Islands of Encounter: A Reflection on the Place of Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

What is an encounter? What is an island? How can discourses on islands speak to our understanding of the place of practice and the placing of affect in the psychoanalytic encounter? Using notions of the island in philosophy and Caribbean Studies, this essay offers a brief reflection on the psychoanalytic encounter as an islanded field of interaction. The psychoanalytic frame islands analyst and analysand, setting the experience in the consulting room off as different from other forms of social interaction. But this is a dyadic island in an archipelago of relations, where overlapping and interlapping waves of relation keep shifting the frame.

Notes

¹ Deleuze (1995), p. 139.

² Deleuze (2004).

³ Glissant (1997); Hau’ofa (2008); also see Hayward (2012), pp. 1–11.

⁴ Steinberg (2005), p. 4.

⁵ DeLoughrey (2001), p. 22.

⁶ Mannoni (1990), p. 101.

⁷ Mannoni (1990), p. 104.

⁸ Deleuze (2004), p. 9.

⁹ Deleuze (2004), p. 9.

¹⁰ From a discussion at the Archipelagoes/Oceans/Americas Symposium held at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, October 6–7, 2016.

¹¹ Brathwaite (1967), p. 47.

¹² Allewaert (2013), p. 31.

¹³ Allewaert (2013), p. 33.

¹⁴ Manning (2012).

¹⁵ Lacan (1998), p. 94.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle A. Stephens

Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is currently the Dean of the Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a graduate of the Licensure Qualifying Program at The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is the author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014); Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005); and co-editor of two recent collections, Archipelagic American Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Fresco Books and Duke University Press, 2017).