Reflections on Janine Puget's Paper

Abstract

In my discussion of Janine Puget's deeply thought-provoking paper, I focus on her central argument that the subject's interior world and the world of intersubjective relationships answer to different logics and evolve along separate developmental paths. Puget's argument hinges on a notion of the other, and of otherness as disruptive and traumatic to the subject. My discussion aims to problematize this notion on two fronts. First, I suggest that otherness is not only external to the subject. I point to some ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of otherness and of the other as integral to the constitution and development of the subject. Further, I argue that individuals sometimes desire and actively seek otherness. I engage in this context the question of social displacement and immigration, Puget's other main concern in her paper. Life tourists, as Puget calls them, are a paradox of will and necessity, where the prospect of confronting otherness and being othered is both a threat and a life-affirming recourse. Yet there seems to be more involved in immigration than the psychology of individuals or their relationships. Drawing on my personal and clinical experience as an immigrant working with other immigrants, I suggest that beyond the self-other relation, we can recognize otherness on a third dimension, that of collective, socio-political, normative discourse. Looking at the psychoanalytic notion of Oedipus, I suggest the possibility that Puget's view of the subjective and intersubjective as disparate captures the effect this third, social dimension of human life on the construction of subjectivity and of human relating. I argue that the fault line Puget recognizes may be understood as the effect, within subjectivity, of social power.

Notes

¹I refer here to Vincente Minnelli's 1944 film staring Judy Garland, a film that among other things gave us the classic song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”