The Impossibility of Meaning: Joining and Rejoining: Reply to Cooney, Ferro, and Stern

Abstract

In response to commentaries on my paper The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative, by Donnel B. Stern, Antonino Ferro, and Amy Schwartz Cooney (this issue), I grapple with queries including defining subjectivity and sovereignty (Cooney); the negative in relation to subjectivity (Stern); the power and problematic nature of the analyst as both part of the field and interpreter of the field (Ferro); and the asymmetry of the analyst/patient relationship. More significantly I return to my own emphasis on knowing as assurance and wonder how our writing may engage less sovereignty and include more performance, play, risk and vulnerability. I query what we achieve when knowing is interrupted by the negative and suggest a shared sensory experiencing may allow access to a transformational process where the force of the negative runs through us all.

This article responds to:

Through a Glass Darkly: A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

Thinking Absence: A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jade McGleughlin

Jade McGleughlin, L.I.C.S.W., is Past President, Supervisor, Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Contributing Editor of Gender and Sexuality. She is a former Instructor in Psychiatry for Harvard Medical School, former Co-Director Sexual Abuse Treatment Team, Psychiatry, Children’s Hospital, and Founder and Director, Center For Alternative Families. She is in private practice in Cambridge, MA providing consultation, supervision, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to children and adults. She specializes in consultations to difficult therapies. Her writing focuses on gender, the negative, the analyst’s necessary nonsovereignty, and uses of visual art to articulate problems in representation. She is a portrait painter.