Browsing by Subject "Psychoanalysis"

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

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 how the contemporary Anglophone novel asks its readers to imagine and respond to disposable life as it emerges in our present-day biopolitical landscape. As the project frames it, disposable life is not just life that is disposed of; it is life whose disposal is routine and unremarkable, even socially and legally sanctioned for such purposes as human consumption, scientific knowledge-production, and economic and political gain. In the novels considered, disposability is tied to excess--to the "too many" who cannot be counted, much less individuated on a case-by-case basis.

This project argues that the contemporary novel forces a global readership to confront the mechanisms of devaluing life that are part of everyday existence. And while the factory-farmed animal serves as the example of disposable life par excellence, this project frames disposability as a form of normalized violence that has the power to operate across species lines to affect the human as well. Accordingly, each chapter examines the contemporary condition of disposability via a different figure of disposable life: the nonhuman (the animal in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace), the replicated human (the clone in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go), the woman (in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy), and the postcolonial subject (the victim of industrial disaster in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and political violence in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost). Chapter by chapter, the dissertation demonstrates how the contemporary novel both exposes the logic and operations of disposability, and, by mobilizing literary techniques like intertextual play and uncanny narration, offers up a set of distinctively literary solutions to it.

The dissertation argues that the contemporary novel disrupts the workings of disposability by teaching its audience to read differently--whether, for instance, by destabilizing the reader's sense of mastery over the text or by effecting paradigm shifts in the ethical frameworks the reader brings to bear on the encounter with the literary work. Taken together, the novels discussed in this dissertation move their readership away from a sympathetic imagination based on the potential substitutability of the self for the other and toward a form of readerly engagement that insists on preserving the other's irreducible difference. Ultimately, this project argues, these modes of reading bring those so-called disposable lives, which are abjected by dominant social, economic, and political frameworks, squarely back into the realm of ethical consideration.

Dreaming Woman decenters Europeanist histories of psychoanalysis by examining the ways in which forced migration has shaped psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference and evolving modes of feminist practice in Latin America. Home to more psychoanalysts per capita than any other country, Argentina emerged as a site of political asylum during WWII and of exilic dissemination during periods of military dictatorship. Taking Argentina as an exemplary case of psychoanalytic entrenchment that disrupts neat oppositions between Europe and its others, Dreaming Woman reframes the psychoanalytic archive on sexual difference as a discourse on migration. Tracing the coincident rise of psychoanalysis and authoritarianism in Argentina, I examine the role of migrant women, and of discourses on Woman, in establishing new relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

Through a multimedia archive that includes literature, autobiography, pop culture artifacts, transnational correspondences, clinical case studies, theoretical essays, and artwork, Dreaming Woman approaches psychoanalysis as a heterogeneous set of clinical and cultural practices through which Argentines have articulated distinctive feminist and anti-imperialist projects throughout the twentieth century. These archival materials share a concern for female sexuality as a national problem—that is, a problem tied to national identity and a problem for the nation-state to solve. They also show the transformative impact of clinical encounters with female sexuality, maternal grief, and torture on modern theories of the subject. In view of contemporary anxieties surrounding global migration, the case of Argentina shows that psychoanalysis has always been a political practice forged through exile, one that offers an indispensable conceptual framework for addressing the persistent psychic traces of displacement.

Theorists of deliberative democracy maintain that genuine dialogue is premised on the mutual respect of participants, yet a great deal of what passes for civic discourse even in mature democracies takes place among political actors who avowedly do not respect one another. This dissertation investigates psychological obstacles to mutual respect, and mutual understanding, in an effort to enhance possibilities for democratic deliberation. It identifies two such obstacles in political narcissism and ressentiment, which it construes as pathologies of political judgment. More generally, the dissertation argues for a self-consciously hermeneutical and psychoanalytically informed approach to deliberation, one that seeks a deeper understanding of our interlocutors in deliberation so as to carry on a more fruitful dialogue with them. Accordingly, it argues that speech is distorted when it does not align with the subjective intent of the speaker, even when that intent is unconscious or unknown to him. It contends that a depth hermeneutical mode of deliberation is necessary to engage in genuine communicative action, and suggests a role for psychoanalytically informed rhetoric in deliberation. Finally, it offers a methodological sketch of what a depth hermeneutical approach might look like when applied not only toward understanding one’s interlocutor, but also toward offering justificatory arguments vis-à-vis the shared ethical traditions and discourses that give legitimacy to political action. It suggests we need to read between the lines of tradition to ensure that minority discourses are not overshadowed, just as we need to look beneath the explicit claims of our interlocutors if we wish to understand them.

