The section ‘gay rights in Israel’, part of the gaytlvguide.com website promoting gay life and culture in Israel, narrates Israel as ‘… one of the world’s most progressive countries in terms of equality for sexual minorities… by far the most tolerant Middle Eastern country towards homosexuals’. The ways in which Israel has been positioning its spatio-cultural exceptionality and the rise in LGBT discourses of national inclusion in Israel and beyond has already been identified by Jasbir Puar as ‘homonationalism’. This article, however, asks how. Namely, how do homonational discourses come to produce and hail queer populations as national loyal subjects? I suggest that, to better understand the hailing power of homonational discourses in Israel and beyond, theories of national-civilisational belonging, affect and interpellation must be reassessed and the insecurity at the heart of the national-civilisational edifice interrogated. To do so, the article draws on Lacanian psychoanalytical tools as I look into the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) approach towards LGBT recruits as well as the rise in LGBT campaigning on the political right.

This study claims that the roots of the symptomatic ‘madness’ found in the Syrian-Christian Kottayam family in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy traverse beyond the general postcolonial identity crisis. It investigates the self-destructive element hidden within this family that obviously had an impact on Ammu, Chako, Baby Kochamma and others in developing some form of self-annihilation, which cannot be simply attributed to postcolonial identity politics. The authors find that the ‘dual identity’ (symbiosis) (Bhabha, 1994), the ‘disconnectivity’ (Jameson, 1991) and ‘death as a pathway to rebirth’ (Holbrook, 1971) experienced by the Kottayam family force the authors’ reading of the novel to go beyond postcolonial discourse and exploit Žižekian psychoanalytic tools. The death drive and self-annihilation that run within the family members, which distance them from the rest of the contemporary Kerala society, demand a broad universal analysis of the text. The only rebel in The God of Small Things, Ammu, who ‘radically annihilated her existence’ by loving an untouchable, ends up in a tragic Žižekian misrecognition. Her act is, therefore, an attempt of escapism from the false deadlock of stagnating identity politics that made her life quite miserable and un-liberating. Though there are substantial features of discursive success throughout the novel, Roy’s own failure and inability to contextualise India in a universal emancipatory stream is widely evidenced by the symbolic deaths in her ‘imaginary’ (yet empirical) family.

This article aims at mapping out some of the ways in which masculinity studies has recently renewed the critical approach to certain literary texts. It argues that this fairly new disciplinary field has helped to de-territorialize literary inquiry and challenges deep-rooted assumptions about reading and writing. Essentialist notions like “masculine writing,” bodily analogies between the pen and the phallus, and psychoanalytical tools such as the Oedipus myth have tended to obfuscate the multitude of masculine identities at work in literature. Combined with the textual and performative approach developed by queer theorists, the work done by historians of masculinity enables, for instance, to shed light on the pressures that burdened authorial identity in a context of homophobia like the Cold War period in the United States, to delineate the ways in which the constitutive homosociality of poetic circles in the 1950s fashioned their aesthetic norms and practices, and to deconstruct the narrative codes and the fictions of masculinity which structured certain literary genres like the crime novel and the adventure novel.

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on discourse-analytical and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency.

