"In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celeb... more "In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater."
The article takes its basis in D.W. Winnicott's theories of play and transitional space to argue ... more The article takes its basis in D.W. Winnicott's theories of play and transitional space to argue that Stagnation-era sound recordings and animated films found a devoted audience of both adults and children because, like Winnicott's good-enough mother or therapist, they created the conditions for playing: they did not merely narrate play, but also embodied, invited, and enacted it. Fishzon looks closely at the performative and analytic functions of Vladimir Vysotskii's popular musical adaptation of Alisa v strane chudes (Alice in Wonderland, 1977), which employed and served as a play framework or analytic session. Vysotskii's broadly circulated, well-known work enabled Brezhnev-era citizens to dream a new habitus and ideology at a time when irony and playing were becoming increasingly difficult. While opportunities for paradox narrowed in Soviet official discourse and printed fiction after the Thaw, children's records and animated films shaped critical imaginations and made space for subjectivity.
Response to Sergio Benvenuto's WHAT ARE PERVERSIONS? SEXUALITY, ETHICS, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (Karna... more Response to Sergio Benvenuto's WHAT ARE PERVERSIONS? SEXUALITY, ETHICS, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (Karnac, 2016)
This article argues that a queer temporality emerged during the era of Soviet Stagnation: the Sta... more This article argues that a queer temporality emerged during the era of Soviet Stagnation: the Stalinist past was unspeakable and the future postponed or foreclosed. In response to the limited horizon of “developed socialism” – the loss of narrative coherence and futurity, the never‑to‑arrive communist promise – an expanded present rich in possibility and feeling was brought into being in animated films, providing a time and space where one could desire again. Iurii Norshtein’s Ëzhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Fëdor Khitruk’s Vinni‑pukh films (1969‑72) and Bremenskie muzykanty (Bremen Musicians, 1969) activated desire and altered fantasy not, as one might expect, through a reestablishment of linear time, but a reimagining of stagnation as a domain of thrilling, non‑teleological explorations. Where the fog in Ëzhik v tumane precipitated a lack and set the libido in motion, Vinni‑pukh provided a partial solution to the Brezhnev‑era desire crisis by staging polymorphous perversity and an elastic “kitchen time”; and Bremenskie muzykanty further developed the new socialities, loves, and forms of enjoyment communicated by such queer temporality. Gaps, magically intimate spaces, queer embodiment, and disfigured time were performed within the diegetic frame as well as instantiated by the film‑as‑object, asking spectators to playfully examine the impasses of late socialism, and imagine a libidinally saturated life, abounding with potentiality.
What does Donald Moss have against common sense, Captain Obvious, sincerity, and everything duh!?... more What does Donald Moss have against common sense, Captain Obvious, sincerity, and everything duh!? At War with the Obvious: Disruptive Thinking in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018) turns to culture and the clinic to reach beneath semblance, the lure of affect, and the comforts of doxa, and to discuss “erotic thought,” rupture, and conceptual transgression. Moss is interested in how flashes of profound epistemological disorientation and isolation are transmuted into potentiality and theory: from fragmenting “zones of uncertainty” and the suffocating flood of experience we might -- as analysts, artists, writers, and political actors -- manage our way back to sociality and thinking, safely ashore and reconstituted but not the same.
As in his previous books, Moss writes courageously, revealing his own periodic struggles with smugness and easy solutions – moments when he, unable to analyze or gather himself – lashed out, fled, and recovered with great difficulty. In a particularly compelling chapter, Moss describes his experience of terror, shame, and rage when a violent patient threatens to hit him in the face and leaves the consulting room shouting “faggot!” The epithet later erupts in Moss as he waits on a subway platform next to an effeminate man and resounds in the reader as Moss parses his identifications and disidentifications, both with the ostensibly gay stranger and with physical and psychic vulnerability.
In the chapter, “On thinking and not being able to think,” Moss reflects on what happens when he observes objects, specifically performance art and documentary photographs, and endures an unexpected collapse of the frame, a sudden loss of legibility. Moss recounts such a disintegration while viewing photos of Abu Ghraib, and attributes it not to the photos’ disturbing subject matter but to their uncanny registering of his look: when the spectator’s gaze appears within the framed spectacle his subjectivity is obliterated. Captured by the photograph, losing his privileged perspective and link to other audience members, Moss is momentarily rendered an object. Without a stable “I” he is unable to interpret. He concludes that the capacity to create a new frame and thereby regain distance depends on the re-establishment of a transferential “we” -- a refinding of one’s place among an expanded and transformed community of viewers and readers.
The book’s most original and moving chapter, “I and You,” is the result of a yearlong collection of patients’ utterances. Moss wrote down one sentence from every session, collated each day’s lines, and published them in abridged form in At War With the Obvious (all 154 days are presented in a separate book). Together they constitute a dirge, a mournful cry made no less searing by its unstable and acousmatic authorship.
In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From ... more In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted with his surgeon Hans Pichler 92 times. Freud’s smoking motivated much of the fussiness with his prosthetic jaw: it had to be right at the palate edge, with optimal occlusion so as to get the most out of his cigars. For Freud, smoking facilitated writing and intellectual creativity; it provided exquisite enjoyment. An inanimate object thus served as a conduit of both vitality and grave illness -- a testament to the entanglement, indeed, the indistinguishability of the life and death drives.
In 1977, after a biopsy of a tumor in her right breast, Audre Lorde fantasized about lopping off the agent of her destruction like “a she-wolf chewing off a paw caught in a trap” (56). In the manner of a Kleinian infant, she directed her rage at the persecutory breast that betrayed her (once again) and ceased being her own. Lorde turned her poetry and personal survival into political acts of reparation, linking the ravages of cancer to racial and sexual injury and offering herself to queer communities of color as an object of introjection and identification.
In 1992, on the anniversary of her breast cancer diagnosis, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was en route to yet another academic lecture. She sat in a plane on a runway in frigid Toronto watching Pepto-Bismol-pink anti-icing fluid run down the window beside her. Seized by nauseating horror, she recalled the bloody lymphatic discharge draining from her body in the weeks following her mastectomy. In 1996, after imaging revealed a spinal metastasis that would ultimately kill her, Sedgwick emerged as a patient-teacher in her polyphonic A Dialogue on Love (1999), an account of a psychodynamic treatment intermixed with her poetry and her therapist’s notes. Through autobiographically inflected theoretical writings and the advice column, “Off My Chest,” Sedgwick engaged in what she called good pedagogy, instructing readers about love and mourning in the “prognosis time” of incremental bodily loss.
Lana Lin brings together the stories of Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick, as well as insights from her own struggle with breast cancer in the tour de force, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham University Press, 2017). With her three transferential figures, Lin explores what it means to loosen one’s grip on objects, to live with self-estrangement and threats to bodily integrity, and to understand loss as the maintenance of relationality. As cancer fragments and changes one’s relationship to time, it becomes a catalyst for reparation, invention, and love.
Alenka Zupančič has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about ... more Alenka Zupančič has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about sex with only cursory mention of things naughty. What is Sex? (The MIT Press, 2017) avoids fluff, heterosexual intercourse, and the gender binary (and gender altogether) and instead cogently explains sexual difference, the elusive “beyond” of the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, the materiality of signifiers, the hole in being, the non-coincidence of truth and knowledge, primal repression, passion, the event, and the political importance of psychoanalysis.
Sex for Zupančič is an ontological problem, co-extensive with a disturbance in reality, a signifying gap and structural impediment. Sex is attached to that which cannot be fully known or embodied and is therefore directly related to the unconscious. Subjectivity emerges from within the fault entailed in signification, as does surplus enjoyment. Important here, too, is the well-worn notion, but with a twist, that there is no reality prior or external to discourse. Zupančič reminds us that nature is not a pure and full presence before the arrival of the human but an object produced by and for science. The Real is an effect of language: the signifier invades the signified and alters it from within. Finally, and perhaps most mind-blowingly, the human in her formulation is not that which is merely in excess of the animal (dressing it up in language and culture, let’s say) but, rather, an unfinished and dysfunctional dimension: humanity as a veil that simultaneously points and gives form to animal’s ontological incompleteness.
We cover these complex ideas in the interview, as well as other pressing matters: the disappearance of the hysteric, the desert of the post-oedipal (the only one who managed to escape the Oedipus Complex, Lacan noted, was Oedipus himself), and the status of love at the end of analysis.
Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgende... more Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgender experience. Building on the work of sexologists, Freud not only posited a universal bisexuality, thereby implying that we are all transgender in our unconscious, but also indexed something in sexuality that exceeds our grasp. His most controversial claim, perhaps, was that human sexuality itself is faulty and symptomatic — that our confrontation with the enigma and overproximity of parental desire never leads to a resolution but rather to the formation of mediating fantasies. Freud instructed his colleagues to listen attentively to these fantasies and to be open to sexuality in all its manifestations and vicissitudes: desire and the drives, the problem of sexual difference, and the mortality of the sexed body. It was precisely these ethics, this Freud, to which Lacan urged a return and from which he believed psychoanalysis had strayed. Disturbed by ego psychologists’ focus on adaptation to prevailing sociocultural norms, Lacan instead emphasized and elaborated upon the traumatic aspect of sexuality — the difficulties of assuming a sexed body and of regulating jouissance. He stressed listening to what analysands actually say, as opposed to what they mean, in order to approach the locus from which an unbearable truth speaks.
Yet, historically, psychoanalysts and institutional psychoanalysis have been tone-deaf to transgender desire. Freudians have linked transsexuality to perversion and borderline disorders. Lacanians have deemed transgender expression an indicator of psychosis. Such pathologization has failed transgender subjects, asserts Patricia Gherovici, in her brilliant and provocative Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). Despite availing themselves of various forms of talk therapy, trans patients remain wary of psychoanalytic treatments and the suicide attempt rate in the trans population is astonishingly high.
Gherovici argues persuasively that psychoanalysis and the trans community have much to offer one another and that Lacan’s sinthome and sexuation formulae serve as especially productive, nonpathologizing frameworks for such a dialogue. She demonstrates how transgender discourse intervenes in and transforms key Lacanian concepts and maintains that psychoanalytic listening can alleviate the anguish felt by transgender subjects, helping them to live. When I press her on this point, inquiring how analysts might attend to the singularity of each case and still manage to generalize about the category of transgender experience, Gherovici, in an adroit dialectical maneuver, finds the universal in the particular. Transgender expression, she explains, offers novel ways of thinking about subjects not wholly dependent on phallic signification and disrupts the binary logic imposed by the phallus as universal signifier. Trans patients’ particular struggles with gendered embodiment and the symbolization of sex bring to light the trouble inherent in taking ownership of the body for all speaking beings. Covering a vast conceptual and evidentiary terrain, Gherovici moves from the public sphere to the clinic to show how increasing transgender visibility and activism paradoxically subvert identitarian claims, making explicit the constitutive elements and continual failures of Man and Woman.
Jared Russell, Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017)
... more Jared Russell, Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017)
By Anna Fishzon
While I was in college, undergrads reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes paraded on gothic quads with flannel armor, black-rimmed glasses, messenger bags, and paperback copies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mired in misinterpretation, budding philosophers of various political stripes dreamed of amoral Ubermenschian architects expressing “will to power” through design of phallic buildings and superior socialities. This memory haunted me years later while teaching The Genealogy of Morals to first-year college students but was finally vanquished by Jared Russell’s excellent Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017).
Clinicians familiar with stereotypical and distorted readings of Nietzsche (almost as common as those of Freud) will be surprised and invigorated by Russell’s book, which not only synthesizes philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, but also stages a highly productive encounter between academic work and the practice of psychoanalysis. Each chapter focuses on a distinct psychoanalytic orientation and contains a clinical vignette illustrating the relevance of Nietzsche’s ideas. With rigor and openness, each chapter asks: what does Nietzsche offer the clinic?
Russell discusses Nietzschean notions like perspectivism, will to power, and ressentiment, as well as the philosopher’s critiques of metaphysics, commercial culture, authoritarianism, and morality. He then demonstrates the ways Nietzsche’s thought augments and refines psychoanalytic concepts: the Freudian drive, Helene Deutsch’s “as-if personality,” Alan Bass’s "concreteness," Melanie Klein’s envy and projective identification, Winnicottian play, and Lacan’s late teachings on jouissance and the real unconscious. But perhaps the most original aspect of the book resides in Russell’s ability to put Nietzsche into dialogue with specific elements of analytic clinical practice: interpretation, free association and evenly suspended attention, and knowledge and truth as they emerge for each analysand.
"In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celeb... more "In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater."
The article takes its basis in D.W. Winnicott's theories of play and transitional space to argue ... more The article takes its basis in D.W. Winnicott's theories of play and transitional space to argue that Stagnation-era sound recordings and animated films found a devoted audience of both adults and children because, like Winnicott's good-enough mother or therapist, they created the conditions for playing: they did not merely narrate play, but also embodied, invited, and enacted it. Fishzon looks closely at the performative and analytic functions of Vladimir Vysotskii's popular musical adaptation of Alisa v strane chudes (Alice in Wonderland, 1977), which employed and served as a play framework or analytic session. Vysotskii's broadly circulated, well-known work enabled Brezhnev-era citizens to dream a new habitus and ideology at a time when irony and playing were becoming increasingly difficult. While opportunities for paradox narrowed in Soviet official discourse and printed fiction after the Thaw, children's records and animated films shaped critical imaginations and made space for subjectivity.
Response to Sergio Benvenuto's WHAT ARE PERVERSIONS? SEXUALITY, ETHICS, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (Karna... more Response to Sergio Benvenuto's WHAT ARE PERVERSIONS? SEXUALITY, ETHICS, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (Karnac, 2016)
This article argues that a queer temporality emerged during the era of Soviet Stagnation: the Sta... more This article argues that a queer temporality emerged during the era of Soviet Stagnation: the Stalinist past was unspeakable and the future postponed or foreclosed. In response to the limited horizon of “developed socialism” – the loss of narrative coherence and futurity, the never‑to‑arrive communist promise – an expanded present rich in possibility and feeling was brought into being in animated films, providing a time and space where one could desire again. Iurii Norshtein’s Ëzhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Fëdor Khitruk’s Vinni‑pukh films (1969‑72) and Bremenskie muzykanty (Bremen Musicians, 1969) activated desire and altered fantasy not, as one might expect, through a reestablishment of linear time, but a reimagining of stagnation as a domain of thrilling, non‑teleological explorations. Where the fog in Ëzhik v tumane precipitated a lack and set the libido in motion, Vinni‑pukh provided a partial solution to the Brezhnev‑era desire crisis by staging polymorphous perversity and an elastic “kitchen time”; and Bremenskie muzykanty further developed the new socialities, loves, and forms of enjoyment communicated by such queer temporality. Gaps, magically intimate spaces, queer embodiment, and disfigured time were performed within the diegetic frame as well as instantiated by the film‑as‑object, asking spectators to playfully examine the impasses of late socialism, and imagine a libidinally saturated life, abounding with potentiality.
What does Donald Moss have against common sense, Captain Obvious, sincerity, and everything duh!?... more What does Donald Moss have against common sense, Captain Obvious, sincerity, and everything duh!? At War with the Obvious: Disruptive Thinking in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018) turns to culture and the clinic to reach beneath semblance, the lure of affect, and the comforts of doxa, and to discuss “erotic thought,” rupture, and conceptual transgression. Moss is interested in how flashes of profound epistemological disorientation and isolation are transmuted into potentiality and theory: from fragmenting “zones of uncertainty” and the suffocating flood of experience we might -- as analysts, artists, writers, and political actors -- manage our way back to sociality and thinking, safely ashore and reconstituted but not the same.
As in his previous books, Moss writes courageously, revealing his own periodic struggles with smugness and easy solutions – moments when he, unable to analyze or gather himself – lashed out, fled, and recovered with great difficulty. In a particularly compelling chapter, Moss describes his experience of terror, shame, and rage when a violent patient threatens to hit him in the face and leaves the consulting room shouting “faggot!” The epithet later erupts in Moss as he waits on a subway platform next to an effeminate man and resounds in the reader as Moss parses his identifications and disidentifications, both with the ostensibly gay stranger and with physical and psychic vulnerability.
In the chapter, “On thinking and not being able to think,” Moss reflects on what happens when he observes objects, specifically performance art and documentary photographs, and endures an unexpected collapse of the frame, a sudden loss of legibility. Moss recounts such a disintegration while viewing photos of Abu Ghraib, and attributes it not to the photos’ disturbing subject matter but to their uncanny registering of his look: when the spectator’s gaze appears within the framed spectacle his subjectivity is obliterated. Captured by the photograph, losing his privileged perspective and link to other audience members, Moss is momentarily rendered an object. Without a stable “I” he is unable to interpret. He concludes that the capacity to create a new frame and thereby regain distance depends on the re-establishment of a transferential “we” -- a refinding of one’s place among an expanded and transformed community of viewers and readers.