This dissertation examines a series of novels by Aminata Zaaria, Ken Bugul, Gaston-Paul Effa, Boubacar Boris Diop and Yolande Mukagasana. At the heart of my study is a problem that haunts much literary production and literary criticism about post-colonial Francophone African writing: the layers of distance and misunderstanding that often exist between readers and writers. Several of the authors in this study express frustration at the limited expectations that readers have of them, complaining that readers outside of the continent continue to read their novels solely in order to gain a grasp of socio-political "realities" of Africa. I propose a return to a select group of author's largely semi-autobiographical texts in order to better understand each writer's individual literary projects within the interdisciplinary framework of trauma studies. Interviews that I conducted with Senegalese and Cameroonian publishing directors, psychologists, sociologists and authors themselves offer an analysis of these texts within the context of broader social debates.

My first chapter focuses on Zaaria's La Nuit est tombée sur Dakar (2004) and Bugul's Le Baobab Fou (1983) and Cendres et Braises (1995) in order to examine intergenerational Senegalese semi-autobiographical representations of prostitution. My study ultimately finds that neither Senegalese society nor Zaaria and Bugul's narratives evidence healing through writing. Rather, both present literature as a "default" chosen because the authors found no one with whom they could initially share their stories face-to-face. Chapter Two hones in on Bugul's relationship with her mother, a painful theme revisited from one end of Bugul's semi-autobiographical oeuvre (Le Baobab Fou, 1982) to the other (De l'autre côté du regard, 2002). Chapter Three examines the trauma of parental loss in Gaston-Paul Effa's semi-autobiographical works, from Tout ce bleu (1996) to a more recent novel (Nous, les enfants de la tradition, 2008) in order to examine the evolution of Effa's personal identity quest and his extensive self-analysis over time in light of the author's permanent exile in France. My fourth chapter begins with a study of genocide survivor Yolande Mukagasana's recent narrative entitled N'aie pas peur de savoir (1999) in order to examine author/reader relationships in light of the often inconceivable trauma of genocide. I then move on to consider the ethics of speaking "for" genocide survivors by analyzing the well-known Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000) and the related Fest'Africa project. I end Chapter Four with a critique of Etoke's Melancholia africana: l'indéspensable dépassement de la condition noire (2010) in order to question whether or not sweeping theories of the various traumas experienced by members of Africa and its diaspora are in fact helpful in every context. Finally, I end my study with Effa's Voici le dernier jour du monde, which exhibits the interplay between autobiography, biography, fiction and the issue of literary violence.

I ultimately argue that a major difference between the "talking cure" of psychoanalysis and the process of seeking healing through literary narratives involves the question of audience. In the case of Sub-Saharan African literature, the author/reader relationship does not necessarily provide a safe space akin to the doctor/patient model in Freud's "talking cure." Therefore, I ultimately call for a closer analysis of the myriad ways by which authors are seeking healing and answers outside the realm of literature.

This dissertation identifies Cicero's Consolatio, Seneca's Ad Polybium de consolatione, and Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae as self-consolations, in which these Roman authors employ philosophical argument and literary art, in order to provide a therapy for their own crippling experience of grief. This therapeutic discourse unfolds between two contradictory conditions, though, since the philosophers must possess the self-mastery and self-possession that qualifies the consoler to perform his task felicitously, and they must lack those very same qualifications, insofar as their experience of loss has exposed their dependence upon others and they thus require consolation. Foucault's theoretical treatment of ancient philosophical discourse is supplemented by Lacanian critical theory and the political theology of Giorgio Agamben to perform analyses of the consolatory texts and their political context. These analyses reveal that self-consolation overcomes the contradictory conditions that found this discourse through literary and rhetorical artifice. But this resolution then places the apparent completeness of the philosophical argument in doubt, as the consoled authors in each case finally call for a decisive action that would join philosophical reflection to the merely human world that philosophy would have these consolers leave behind. Each author's self-consolation therefore demonstrates a split allegiance to the Roman political community and to a Socratic philosophical heritage that advocates for withdrawal from politics.