Abstract This paper illustrates an empirical paradigm for a minimally‐biased characterization of the internal representations of female enemy members by male soldiers in the context of a military occupation. Using a combination of psycholinguistic and psychoanalytic tools, the study examined the associative structure of the language that was used by Israeli ex‐soldiers in a large corpus of verbatim testimonies detailing their service in the Palestinian occupied territories. Since explicit dehumanization is rare in Israeli official discourse and in media‐ and political correctness‐savvy occupying forces worldwide, this study examined implicit dehumanization through the non‐conscious use of spontaneous linguistic choices. Using both computerized and quantitative linguistic analyses, this study tracked a particular pattern or word choice, presumed to capture implicit dehumanization based on a trans‐disciplinary definition of the construct. Furthermore, to mitigate the potential confound between fear of the enemy and its dehumanization, this study focused on anecdotes concerning Palestinian women, as they pose less realistic threat to Israeli soldiers. Consistent with this study's formulation of implicit dehumanization, Israeli soldiers tended to describe Palestinian women's mental state in situational and behavioral terms (e.g. scream, make a mess, piss her pants, had a heart attack, etc.). In contrast, empathic inference – whereby the narrator extends their emotional understanding of themselves and other humans to the person whose emotional state they attempt to describe or understand – was often reserved in the testimonials only to the narrator and his fellow comrades. This evidence for implicit dehumanization is then discussed as a borderline‐level defense mechanism within the larger context of both individual‐ and national‐level anti‐Arab prejudice in Israel. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cet article propose une lecture analytique du long métrage Tetro (2009) de Francis Ford Coppola à la lumière des théories narratives et psychanalytiques connexes aux trauma studies. Nous y analysons le fonctionnement traumatique du récit filmique à travers un certain nombre de choix filmiques et techniques, en insistant notamment sur la problématique de la matérialité de l’image, aussi fluctuante dans le film que le matériau mémoriel qui hante les protagonistes. Dans son film, Coppola met en exergue la capacité du cinéma à faire lumière sur le trauma au moyen de l’incandescence, métaphore centrale d’un film soucieux d’éclairer les fantômes du passé.

The twenty-first century brings to our clinical doorsteps increasing numbers of children exploring and questioning their gender identities and expressions. This paper begins with a reassessment of the psychoanalytic thinking about gender and then outlines a clinical and developmental model of gender adapted from D. W. Winnicott's concepts of true self, false self, and individual creativity. The underlying premise is that gender nonconformity, when the core psychological issue, is not a sign of pathology but rather a reflection of healthy variations on gender possibilities. Working from that premise, composite clinical material from the author's practice as a psychoanalytic gender specialist is presented of a gender-nonconforming child transitioning from female to male, to demonstrate the psychoanalytic tools applied, including listening, mirroring, play, and interpretation, with the goal of facilitating a child's authentic gender self. Emphasis is placed on learning from the patient, working collaboratively with the family and social environments, and remaining suspended in a state of ambiguity and not-knowing as the child explores and solidifies a True Gender Self.

Using the metaphor of a fabric woven from many threads, this paper describes nine of the many conceptual strands that have contributed to the development of child psychoanalysis over its first century. It notes the unfortunate isolation (sometimes self-imposed) of child analysis from related fields (including adult analysis) and argues that we must recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of our psychoanalytic tools if we are to collaborate with and profit from the work of nonanalytic colleagues. It closes with the suggestion that the continued weaving of child analysis will require the creation of new looms, structures that are able to support a new generation of child analysts and the continued elaboration of the field.

The article has discussed the Leningrad Siege (1941-1944), focusing on the individual and collective memories of survivors who had lived through that trauma during their childhood. Thus far there has been no psychological investigation of the feelings of extreme deprivation caused by that Siege, despite the reams of material published on Leningrad under siege. To deal with this shortfall, the critique has considered the effect of that experience on the future lives of the people concerned. The basic methodology, the paper maintains, combined quantitative and qualitative approaches and involved a comparison of two equal-sized groups: the experimental group, comprising 60 war survivors who lived through the Siege; and the control group, comprising 60 war survivors who were evacuated from Leningrad during the Siege and consequently did not experience the trauma. The review related that the groups were matched by age and by gender distribution. Data for the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis-based qualitative analysis (QA) were collected according to psychometric measures (containing scales for depression, general satisfaction with life, and stress) applied in semi-structured interviews. The QA, for its part, used methods such as correlation, factor- and cluster-analysis to measure data segments. The nature of the suffering and the persistence of the human threat (past and present) were reconstructed within the framework of the psychological experiences (under extreme conditions) faced by the experimental group. The report, in conclusion, has stated that these experiences were evaluated via psychoanalytic tools dealing with child development, mourning and symbolization of traumatic events. These enabled it to identify psychological phenomena such as child grief and the impact of trauma on the adult life of the former Siege victims.