The book’s most original and moving chapter, “I and You,” is the result of a yearlong collection of patients’ utterances. Moss wrote down one sentence from every session, collated each day’s lines, and published them in abridged form in At War With the Obvious (all 154 days are presented in a separate book). Together they constitute a dirge, a mournful cry made no less searing by its unstable and acousmatic authorship.
In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From ... more In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted with his surgeon Hans Pichler 92 times. Freud’s smoking motivated much of the fussiness with his prosthetic jaw: it had to be right at the palate edge, with optimal occlusion so as to get the most out of his cigars. For Freud, smoking facilitated writing and intellectual creativity; it provided exquisite enjoyment. An inanimate object thus served as a conduit of both vitality and grave illness -- a testament to the entanglement, indeed, the indistinguishability of the life and death drives.
In 1977, after a biopsy of a tumor in her right breast, Audre Lorde fantasized about lopping off the agent of her destruction like “a she-wolf chewing off a paw caught in a trap” (56). In the manner of a Kleinian infant, she directed her rage at the persecutory breast that betrayed her (once again) and ceased being her own. Lorde turned her poetry and personal survival into political acts of reparation, linking the ravages of cancer to racial and sexual injury and offering herself to queer communities of color as an object of introjection and identification.
In 1992, on the anniversary of her breast cancer diagnosis, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was en route to yet another academic lecture. She sat in a plane on a runway in frigid Toronto watching Pepto-Bismol-pink anti-icing fluid run down the window beside her. Seized by nauseating horror, she recalled the bloody lymphatic discharge draining from her body in the weeks following her mastectomy. In 1996, after imaging revealed a spinal metastasis that would ultimately kill her, Sedgwick emerged as a patient-teacher in her polyphonic A Dialogue on Love (1999), an account of a psychodynamic treatment intermixed with her poetry and her therapist’s notes. Through autobiographically inflected theoretical writings and the advice column, “Off My Chest,” Sedgwick engaged in what she called good pedagogy, instructing readers about love and mourning in the “prognosis time” of incremental bodily loss.
Lana Lin brings together the stories of Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick, as well as insights from her own struggle with breast cancer in the tour de force, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham University Press, 2017). With her three transferential figures, Lin explores what it means to loosen one’s grip on objects, to live with self-estrangement and threats to bodily integrity, and to understand loss as the maintenance of relationality. As cancer fragments and changes one’s relationship to time, it becomes a catalyst for reparation, invention, and love.
Alenka Zupančič has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about ... more Alenka Zupančič has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about sex with only cursory mention of things naughty. What is Sex? (The MIT Press, 2017) avoids fluff, heterosexual intercourse, and the gender binary (and gender altogether) and instead cogently explains sexual difference, the elusive “beyond” of the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, the materiality of signifiers, the hole in being, the non-coincidence of truth and knowledge, primal repression, passion, the event, and the political importance of psychoanalysis.
Sex for Zupančič is an ontological problem, co-extensive with a disturbance in reality, a signifying gap and structural impediment. Sex is attached to that which cannot be fully known or embodied and is therefore directly related to the unconscious. Subjectivity emerges from within the fault entailed in signification, as does surplus enjoyment. Important here, too, is the well-worn notion, but with a twist, that there is no reality prior or external to discourse. Zupančič reminds us that nature is not a pure and full presence before the arrival of the human but an object produced by and for science. The Real is an effect of language: the signifier invades the signified and alters it from within. Finally, and perhaps most mind-blowingly, the human in her formulation is not that which is merely in excess of the animal (dressing it up in language and culture, let’s say) but, rather, an unfinished and dysfunctional dimension: humanity as a veil that simultaneously points and gives form to animal’s ontological incompleteness.
We cover these complex ideas in the interview, as well as other pressing matters: the disappearance of the hysteric, the desert of the post-oedipal (the only one who managed to escape the Oedipus Complex, Lacan noted, was Oedipus himself), and the status of love at the end of analysis.
Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgende... more Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgender experience. Building on the work of sexologists, Freud not only posited a universal bisexuality, thereby implying that we are all transgender in our unconscious, but also indexed something in sexuality that exceeds our grasp. His most controversial claim, perhaps, was that human sexuality itself is faulty and symptomatic — that our confrontation with the enigma and overproximity of parental desire never leads to a resolution but rather to the formation of mediating fantasies. Freud instructed his colleagues to listen attentively to these fantasies and to be open to sexuality in all its manifestations and vicissitudes: desire and the drives, the problem of sexual difference, and the mortality of the sexed body. It was precisely these ethics, this Freud, to which Lacan urged a return and from which he believed psychoanalysis had strayed. Disturbed by ego psychologists’ focus on adaptation to prevailing sociocultural norms, Lacan instead emphasized and elaborated upon the traumatic aspect of sexuality — the difficulties of assuming a sexed body and of regulating jouissance. He stressed listening to what analysands actually say, as opposed to what they mean, in order to approach the locus from which an unbearable truth speaks.
Yet, historically, psychoanalysts and institutional psychoanalysis have been tone-deaf to transgender desire. Freudians have linked transsexuality to perversion and borderline disorders. Lacanians have deemed transgender expression an indicator of psychosis. Such pathologization has failed transgender subjects, asserts Patricia Gherovici, in her brilliant and provocative Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). Despite availing themselves of various forms of talk therapy, trans patients remain wary of psychoanalytic treatments and the suicide attempt rate in the trans population is astonishingly high.
Gherovici argues persuasively that psychoanalysis and the trans community have much to offer one another and that Lacan’s sinthome and sexuation formulae serve as especially productive, nonpathologizing frameworks for such a dialogue. She demonstrates how transgender discourse intervenes in and transforms key Lacanian concepts and maintains that psychoanalytic listening can alleviate the anguish felt by transgender subjects, helping them to live. When I press her on this point, inquiring how analysts might attend to the singularity of each case and still manage to generalize about the category of transgender experience, Gherovici, in an adroit dialectical maneuver, finds the universal in the particular. Transgender expression, she explains, offers novel ways of thinking about subjects not wholly dependent on phallic signification and disrupts the binary logic imposed by the phallus as universal signifier. Trans patients’ particular struggles with gendered embodiment and the symbolization of sex bring to light the trouble inherent in taking ownership of the body for all speaking beings. Covering a vast conceptual and evidentiary terrain, Gherovici moves from the public sphere to the clinic to show how increasing transgender visibility and activism paradoxically subvert identitarian claims, making explicit the constitutive elements and continual failures of Man and Woman.
Jared Russell, Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017)
... more Jared Russell, Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017)
By Anna Fishzon
While I was in college, undergrads reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes paraded on gothic quads with flannel armor, black-rimmed glasses, messenger bags, and paperback copies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mired in misinterpretation, budding philosophers of various political stripes dreamed of amoral Ubermenschian architects expressing “will to power” through design of phallic buildings and superior socialities. This memory haunted me years later while teaching The Genealogy of Morals to first-year college students but was finally vanquished by Jared Russell’s excellent Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017).
Clinicians familiar with stereotypical and distorted readings of Nietzsche (almost as common as those of Freud) will be surprised and invigorated by Russell’s book, which not only synthesizes philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, but also stages a highly productive encounter between academic work and the practice of psychoanalysis. Each chapter focuses on a distinct psychoanalytic orientation and contains a clinical vignette illustrating the relevance of Nietzsche’s ideas. With rigor and openness, each chapter asks: what does Nietzsche offer the clinic?
Russell discusses Nietzschean notions like perspectivism, will to power, and ressentiment, as well as the philosopher’s critiques of metaphysics, commercial culture, authoritarianism, and morality. He then demonstrates the ways Nietzsche’s thought augments and refines psychoanalytic concepts: the Freudian drive, Helene Deutsch’s “as-if personality,” Alan Bass’s "concreteness," Melanie Klein’s envy and projective identification, Winnicottian play, and Lacan’s late teachings on jouissance and the real unconscious. But perhaps the most original aspect of the book resides in Russell’s ability to put Nietzsche into dialogue with specific elements of analytic clinical practice: interpretation, free association and evenly suspended attention, and knowledge and truth as they emerge for each analysand.
Please join us at 2pm on October 14 at NPAP for a panel discussion to celebrate the release of Is... more Please join us at 2pm on October 14 at NPAP for a panel discussion to celebrate the release of Issue 7 of The Candidate Journal, THE CANDIDATE, BARRED, as part of a series of panels on “The Candidate’s Voice” organized by the journal.
Contributors to the issue, as well as other psychoanalytic candidates and early-career clinicians, will discuss some of the themes brought up in Issue 7 relating to questions of psychoanalytic training and institutional psychoanalysis: transference within the institute, matters of pedagogy, the transmission of psychoanalysis, the evaluation of candidates, the role of the state in psychoanalytic training, the training analysis and its place in the birth of an analyst. Most broadly, we hope to provide an arena for candidates and early-career clinicians to theorize the candidate's position, as well as to articulate something of the problem represented by the speaking candidate.
EVENT: The Candidate, or The Candidate, Barred
Welcoming Remarks Gav Reisner, PhD, National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP)
Introduction Olga Poznansky, PhD, NPAP
Panel Participants Karen Dougherty, MA, RP, Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis (TIP) Justine Duhr, MFA, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP) Anna Fishzon, PhD, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) Kerry Moore, PhD, Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) Sam Semper, PhD, IPTAR Marcus Silverman, MA, LP, Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS) Monroe Street, MA, Washington Square Institute (WSI)
Emma Lieber, PhD, NPAP, moderator
LOCATION: NPAP, 40 W. 13th Street
DATE AND TIME: Saturday, October 14, 2017, 2-4pm
We look forward to a stimulating exchange among candidates from different institutes and hope you will take part in the conversation. __
THE CANDIDATE JOURNAL is a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to exploring psychoanalysis across generations, institutes, and theories. Its goal is to foster a vibrant psychoanalytic community and to work collaboratively to promote ongoing conversation about psychoanalysis in its many varieties.
In the 2016 presidential election, the unconscious insisted: it was provoked and made manifest in... more In the 2016 presidential election, the unconscious insisted: it was provoked and made manifest in Trump as collective phantasm, in the vote as the blind action of the death drive, and in the media’s refusal to know. It is the psychoanalyst’s responsibility to articulate the coordinates of this event as it registers and is registered by the unconscious, and the psychoanalyst proceeds from the dream.
Please join us for a performance based on the post-election dreams collected and curated online by The Candidate Journal. The performance will feature dream readers reciting the 35 collected dreams while the texts of the dreams are projected behind the readers in slideshow format. Projected as well will be the visual artworks, also depicting dreams that were submitted to the journal. The readings will be interspersed with dance and music. Artwork by several of the artists participating in the project will be displayed -- both new works and the works originally submitted. The performance will be followed by an open mic. Audience members will be invited to share their own post-election dreams and engage in on-the-spot dream analysis.
Transgender identities have arrived, both upon the national cultural stage as well as within the ... more Transgender identities have arrived, both upon the national cultural stage as well as within the more intimate context of the consulting room. Psychoanalysts, in response to this arrival, find themselves facing yet another controversy that calls into question apparently foundational notions about gender and embodiment.
When it comes to transgender identities, what kind of a controversy are we dealing with? On the one hand, there are those who view the gender binary of female/male as inherently repressive. Psychoanalysis, from this perspective, should be on the side of innumerable subversive gender performances, in which any norm related to gender or sexuality is resoundingly questioned in the service of some kind of transformative overcoming. On the other hand, there are those who argue that transgender phenomena are inevitably symptomatic manifestations of psychopathology, usually of the more severe types such as borderline, psychotic or perverse. The transgender individual, from this perspective, would be conceptualized in terms of the power of unconscious, omnipotent fantasy to disavow the difference between the sexes—a disavowal that sometimes involves a demand for surgical interventions.
Our workshop aims to elaborate upon some of the coordinates of this controversy while at the same time to seek ways to move beyond it. Together we will search for more analytically nuanced responses to the theoretical and clinical difficulties that analysts face in their attempts to understand and help their transgender patients.
The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research hosts SERGIO BENVENUTO in conversation wit... more The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research hosts SERGIO BENVENUTO in conversation with Das Unbehagen and The Candidate Journal on the topic of his new book:
What Are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, and Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2016)
Dr. Benvenuto will be joined by panelists from IPTAR, The Candidate Journal and Das Unbehagen: Drs. Aleksandra Wagner, Sam Semper, Emma Lieber, and Anna Fishzon
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2016 8:00-10:00pm Arrive early and join us for a wine and cheese reception at 7:30pm IPTAR Conference Room, 1651 Third Avenue, suite 205 (between 92nd and 93rd streets) This event is free and open to all
REGISTER at IPTAR.ORG
What Are Perversions? questions above all what we mean when we use the term “perversion.” Are we dealing with a sexological classification, a mental disturbance, an ethical deviation, a hedonistic style, or a historical-cultural artifact? The book retraces some of the fundamental stages in the field of psychoanalytic thought — from Freud to Masud Khan, Stoller and Lacan — and propose an original approach: that “paraphilias” today are taken as an ethical failure of the sexual relationship with the other. The perversions signal a specific relationship with the other, who is treated not simply as a sexual object, but someone whose subjectivity is ably exploited precisely in order to get a perverse pleasure. Acts, if considered perverse, are understood as a metaphorical re-edition of a trauma, above all sexual, in which the subject (as a child) suffered the bitter experience of exclusion or jealousy. The book articulates a heterodox hypothesis by drawing on clinical cases, from both the author’s own analytic practice and those of others; but it also draw on cinema, historical episodes, social psychology experiments (for example, Stanley Milgram’s experiment), stories and novels, and philosophical works. The final appendix delves more deeply into Freud’s theory of masochism.
Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst and a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome. He is editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and member of the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Discourse (PSYAD). He has contributed to Lettre Internationale, Texte, Journal for Lacanian Studies, L’évolution psychiatrique, American Imago, and Telos. Among his most recent books in Italian: Lacan, oggi [Lacan, Today] (Mimesis, 2014).
Psychoanalysis introduced us to the queer child when it located “perversion” in infancy and posit... more Psychoanalysis introduced us to the queer child when it located “perversion” in infancy and posited an adult genital sexuality gradually achieved through narcissistic, oral, and anal pleasures. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Sigmund Freud famously suggested that homosexuality was regressive – that it meant getting stuck at a primitive, extra-genital stage of development. But another strain in his thought universalized perversion and lamented the libidinal sacrifice required by “normal” adult genitality. Arguably, it is from this Victorian understanding of psychosexuality that the idea of the ever-threatened and threatening “child” emerged – a child at once innocent of fully realized sexual knowledge and the seedbed of abnormality; a potential victim of corrupting adult perversion and the pervert haunting each of us. The impeccable childhood requiring protection at all cost, the childhood structuring therapeutic optimism (and hopefulness as such) results from the disavowal of both psychoanalytically domesticated queerness and the psychically mature queer.
In the polemical No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman uses psychoanalysis to draw attention to the figural Child (as opposed to living children) at the heart of contemporary politics — the synonym and symptom of the political, or the Symbolic. The Child, according to Edelman, is the antiqueer: the phantasmatic object that promises Imaginary wholeness and enables discursive unity by screening out the unreachable thing, or disavowed constitutive lack in the heteronormative order. Edelman exhorts queers to turn away from the politics of “reproductive futurism” — the Child in the name and for the protection of which we perpetually are encouraged to sacrifice the present. He argues that such a politics always excludes the queer, indeed is constituted by the queer’s abjection. Edelman tells queer theorists and all outcasts to fuck Little Orphan Annie and the wide beckoning eyes of Tiny Tim; and also to fuck the ultimately impossible liberal queer variant of reproductive futurism: same-sex marriage, adoption, and so on. Instead, Edelman challenges queers to attempt to occupy the politically unthinkable position assigned to them by the social order (a position they cannot, by definition, escape anyway) in order to undo it from within – to embrace negation, jouissance, and the ruthless work of the death drive.
Since the appearance of Edelman’s book in 2004, the unthinkable has happened. The queer child has become visible in contemporary popular culture and political debate not as a scare image to be feared by “normal” adults or a pathological adolescent to be cured by therapists, but a positively cathected victim: the target of homophobic bullying at school; the suicidal teen needing support and recognition; the beneficiary of transnational adoption or sex reassignment surgery afforded by understanding parents; the one for whom it eventually gets better. Alongside and perhaps in reaction to Edelman’s controversial intervention, and also in response to the return of the repressed queer child in public discourse, queer theorists have begun to probe the field of cultural production aimed at children in order to create fairy tales of political futures, new political imaginaries, feelings of hope, potentiality, freedom, experimentation, wonder, and enchantment. Some in queer studies are treating the affective field in which the child is ensconced as rife with the kind of imaginative plasticity that makes possible the envisioning of political and social alternatives.
