Editor’s Introduction: Closed Loops and Melting Ice

ABSTRACT

Psychoanalytic Dialogues is proud to present a groundbreaking panel on autotheory that pairs Leigh Lyndon’s essay, The Ice is Melting, with responses by Gila Ashtor, Masha Borovikova Armyn, Adam Blum, and Maxine Chung. In this brief introduction, autotheory is introduced to frame an emergent conversation that launches from the page, through the potential space carved by readers and writers, to forge an ever more open-source mode of sharing personal experience.

Psychoanalytic writing tends to have a certain rhythm to it, a certain style and form, the sonorous vibe of hours logged on the couch or couch-side, an assembly of ideas, references, and citations, often ruthless, at times partisan, clinical and/or theoretical, wise, worn, weary at times: thoughtful. Even when psychoanalytic writing breaks free of routine conventions (introduction, literature review, case vignette, discussion, references), there is an author or a team of authors in dialogue; the work of “theory” (informed by other theories, by reverie, in nachtraeglichkeit, and by hours logged on the couch or couch-side with patients whose identities are “anonymized” for the purpose of advancing our theory), the act of theorizing, takes place on the page in more or less digestible nuggets that we do or don’t grasp.

Autotheory skates in the margins of the page, beyond the guard rails provided by textual conventions. Here is an example from our pages. Jane Tilman (2023) tells the story of a conversation that she had with Adrienne Harris, while she was researching states of mind preceding near-lethal attempts at suicide. Tilman explains that she was searching for the steadiness provided by data that might indicate a common pathway to explain how something so inexplicable might be explained – knowing, deep down, that this was not an achievable goal. She sought Harris’s counsel, and Harris suggested to Tilman that perhaps she were struggling to chart something that ought not be generalized? Perhaps, the effort to chart central tendencies in suffering is marred by the risk of erasing the particulars that organize unique moments of suffering into singularities, reducing the multitude of fractal sensations that coalesce in suffering to patterns?

Tilman comes to autotheory with some methodological skepticism – she is, after all, an applied researcher and autotheory, a blend of thick description (Geertz, 1973), postmodern theory, and autobiography. Nevertheless, Tilman sees value in both “general” and “particular” approaches to theory. She recounts her conversation with Harris, not to contrast the merits of one or the other approach but to demonstrate the inherent value in the struggle that turns up on the page when one is adrift among different approaches. Delving into the struggle with theory becomes a worthy mode of theorizing (see Ashtor, 2024). Not wild theory, not anything goes theory, not the kitchen sink of theories all glommed together in a theory blender. Rather, theory as an open-source modality. Conversation becomes a mode of theorizing, one that we may contrast with a more methodical mode of clinical theory. The conversation with Harris sets up Tilman’s entrée to the autotheoretical landscape that she later explores in Alexis Tomarken’s (2023) autotheoretical meditation on suicide and loss. Tilman writes: “the temptation in psychoanalysis and autotheory may be to move too confidently toward a theoretical generalization when the richness of the theory derives from being embedded in the particular data of lived experience of the theorizer” (2023, p. 176).

In the eloquent discussions by Gila Ashtor, Maxine Chung, Adam Blum, and Masha Borovikova Armyn that we are fortunate to have assembled to comment on Leigh Lyndon’s stunning experimental paper, The Ice is Melting, theory happens in an ever-widening circle of conversations, struggles, blindsides, and triple axels that launch off from the page and become music. We hear echoes of Muriel Dimen’s effort to converse to, with, and as Us. Conversations happen in the narrator’s internal world and in dialogue with real and imagined readers. Autotheoretical conversation follows a sequence that has no ruled edge with which to iron out some kind of a through line in the wrinkle of confusion where theorizing happens.

Lyndon, (2024, p. 20–21) recounts years tracing “closed loops” as a competitive figure skater whose greatest love was the repetitive challenge of School Figures: “I logged hundreds and hundreds of hours going around and around, looping myself towards the achievement of perfection. Narrowing the spaces between traces, inscribing the ice and myself with the message that spaces in between were nebulous and scary. Closing the loop.” As she moves through episodes in her life that trace the edge of chaos, there is an emergent description of the pleasures and tyrannies that closed loops circumscribe. In Lydon’s approach to autotheory, a genre not meant to coalesce as a genre, a spontaneous gesture that shatters closed loops, a practice not a sport, there are no School Figures, there are no standard citations and references. Dialogues with internal objects and influential mentors, scenes of joys and crimes, connections between ideas and influences, reveries that round out time and space, these are all left open, with and without School Figures, incompletes, untranslatables, undeciphered, potentials sometimes on the edge of chaos, sometimes potentials certifiable, sometimes potentials yet to be named. Autos. Crashes. Loves.

This is autotheory. The next frontier in psychoanalytic theory. A path already paved by authors as notable as Thucydides, Alexis De Tocqueville, Sojourner Truth, Paul Preciado, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankin, and now Leigh Lyndon among others who quote less to struggle more. A path that this introduction will not, in deference to all that autotheory intends, attempt to pave except to clear a path for what may be paved. And, as for citation, beyond encouraging you to dive deeply into the wise words (that Lyndon in a personal communication expressed so much gratitude for) from Ashtor and Chung and Blum and Borovikova, only this: a nod to Adrienne Harris (2008, p. 186) who anticipated autotheory when she wrote of, what is now a psychoanalytic standard, the third: “thirdness is perhaps at the edge of chaos, simultaneously an element in the general system and an aspect of the organized configuration of gender … Thirdness opens a system and offers the potential for a more fractal strange attractor organization to emerge and reorganize. Thirdness, in this sense, may contain both the hegemonic discourse and its potential for deconstruction.” Thirdness on the brink of collapse is a third that offers the potential to bond if we dis-close the loops that bind us.

Such is autotheory in the arc of Lydon’s prose and in her discussants’ personal adventures in the potential space carved out of closed loops opening that Lyndon poetically autotheorizes.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Stephen Hartman

Stephen Hartman, Ph.D., is a joint editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.