The psychoanalytic interest in is quite recent, if it is true that the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, has never devoted a research to as such. Nevertheless, we think that therapy could benefit from a proficuous dialogue with psychoanalysis. In this manuscript, using different psychoanalytical tools, we have provided a unitary interpretation of the meaning and the potentiality of therapy, showing why has to be considered the primordial authentic language and in which sense music speaks us (to paraphrase Heidegger's famous statement: Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch). Since ancient times it is well known that has a therapeutic effect and power, but only recently neuroscience has confirmed the biological effects of on human brain. Music acts as containing and structuring factor that can heal the psychological wounds of the Self and feeds and nourishes the patient himself. During the therapy session, the patient should recover and re-discover his early and genuine relationship with music. He goes back to his infant-hood and becomes familiar again with a pre- verbal language, which is the authentic language of his Self.

Literature and the Meta-Psychoanalysis of Race:After and With Fanon Jean-Paul Rocchi (bio) Fanon offers his own approach to psychoanalysis through the introduction of a discourse on failures. Here he is being phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and dialectical. The phenomenological point pertains to the study of human beings, which he says in the second chapter of Black Skin, White Masks is not identical to botany and mathematics—namely, natural science and analytical or deductive systems. It is psychoanalytical because it raises questions of what is repressed by the declaration of failure. . . . Nothing intrinsically fails. It simply is. That failure is a function of the human world means that it must be connected to notions of meaning and purpose. Fanon's point is that we should not simply dismiss failures but try to understand them; we should try and learn both about what failure signifies and what it means to us who interpret it as such. And finally, it is dialectical because it involves examining contradictions, wherein learning constitutes the forward movement or consequence of such an engagement. —Lewis R. Gordon1 Of the Failure in the Method: Toward a Meta-Psychoanalysis of Race From Freud to subsequent critiques of him by gay, lesbian, and queer studies, race has been manifested primarily through its absence or its effacement. This racial void is freighted with consequences: it in part invalidates the [End Page 52] recourse to the method of applied psychoanalysis, which would produce a psychoanalytical reading of black literature, whether in its African American, diaspora, or postcolonial forms. Consequently, it requires the use of an inverse method, which Pierre Bayard calls "applied literature" in Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse?2 and which consists of inventing new conceptual and methodological psychoanalytical tools from literary texts that would make manifest how much race has been absorbed in the discourses and the systems addressing sexuality. Because of the organic link between psychoanalysis and literature, Bayard establishes his method on the latter. Constructed on such a loose foundation, the edification of the method ends up collapsing. In effect, an analytical method based on literature is in itself a paradox; as it can only exist through a singular reading, it eludes the very idea of transmission. Bayard's impossible method thus reveals what psychoanalysis refuses to admit about its own method: it is impossible to theorize successfully an object that resists constituting itself as such. For Bayard the object is literature, for Freud it is sex. The theory and the method that fail are, for the former, literature applied to psychoanalysis; and for the latter, a psychoanalysis that works. I will retain Bayard's method of "applied literature" complete with its failures since, as Lewis R. Gordon in keeping with Frantz Fanon reminds us, failure is productive when correctly interpreted.3 We will show that it is precisely through failure that applied black literature can succeed, though this may not be the successful idealization that psychoanalysis proposes. The queer criticism of the past few years attributed success in psychoanalysis to Freud's sheer strength of will exhibited in the face of evidence relative to the failure of sex. Beyond this and because such failure is consubstantial with psychoanalysis, literature, and identity, it must be integrated into the method itself, as must the relationship of the failure to the method be considered. According to this perspective, we will consider race as an identif ication destined by its very nature to fail, but one that has been forced to prevail as a form of identity. The successful circumvention of this failure has its roots and its expression in sexuality. It remains, however, perceptible in Freudian texts, and in the queer texts that criticize them, through the disappearance of race as a fully constituted object and therefore "theorizable" on the same level as sex. No matter how productive they may be methodologically, the theories of sexuality, whether they are superseded, as in psychoanalysis, or reintegrated, as in queer criticism, fail to deliver their anticipated returns. Within the very method itself, what these failings reproduce time and again is race—not as an object, but as a primary condition so that sexuality has an object—that Freud...

