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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. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, The Candidate Journal, Russian Literature Journal, Slavic and East European Journal, Laboratorium, and other academic publications. She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology
Rendering Unconscious episode 274. Dr. M.E. O'Brien joins Rendering Unconscious to discuss her new book Family Abolition: Capitalism & the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023). https://amzn.to/48oNfFL Dr. O'Brien received her MSW from Hunter College, CUNY, and completed her PhD in Sociology at NYU. After two years in psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), she is now enrolled in psychoanalytic studies at a newly established clinic, Pulsion. As well as her clinical practice, she spent years coordinating the NYC Trans Oral History Project, organizing with communities impacted by HIV and AIDS, and on the frontlines of social justice advocacy. https://usqtherapy.org/michelle-obrien/ Follow her on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/genderhorizon/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/genderhorizon Support M.E. O'Brien at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/meobrien This episode available to view at YouTube: https://youtu.be/R75vSGYRnlM?si=RZHwCY52hiXJfDzX Check out previous episodes: RU210: M.E. O'BRIEN & EMAN ABDALHADI ON EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK COMMUNE, 2052–2072 RU73: NYC TRANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT WITH MICHELLE O'BRIEN & NICO FUENTES Support the podcast at our Patreon where we post exclusive content every week, as well as unreleased material and works in progress, and we also have a Discord server: https://www.patreon.com/vanessa23carl We also have a Substack where weekly content is posted: https://vanessa23carl.substack.com Rendering Unconscious is a labor of love and receives no funding from outside sources. The only support comes from our Patreon community. Please join us there to support the podcast. Your support is HUGELY appreciated! Rendering Unconscious Podcast is hosted by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, a psychoanalyst based in Sweden, who works with people internationally: http://www.drvanessasinclair.net Follow Dr. Vanessa Sinclair on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rawsin_/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rawsin_ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drvanessasinclair23 Visit the main website for more information and links to everything: http://www.renderingunconscious.org Many thanks to Carl Abrahamsson, who created the intro and outro music for Rendering Unconscious podcast. https://www.carlabrahamsson.com His publishing company is Trapart Books, Films and Editions. https://store.trapart.net Check out his indie record label Highbrow Lowlife at Bandcamp: https://highbrowlowlife.bandcamp.com Follow him at: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaAbrahamsson Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carl.abrahamsson/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@carlabrahamsson YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@carlabrahamsson23 The song at the end of the episode is “I've changed my mind” from the brand new album “Disturbance” by Vanessa Sinclair and Pete Murphy. Available at Pete Murphy's Bandcamp Page. https://petemurphy.bandcamp.com Our music is also available at Spotify and other streaming services. https://open.spotify.com/artist/3xKEE2NPGatImt46OgaemY?si=nqv_tOLtQd2I_3P_WHdKCQ Image: book cover
Tonya Lester helps you if you're feeling confused, overwhelmed or lazy Episode 2934: Feeling Confused, Overwhelmed, or Lazy? by Tonya Lester on Pursuing Your Dreams and Getting Unstuck Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/feeling-confused-overwhelmed-or-lazy Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalLivingDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester helps you if you're feeling confused, overwhelmed or lazy Episode 2934: Feeling Confused, Overwhelmed, or Lazy? by Tonya Lester on Pursuing Your Dreams and Getting Unstuck Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/feeling-confused-overwhelmed-or-lazy Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalLivingDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester helps you if you're feeling confused, overwhelmed or lazy Episode 2934: Feeling Confused, Overwhelmed, or Lazy? by Tonya Lester on Pursuing Your Dreams and Getting Unstuck Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/feeling-confused-overwhelmed-or-lazy Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalLivingDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester shares productivity tips for busy people Episode 1105: Productivity Tips: Ideas For People With Too Many Things to Do by Tonya Lester on Creating More Time For Yourself Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/productivity-tips-for-poeple-with-more-than-one-things-to-do Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalStartUpDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester shares productivity tips for busy people Episode 1105: Productivity Tips: Ideas For People With Too Many Things to Do by Tonya Lester on Creating More Time For Yourself Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/productivity-tips-for-poeple-with-more-than-one-things-to-do Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalStartUpDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about why marriage is a lousy deal for women Episode 1867: Is Marriage a Lousy Deal for Women? by Tonya Lester on Differences Between Men and Women Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/is-marriage-a-lousy-deal-for-women Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about time management Episode 2828: A Personal Perspective on Time Management by Tonya Lester on Making More