Shame and Cognitive Strikes: What Would it “Really” Mean for Queer Psychoanalysis to Enter the Perverse?

ABSTRACT

Clinical psychoanalysis and queer theory have at their core a deep exploration of sexuality. Although the link between shame and sex has generated a strong theoretical reflection (Butler, 1993; Dimen, 2013; Saketopoulou, 2013, 2014; Sedgwick, 1993; Stein, 1997, 2012; Straker, 2007), shame is in this literature primarily a threatening affect in need of psychic elaboration. In contrast, I look at shame as a critical and surprising intervention provoked by the analyst. I argue that analysts perform in their work not only psychic labor but also “excessive” nonverbal states which challenge the established boundaries of the analytic relationship. I show that such moments function as “cognitive strikes,” which can be productively deployed by analysts to reap their benefits.

The aim of my argument is to show that the analysts “enter the perverse” when they momentarily stop processing difficult mental states. According to the professional ideal of “mentalization” (Fonagy & Target, 1996), psychoanalysts are put in the position to permanently do cognitive work. Yet refusing this demand offers the analyst the freedom to shift the relationship between a paid laborer and a beneficiary of therapeutic work. I theorize these noncognitive acts of “excessive shame” to expand on and criticize theories of queer performativity such as Judith Butler’s and Eve Sedgwick’s. The first contribution of this article is to draw the attention of clinicians to queer work that theorizes the emergent materiality of affects. The second contribution is to ask queer psychoanalytic theorists to take seriously the potential of surprising interventions which interrupt the demand to incessantly perform mental labor for their clients.

Notes

¹ See the development of “the emotional proletariat” as an effect of the rise of service economy in Macdonald and Sirianni (1996, p. 3).

² In this literature, shame is seen as a defensive affect in need of cognitive processing or resignification. See Butler’s (1993, p. 23) description of shame as stigma; Sedgwick’s (1993, p. 5) theory about shame as prohibitive and productive; Stein’s (1997, p. 111) shame as “one of the principal factors contributing to the analyst-patient collusions;” Stern’s (2010: 15-16) interpretation of shame as enactment; and Dimen’s (2013: p. 386) shame that necessitates safety and the capacity to transform negative feelings.

³ I am inspired here by Italian Marxists such as Mario Tronti, who argued that “saying no” is a momentary blockage of the work process that offers the possibility for laborers to start to valorize themselves and their work (as cited in Hardt & Virno 1996, p. 263). The concept of “refusal of work,” which was at the heart of autonomista social movements in the 1970s, saw communism not as a liberation of work but as a liberation from work. Rather than working more, autonomista Marxists claimed that new possibilities for living would emerge if people would stop working. Similarly, I see the momentary stop in the cognitive demands of the analyst as a potential moment of changing a relationship between a worker and an employer.

⁴ In this, I follow Stern (2010, p. 11): “To absorb the potential meaning of interpersonal events is to be curious, to allow oneself, with a willingness that derives not from moral force but from desire, to imagine as freely as possible the ways of grasping and feeling one’s own and the other’s conduct and experience.” While Stern offers vignettes in which we see enactments as initiated both by analyst and patient, his examples primarily focus on patients enacting their dissociations (2010, pp. 15, 32, 79–81). Here I focus on the analysts’ shame. Stern (2010, pp. 88–90) briefly discusses analysts’ dissociations but he does not explore in depth their productive potential in analysis.

⁵ For instance, a theory of psychoanalytic interaction with “two partners in thought” (Stern, 2011, p. 381) seems to avoid discussing the moment when the analyst initiates a shaming exchange. See also note 12.

⁶ For example, Saketopoulou (2014, pp. 256–257, 259) challenges the different explanations of perversion, e.g., a dismal repetition of a traumatic past, a perverse “healthy” relationship within the boundaries of a mutual, intimate relationship, or an effort to stabilize the danger in feeling pleasure. She targets primarily psychoanalysts such as Otto Kernberg, Jessica Benjamin, Peter Fonagy, and Ruth Stein.

⁷ Saketopoulou asks us to consider the clinician’s attitude as one of “reflective curiosity,” one that does not view perversion from “a state of alarm” but that embraces its “psychically productive potential” (2014, p. 255).

⁸ See Stern’s (2010, p. xv) emphasis on “new perceptions,” which emerged from his observation that many clinical events took place apart from verbal language.

⁹ Bersani (2009, pp. 24–25) discusses the relationship between the perverse and shattering the self. “The self-shattering into the sexual” is an experience in which “the self is exuberantly discarded” (p. 25).

¹⁰ For instance, in her interactions with Aliza, Benjamin’s verbal and spontaneous affirmation of her love for the patient led to a recovery of dissociated states of terror and aloneness (2004, pp. 37–38).

