Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. "Six years ago, when I published Please Select Your Gender, a book inspired by my clinical practice, I had not foreseen a wave that has swept away everything else in pop culture’s imagination. It also engulfed psychiatric and psychoanalytic ...
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Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change

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 ...

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Psychoanalysis, Democracy, Desire

Kristeva on Maternal Self-Mourning

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. In her 1977 essay “Stabat Mater,” Julia Kristeva prominently states, “A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language -- and it has always been so” (all quotations from essay ...
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Kristeva on Maternal Self-Mourning

Donald Trump’s Reductio Ad Penis

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. “Look at those hands; are they small hands?” the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump said during the debate on March 3, 2016. Trump added, “And, he referred to my hands -- ‘if they’re small, something else ...
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Donald Trump’s Reductio Ad Penis

The Business of Being Made

Two weeks ago The New School’s Ferenczi Center hosted Katie Gentile and a panel of contributors to celebrate the launch of a new book and a new series. The book, The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, is the first to critically analyze ...
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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 ...

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Sick Bodies, Hysterical Pregnancies, ISIS Wives

Between Freud and Einstein

On the homology at the heart of modernist art

With this possibility of a coincidence in mind, we may dare to compare the two fundamental contributions given by Sigmund Freud in the field of the humanities and by Albert Einstein in the almost opposite world of the natural sciences. Let us remember the well-known formula on which Einstein’s relativity ...
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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 ...

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The Discarded and the Dignified – Part 6