Time For Yourself Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/a-personal-perspective-on-time-management Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalLivingDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about time management Episode 2828: A Personal Perspective on Time Management by Tonya Lester on Making More Time For Yourself Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/a-personal-perspective-on-time-management Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalLivingDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about time management Episode 2828: A Personal Perspective on Time Management by Tonya Lester on Making More Time For Yourself Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/a-personal-perspective-on-time-management Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalLivingDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about what questions you should ask yourself before getting married Episode 1783: Time For Marriage? Ask These Three Questions First by Tonya Lester on Preparing to Get Married Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/should-we-get-married Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about speaking up and asserting yourself Episode 1748: Is It Worth It to Speak Up and Assert Yourself? by Tonya Lester Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/is-it-worth-it-to-speak-up-and-assert-yourself Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about what to do when your partner isn't sure they want a future with you. This is part 2 of 2. Episode 1704: [Part 2] When Your Partner Isn't Sure They Want a Future With You by Tonya Lester Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog//when-your-partner-isnt-sure-they-want-a-future-with-you Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about what to do when your partner isn't sure they want a future with you. This is part 1 of 2. Episode 1703: [Part 1] When Your Partner Isn't Sure They Want a Future With You by Tonya Lester Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog//when-your-partner-isnt-sure-they-want-a-future-with-you Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester talks about how to set boundaries with your parents Episode 1645: How to Set Boundaries With Your Parents by Tonya Lester Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/how-to-set-boundaries-with-your-parents Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester tells you when it's time to leave a relationship Episode 1628: When Is It Time to Leave a Relationship? by Tonya Lester Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/when-is-it-time-to-leave-a-relationship Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonya Lester compares love and attachment Episode 1602: Love Vs. Attachment by Tonya Lester Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Social Work. Her post-graduate training includes a fellowship at Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research (IPTAR) and supervised practice in Psychodynamic Therapy under Drs. C.E. Robins and John Broughton. She completed training in IFS with Dick Schwartz, Nancy Sowell, and Pam Krause. Her training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was with John Forsyth, Ph.D. She studied RLT with its creator, Terry Real. The original post is located here: https://www.tonyalester.com/blog/love-vs-attachment Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalRelationshipsDailyMarriageParenting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carli and Laura interview Carlos Padrón, licensed psychoanalyst. Our conversation today was split into two episodes (#30 and #31). In this episode, we begin to discuss the ethics of care within psychoanalysis, what care means, and how we might use or misuse empathy in the consulting room with our patients. We also discuss the radial use of silence, contemplative stillness, and attentive listening. We further explore how our use of empathy might cut off, or foreclose, possibilities with that patient and within the intersubjective space. Carlos is a licensed psychoanalyst and an advanced candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). He originally studied philosophy in Venezuela, then earned an MA in philosophy with a concentration in psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research, and finally an MPhil in Latin American literature at New York University. He has written and presented on the intersections between philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and Latin American Thought. He was a teaching fellow at NYU, a faculty member at John Jay College (CUNY), the Contemporary Freudian Society, and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. Carlos is currently a faculty member at IPTAR where he co-teaches a class on clinical aspects of diversity. He also teaches a Seminar on Psychodynamic Theory at the Silberman School of Social Work in Hunter College (MSW). Carlos participated in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, a film on working psychoanalytically with underprivileged Latinx patients in the U.S., and has given talks and published on this topic. Lately, he published an essay in the edited volume Psychoanalysis in the Barrios (Routledge, 2019), has an essay on whiteness and the “good white” in a special edition of Division Review #22 dedicated to COVID-19 and racism, and was invited to write an essay for a special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology tentatively titled Notes from a Pandemic: Reflections from 19 Clinicians on the Year of COVID-19. Finally, Carlos wrote an excellent piece for Stillpoint Magazine, called Totemizing the Taboo, or Seizing the Fortress of Whiteness. Carlos has worked psychoanalytically in different settings and is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program where he supervises PhD Psychology students. You can find Carlos on Instagram. You can find us on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (the neglected account) Carlos was one of our first guests on the podcast - his first interview can be found on Episode 5. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/unconventionaldyad/support