Despite Edelman’s call for the queer refusal of the Child and the entire symbolic order it signifies, queer theory seems unable to let the child go, or to successfully mourn its loss. The child has become that thing queer theorists cannot not talk about. In fact, queer studies, psychoanalysis, the history of childhood, and the politics of the Child are increasingly converging. Kathryn Stockton, for one, explores childhood as a queer, nonlinear time of “sideways growth” – an elastic temporality that permits children not simply to “grow up” in one vertical continuous movement, but to expand horizontally, incorporating sensations, emotional connections and experiences (masochistic scenes, violent impulses and seductions, for example) later disavowed by the retroactively conceived, figural Child. She not only asks how gay children play with the asynchronicity of their queer, publically impossible and deferred identity, but also looks at the undeniable strangeness of all children. Stockton takes apart the implied whiteness and middle-class privilege even of the polymorphously perverse and onanistically inclined psychoanalytic child (the child queered by Freud) to illuminate other models of “dangerous children”: the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by money, the grown homosexual seen as a child, and the gay child made ghostly, unavailable to itself, by legal and parental misrecognition. As queer theorist Jasbir Puar points out, gay children are promised that they will “get more normal” in adulthood – succeed financially, find acceptance, love, community, family, and so on. But, in the smart words of one blogger, “it gets better a lot sooner if you are white, cisgendered, and middle-class.”
This workshop brings together a group of scholars and clinicians working at the intersections of childhood studies, psychoanalysis, psychology, pedagogy, and queer theory in order to have a conversation about queer children and the queerness of childhood. It seeks to investigate the child as a critical tool, a political trope, an affective field, a site of cultural production and consumption, a psychoanalytic subject, and a living, breathing historical personage to whom we are ethically beholden: a figure for both queer political possibility (Jack Halberstam) and political or symbolic death (Edelman). Participants were asked to explore questions such as: Who is the queer child and why does it continue to command the attention of queer theorists and psychoanalysts? What is queer about childhood? What is childish about the queer and queer theory? Why does queer studies cathect the childlike and the infantile? How do its libidinal interests dovetail with those of psychoanalytic theory and practice? When the child is shorn of its bourgeois whiteness and denied its heterosexuality, does it still require our protection, and if so, what kind? When the queer child grows publically, nonlinearly, what do we gain? New collectivities formed around failure? Alternate temporalities offering hope, and, paradoxically, success and futurity, i.e. a new normativity? Finally, if we keep putting the child at the center of our (anti) politics, how can we remain critical of the social conditions and symbolic effects of this investment? What does the concept of the queer child do to notions of childhood? What does it mean for the queer to “fuck the figural Child” (Edelman) when the gay child is already fucked, in suicidal crisis? How can we attend to the sideways growth of all children?
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2013
Paul du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia. 290 pp. U... more Paul du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia. 290 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0271034676. $65.00. Olga Haldey, Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater. 416 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0253354686. $44.95. James Loeffler, Use Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire. 288 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0300137132. $55.00. Lynn M. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life. 368 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0199735266. $45.00. The question I want to pose here is one that has been addressed increasingly by music scholars, most recently Lynn Sargeant: how do we integrate Russian music and musical life, so often overlooked by historians, into the historical narratives of Europe, the fin de siecle, and late imperial Russia? Students of the 19th- and 20th-century tsarist empire acknowledge the centrality of literary forms while paying Par less attention to aural and visual cultures (5-6, 7). The reasons for the omissions are many, but the most obvious seems to be lack of musical expertise among historians and the assumption that such topics are better left to those formally trained in musical analysis, performance, and art history. Certainly one can make a case for such a division of labor. Musically inclined literature scholars and musicologists--among them Rosamund Bartlett, Julie Buckler, Boris Gasparov, Simon Morrison, and the prolific and highly influential Richard Taruskin--already offer us much more than just musical interpretation. (1) They present readers with complex social and intellectual worlds, critical reactions, and insights into performance, relating musical practice to political events such as the revolution of 1905 and the larger story of Russian politics and society. Nonetheless, their focus on well-known compositions, composers, virtuosos, and published criticism leave unexamined political and social fields crucial for historians. Why, after all, have the weighty contributions of these scholars not been engaged or taken up in significant ways by broad social and political histories of the Russian Empire? Despite the heroic efforts of historicist music and literature scholars, as well as historians of theater cultures such as Murray Frame and Richard Stites, music often has remained outside, or beside, history. (2) Two recent books, Lynn M. Sargeant's Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life and James Loeffler's The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire give an impression of music making and its relation to cultural politics and everyday life different from most of those mentioned above. Although the stories told by Loeffler, who writes at length about the Society for Jewish Folk Music, and Sargeant, who focuses almost exclusively on the Russian Musical Society (RMO), diverge at key moments, I find it fitting to treat them here together: both address music history as history, bringing musical life to questions about civil society, national identity, and spirituality: They take so-called fine art out of the arguably narrow context of debates about aesthetics and locate it in developments such as professionalization, the commercialization of entertainment, and the struggle for Jewish emancipation. Both authors discuss changing modes of viewing and listening--as William Weber and James Johnson have done for 19th-century London, Vienna, and Paris--and suggest a distinctly Russian version of the bourgeoisification of culture. The approaches of the two scholars differ in some respects, however: Sargeant is a social and cultural historian of imperial Russia, more allied in argument and method with Weber and Johnson, and interested in the ways music is used to elaborate class identity. …
In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound rec... more In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound recording contributed to notions of audientic selfhood in late imperial Russia. Public discussions about celebrities like the Bol'shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin helped forge understandings of sincerity and spoke to contemporary concerns regarding the relationship between fame and artifice, the public persona and the inner self. Fishzon suggests that the emergent recording industry penetrated and altered everyday emotional experience, the arena of work, and the organization of leisure, linking gramophonic discourses to celebrity culture and its rhetoric of authenticity and sincerity. In part because Russian audio magazines and gramophone manufacturers heavily promoted celebrity opera recordings, sonic fidelity was equated with the capacity of the recorded voice to convey “sincerity,” understood, in turn, as the announcement of ardent feelings. Fan letters to Shaliapin and Ivan Ershov ...
Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema , declares Masha Salazkina in her bold intr... more Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema , declares Masha Salazkina in her bold introduction, is a collection of essays that seeks to bring the “sonic turn” to Russian and Soviet cinema (as its much criticized “logocentrism” has been reproduced unwittingly in scholarship) and to foster an overdue dialogue between the latter and sound studies (pp. 1–3). It is important not to conflate completely these distinct but intimately related aims.
At the height of his fame, Fedor Shaliapin received a letter from a certain Vera. She did not kno... more At the height of his fame, Fedor Shaliapin received a letter from a certain Vera. She did not know Shaliapin personally and began by explaining her reasons for composing what she described as a “reproof.” Vera had spotted Shaliapin by chance at a railway station, and after scrutinizing the man she called “the pride and glory of Russia” was prompted to write to him. Vera declared that she was “somewhat interested in the arts, although [she] had not attended the theater since [her] youth.”1 The tone of the letter was at moments impassioned and peremptory and at others apologetic and demure. The “reproof” consisted of a critical examination of Shaliapin’s physique and recommendation about how he might manipulate it to better suit the role of Mephistopheles: I saw your Mephistopheles in the journals and it struck me that one cannot detect on your hands strained tendons or muscles and, in general, the tension that ought to be visible in a powerful demonic figure. If your legs are not lean enough then you should cover them with your cloak, otherwise the incarnation of Mephistopheles suffers due to the sleekness of your tights. To what extent this can be seen from the stage I do not know. I repeat that I am judging only from photographs. I wanted you to provide a more truthful portrait, even in the details, and that is the only reason I am giving you my opinion. I believe that a truly Russian soul will not be insulted by a sincere reproof perhaps by an ignorant person in artistic matters but one who loves and senses art in all its manifestations.2
Authenticity and sincerity have been obsessions in the West since the late eighteenth century. No... more Authenticity and sincerity have been obsessions in the West since the late eighteenth century. Now, perhaps more than ever, mass media draws attention to the authenticity of politicians and other famous individuals (or, sometimes cynically, to how well they have been able to affect it). Historians have attributed the ascendancy of authenticity and sincerity to Enlightenment and romantic ideas—to what can be called, succinctly, the emergence of the individual as the most important repository of morality.1 Others have traced the preoccupation with authenticity specifically to capitalism and the advent of mechanical reproduction. As Walter Benjamin noted decades ago, issues of authenticity could gain widespread currency only when copies and reproduced commodities began to permeate everyday life.2 Sociologists like Rojek have complicated the discussion by turning our attention to celebrity culture as an important vehicle for both consumer desire and discourses of sincerity and authentic selfhood. They have argued that celebrities, by periodically falling from grace or giving us a glimpse of their imperfect everyday selves, perform authenticity itself and testify to the power of the human personality.3
On October 27, 1872, Savva and Liza Mamontov arrived in Rome, their three children and nanny in t... more On October 27, 1872, Savva and Liza Mamontov arrived in Rome, their three children and nanny in tow, planning to stay for seven months. While Savva periodically returned to Russia to oversee railroad construction, Liza remained in a rented villa through late May, tending to their ailing son Andrei and carousing with a circle of Russian expatriates. The couple would play a key role in the transformation of Russian opera 13 years later, when the Imperial Theaters dissolved their monopoly (1882) and private enterprises appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Savva Ivanovich Mamontov, a railway magnate and prominent arts patron, founded, financed, and directed the influential Moscow Private Opera (1885–87; 1896–99). Elizaveta Grigor’evna Sapozhnikova Mamontova (1847–1908) organized arts and crafts workshops at Abramtsevo, the family summer residence and art colony just north of Moscow. Though not directly involved in Savva’s opera enterprise, she provided the inspiration for many of its productions, encouraging the artists he employed to study and revive Russian peasant architecture and handicrafts, and create murals and sets based on folklore themes.
Colleen McQuillen’s Modernist Masquerade : Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costume joins a growin... more Colleen McQuillen’s Modernist Masquerade : Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costume joins a growing body of work on the Russian fin‑de‑siecle and the Silver Age that is positioned in the interstices of history and literature, contributing to and troubling both disciplines. Cultural histories like Louise McReynolds’ Russia at Play : Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (2003), Roshanna P. Sylvester’s Tales of Old Odessa : Crimes and Civility in a City of Thieves (2005), and Mark D. ...
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As in his previous books, Moss writes courageously, revealing his own periodic struggles with smugness and easy solutions – moments when he, unable to analyze or gather himself – lashed out, fled, and recovered with great difficulty. In a particularly compelling chapter, Moss describes his experience of terror, shame, and rage when a violent patient threatens to hit him in the face and leaves the consulting room shouting “faggot!” The epithet later erupts in Moss as he waits on a subway platform next to an effeminate man and resounds in the reader as Moss parses his identifications and disidentifications, both with the ostensibly gay stranger and with physical and psychic vulnerability.
In the chapter, “On thinking and not being able to think,” Moss reflects on what happens when he observes objects, specifically performance art and documentary photographs, and endures an unexpected collapse of the frame, a sudden loss of legibility. Moss recounts such a disintegration while viewing photos of Abu Ghraib, and attributes it not to the photos’ disturbing subject matter but to their uncanny registering of his look: when the spectator’s gaze appears within the framed spectacle his subjectivity is obliterated. Captured by the photograph, losing his privileged perspective and link to other audience members, Moss is momentarily rendered an object. Without a stable “I” he is unable to interpret. He concludes that the capacity to create a new frame and thereby regain distance depends on the re-establishment of a transferential “we” -- a refinding of one’s place among an expanded and transformed community of viewers and readers.
The book’s most original and moving chapter, “I and You,” is the result of a yearlong collection of patients’ utterances. Moss wrote down one sentence from every session, collated each day’s lines, and published them in abridged form in At War With the Obvious (all 154 days are presented in a separate book). Together they constitute a dirge, a mournful cry made no less searing by its unstable and acousmatic authorship.
In 1977, after a biopsy of a tumor in her right breast, Audre Lorde fantasized about lopping off the agent of her destruction like “a she-wolf chewing off a paw caught in a trap” (56). In the manner of a Kleinian infant, she directed her rage at the persecutory breast that betrayed her (once again) and ceased being her own. Lorde turned her poetry and personal survival into political acts of reparation, linking the ravages of cancer to racial and sexual injury and offering herself to queer communities of color as an object of introjection and identification.
In 1992, on the anniversary of her breast cancer diagnosis, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was en route to yet another academic lecture. She sat in a plane on a runway in frigid Toronto watching Pepto-Bismol-pink anti-icing fluid run down the window beside her. Seized by nauseating horror, she recalled the bloody lymphatic discharge draining from her body in the weeks following her mastectomy. In 1996, after imaging revealed a spinal metastasis that would ultimately kill her, Sedgwick emerged as a patient-teacher in her polyphonic A Dialogue on Love (1999), an account of a psychodynamic treatment intermixed with her poetry and her therapist’s notes. Through autobiographically inflected theoretical writings and the advice column, “Off My Chest,” Sedgwick engaged in what she called good pedagogy, instructing readers about love and mourning in the “prognosis time” of incremental bodily loss.
Lana Lin brings together the stories of Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick, as well as insights from her own struggle with breast cancer in the tour de force, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham University Press, 2017). With her three transferential figures, Lin explores what it means to loosen one’s grip on objects, to live with self-estrangement and threats to bodily integrity, and to understand loss as the maintenance of relationality. As cancer fragments and changes one’s relationship to time, it becomes a catalyst for reparation, invention, and love.
Sex for Zupančič is an ontological problem, co-extensive with a disturbance in reality, a signifying gap and structural impediment. Sex is attached to that which cannot be fully known or embodied and is therefore directly related to the unconscious. Subjectivity emerges from within the fault entailed in signification, as does surplus enjoyment. Important here, too, is the well-worn notion, but with a twist, that there is no reality prior or external to discourse. Zupančič reminds us that nature is not a pure and full presence before the arrival of the human but an object produced by and for science. The Real is an effect of language: the signifier invades the signified and alters it from within. Finally, and perhaps most mind-blowingly, the human in her formulation is not that which is merely in excess of the animal (dressing it up in language and culture, let’s say) but, rather, an unfinished and dysfunctional dimension: humanity as a veil that simultaneously points and gives form to animal’s ontological incompleteness.
We cover these complex ideas in the interview, as well as other pressing matters: the disappearance of the hysteric, the desert of the post-oedipal (the only one who managed to escape the Oedipus Complex, Lacan noted, was Oedipus himself), and the status of love at the end of analysis.
Yet, historically, psychoanalysts and institutional psychoanalysis have been tone-deaf to transgender desire. Freudians have linked transsexuality to perversion and borderline disorders. Lacanians have deemed transgender expression an indicator of psychosis. Such pathologization has failed transgender subjects, asserts Patricia Gherovici, in her brilliant and provocative Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). Despite availing themselves of various forms of talk therapy, trans patients remain wary of psychoanalytic treatments and the suicide attempt rate in the trans population is astonishingly high.
Gherovici argues persuasively that psychoanalysis and the trans community have much to offer one another and that Lacan’s sinthome and sexuation formulae serve as especially productive, nonpathologizing frameworks for such a dialogue. She demonstrates how transgender discourse intervenes in and transforms key Lacanian concepts and maintains that psychoanalytic listening can alleviate the anguish felt by transgender subjects, helping them to live. When I press her on this point, inquiring how analysts might attend to the singularity of each case and still manage to generalize about the category of transgender experience, Gherovici, in an adroit dialectical maneuver, finds the universal in the particular. Transgender expression, she explains, offers novel ways of thinking about subjects not wholly dependent on phallic signification and disrupts the binary logic imposed by the phallus as universal signifier. Trans patients’ particular struggles with gendered embodiment and the symbolization of sex bring to light the trouble inherent in taking ownership of the body for all speaking beings. Covering a vast conceptual and evidentiary terrain, Gherovici moves from the public sphere to the clinic to show how increasing transgender visibility and activism paradoxically subvert identitarian claims, making explicit the constitutive elements and continual failures of Man and Woman.
By Anna Fishzon
While I was in college, undergrads reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes paraded on gothic quads with flannel armor, black-rimmed glasses, messenger bags, and paperback copies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mired in misinterpretation, budding philosophers of various political stripes dreamed of amoral Ubermenschian architects expressing “will to power” through design of phallic buildings and superior socialities. This memory haunted me years later while teaching The Genealogy of Morals to first-year college students but was finally vanquished by Jared Russell’s excellent Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017).
Clinicians familiar with stereotypical and distorted readings of Nietzsche (almost as common as those of Freud) will be surprised and invigorated by Russell’s book, which not only synthesizes philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, but also stages a highly productive encounter between academic work and the practice of psychoanalysis. Each chapter focuses on a distinct psychoanalytic orientation and contains a clinical vignette illustrating the relevance of Nietzsche’s ideas. With rigor and openness, each chapter asks: what does Nietzsche offer the clinic?
Russell discusses Nietzschean notions like perspectivism, will to power, and ressentiment, as well as the philosopher’s critiques of metaphysics, commercial culture, authoritarianism, and morality. He then demonstrates the ways Nietzsche’s thought augments and refines psychoanalytic concepts: the Freudian drive, Helene Deutsch’s “as-if personality,” Alan Bass’s "concreteness," Melanie Klein’s envy and projective identification, Winnicottian play, and Lacan’s late teachings on jouissance and the real unconscious. But perhaps the most original aspect of the book resides in Russell’s ability to put Nietzsche into dialogue with specific elements of analytic clinical practice: interpretation, free association and evenly suspended attention, and knowledge and truth as they emerge for each analysand.
As in his previous books, Moss writes courageously, revealing his own periodic struggles with smugness and easy solutions – moments when he, unable to analyze or gather himself – lashed out, fled, and recovered with great difficulty. In a particularly compelling chapter, Moss describes his experience of terror, shame, and rage when a violent patient threatens to hit him in the face and leaves the consulting room shouting “faggot!” The epithet later erupts in Moss as he waits on a subway platform next to an effeminate man and resounds in the reader as Moss parses his identifications and disidentifications, both with the ostensibly gay stranger and with physical and psychic vulnerability.
In the chapter, “On thinking and not being able to think,” Moss reflects on what happens when he observes objects, specifically performance art and documentary photographs, and endures an unexpected collapse of the frame, a sudden loss of legibility. Moss recounts such a disintegration while viewing photos of Abu Ghraib, and attributes it not to the photos’ disturbing subject matter but to their uncanny registering of his look: when the spectator’s gaze appears within the framed spectacle his subjectivity is obliterated. Captured by the photograph, losing his privileged perspective and link to other audience members, Moss is momentarily rendered an object. Without a stable “I” he is unable to interpret. He concludes that the capacity to create a new frame and thereby regain distance depends on the re-establishment of a transferential “we” -- a refinding of one’s place among an expanded and transformed community of viewers and readers.
The book’s most original and moving chapter, “I and You,” is the result of a yearlong collection of patients’ utterances. Moss wrote down one sentence from every session, collated each day’s lines, and published them in abridged form in At War With the Obvious (all 154 days are presented in a separate book). Together they constitute a dirge, a mournful cry made no less searing by its unstable and acousmatic authorship.
In 1977, after a biopsy of a tumor in her right breast, Audre Lorde fantasized about lopping off the agent of her destruction like “a she-wolf chewing off a paw caught in a trap” (56). In the manner of a Kleinian infant, she directed her rage at the persecutory breast that betrayed her (once again) and ceased being her own. Lorde turned her poetry and personal survival into political acts of reparation, linking the ravages of cancer to racial and sexual injury and offering herself to queer communities of color as an object of introjection and identification.
In 1992, on the anniversary of her breast cancer diagnosis, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was en route to yet another academic lecture. She sat in a plane on a runway in frigid Toronto watching Pepto-Bismol-pink anti-icing fluid run down the window beside her. Seized by nauseating horror, she recalled the bloody lymphatic discharge draining from her body in the weeks following her mastectomy. In 1996, after imaging revealed a spinal metastasis that would ultimately kill her, Sedgwick emerged as a patient-teacher in her polyphonic A Dialogue on Love (1999), an account of a psychodynamic treatment intermixed with her poetry and her therapist’s notes. Through autobiographically inflected theoretical writings and the advice column, “Off My Chest,” Sedgwick engaged in what she called good pedagogy, instructing readers about love and mourning in the “prognosis time” of incremental bodily loss.
Lana Lin brings together the stories of Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick, as well as insights from her own struggle with breast cancer in the tour de force, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham University Press, 2017). With her three transferential figures, Lin explores what it means to loosen one’s grip on objects, to live with self-estrangement and threats to bodily integrity, and to understand loss as the maintenance of relationality. As cancer fragments and changes one’s relationship to time, it becomes a catalyst for reparation, invention, and love.
Sex for Zupančič is an ontological problem, co-extensive with a disturbance in reality, a signifying gap and structural impediment. Sex is attached to that which cannot be fully known or embodied and is therefore directly related to the unconscious. Subjectivity emerges from within the fault entailed in signification, as does surplus enjoyment. Important here, too, is the well-worn notion, but with a twist, that there is no reality prior or external to discourse. Zupančič reminds us that nature is not a pure and full presence before the arrival of the human but an object produced by and for science. The Real is an effect of language: the signifier invades the signified and alters it from within. Finally, and perhaps most mind-blowingly, the human in her formulation is not that which is merely in excess of the animal (dressing it up in language and culture, let’s say) but, rather, an unfinished and dysfunctional dimension: humanity as a veil that simultaneously points and gives form to animal’s ontological incompleteness.
We cover these complex ideas in the interview, as well as other pressing matters: the disappearance of the hysteric, the desert of the post-oedipal (the only one who managed to escape the Oedipus Complex, Lacan noted, was Oedipus himself), and the status of love at the end of analysis.
Yet, historically, psychoanalysts and institutional psychoanalysis have been tone-deaf to transgender desire. Freudians have linked transsexuality to perversion and borderline disorders. Lacanians have deemed transgender expression an indicator of psychosis. Such pathologization has failed transgender subjects, asserts Patricia Gherovici, in her brilliant and provocative Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). Despite availing themselves of various forms of talk therapy, trans patients remain wary of psychoanalytic treatments and the suicide attempt rate in the trans population is astonishingly high.
Gherovici argues persuasively that psychoanalysis and the trans community have much to offer one another and that Lacan’s sinthome and sexuation formulae serve as especially productive, nonpathologizing frameworks for such a dialogue. She demonstrates how transgender discourse intervenes in and transforms key Lacanian concepts and maintains that psychoanalytic listening can alleviate the anguish felt by transgender subjects, helping them to live. When I press her on this point, inquiring how analysts might attend to the singularity of each case and still manage to generalize about the category of transgender experience, Gherovici, in an adroit dialectical maneuver, finds the universal in the particular. Transgender expression, she explains, offers novel ways of thinking about subjects not wholly dependent on phallic signification and disrupts the binary logic imposed by the phallus as universal signifier. Trans patients’ particular struggles with gendered embodiment and the symbolization of sex bring to light the trouble inherent in taking ownership of the body for all speaking beings. Covering a vast conceptual and evidentiary terrain, Gherovici moves from the public sphere to the clinic to show how increasing transgender visibility and activism paradoxically subvert identitarian claims, making explicit the constitutive elements and continual failures of Man and Woman.
By Anna Fishzon
While I was in college, undergrads reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes paraded on gothic quads with flannel armor, black-rimmed glasses, messenger bags, and paperback copies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mired in misinterpretation, budding philosophers of various political stripes dreamed of amoral Ubermenschian architects expressing “will to power” through design of phallic buildings and superior socialities. This memory haunted me years later while teaching The Genealogy of Morals to first-year college students but was finally vanquished by Jared Russell’s excellent Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017).
Clinicians familiar with stereotypical and distorted readings of Nietzsche (almost as common as those of Freud) will be surprised and invigorated by Russell’s book, which not only synthesizes philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, but also stages a highly productive encounter between academic work and the practice of psychoanalysis. Each chapter focuses on a distinct psychoanalytic orientation and contains a clinical vignette illustrating the relevance of Nietzsche’s ideas. With rigor and openness, each chapter asks: what does Nietzsche offer the clinic?
Russell discusses Nietzschean notions like perspectivism, will to power, and ressentiment, as well as the philosopher’s critiques of metaphysics, commercial culture, authoritarianism, and morality. He then demonstrates the ways Nietzsche’s thought augments and refines psychoanalytic concepts: the Freudian drive, Helene Deutsch’s “as-if personality,” Alan Bass’s "concreteness," Melanie Klein’s envy and projective identification, Winnicottian play, and Lacan’s late teachings on jouissance and the real unconscious. But perhaps the most original aspect of the book resides in Russell’s ability to put Nietzsche into dialogue with specific elements of analytic clinical practice: interpretation, free association and evenly suspended attention, and knowledge and truth as they emerge for each analysand.
Contributors to the issue, as well as other psychoanalytic candidates and early-career clinicians, will discuss some of the themes brought up in Issue 7 relating to questions of psychoanalytic training and institutional psychoanalysis: transference within the institute, matters of pedagogy, the transmission of psychoanalysis, the evaluation of candidates, the role of the state in psychoanalytic training, the training analysis and its place in the birth of an analyst. Most broadly, we hope to provide an arena for candidates and early-career clinicians to theorize the candidate's position, as well as to articulate something of the problem represented by the speaking candidate.
