On Psychoanalytic Writing (and Writing Psychoanalysis) as Migratory Action and Postcolonial Revolt: A Response to Alexander Stein

Abstract

Alexander Stein’s essay, a provocative and performative appeal to psychoanalysts, challenges us to move beyond both our jargon-filled literature and our self-abnegating professional stance by intervening in the public realm, especially through writing. I share Stein’s appeal but also suggest that, actually, many psychoanalysts have already taken up his call, and that we are witnessing a renaissance of the public psychoanalytic essay, along with the birth of psychoanalytic podcasting. Further, beyond the solutions-focused genre of psychoanalytic writing that Stein specifically advocates, I suggest that we cultivate both scholarly and eccentric writing which aims to dislocate, by speaking not only from the mantle of power and authorized leaders but from the margins. Only then will we truly perform psychoanalysis as Freud’s plague—i.e., the “disruptive innovation” it is. Such performative interventions are urgently needed in a world reeling from its own destructive creations. These may have the added benefit of resuscitating the public perception of our field as discredited, and our own flagging and too long dispirited professional self-esteem.

Keywords:

• branding
• diasporic
• disruption
• performative action
• plague
• postcolonial psychoanalysis
• public essay
• writing

Notes

¹ As cited in Strenger (2010).

² Taking a lead on this front, Jonathan Shedler, in many a tussle on multiple platforms, has offered incisive, clear, and persuasive critiques which (partly through empirical analysis) discredit misleading narratives while also calling us to account for failing to refute them.

³ The nearest precedent for this vibrant foray into the social, and to recognizing our irreducible imbrication with the social, was the emergence after World War II of the Frankfurt School. Warning that fascism remained a critical threat to a “deeply ailing world” (Adorno, 1951, p. 200) and that postwar Europe, contra fantasies of Enlightenment advancement, was “sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944, p. xi).

⁴ www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/#6e08962a4d99.

⁵ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/search/site/psychoanalysis.

⁶ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/contemporary-psychoanalysis-in-action; https://apsa.org/content/blog-freud-everywherehttps://psychoanalyticactivist.com; https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychoanalysis-unplugged-0

⁷ https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/avgi-saketopoulou/;

⁸ https://www.nytimes.com/column/couch.

⁹ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/consentsowhite-on-the-erotics-of-slave-play-in-slave-play/; https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/beyond-metoo-female-agency-as-heroine-in-the-tale/.

¹⁰ https://publicseminar.org.

¹¹ https://slate.com/technology/2017/03/donald-trump-isnt-mentally-ill-hes-evil.html; https://www.salon.com/2016/03/25/12_step_groups_of_hate_a_psychotherapists_take_on_donald_trumps_wild_rallies/; https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/trump-freud-and-the-puzzle-of-femininity/; https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/august/the-case-against-obama.

¹² https://damagemag.com/about/and https://www.analytic-room.com. According to Hattie Myers, editor of Room, over 100 essays have been published to date, all accessible to the public on its website “that exists as a (psychoanalytic) living archive of our process” personal communication, February 17, 2020.

¹³ https://madnesspodcast.com; https://mindofstate.com; https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/science-technology/psychoanalysis/; https://www.estherperel.com/podcast.

¹⁴ https://psian.org.

¹⁵ As Stein notes, many analysts without mental health degrees are being trained and, at least in some states, licensed and fully recognized as psychoanalysts. With no effort to distinguish a subcategory of lay analyst. Similarly, many analysts are increasingly engaged in nonconventional (beyond traditional clinical) practices; some institutes are creating community-based training commitments as inseparable aspects of what it means to practice psychoanalysis (e.g., the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California) and providing nontraditional consultative services (e.g., the NYU Postdoctoral Program’s Immigration and Human Rights’ Working Group). This dichotomy too is has been substantially though not totally rendered obsolete. At any rate, Stein’s recommendations seem to flirt with some notion of an independent adjudicating body, as if such decisions were made from above, but would create consensus and treat some ideas as settled, certain practices as obsolete, and so forth. Judging from the robust momentum in recent discourse, it would seem at very least that what is being “settled” is that we are entering a post-settler colonial idiom and practice, that we are unsettling the binary, and its strictures. The risk remains, and is a valid concern, that in the exhilaration of casting off old orthodoxies, we exchange one identitarian move for another. The ways that identity can masquerade as difference are numerous and antithetical to a postcolonial and emancipatory praxis, just as they were to the dialectical concerns of the Frankfurt School theorists, for whom mediation and uncertainty/doubt were critical features of an open (versus closed and totalizing) philosophical system.

¹⁶ Kirsner (2000).

¹⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation/retrieved February 21, 2020. Wikipedia cites: Ab Rahman, Airini, et al. (2017). ”Emerging Technologies with Disruptive Effects: A Review”. PERINTIS eJournal. 7 (2). Retrieved 21 December 2017.

¹⁸ Makari (2008), p. 245. Citing Freud (1910), p. 147.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Gentile

Jill Gentile, PhD is faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and supervising analyst at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She sits on several editorial boards including Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Studies in Gender and Sexuality; Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context. She writes about the semiotics and phenomenology of desire and agency, and was awarded the 2017 Gradiva Award for her essay, “What is special about speech?” She is the author of Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire, with Michael Macrone (Karnac, 2016), a study of psychoanalysis and democracy through the lenses of free speech and the feminine.