Carli and Laura interview Carlos Padrón, psychoanalyst. Topics of discussion include the immigrant identity; misattunements and mistakes in and outside the frame of therapy; the importance of the "marginal" and the "other" in psychoanalysis; and the flip-side of identity politics. Carlos Padrón is a Latinx licensed psychoanalyst and an advanced candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). He originally studied philosophy in Venezuela, then earned an MA in philosophy with a concentration in psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research, and finally an MPhil in Latin American literature at New York University. He has written and presented on the intersections between philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and Latin American Thought. He was a teaching fellow at NYU, a faculty member at John Jay College (CUNY), the Contemporary Freudian Society, and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. Carlos is currently a faculty member at IPTAR where he co-teaches a class on clinical aspects of diversity. He also teaches a Seminar on Psychodynamic Theory at the Silberman School of Social Work in Hunter College (MSW). Carlos participated in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, a film on working psychoanalytically with underprivileged Latinx patients in the U.S., and has given talks and published on this topic. Lately, he published an essay in the edited volume Psychoanalysis in the Barrios (Routledge, 2019), has an essay on whiteness and the “good white” in a special edition of Division Review #22 dedicated to Covid 19 and racism, and was invited to write an essay for a special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology tentatively titled Notes from a Pandemic: Reflections from 19 Clinicians on the Year of COVID-19. Carlos has worked psychoanalytically in different settings and is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program where he supervises PhD Psychology students. Carlos Padrón on Instagram Psychoanalysis in El Barrio (documentary film) Six Inconclusive Notes on the Whiteness of the “Good White” (essay) ---------- You can find us on: Our website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/unconventionaldyad/support
Rendering Unconscious welcomes Carlos Padrón, a Latinx licensed psychoanalyst and an advanced candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). He originally studied philosophy in Venezuela, then earned an MA in philosophy with a concentration in psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research, and finally an MPhil in Latin American literature at New York University. He has written and presented on the intersections between philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis. He was a teaching fellow at NYU and a faculty member at John Jay College (CUNY), the Contemporary Freudian Society, and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. Carlos is currently a faculty member at IPTAR where he co-teaches a class on clinical aspects of diversity. He also teaches a Seminar on Psychodynamic Theory at the Silberman School of Social Work in Hunter College (MSW). Carlos participated in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, a film on working psychoanalytically with underprivileged Latinx patients in the U.S., and has given talks and published on this topic. Lately he published an essay in the edited volume Psychoanalysis in the Barrios (Routledge, 2019), has an essay on whiteness soon to come out in Division Review, and was invited to write an essay for a special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology tentatively titled Notes from a Pandemic: Reflections from 19 Clinicians on the Year of COVID-19. Carlos has worked psychoanalytically in different settings and is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program. Link to the documentary "Psychoanalysis in El Barrio" on PeP Web which is by subscription but free for a month: http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=pepgrantvs.001.0010a Mr. Padrón contributed to the book "Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious" (Routledge, 2019). https://www.routledge.com/Psychoanalysis-in-the-Barrios-Race-Class-and-the-Unconscious/Gherovici-Christian/p/book/9781138346406 A brief text Mr. Padrón wrote for Room: http://www.analytic-room.com/essays/can-you-see-me-psychoanalysis-and-soul-blindness-by-carlos-padron/ Follow him at Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carlospadron_psychoanalysis/ Rendering Unconscious Podcast is hosted by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, who interviews psychoanalysts, psychologists, scholars, creative arts therapists, writers, poets, philosophers, artists & other intellectuals about their process, world events, the current state of mental health care, politics, culture, the arts & more. Episodes are also created from lectures given at various international conferences. http://www.renderingunconscious.org You can support the podcast at: https://www.patreon.com/vanessa23carl Rendering Unconscious is also a book and e-book! Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics and Poetry (Trapart Books, 2019): https://store.trapart.net/details/00000 Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst based Stockholm, who sees clients internationally, specializing in offering quality psychoanalytic treatment remotely and online. Her books include Switching Mirrors (2016), The Fenris Wolf vol 9 (2017) co-edited with Carl Abrahamsson, On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives (2018) co-edited with Manya Steinkoler, and Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: the Cut in Creation forthcoming from Routledge 2020. http://www.drvanessasinclair.net Dr. Sinclair is a founding member of Das Unbehagen: A Free Association for Psychoanalysis. http://dasunbehagen.org Please visit http://www.renderingunconscious.org/about/ The track at the end of the episode is "Psychoanalytic Snakes to Honor My Lineage" from the album "Switching" by Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson, available from Highbrow Lowlife and Trapart Editions: https://store.trapart.net/details/00111 https://vanessasinclaircarlabrahamsson.bandcamp.com/album/switching
