Breaking apart the splits that glue us together: Disruption as therapeutic action

ABSTRACT

Drawing an analogy among the splits in US Constitutional democracy, in Communist totalitarianism, in our field, and in many of our patients’ psychic foundations, the essay advances the idea that the disruption of fundamental splits—often fastened together by keystone selfobjects—is vital for an emancipatory psychoanalysis. My argument is that to heal our democracy, and to help many of our patients heal, our praxis must cultivate a generative rupturing of the psyche/social status quo that goes beyond the incremental work that often characterizes what we do, and builds upon the promise of Winnicott’s “breakdown experience” and Fanon’s decolonial praxis. The author further considers resonances across her conception of “feminine law” and the vaginal signifier as the zero of the signifying chain, Koichi Togashi’s “psychoanalytic zero”, and Hortense Spillers’ reading of the black feminine as the zero of the social order. This zero, she argues, acts as a site of rupture and radical transformation, enabling alterity, contradiction, and the operations of a disordered apres coup temporality. Clinically, this manifests as desperation and desire coalescing as a liberatory force, infused with ethical charge, with the potential to dismantle archaic oppressive structures and alliances. The essay concludes that that we are at the brink of a collective, paradoxical experiment in constituting ourselves as fully human in which we reclaim an alienated (material) dimension of human subjectivity, surrendering to the other-than-human, for the sake of joining liberty and love, present and ancestral truths, in a relationship that doesn’t require splitting.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• democracy as selfobject
• disruption
• Fanon
• feminine law
• splitting
• Winnicott’s breakdown
• zero

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges Steve Tublin, Chris Gilmore and Barnaby B. Barratt for their substantial editing contributions and two anonymous reviewers for their considerable thought-provoking comments on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Though I write here inclusively as if “we” are one, thereby extinguishing difference, I’m appealing mainly to the whiteness and privilege of western analysts and peoples, recognizing that there is an enormous range of diversity that gets wiped out by such rhetoric. In most of my writing I’ve been dedicated to the theorizing of difference and of singularity, but here I ask the reader to permit this device for the sake of the broader thesis.

² In a series of essays, beginning with Gentile and Macrone (2016) and most recently bookmarked by Gentile (2022, 2023), I’ve insistently argued that this colonization begins with psychoanalysis’s erasure of the feminine, and congeals specifically at the site of anatomical difference, the unsignified gap of the vaginal, with profound and debilitating effects for free association, freedom of speech and the movement of desire, thereby aiding patriarchal inequalities and systemic (sexed, gendered, racialized, etc) oppressions.

³ It is worth noting, because it is easy to miss, that Togashi and I land at exactly opposite conclusions here. In further dialogue (personal communication, October 25, 2022), we realized that we’d arrived at a place of paradox. Or perhaps intersubjective recognition followed by a collapse of difference and accommodation to each other?! Leaning on the side of paradox, the question is not to be asked, as Winnicott might have advised.

⁴ In a resonant recent essay, Sally Swartz (2023) draws from Hook’s (2020) analysis of Fanon’s zone of nonbeing, to invoke the zero’s signifying power for radical transformation.

⁵ Barbara Demick (2015). Nothing to Envy, p. 279.

⁶ In this passage, I draw from J. Kameron Carter’s (2020) play with Ashon Crowley’s notion of “otherwise worlds.” Carter links this to Fred Moten’s commentary on a Claudia Rankine (2014) passage referring to a “nowhere” (echoing the middle passage).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Gentile

Jill Gentile is an adjunct clinical associate professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and the author (with Michael Macrone) of Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016) and of many scholarly essays on personal and political agency, developmental semiotics, and on the (repudiated) signification of the feminine. She is an associate editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and sits on several editorial boards. She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and hosts online supervision and study groups.