Drucilla Cornell's Just Cause

This paper analyses three works of art namely ‘House of Hunger’, ‘The Black Insider’ and ‘Mindblast’ by one of Zimbabwe’s most famous, talented and controversial authors, Dambudzo Marechera, using mainly psychoanalytic tools of inquiry. The aforementioned works of fiction have been carefully chosen to sample the writer’s skills and concerns as a poet, playwright and novelist extraordinaire. These works, which were written between 1978 and 1984, give a fair representation of the said author’s vast and varied skills whose works according to one critic ‘read a little like a clever dissertation for a PhD’(Veit-Wild, 1992: 17) yet he never completed a first degree! Key words: ‘House of Hunger’, ‘The Black Insider’, ‘Mindblast’

Taking memoirs, biographies, oral histories and interviews of émigré analysts as her subjects of interrogation, Kowalik questions what these analysts felt about the loss of their mother-tongue, deliberates what vulnerabilities this loss made them heir to and what compensatory strategies this trauma led them to. She scrutinizes the histories, both those of eminent founders of the Southern Californian Institutes as well as those of the institutions and finds that the issues of the loss of the most important tool of the émigré analyst, their mother tongue, have neither been researched nor even been thematized. She maintains that only a history of psychoanalysis as praxis can access the effects of the loss and outlines the difficulties in writing such a history (confidentiality, medicalization of psychoanalysis, the status of the dyad, need to forget trauma). She concludes with a challenge to historians to use psychoanalytic tools in writing the history of psychoanalysis in Southern California.

Transgender on Screen is an eclectic investigation of gender through representations of (and ambivalent responses to) crossdressing, transgenderism and transsexuality in mainstream film. Phillips argues that little has been published that puts transgender at its heart, and thus ‘This book is designed to fill in the gap’ (p. 1). As he negotiates specific films which feature trans1 subjectivities and themes from within the genres of comedy, horror and others, Phillips offers some introduction to various theoretical frameworks through which to read these films and characters. He posits trans as an interdisciplinary subject matter, but bases his own readings predominantly on the use of psychoanalysis. This book may be significant for media studies or film studies students for whom psychoanalytic tools are useful and whose interest in trans studies and gender politics is growing. Similarly, those involved in gender studies, queer theory and feminism may benefit from the psychoanalytic methodologies employed when reading representations of trans. As an activist from within the trans community, however, my reading of the book is as one whose interests lie in the valorization (or not, as the case may be) of trans subjectivities specifically. It is perhaps necessary to state that my response may not be the same as other readers, but it raises concerns over some of the understandings of trans people that Phillips offers in relation to the films that he critiques. He engages us with psychoanalytical modes such as Lacan's notion of the ‘Real’ and the ‘imaginary’, the ‘symbolic realms’ and the ‘father's law’, as well as Freud's notion of ‘castration anxiety’, each of which offers understandings of how gendered roles are psychically constructed in the world and more specifically from within the family. He understands these types of analysis to be ‘essential tools in the exploration of a powerful textual unconscious’ (p. 5). Phillips also outlines the work of gender studies and queer theorists as an important backdrop when engaging with trans. He breaks down the multiplicity of identities within trans, such as drag queens, female impersonators and transsexuals, informatively, relying heavily on Marjorie Garber. Throughout his introduction he offers short, concise and compelling summaries of understandings of sex, gender and sexuality in relation to the trans body. This demonstrates how ‘trans’ hosts multiple and diverse meanings as well as subjectivities, which ideologically might seek to explode binaries. Phillips cites Garber to this effect: Transvestitism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.2 (p. 3)

