Browsing by Author "Viego, Antonio"

In 1925, Sigmund Freud wrote a short preface for August Aichhorn’s forthcoming book, Wayward Youth. There, Freud hailed ‘the child’ as the future of psychoanalysis, declaring that “[o]f all the fields in which psychoanalysis has been applied none has aroused so much interest… as the theory and practice of child training. …The child has become the main object of psychoanalysis research” (Freud, p. v). Freud’s observation was prophetic as the figure of the child did indeed become the central focus of psychoanalysis’s theories of psychic life in the decades that followed. Throughout the interwar and postwar periods in Western Europe, child analysis became the most innovative and influential strain of psychoanalysis as child analysts turned their gaze, clinically and socially, to the formative impact of the mother-child relation. As I show, psychoanalysts used the figure of the child to expand the political reach of their work by mobilizing the clinic as a site through which to theorize politics.

In my dissertation, I analyze the ascension of the child as a way into a broader consideration of the political life of psychoanalytic practice in the twentieth century. In the wake of World Wars, mass casualties, and the dramatic reorganization of Europe, child analysts like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and John Bowlby reinvented clinical practice for the child patient according to explicitly political idioms. The analytic exercise of paternal "authority," the cultivation of maternal “reparations,” and the maternal facilitation of an inherent “democratic tendency,” and the provision of maternal “security” were just some of the ways that these child analysts defined their clinical work. Tracing these techniques through the rise and fall of democracy in interwar, wartime, and postwar Europe, I argue that the clinic became a proto-political laboratory where psychoanalysts experimented with different formats of political action and relation. For these analysts, the clinic was anything but apolitical. But, in contrast to analyses that address the abstract connotation of these terms, in my analysis I focus specifically on their gendered dimensions, revealing how political concepts like authority, reparation, democracy, and security were reconfigured in the clinic according to the perimeters of maternity and paternity. As I contend throughout, the child analytic clinic provided a site for explicitly gendered forms of political theorizing.

In Chapter One, “On Good Authority: Anna Freud, Child Analysis, and the Politics of Authority,” I chart how Anna Freud postulated the clinical necessity of paternal authority, situating her work within interwar political debates about the relationship between democracy and authority. In Chapter Two, “Beyond Repair: War, Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play Technique,” I interrogate the ethical status of Klein’s clinical idealization of maternal reparations by contextualizing them within wartime Britain and the effects of German reparations. Chapter Three, “Mothering a Nation: D.W. Winnicott, Gender, and the Postcolonial British Welfare State,” reads Winnicott’s “Piggle” case study in order to elaborate how Winnicott’s theories of good enough mothering and an inherent democratic tendency were grappling with the effects of British decolonization. In chapter four, “States of Security: John Bowlby, Cold War Politics, and Infantile Attachment Theory,” I reveal how the language of maternal security that Bowlby promoted in his clinical work buttressed a growing Cold War emphasis on national security.

Child’s Play contributes to a growing body of scholarship by feminist theorists, historians, and political theorists like Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (2011), Sally Alexander (2012), Michal Shapira (2013), Eli Zartesky (2015), Daniel Pick and Matt ffytche (2016), and Dagmar Herzog (2017) that showcases how psychoanalysis was influenced by—and, in turn, had a decisive influence on—the political climates it inhabited. My project adds to this work an explicit focus on the psychoanalytic clinic and the gendered scientific techniques developed therein. Although the psychoanalytic clinic has often dismissed for being either politically isolated or irredeemably normalizing, one of the overarching arguments that I make throughout this project is that a keen attention to clinical technique—to the unique scientific methods analysts developed to relate to and treat the psyche of the modern child—is an invaluable resource for understanding the political reach of psychoanalysis. Critically, these child psychoanalytic vocabularies and techniques developed together with the spread of liberal democracies following World War I and, to the extent that they narrate modern political affiliations through psychological narratives of childhood, they are still at the forefront of fervent political contestations today.

This dissertation explores the relationship between identity and place in the imagination, performance and production of post-World War II Puerto Rican urban space in Chicago. Specifically, I contend that the articulation of Puerto Rican spatiality in the city has emerged primarily as a response to the threat of local displacement as a byproduct of urban renewal and gentrification. I further argue the experience of displacement, manifested through territorial attachment, works to deepen the desire for community and belonging. Through a performance and cultural studies approach, this project works to track this recent history of Puerto Rican geographic and psychic displacement within Chicago as it is evidenced by various performative spatial interventions and manifested within the community's expressive culture.

My topics of study include the 1966 Division Street Riots, the Young Lords Organization (YLO), Humboldt Park's Paseo Boricua and spoken-word poet David Hernández. Through these interventions and forms of expression, I argue that physical, political, discursive, and affective claims are made to local territory, articulating a Puerto Rican cultural identity inextricably connected to urban space. In so doing, I aim to endorse the theoretical utility of concepts of "space" by highlighting the enduring material and metaphoric significance of place for Puerto Ricans, arguing against a tendency in contemporary Puerto Rican studies to equate circular migratory movement with transnationalism by virtue of its opposition to territorially grounded definitions of identity.

This dissertation takes as its starting point what contemporary cultural, literary, and science fiction scholarship have described as the “end of the future,” or the post-1970s rise in stagnant, bleak, and apocalyptic images of what is to come. Using science fiction films and novels as its primary objects of inquiry, it argues that such a dystopian (or false utopian) imaginary should not be normatively chastised or embraced, but rather analyzed as part of a set of post-productive capitalist conditions. Doing so makes visible both the material constraints upon the contemporary imagination—the way that images of decline, particularly in SF, are cognitively imbricated in their larger socio-economic moment—and what is termed the “postfuturist problem,” or the question of science fiction without a future. With both ideas in mind, the ultimate claim is that in order to think science fiction (and cultural production more broadly) in a moment of imaginative foreclosure, one must look deeper into these no-futurist works themselves. Rather than nostalgically lingering upon the past, lamenting the loss of a dynamic and optimistic futurism, our task is to discern how renewed conditions of thought might develop out of the contradictions of the present. In an era without a future, science fiction—and culture writ large—does not gain its relevance (its ability to map and estrange us from our actually-existing reality) by offering visions of the radically new and different, but immanently, within the hyper-extended confines of the present.

This dissertation turns to illiberal state violence and state formation in Latin America’s Southern Cone region as the ground for trans politics and activisms. Focusing on the entanglements of Argentine trans politics with histories of dictatorship (1976-83), I ask: how do contemporary transgender cultural producers deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present? What sorts of political, aesthetic, and legal tactics do trans cultural producers adopt within political contexts hyper-saturated by state violence? What ethical and political challenges arise? In response, I formulate a trans framework of analysis that combines archival, visual culture, literary, and ethnographic methods to study contemporary transgender politics and cultural production as these have taken shape in response to shifting Argentine state formations.

Each chapter considers how trans activists strategically deploy existing visual and material culture, activist strategies, and legal interventions developed by antigenocide activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to forward trans rights claims. In doing so, my work traces unexpected affinities between Argentine transgender and antigenocide politics, cultural production, and activisms. Taken together, the dissertation’s chapters evoke an interdisciplinary method that twins the study of cultural practices with histories of state violence, focusing on gender and sexuality as central to such analyses. By tracing the ways Argentine trans activists reanimate the past to meet the demands of the present, my dissertation offers an historical interpretation of trans political subjectivity that extends and revises trans studies’ geopolitical imagination, bringing Latinx American archives, national histories, and political strategies to bear on existing trans studies scholarship.