Autotheory, Critical and Clinical

ABSTRACT

It is in the spirit of viewing autotheory as an unsettled genre that dramatizes the mind’s own unsettlement, that I want to experiment with the implications for clinical writing. In this paper, I include a clinical case that I wrote in two channels – one is a straightforward clinical style, while the other is a series of more personal reflections. I italicized the personal voice in order to experiment with rhythms and tones that would have been lost if the piece had to cohere in a stylistically continuous way. After my experiment with clinical writing, I will offer some thoughts on Lyndon’s own contributions to this emerging genre.

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The Ice Is Melting

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ Originally introduced in 1997 by Stacey Young to describe queer women of color texts published in the 1980s, the designation “autotheory” really took off in 2015 when Nelson said in an interview that she didn’t like thinking of her book as “memoir,” and preferred “autotheory” instead. Although Nelson says, “I flat out stole this term from Paul Preciado’s amazing Testo Junkie,” Lauren Fournier situates the genre in a broader history of feminist practice. Fournier writes, “the term ‘autotheory’ emerged in the early part of the twenty-first century to describe works of literature, writing, and criticism that integrate autobiography with theory and philosophy in ways that are direct and self-aware. The ‘memoir with footnotes’ would be one example. Most simply, the term refers to the integration of theory and philosophy with autobiography, the body, and other so-called personal and explicitly subjective modes. It is a term that describes a self-conscious way of engaging with theory – as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment, something very much in the Zeitgeist of cultural production today – especially in feminist, queer, and BIPOC – Black, Indigenous, and people of color – spaces that lives on the edges of art and academia” (Fournier, 2021, p. 7). In a sense, “autotheory” performed the encounter between “auto” and “theory” that so many radical academics had been experiencing anyway, or at least since the “first person innovations of such second wave [feminist] writers as Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua” (Wiegman, 2020).

² Andre Green writes: “for over twenty years we have seen the vicissitudes of an endless written and spoken debate between those analysts who want to restrict the scope of classical psychoanalytic technique (Eissler, 1953); (Fenichel, 1941); (A. Freud, 1954); (Greenson, 1967); (Lampl-de Groot, 1967); (Loewenstein, 1958); (Neyraut, 1974); (Sandler et al, 1973); (Zetzel, 1956) and those who support its extension (Balint, Bion, Fairbairn, Giovacchini, Kernberg, Khan, M. Klein, Little, Milner, Modell, Rosenfeld, Searles, Segal, Stone, Winnicott) (Green, 4, 1975)

³ In the psychoanalytic literature, enactment has gained widespread use and is often used interchangeably with acting out to describe instances where the patient transgresses the norms of treatment by taking action instead of verbalizing their emotions (Bettelheim, 2022; Boesky, 1982). However, although acting out has mostly been replaced by enactment in contemporary theory, it may be valuable to distinguish acting out and enactment according to whether the analyst’s subjectivity becomes involved (Bohleber et al., 2013, p. 520). Following Bettelheim (2022), I would suggest that “acting out can be defined as the motor expression of verbally inaccessible traumatic memory by either past or therapist. Enactment can be defined as their mutual acting out of coincident unresolved material” (80).

⁴ I discuss the baby as the “original hermeneut” in my essay on the subject (Ashtor, 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gila Ashtor

Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychoanalysis at Columbia University as well as a faculty member of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is on the Faculty at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and at IPTAR. She is the author of three books, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (Fordham UP, 2021), Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2021) and Aural History (Punctum, 2020). Her primary areas of academic and clinical expertise include identity, trauma and sexuality. She is in private practice in New York City.