This dissertation, The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate, intervenes in the conundrum I call “the trans autobiographical mandate” that characterizes the relationship between U.S. Trans studies and sexological genres of trans autobiography. The conundrum is as follows: some forms of trans self-representation—namely, those found in sexological archives—have been understood by Trans Studies to be oppressive and too mired in anti-trans ideologies and discourses to allow for trans people’s agency. This has meant that, to do justice to the trans authors of these autobiographies, Trans Studies critics have been compelled to read the past through the enabling perspective of a trans affirming present, where what is found in the archive is given new shape through contemporary lexicons of trans identity. At the same time, other forms of trans self-representation, including those found on the presumed “outside” of medicine, have been endowed with a liberatory potential to challenge, disrupt, overcome, and rewrite the norms and ideologies of medicalization that have historically defined trans life in limited and limiting ways. In The Lure of Origins, I argue against three tendencies that have characterized the dominant position of Trans Studies in its attempt to resolve the conundrum of the trans autobiographical mandate: I contest the idea that trans medicalization only represses trans life, which has established the assumption that the field already knows both what can be found in the medical archive and how to read what we find there; I resist the idea that there exist forms of trans autobiography that are free from the constraints of medicalization and pathologization; and I refuse the burden that this bifurcation in modes of autobiographical reading and writing places on trans people to know ourselves and each other, to be able to author and authorize our own stories, and to do so in terms which are imagined to be our own. To these ends, I reopen an anonymous case study I call “the case of the metamorphosing physician,” which arrives to us in the Trans Studies present as definitively trans, in order to retell the story of how the case arrives here. I construct an account of the multiplicity that this case carries in its enmeshment in discourse, interpretation, and the desires of those who have gone back to read and re-read it while offering pathologizing frames for understanding its true meaning. Over four chapters, I follow the case study’s successive resignification in the course of the long twentieth century sexological canon: as a “Stage of Transition to Metamorphosis Sexualis Paranoica” in Krafft-Ebing (1892); a case of delusional cross-dressing for Magnus Hirschfeld (1910); an illustration of the difference between same-sex desire and cross-gender identity in Havelock Ellis (1913); and finally as the original autobiography of a transsexual in Richard Green (1966). In each chapter, I examine how the meaning of this paradigmatic case study evolves by changing sets of sexological hermeneutics which transform how the autobiography is read. I call attention to the multiple diagnostic inheritances buried within the contemporary signifier “trans,” including those that carry a pathologizing history with which the field has sought to dispense, and argue against reading this case within the singular “true” meaning of a trans origin offered by Trans Studies today. By attending to each scene of its medicalization, I consider how “trans” harbors a complex history of pathologizing frameworks from which it is still not free. I also show how the notion of a self-defining trans person who knows themselves does not emerge apart from the history of trans medicalization, but rather as a product of medicalization itself, which has demanded an equation between health and self-certainty as a prerequisite for trans inclusion. I insist on the importance of attending to the complex archive of pathology that troubles Trans Studies from the inside, not to recuperate pathology for more liberatory ends, but to disrupt the fantasy of the trans autobiographical mandate which demands a self-authorizing and self-knowing trans subject. I argue for a de-exceptionalizing story of the trans “origin” which refuses to pull this figure from the past into the self-conscious form that Trans Studies now desires. Ultimately, I rethink the terms by which trans affirmation has been made equivalent to the insistence that trans must be disarticulated from categories associated with insanity, particularly paranoia and psychosis, in order to be legitimate. By refusing this disarticulation or the assumptions in which it is grounded—which would only permit the freedom of transition to subjects who are presumed, by medicine’s own standards, to be sane—I insist on reading “trans” within a broader context in which its formation is unthinkable outside of its enmeshment with pathologizing histories. In doing so, I offer a mode of storytelling that historizes “trans” while resisting the demand to prove trans sanity through the articulation of true trans selves in transparent, autobiographical speech.

Psychoanalysis has always been based on the eclipse of the visual and on the primacy of speech: this is evident in any clinical experience where the patient lies on the couch and never looks the psychoanalyst in his/her eyes. The work of Jacques Lacan though, is strangely full of references on the visual field and on images: from the text on the “mirror stage” in the Forties to the elaboration of the visual dimension of objet petit a (gaze) in the Sixties. As a consequence, a long tradition of film studies made reference to Lacan and used psychoanalysis as a tool in order to explain the inclusion of the subject of the unconscious in the experience of vision. What is less known is how the late Lacanian reflection on the topic of analytic formalization opened up a further dimension of the visual that goes beyond the subjective experience of vision: not in the direction of a mystical ineffable (the Real-as-impossible) but rather toward a subtractive mathematization of space, as in non-Euclidean geometries. The outcome sounds paradoxical but it can have major impacts on the way we understand the visual field and we represent it in visual studies: sometimes abstract formalization can help us looking at the space even better than our eyes.

The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals.

In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.