EVENT: The Candidate, or The Candidate, Barred
Welcoming Remarks
Gav Reisner, PhD, National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP)
Introduction
Olga Poznansky, PhD, NPAP
Panel Participants
Karen Dougherty, MA, RP, Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis (TIP)
Justine Duhr, MFA, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP)
Anna Fishzon, PhD, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR)
Kerry Moore, PhD, Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS)
Sam Semper, PhD, IPTAR
Marcus Silverman, MA, LP, Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS)
Monroe Street, MA, Washington Square Institute (WSI)
Emma Lieber, PhD, NPAP, moderator
LOCATION: NPAP, 40 W. 13th Street
DATE AND TIME: Saturday, October 14, 2017, 2-4pm
We look forward to a stimulating exchange among candidates from different institutes and hope you will take part in the conversation.
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THE CANDIDATE JOURNAL is a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to exploring psychoanalysis across generations, institutes, and theories. Its goal is to foster a vibrant psychoanalytic community and to work collaboratively to promote ongoing conversation about psychoanalysis in its many varieties.
Please join us for a performance based on the post-election dreams collected and curated online by The Candidate Journal. The performance will feature dream readers reciting the 35 collected dreams while the texts of the dreams are projected behind the readers in slideshow format. Projected as well will be the visual artworks, also depicting dreams that were submitted to the journal. The readings will be interspersed with dance and music. Artwork by several of the artists participating in the project will be displayed -- both new works and the works originally submitted.
The performance will be followed by an open mic. Audience members will be invited to share their own post-election dreams and engage in on-the-spot dream analysis.
When it comes to transgender identities, what kind of a controversy are we dealing with? On the one hand, there are those who view the gender binary of female/male as inherently repressive. Psychoanalysis, from this perspective, should be on the side of innumerable subversive gender performances, in which any norm related to gender or sexuality is resoundingly questioned in the service of some kind of transformative overcoming. On the other hand, there are those who argue that transgender phenomena are inevitably symptomatic manifestations of psychopathology, usually of the more severe types such as borderline, psychotic or perverse. The transgender individual, from this perspective, would be conceptualized in terms of the power of unconscious, omnipotent fantasy to disavow the difference between the sexes—a disavowal that sometimes involves a demand for surgical interventions.
Our workshop aims to elaborate upon some of the coordinates of this controversy while at the same time to seek ways to move beyond it. Together we will search for more analytically nuanced responses to the theoretical and clinical difficulties that analysts face in their attempts to understand and help their transgender patients.
What Are Perversions?
Sexuality, Ethics, and Psychoanalysis
(Karnac, 2016)
Dr. Benvenuto will be joined by panelists from IPTAR, The Candidate Journal and
Das Unbehagen: Drs. Aleksandra Wagner, Sam Semper, Emma Lieber, and Anna Fishzon
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2016
8:00-10:00pm
Arrive early and join us for a wine and cheese reception at 7:30pm
IPTAR Conference Room, 1651 Third Avenue, suite 205 (between 92nd and 93rd streets)
This event is free and open to all
REGISTER at IPTAR.ORG
What Are Perversions? questions above all what we mean when we use the term “perversion.” Are we dealing with a sexological classification, a mental disturbance, an ethical deviation, a hedonistic style, or a historical-cultural artifact? The book retraces some of the fundamental stages in the field of psychoanalytic thought — from Freud to Masud Khan, Stoller and Lacan — and propose an original approach: that “paraphilias” today are taken as an ethical failure of the sexual relationship with the other. The perversions signal a specific relationship with the other, who is treated not simply as a sexual object, but someone whose subjectivity is ably exploited precisely in order to get a perverse pleasure. Acts, if considered perverse, are understood as a metaphorical re-edition of a trauma, above all sexual, in which the subject (as a child) suffered the bitter experience of exclusion or jealousy. The book articulates a heterodox hypothesis by drawing on clinical cases, from both the author’s own analytic practice and those of others; but it also draw on cinema, historical episodes, social psychology experiments (for example, Stanley Milgram’s experiment), stories and novels, and philosophical works. The final appendix delves more deeply into Freud’s theory of masochism.
Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst and a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome. He is editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and member of the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Discourse (PSYAD). He has contributed to Lettre Internationale, Texte, Journal for Lacanian Studies, L’évolution psychiatrique, American Imago, and Telos. Among his most recent books in Italian: Lacan, oggi [Lacan, Today] (Mimesis, 2014).
In the polemical No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman uses psychoanalysis to draw attention to the figural Child (as opposed to living children) at the heart of contemporary politics — the synonym and symptom of the political, or the Symbolic. The Child, according to Edelman, is the antiqueer: the phantasmatic object that promises Imaginary wholeness and enables discursive unity by screening out the unreachable thing, or disavowed constitutive lack in the heteronormative order. Edelman exhorts queers to turn away from the politics of “reproductive futurism” — the Child in the name and for the protection of which we perpetually are encouraged to sacrifice the present. He argues that such a politics always excludes the queer, indeed is constituted by the queer’s abjection. Edelman tells queer theorists and all outcasts to fuck Little Orphan Annie and the wide beckoning eyes of Tiny Tim; and also to fuck the ultimately impossible liberal queer variant of reproductive futurism: same-sex marriage, adoption, and so on. Instead, Edelman challenges queers to attempt to occupy the politically unthinkable position assigned to them by the social order (a position they cannot, by definition, escape anyway) in order to undo it from within – to embrace negation, jouissance, and the ruthless work of the death drive.
Since the appearance of Edelman’s book in 2004, the unthinkable has happened. The queer child has become visible in contemporary popular culture and political debate not as a scare image to be feared by “normal” adults or a pathological adolescent to be cured by therapists, but a positively cathected victim: the target of homophobic bullying at school; the suicidal teen needing support and recognition; the beneficiary of transnational adoption or sex reassignment surgery afforded by understanding parents; the one for whom it eventually gets better. Alongside and perhaps in reaction to Edelman’s controversial intervention, and also in response to the return of the repressed queer child in public discourse, queer theorists have begun to probe the field of cultural production aimed at children in order to create fairy tales of political futures, new political imaginaries, feelings of hope, potentiality, freedom, experimentation, wonder, and enchantment. Some in queer studies are treating the affective field in which the child is ensconced as rife with the kind of imaginative plasticity that makes possible the envisioning of political and social alternatives.
Despite Edelman’s call for the queer refusal of the Child and the entire symbolic order it signifies, queer theory seems unable to let the child go, or to successfully mourn its loss. The child has become that thing queer theorists cannot not talk about. In fact, queer studies, psychoanalysis, the history of childhood, and the politics of the Child are increasingly converging. Kathryn Stockton, for one, explores childhood as a queer, nonlinear time of “sideways growth” – an elastic temporality that permits children not simply to “grow up” in one vertical continuous movement, but to expand horizontally, incorporating sensations, emotional connections and experiences (masochistic scenes, violent impulses and seductions, for example) later disavowed by the retroactively conceived, figural Child. She not only asks how gay children play with the asynchronicity of their queer, publically impossible and deferred identity, but also looks at the undeniable strangeness of all children. Stockton takes apart the implied whiteness and middle-class privilege even of the polymorphously perverse and onanistically inclined psychoanalytic child (the child queered by Freud) to illuminate other models of “dangerous children”: the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by money, the grown homosexual seen as a child, and the gay child made ghostly, unavailable to itself, by legal and parental misrecognition. As queer theorist Jasbir Puar points out, gay children are promised that they will “get more normal” in adulthood – succeed financially, find acceptance, love, community, family, and so on. But, in the smart words of one blogger, “it gets better a lot sooner if you are white, cisgendered, and middle-class.”
This workshop brings together a group of scholars and clinicians working at the intersections of childhood studies, psychoanalysis, psychology, pedagogy, and queer theory in order to have a conversation about queer children and the queerness of childhood. It seeks to investigate the child as a critical tool, a political trope, an affective field, a site of cultural production and consumption, a psychoanalytic subject, and a living, breathing historical personage to whom we are ethically beholden: a figure for both queer political possibility (Jack Halberstam) and political or symbolic death (Edelman). Participants were asked to explore questions such as: Who is the queer child and why does it continue to command the attention of queer theorists and psychoanalysts? What is queer about childhood? What is childish about the queer and queer theory? Why does queer studies cathect the childlike and the infantile? How do its libidinal interests dovetail with those of psychoanalytic theory and practice? When the child is shorn of its bourgeois whiteness and denied its heterosexuality, does it still require our protection, and if so, what kind? When the queer child grows publically, nonlinearly, what do we gain? New collectivities formed around failure? Alternate temporalities offering hope, and, paradoxically, success and futurity, i.e. a new normativity? Finally, if we keep putting the child at the center of our (anti) politics, how can we remain critical of the social conditions and symbolic effects of this investment? What does the concept of the queer child do to notions of childhood? What does it mean for the queer to “fuck the figural Child” (Edelman) when the gay child is already fucked, in suicidal crisis? How can we attend to the sideways growth of all children?