We psychoanalysts – as split subjects – are not immune to charismatic leaders who preach violence against selected targets depicted as the cause of all evils. Freud, in Group psychology and the analysis of the ego, alerted us against such leaders, who can manipulate by transforming us into an uncritical mass. This would be the social equivalent of the perverse pact in repressive desublimation between the superego and the id at the expense of the ego: the latter is put to sleep, and the superego exhorts the id to do violence and regress. Socially, these perverse pacts often take place with the superego represented by charismatic leaders who foster identification with themselves, put the egos of their audiences to sleep through manipulation and thus address an amorphous mass that they can direct towards violence and destruction. An event in which such a phenomenon apparently occurred will be discussed to show how urgent it is to revisit psychoanalytic writings on these matters in order to withstand the temptation to be herded by manipulative leaders. This will certainly protect psychoanalysis and allow for its transmission. It is up to us to exercise the critical analysis that psychoanalytic tools equip us for so that we can detect such summons to perverse pacts and denounce them.

David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are films that deeply startle spectators, fascinating some, upsetting others, but always causing much debate on the subject of “what the movie was about.” For most spectators and critics, this means figuring out the story and, ultimately, trying to distinguish between reality, or the real story, and the character’s fantasies, sometimes using psychoanalytic tools. But Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are films that seem to evade ra...

This commentary on Beatrice Beebe's long-term intensive work with an adult patient using the video as an adjunct to the treatment offers a perspective on the work that reflects on the need for bridges to be built across the Atlantic and between disciplines. Using the classic psychoanalytic tools of transference, countertransference, and the paradigm of the Oedipus complex, the author considers the importance of mother—infant research in informing psychoanalytic work. She looks at ways in which this research can vitally inform a different but related territory, while not necessarily becoming incorporated into the consulting room.

The belief that good analysts do not ask, and do not answer, questions is a still-living strange recommendation, transmitted throughout psychoanalytic generations. The authors have extensively reviewed electronic databases and technical texts. They found that interrogative acts are largely omitted from technical considerations, generating a prejudice that does not consider questions as proper psychoanalytic tools, and they discuss possible foundations for this belief. The authors believe that the few authors that have touched on this issue have done so in a non-systematic and frequently incomplete form. Linguistic philosophy presents questions as speech acts: actions that are able to alter the equilibrium of dialogical discourses. This view permits psychoanalysts to understand the potentiality of questions to introduce psychic change because they can, simultaneously, interfere in the self, in the other and in the intersubjective relationship. An internal state of curiosity is described as a component of the mind of the analyst. Based on the argument of the ubiquity of the state of curiosity of the analyst, the authors carried out a set of technical propositions, regarding, on the one hand, when questions are not to be introduced (for instance, in the presence of free associations) and, on the other hand, when they would be useful as expanding factors of the preconscious-conscious system. Considering psychoanalyses as experiences of curiosity, they emphasize that both the internal state of curiosity of the analyst, and the eventual verbal questions put to the patient are potentially positive factors for psychic change. The authors present several clinical vignettes.

The belief that good analysts do not ask, and do not answer, questions is a still‐living strange recommendation, transmitted throughout psychoanalytic generations. The authors have extensively reviewed electronic databases and technical texts. They found that interrogative acts are largely omitted from technical considerations, generating a prejudice that does not consider questions as proper psychoanalytic tools, and they discuss possible foundations for this belief. The authors believe that the few authors that have touched on this issue have done so in a non‐systematic and frequently incomplete form. Linguistic philosophy presents questions as speech acts: actions that are able to alter the equilibrium of dialogical discourses. This view permits psychoanalysts to understand the potentiality of questions to introduce psychic change because they can, simultaneously, interfere in the self, in the other and in the intersubjective relationship. An internal state of curiosity is described as a component of the mind of the analyst. Based on the argument of the ubiquity of the state of curiosity of the analyst, the authors carried out a set of technical propositions, regarding, on the one hand, when questions are not to be introduced (for instance, in the presence of free associations) and, on the other hand, when they would be useful as expanding factors of the preconscious‐conscious system. Considering psychoanalyses as experiences of curiosity, they emphasize that both the internal state of curiosity of the analyst, and the eventual verbal questions put to the patient are potentially positive factors for psychic change. The authors present several clinical vignettes.