Theory
The Psychoanalysis to Come
What form will the psychoanalysis to come take? Will it remain entangled, as it were, with private property and psychic forms of enclosure, lingering in an affective core of pain, alienation, and despair? Or will it become, as Emma Goldman suggests, “nothing less than an opportunity for human beings to recover their wholeness—to exorcise their most profound terrors, to accept their bodies, to regain access to the full range of their emotions”? I believe like Goldman that analysis can bring us to a place of radical love and the attendant joy that follows.
As theoretician and clinician, I approach psychoanalysis as both a mode of thought and a discipline. With the intent of gaining historical perspective on theories of subjectivity and their changing relation to ownership and possession, I read the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir as laying the groundwork for the emergence of psychoanalysis; the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as a fundamental underpinning of the violent separation of self and other; and Nietzsche’s provocative conceptualization of repression as the imprisonment of “man’s instinct for freedom” as a starting point for re-thinking intersubjectivity and desire. My work breaks with the Cartesian conceptualization of the self as enclosed and separate from the world, and interrogates the relationship between personhood and property in classic psychoanalytic texts by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and others. Finally, by turning to contemporary thinkers and analysts like Christopher Bollas, Esmé Weijun Wang, Angela Garcia, and Paul Brodwin, I aim to imagine the contours of new forms of subjectivity and sociality, unencumbered by private property and its material and psychic forms of enclosure.
In taking up the call to think together the psychological and the political, I seek to discover how the symptoms and pathologies of modern life—estrangement, negativized desire, and money-love—might be addressed by the psychoanalysis to come. How can we think personhood in relation to zones of social abandonment, outside private property and the law, ex-human and socially dead? How can social death be collectively refused? And finally, if the relation itself—so central to intersubjectivity and desire—has been disfigured by property and possession, how could it become otherwise?