Psychoanalysis, Democracy, Desire
Anyone passingly familiar with the history of psychoanalysis knows that the field has occupied an embattled, marginalized, often indeterminate identity, and that its survival has often seemed precarious. Yet it is from this perch on the margins of culture and community that psychoanalysis speaks. By channeling a vortex of unconscious ...
Pornography in the Political Domain: A Citizen is Being Beaten
It is election time. I am almost done with the course “Gender and Domination.” However, the echoes of conversations started in that class are proving to be difficult to silence. Among the questions that this seminar has left lingering, the one that has stayed with me the most has to ...
Kristeva on Maternal Self-Mourning
Psychoanalysis’ Reductio Ad Sex, Beauvior’s Better Critique
Dilley in Retrospect: Machismo & Lasting Emotional Injury, Part II
On the other side of the political situation that women fleeing Central America represent for the United States are the individual stories of the women and children who populate the prison in Dilley Texas. As a psychoanalytically oriented clinician, I was struck by stories I heard, one after the next, ...
Donald Trump’s Reductio Ad Penis
The Business of Being Made
Sick Bodies, Hysterical Pregnancies, ISIS Wives
Conversion Disorder
I wonder if “conversion disorder” -- a classical psychiatric term for the conversion of psyche into soma in the form of psychosomatic issues -- could be one way of thinking about the present. Especially with so many patients complaining of bodily symptoms, armed at times with cadres of healers; with ...
On Pope Francis, Climate Change, and Global Capitalism
A psychological perspective
Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato si': On Care for our Common Home, has drawn worldwide attention to climate change and its relationship to global capitalism in advance of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Paris in late November ...
...Between Freud and Einstein
On the homology at the heart of modernist art
The Discarded and the Dignified – Part 6
From the Failed Witness to “You are the Eyes of the World”
Embodying the third
Returning to the beginning of this essay, I have tried to suggest how we might view the embodied rather than dissociated self state as part of the reconstruction of the third in the wake of trauma. In her discussion of the Gugaleto Seven case Gobodo-Madikizela (2013) described the ...