¹¹ Freud noticed that affect does not so much reflect or think but instead acts (Seigworth & Gregg, 2007, p. 2).

¹² See Layton (2016, p. 99), where she describes her shaming of a patient who expressed sexual longings. Shame in her account seems to be an impediment to developing a stronger relationship. For a strong opposition between freedom and negative affects such as shame in the therapeutic relationship, see Stern (2010, p. 103–104).

¹³ This observation builds on Boesky’s observation that “if the analyst does not get emotionally involved sooner or later in a manner that he had not intended, the analysis will not proceed to a successful conclusion” (Boesky cited in Renik 1993, p. 417).

¹⁴ Many psychoanalytic texts argue that countertransference fantasies are important material to process, whereas countertransference enactment is perceived as a barrier—and even a danger—to analysis (Renik, 1993, p. 409).

¹⁵ Although the ideal type of analyst is the one who is fully aware of unconscious dynamics but who does not act, who recognizes that “the principle awareness instead of action guides analytic technique” (Renik, 1993, p. 410), Renik argues that this isn’t always possible, that “awareness of countertransference is always retrospective, preceded by countertransference enactment” (p. 410–411).

¹⁶ In traditional psychoanalysis, the analysts feel that they need to exclude moments of personal involvement and remain as detached as possible from expressing judgments about their patients. However, Renik argues that because “we are always completely personally involved in our judgments and decisions,” the moment when an analyst thinks he or she is not deeply involved is precisely the moment that “we are in the greatest danger of self-deception and departure from sound methodology” (1993, p. 415).

¹⁷ Saketopolou (2013, p. 249) writes that it is “tempting to relate to these kinds of historical and discursive wounds as categories of experience that can be eliminated through activism or cleansed through language.” Compare that with Sedgwick’s passage in “Queer Performativity” (1993, p. 13): “which means, among other things, that therapeutic or political strategies aimed directly at getting rid of individual or group shame, or undoing it, have something preposterous about them: they may ‘work’—they certainly have powerful effects—but they can’t work in the way they say they work.”

¹⁸ Central to a queer theory of performativity is the act of refusing identity, which is articulated as a gesture of “deflecting the logic” of the heteronormativity (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 4) or a turn against a shaming interpellation such as queer (Butler, 1993, p. 19).

¹⁹ In its positive dimension, drag demonstrates that the regime of gender is contingent and that many gender and sex possibilities have been lost by the stabilization of masculinity and femininity. Acting out is a sign of revolt. For Butler, therefore, the straight person is the true melancholic. Drag, however, is a performative that is tightly bound up with the notion of mourning, so that drag shows that object is “phantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go” (1993, p. 25). Because straights are unable to mourn, Butler locates mourning, the act of processing and elaborating one’s failed attachments, at the heart of queer performativity.

²⁰ When Butler (2003) analyzes the U.S. response to 9/11, she thinks that striking back is the wrong solution to conflict: “Revenge tries to solve the problem of vulnerability. If I strike back, then I am not vulnerable but rather the other person is. I transfer vulnerability from myself to the other… . The quick move to action is a way of foreclosing grief, refusing it, and even as it anaesthetizes one’s own pain and sense of loss, it comes, in time, to anaesthetize us to the losses that we inflict upon others.”

²¹ Sedgwick (1993, p. 27–35) is interested in how queers shame their audience, but she seems to be less interested in the impact of such actions on an interpersonal dynamic. She does not seem to discuss shame as a relational affect produced by and mediated between individuals.

²² It is a bit odd that Sedgwick (1993, p. 13) sees shame as primarily an object that produces “durable, structural changes” rather than as an entity that changes its substance according to different dynamics.

²³ For shame as a disciplinary affect as opposed to a queer affect, see Popa (2017, p. 18).

²⁴ An affective structure such as shame is felt as excessive or disorderly in a certain “situation” that represents “a state of animated and animating suspension that forces itself on consciousness, that produces a sense of emergence of something in the present that may become an event” (Berlant, 2011, p. 5).

²⁵ See Stern’s (2010, p. 86) model where enactment (the act of expressing a dissociated state) needs to be followed by “the achievement of internal conflict.”

²⁶ As Maurice Blanchot (2004, p. 41) argued, the moment when a sadistic act is performed is a moment that could change the perception of a particular situation. See Blanchot (2004, p. 41): “Between the normal man who confines the sadistic man to an impasse and the sadistic man who makes this impasse a way out, it is the latter who knows more about the truth and logic of his situation and whose knowledge is deeper, to the point of being able to help the normal man to understand himself, by helping him to change the conditions of all understanding.”

Additional information

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Bogdan Popa

Bogdan Popa, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Gender Studies, Centre for Gender Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. He works on histories of sexuality, gender, and affects, and his monograph, Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. His next project analyzes changes in sexuality discourses from 1950s socialism to today.