalized ‘audience’ into a heterogeneous and credible content ‘producer.’ Drawing on this dynamics and operation of the digital media, it has urged the need to re-theorize ‘marginalization’ and ‘race.’ Hence, this paper critiques the digital-media tool, blogs, using a rhetoric-textual analysis method and critical discourse analysis method for the fictional text, Americanah. These methods employ the psychoanalytical-Althusserian critique of Adichie’s fictional narrative, Americanah. In the psychoanalytical sense, blog-writing can qualify as a mechanism of ‘sublimation’ in the post-modern world. In the Althusserian sense, blogs become persuasive mechanisms for a subject’s interpellation into non-dominant ideology. Among the plethora of marginalized global communities, African-Americans are enormously embracing the virtual communication trends for socio-political motives. This paper theorizes the correlations between race-related blogging, psychoanalytic sublimation, and the socio-political repudiation of power structure by employing the literary text as material evidence. Accordingly, the literary study has concluded that digital-mediums (i.e., in this case, political blogs) can depose the power vested in the ideological-state-apparatuses and impose a high potential for expression of unrestrained, credible, and democratic voice of the marginalized. It also validates that blogs/blogging influences and moulds national/political/racial discourses by lending a liberated voice and context-independent perspective to the racially oppressed.

Rozważania teoretyczne nad zastosowaniem fallopletyzmografii w badaniu zinternalizowanej homofobii

Internalized homophobia is a disorder consisting in the manifestation of anti-social prejudices directed at homosexual persons with the simultaneous presence of one’s own, unacceptable and suppressed homosexuality. Falloplethysmography (measurement of volumetric changes in an organ) is a study that was surprisingly used as early as 1996 to verify theories explaining homophobia, one’s own unacceptable homosexuality. Its results confirmed that the majority of homophobic people were in a state of internal conflict between feeling sexual attraction towards people of the same sex and displacing it. The work is theoretical, it is a review of the present research and shows a possible direction for the development of research on internalized homophobia with the use of phalloplethysmography. Internalized homophobia has a negative impact on the mental health (anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts) of LGBT + people, it also implies a number of other social problems, e.g. risky sexual behavior, which increased risk of HIV infection. In the psychoanalytical sense, homophobia is a phenomenon of a fearful nature, namely the fear of being considered homosexual. Penile phalloplethysmography (PPG), mainly used in the field of research on sexual offenders, may also be used in the study of internalized homophobia. The literature on the subject emphasizes the legitimacy of taking into account individual psychological and social factors in research with the use of PPG.

Reconceptualising Female Disordered Eating and Body-Image Perceptions: A Gynocentric Trajectory Through the New-media

Depriving the body from eating and developing a phobia about food is a vital attribute of the neurotic ailment, Anorexia Nervosa. Conspicuously, this is labeled as a female disorder. Various studies have examined that the germination point of this disorder is substantially based on the social presumptions such as, “Thin is beautiful.” In the psychoanalytical sense, this can be a response to ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’ communicated through Lacanian Symbolic Order. This ‘lack’ unconsciously drives the female to look or become ‘thin.’ As proven in the various studies, this disciplinary project is marked by unattainability. Hence, this desire only ensues in female dejection and shame; further, it also restores her ‘deficiency.’ Nevertheless, in the last decade, new-media tools may have transformed the dynamics of female bodily-presumptions and their disordered eating. Various body-positive new-media handles seem to have deposed the Lacanian ‘lack’ and the ‘Symbolic Order’ only to replace them with an unrestrained and real female language. In this lieu, the paper theoretically critiques the Lacanian notions of female ‘Lack’ in the new-media domain. This study attempts to reconceptualise the trajectory of disordered eating and the female body-images from the twentieth century through the twenty-first century (i.e., with the augmentation of new-media).

Melancholy of the Law

The paper attempts to construct a theoretical account of what melancholy—in a psychoanalytical and cultural sense—may mean for jurisprudence. It argues that the map of relations and displacements between the object and the subject that is associated with melancholy in different psychoanalytical approaches can be fruitfully adopted for understanding of normativity. Based on a thorough re-reading of Freud’s Trauer und Melancholie (Mourning and Melancholy), it suggests that there is an irremovable component of melancholy contained in the primordial act of separation of normativity from non-normative reality. This interpretation is confronted with Kelsen’s Theory of Pure Law in order to analyse in which respect the momentum of self-sufficiency within normativity entails structures of melancholy. Kelsen’s concept of ‘effectiveness’ is proposed as a key link which explains how melancholic withdrawal allows the law to interact with reality. Then the paper discusses Agamben’s theory of applicability and of the state of exception to demonstrate the law’s melancholic trap. Finally, the paper draws on Lacanian and post-Lacanian approaches to melancholy in order to investigate how melancholic momentum is inherent in the very structure of the law’s validity.

The Case of The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Childhood, Animality

This article argues a different understanding to that in children's literature studies more widely of the implications of the work of Jacqueline Rose in The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984) for thinking about childhood, animality and children's literature and links these implications to the similar implications of Jacques Derrida's thinking about the child and animality. In both cases, the child and the animal are seen not as psycho-biological entities nor as products of social constructivism nor as categories that must be seen as inclusive of variety, but as memories, where memory is understood in the psychoanalytic sense as a present production of a past, including ‘observation’ as remembered. The implications of the arguments are demonstrated in relation to readings of Jessica Love's award-winning picture book Julián is a Mermaid (2018) as well as several reviews of the text in relation specifically to ideas of (trans) sexuality, gender, childhood, ethnicity and mermaids. Key here is what is understood to be the shared interest of psychoanalysis and deconstructive thinking in not stabilising definitions but instead in reading them as shifting in perspective.

Containment? An investigation into psychoanalytic containment in the NHS in relation to someone with a diagnosis of personality disorder

This research investigated the psychoanalytic idea of containment in the context of NHS staff responses to a person diagnosed with personality disorder. The aim was to identify what, if any, containment was provided by staff for someone diagnosed with personality disorder by recording staff responses to an assessment and analysing the discourse. The research was undertaken with participants selected to represent a cross section of staff in the organisation.The discourse analysis of the interviews examined defences against containment such as splitting, projective identification and idealisation and the positions people occupied in relation to the material and the researcher, as well as looking for examples of containment. Reflexivity was a key part of the methodology, forms a significant part of the thesis and is used to contribute to the discussion. Reflexivity, findings from the review of the literature and the analysis of the interviews form the basis of the discussion and conclusions.The research showed that containment, in its psychoanalytic sense, is often avoided and defended against. Key difficulties with developing the capacity for containment were found to be conflict between the personal and professional in staff and anxiety in relation to the power of others in the organisation.

Sociality and Magical Language

On a certain reading, the respective theories of Freud and Nietzsche might be described as exploring the suffered relational histories of the subject, who is driven by need; these histories might also be understood as histories of language. This suggests a view of language as a complicated mode of identifying-with, which obliges linguistic subjects to identify the non-identical, but also enables them to simultaneously identify with each other in the psychoanalytic sense. This ambivalent space of psychoanalytic identification would be conditioned by relational histories. On one hand, this might lead to conformity within a system of language as a shared, obligatory compromise formation that would defend against the non-identical; magical language, typified in Freud’s critique of animism and in Nietzsche’s critique of “free will” guided by absolute normative signifiers (“Good” and “Evil”), would be symptomatic of this sort of defense. On the other hand, given other relational histories, it may produce the possibility for more transitional modes of identification, and thereby modes of language that can bear its suffered histories, and lead to proliferation of singular compromise formations. It is suggested that while the former is historically dominant, Nietzsche and various psychoanalytic thinkers contribute to conceiving of the possibility of working ourselves towards the latter.

Unmasking the Right of Publicity

In the landmark 1953 case of Haelan Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum, Judge Jerome Frank first articulated the modern right of publicity—a transferable intellectual property right. The right has since been seen to protect the commercial value of one’s “persona”—the Latin-derived word meaning the mask of an actor. Among other frequent criticisms, the right of publicity is accused of lacking a coherent justification, permitting only economic redress against public harms to the persona, and stripping away individual identity by allowing for a proprietary right in one’s personality. Why might Judge Frank have been motivated to fashion a transferable right in the monetary value of one’s public persona distinct from the psychic harm to feelings, emotions, and dignity rooted in the individual and protected under the rubric of privacy? Judge Frank was a leading figure in the American legal realist movement known for his unique and controversial “psychoanalysis of certain legal positions” through influential books including Law and the Modern Mind and Courts on Trial. His work drew heavily on the ideas of psychoanalytic thinkers, like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, to describe the distorting effects of unconscious wishes and fantasies on the decision-making process of legal actors and judges. For Judge Frank, the psychoanalytic interplay between public and private aspects of the personality supported his realist interpretation of lawmaking as a subjective and indeterminate activity. Indeed, though Frank provided little rationale for articulating a personality right separate from privacy in Haelan, he had given a tremendous amount of attention to the personality in his scholarly works. This Article suggests that the modern right of publicity’s aim, as perhaps intended by Judge Frank in considering his psychoanalytic jurisprudence, may be usefully understood through the psychoanalytic conception of the personality—one divided into public and private subparts. In the psychoanalytic sense, the term persona, or “false self,” is used to indicate the public face of an individual, i.e., the image one presents to others for social or economic advantage, as contrasted with their feelings, emotions and subjective interpretations of reality anchored in their private shadow, or “true self.” Yet, the law’s continued reliance on this dualistic metaphor of the personality appears misguided, particularly as technology, internet, and new media increasingly blur the traditional distinctions between public and private. The Article thus concludes by examining intersubjective personality theory. Intersubjectivity could provide publicity law with a useful conceptual update given its view of the self and personality as a relational, contextual, and social construct, rather than a public-private dichotomy.

Contribuições para uma Teoria Psicanalítica da Percepção: Da Regressão Alucinatória À Coisa do Desejo

Resumo Este artigo busca examinar as relações entre percepção, realidade psíquica e desejo sob a perspectiva da psicanálise freudiana. Na primeira parte do trabalho, tratou-se de mostrar que o “esquema” do aparelho psíquico proposto por Freud na Interpretação dos sonhos (1900), evidenciando o mecanismo da regressão alucinatória, descortina a estrutura temporal do desejo, no interior da qual o problema da percepção recebe um sentido propriamente psicanalítico. Na segunda parte, vimos que o aparecimento da noção de das Ding (a Coisa), já no Projeto de uma psicologia (1895), demonstra que o campo dos fenômenos perceptivos se articula em função da relação do sujeito ao “próximo” (Nebensmensch), e, consequentemente, à Coisa do desejo, no enfrentamento do desamparo constitutivo da vida psíquica.

Gratitude and leave-taking: Editorial reflections, 2003–2017

In this article we reflect on our time as editors of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. The article reviews some of the journal’s major contributions to psychoanalytic understanding of social and political problems; considers whether or not we are entering a post-neoliberal world; and discusses some of the challenges faced by PCS given the marginal status of psychoanalysis in the wider culture, the journal’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and its commitment to providing a space for multiple psychoanalytic voices. The article’s later sections consider some of the areas that remain underdeveloped in the journal’s coverage. In particular, the penultimate section explores the challenging task of specifying whether or not social entities, as opposed to individuals, can be said to have properties that are unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense.

Legal Performance: Translating into Law and Subjectivity in Law

Legal language seems to maintain a level of incomprehensibility that creates a barrier, beyond which something is happening: a dispute is resolved, a matter of guilt is ascertained, or a life is taken. This paper tackles a trial (in the sense of any type of legal proceeding before a judge) as a performance of justice; one that, not unlike a magical ritual or ritual theater, happens beyond a certain kind of barrier and is fully accessible only to those duly consecrated. It will be argued that legal language may be understood as such a barrier and the role and status of those who do not master it (i.e. understand law and its concepts) are comparable to those of an audience in a performance. Consequently, this paper will show how understanding the role of this barrier in a performance may help us explore the accessibility of law to the layperson and her subjectivity (in the psychoanalytical sense) within law.

Comment lire « Au-delà du principe de Plaisir » ?

Comment lire « Au-delà du principe de Plaisir » ?

Le cycle de la honte dans l’obésité

IntroductionIn Western countries obesity is currently a major public health issue. Part of a complex system, it should not be studied alone. Yet it is often seen only as the result of qualitatively and/or quantitatively deviant dietary-intake and is seldom questioned as a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, i.e. as a part of a package that makes sense. Objectives of the studyThe purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of shame in the psyche of obese subjects as “subjective backup”. The author questions the experience of shame in obese subjects as the cornerstone of this symptom in the psychoanalytic sense. MethodsWhile reporting a clinical case, the author notes the occurrences of shame in the discourse of the patient. The subsequent analysis is presented based on the transferential and counter-transferential relationship. To carry out this study, the author drew on a device supporting catharsis. ResultsThe author addresses successively: the complaint of obese subjects and the effect of shame, their shame as the alpha and omega of bulimic crises and lastly their body as a work of art by building a monstrosity. The author concludes with the social dimension of shame and how it is part of the symptom of body transformation in obese subjects. DiscussionIt appears that pathological shame reveals a difficulty to maintain a sense of existence. For this reason, it seems important to consider this effect and to establish a framework for the emergence of the latter in the consultations of patients with eating disorders. Under these conditions, the patient is able, on the pedestal of shame, to voice his shame of being and to support a subjectivity.