Michael Stuart Garfinkle, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York, NY. He is on the teaching and supervisory faculty at the Derner Institute/Adelphi University, the New School, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), and Teachers College/Columbia University. Dr. Garfinkle is on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the advisory board for the Candidate Journal, is a reviewer for the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and was an associate editor of the former Frontiers in Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis. He is the author of papers and a book chapter on topics in psychoanalysis, psychological trauma, and interventional cardiology. Dr. Garfinkle is organizing the conference "Next: When the Ice Melts" coming up 15-18 October 2020 in Ljubljana, Slovenia: https://www.next2020.si Along with Dr. Manya Steinkoler, he devised and conducted the 2014 and 2018 psychoanalytic conferences in Reykjavík, Iceland, “Psychoanalysis on Ice”: http://dasunbehagen.org/event/psychoanalysis-on-ice/ Rendering Unconscious Podcast is hosted by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, who interviews psychoanalysts, psychologists, scholars, creative arts therapists, writers, poets, philosophers, artists and other intellectuals about their process, world events, the current state of mental health care, politics, culture, the arts and more: www.drvanessasinclair.net Rendering Unconscious is also a book! Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics and Poetry (Trapart, 2019): www.trapart.net Rendering Unconscious Podcast can be found at: Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud… visit www.renderingunconsious.org/about for links To support the podcast visit: www.patreon.com/vanessa23carl For more, please visit the following websites: https://www.next2020.si www.drvanessasinclair.net/podcast www.renderingunconscious.org/about www.trapart.net www.dasunbehagen.org The track at the end of the episode is “Inner of the Mind” from the recently released album “The chapel is empty.” Words by Vanessa Sinclair. Sounds by Akoustik Timbre Frekuency. From Highbrow Lowlife & Trapart Editions: https://store.trapart.net/details/00062 Photo of Dr. Michael Garfinkle
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. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, The Candidate Journal, Russian Literature Journal, Slavic and East European Journal, Laboratorium, and other academic publications. She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, The Candidate Journal, Russian Literature Journal, Slavic and East European Journal, Laboratorium, and other academic publications. She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
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. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Alenka Zupancic 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? (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 Zupancic 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. Zupancic 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 animals' 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. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Alenka Zupancic 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? (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 Zupancic 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. Zupancic 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 animals’ 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. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 On 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. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin de Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
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 On 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. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin de Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She can be reached at afishzon@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bruce Fink joins me once again, this time to discuss his latest book, A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques For Everyday Practice (W. W. Norton & Co., 2017). What prompted Fink, a world-renowned Lacanian analyst, to return to Freud? In the spirit of Lacan, he informs us at the outset that he was always already, and forever will be, Freudian. This does not mean, of course, that Fink is uncritical of Freud. Carefully, brilliantly, and often playfully, he reads Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and the Rat Man and Dora cases, drawing out the clinical relevance of key Freudian theoretical concepts, and punctuating (the many) moments Freud strayed from his own clinical recommendations. The death knell of Freudianism has been sounded by various groups—some expected, like psychiatrists, neuroscientists, cognitive behavioral therapists, and feminists—and others less so, including Freudians themselves. Few would deny that Freud, in important and unfortunate ways, was a man of the late Victorian era: much ink has been spilled on his patriarchal values, cocaine habit, casual misogyny, and authoritarian attitude toward patients and colleagues. From his cases and letters we know, too, that Freud made almost every error he warned against in his papers on technique: he bombarded patients with interpretations, dispensed advice, intimidated, and asked them for favors. Nonetheless, even Freud’s detractors view him as a revolutionary and influential thinker who, despite failures to follow through on his own ideals and iconoclastic assertions, changed fundamental beliefs regarding gender and sexuality, art and literature, subjectivity, and social life. He continues to have a profound hold on non-Freudian psychoanalysts, even as they rename his metapsychological concepts and claim to leave him in the dust. Fink provides early clinicians with an excellent guide to Freudian theory and technique, paying special attention to dream interpretation, symptoms, the handling of transference, diagnosis, and the facilitation of free association. Periodically, he inserts his own vivid clinical examples while underlining that which remains valuable in Freud and reading him to the letter. And isn’t this the most generous way to read Freud’s work—armed both with sharp critique and an appreciation of his path-breaking ideas? “The only good father,” to quote Lacan, “is a dead one.” Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bruce Fink joins me once again, this time to discuss his latest book, A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques For Everyday Practice (W. W. Norton & Co., 2017). What prompted Fink, a world-renowned Lacanian analyst, to return to Freud? In the spirit of Lacan, he informs us at the outset that he was always already, and forever will be, Freudian. This does not mean, of course, that Fink is uncritical of Freud. Carefully, brilliantly, and often playfully, he reads Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and the Rat Man and Dora cases, drawing out the clinical relevance of key Freudian theoretical concepts, and punctuating (the many) moments Freud strayed from his own clinical recommendations. The death knell of Freudianism has been sounded by various groups—some expected, like psychiatrists, neuroscientists, cognitive behavioral therapists, and feminists—and others less so, including Freudians themselves. Few would deny that Freud, in important and unfortunate ways, was a man of the late Victorian era: much ink has been spilled on his patriarchal values, cocaine habit, casual misogyny, and authoritarian attitude toward patients and colleagues. From his cases and letters we know, too, that Freud made almost every error he warned against in his papers on technique: he bombarded patients with interpretations, dispensed advice, intimidated, and asked them for favors. Nonetheless, even Freud's detractors view him as a revolutionary and influential thinker who, despite failures to follow through on his own ideals and iconoclastic assertions, changed fundamental beliefs regarding gender and sexuality, art and literature, subjectivity, and social life. He continues to have a profound hold on non-Freudian psychoanalysts, even as they rename his metapsychological concepts and claim to leave him in the dust. Fink provides early clinicians with an excellent guide to Freudian theory and technique, paying special attention to dream interpretation, symptoms, the handling of transference, diagnosis, and the facilitation of free association. Periodically, he inserts his own vivid clinical examples while underlining that which remains valuable in Freud and reading him to the letter. And isn't this the most generous way to read Freud's work—armed both with sharp critique and an appreciation of his path-breaking ideas? “The only good father,” to quote Lacan, “is a dead one.” Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Bruce Fink joins me once again, this time to discuss his latest book, A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques For Everyday Practice (W. W. Norton & Co., 2017). What prompted Fink, a world-renowned Lacanian analyst, to return to Freud? In the spirit of Lacan, he informs us at the outset that he was always already, and forever will be, Freudian. This does not mean, of course, that Fink is uncritical of Freud. Carefully, brilliantly, and often playfully, he reads Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and the Rat Man and Dora cases, drawing out the clinical relevance of key Freudian theoretical concepts, and punctuating (the many) moments Freud strayed from his own clinical recommendations. The death knell of Freudianism has been sounded by various groups—some expected, like psychiatrists, neuroscientists, cognitive behavioral therapists, and feminists—and others less so, including Freudians themselves. Few would deny that Freud, in important and unfortunate ways, was a man of the late Victorian era: much ink has been spilled on his patriarchal values, cocaine habit, casual misogyny, and authoritarian attitude toward patients and colleagues. From his cases and letters we know, too, that Freud made almost every error he warned against in his papers on technique: he bombarded patients with interpretations, dispensed advice, intimidated, and asked them for favors. Nonetheless, even Freud’s detractors view him as a revolutionary and influential thinker who, despite failures to follow through on his own ideals and iconoclastic assertions, changed fundamental beliefs regarding gender and sexuality, art and literature, subjectivity, and social life. He continues to have a profound hold on non-Freudian psychoanalysts, even as they rename his metapsychological concepts and claim to leave him in the dust. Fink provides early clinicians with an excellent guide to Freudian theory and technique, paying special attention to dream interpretation, symptoms, the handling of transference, diagnosis, and the facilitation of free association. Periodically, he inserts his own vivid clinical examples while underlining that which remains valuable in Freud and reading him to the letter. And isn’t this the most generous way to read Freud’s work—armed both with sharp critique and an appreciation of his path-breaking ideas? “The only good father,” to quote Lacan, “is a dead one.” Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock's famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott's papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels' books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices