The Dream of Psychosocial Thinking (original) (raw)

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: from Culture to the Clinic

2016

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely. Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult – if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen. Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching Trauma, Sense and Gesture, Impossible Poetics, Without Words, Wounds and Suture and Auto/Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption, the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about. The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, academics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and film studies, filmmakers and artists. “This anthology sets out to 'do the impossible' in interrogating the paradoxes of unrepresentable and unspeakable experience. Drawing together an impressive array of writers from diverse fields including those of clinical practice, film and literary studies, post-colonial theory and cultural analysis, it weaves a complex matrix of ideas grounded in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers as diverse as Freud, Lacan, Bion, Malabou, Winnicott and Meltzer. The essays are lively and compelling, offering new perspectives on themes such as trauma and embodiment, silence and invisibility in the digital age of media, the psychodynamics of touch, voice, gesture, love, grief, adoption, and anxiety. A wide range of textual material embracing literature, cinema, poetry, language, meta psychology and metaphysics, provides the basis for philosophical and psychological commentary that is often astute, and the daring inclusion of creative work premised on personal experience acts as an emotional coup de foudre. Piotrowska and Tyrer have curated a cracking compendium, one that seduces and challenges in equal measure, and one that will surely become essential reading for anyone interested in the riches of psychoanalytic enquiry.” (Caroline Bainbridge, Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis, University of Roehampton, UK) “This is an important collection that speaks to contemporary events with compassion and poignancy. Piotrowska and Tyrer’s Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic is simultaneously wound and suture. It both opens and seeks to comprehend the cultural fault lines that exist around trauma, abuse, race, image and language itself. These diverse, and at times provocative essays, allow for an outpouring of the unconscious and the experience of pain and anxiety. It is the inability to speak with the inability to be silent that suffuses this radical collection and yet it is these same tensions in this book that serve to heal the cultural body.” (Luke Hockley, Professor of Media Analysis, University of Bedfordshire, UK and author of Somatic Cinema [2014])

Misrecognizing the Clinic: Towards a Planetary Psychoanalysis

2020

This paper describes the possibility of a planetary Lacan. It is planetary in that it regards the increasingly global appeal of psychoanalysis as a chance to ground clinical practice within concrete non-Western historical circumstances. Modernisation is hereby understood as a convergence of different histories rather than an inevitable process of Westernization. My argument turns to ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’ to show that for Lacan the clinic is designed not for an abstract universal subject but to address the enclosed individual of Western society. Instead of assuming that the clinic can be exported anywhere, he anticipates a future ‘confluence of forms.’ I turn to the hybridity Malay-Southeast Asian health practices for examples of this confluence wherein modern-Western medicine is entangled with ‘non-modern’ treatments. Grasping Lacan’s relevance for the global south requires that the clinic too should be misrecognised as it encounters different cultural articulations of ...

The Psychoanalytic Paris Square: On Decolonization and Psychoanalysis

2020

The article is based on questions posed by Lucia Murat’s movie called “Paris Square” (2018) [1] and aims to situate psychoanalysis in the discussion around the issue of epistemic decolonization. The film, which is set at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, portrays the troubles of a Portuguese psychoanalyst in dealing with the clinical psychological care of a resident of the Providência favela. From that perspective and supported by the contribution of other fields’ mainly anthropology’s decolonial literature, we will question the apparent colonizing perspective of psychoanalysis. Thus, a possible path is sought through a certain notion of experience in psychoanalysis and a dialogue with the Amerindian’s perspectivism.

Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action

Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action, 2021

This fascinating volume uses psychoanalytic theory to explore how political subjectivity comes about within the context of global catastrophe, via the emergence of collective individuations through trans-subjectivity. Serving as a jumping-off point to address the structural linkage between collective catastrophe, subject, group, and political transformation, trans-subjectivity is the central tenet of the book, conceptualized as a psyche-social dynamic that initiates social transformation and which may be enhanced in the clinical setting. Each chapter investigates a distinct manifestation of trans-subjectivity in relation to various real-world events as they manifest clinically in the analytic couple and within group processes. The author builds her conceptual arguments through a psyche/social reading of Kristeva’s theory of signifiance (sublimation), Lacan’s 1945 essay on collective logic, Heidegger’s secular reading of the apostle Paul’s Christian revolution, and Žižek, Badiou and Jung’s conception of the neighbor within a differentiated humanity. The book features clinical illustrations, an auto-ethnographic study of the emergence of an AIDS clinic, an accounting of trans-subjectivity in Black revolutionary events in the U.S., and an examination of some expressions of care that arose in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action is important reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamic based therapists, psychologists, group therapists, philosophers and political activists. Table of Contents Foreword by Ladson Hinton MD Introduction: Healing is political Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness From leper-thing to another side of care: a reading of Lacan’s logical collectivity A subversive reading of Kristeva and sublimation Trans-subjective agency illustrated in the reals of U.S. (post) slavery racism Author(s) Biography Robin McCoy Brooks is a Jungian Analyst in private practice, educator and consultant in Seattle, WA. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Robin is also a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology and active analyst member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Further, she is a nationally certified Trainer, Educator and Practitioner of Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry and Psychodrama. She currently is sheltering in place aboard a wooden boat on Salmon Bay with her husband and with two Siamese cats, or their home in Bellingham, WA. Reviews A bold and challenging book that interrogates the awakening of ourselves to our responsibilities as political agents. McCoy Brooks takes us deep into the complexities of the self as it is wrenched away from its personal concerns and called into political action. By exposing this shift in concern and the extent to which it can be mastered we are treated to invaluable insights into the psychodynamics of social transformation and into the socio-political crises we continue to wrestle with on a global scale. Her forceful argument is both grounded in and used to critique key ideas of Heidegger, Lacan, Jung, Kristeva, Žižek and Badiou, making it an astute and thought-provoking book on many levels. Lucy Huskinson, Professor of Philosophy at Bangor University, UK, author of various works including Nietzsche and Jung (Routledge 2004) and Architecture and the Mimetic Self (Routledge 2018) For too long the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political has felt forced. In a work of invigorating scholarship, McCoy Brooks revisits questions central to psychoanalysis and political philosophy alike, exploring the themes of solidarity, the nature of the subject, collective blindness, abjection, and the trans-subjective. It is rare that one finds such a bracing series of intersections between Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalysis and the philosophies of Žižek, Badiou and Heidegger, which so originally foregrounds the political crises of today (of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, global warming, etc.) that define our times. She uniquely incorporates the clinical and theoretical perspectives of her theses throughout. Derek Hook, Duquesne University, USA, author of Six Moments in Lacan (Routledge 2018), (Post)apartheid Conditions (2013 Palgrave) and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid (2011 Routledge). Robin McCoy Brooks has brought the therapeutic and the political – the individual and the collective – into delicate tension in what is nothing less than a masterful study of what it means to ‘do’ applied psychoanalysis. By mobilising the notion of trans-subjectivity, McCoy Brooks opens us to the potential for radical change in times of rapid upheaval. Through careful, comparative analysis and a determined focus on that which binds humanity together, she weaves a compelling narrative of relationality – a continuum of I and Other – that is only overshadowed by an equally relentless compassion, delivered through critical analysis and psychological insight. Give hate the right to exist and it will. Provide a doorway leading to greater mutuality, dialogue, and understanding, and the possibilities are endless. Stated succinctly, I would follow Robin McCoy Brooks down the rabbit hole of boundless futures yet to be imagined. Dr Kevin Lu, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Psychogeography and the Victims of the City in McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City

Epiphany

The present article approaches Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984) in light of Merlin Coverley's concept of psychogeography to demonstrate the direct authority of the city as an integral part of the protagonist's persona. The idea is to emphasize that urbanity, in its postmodern sense, can function as a culpable agent in shaping up the protagonist's behavior and determining his fate. Therefore, this research studies McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City to reveal how the life of the leading character-with his unstable state of mind-takes root primarily in his chaotic living environment. A psychogeographic evaluation of this novel allows us to see that urbanity influences the protagonist's psyche, who evinces this deep impact through wandering in the metropolitan Manhattan. Further, this research demonstrates how the city remains triumphant as the protagonist falls into disease and alienation, or is left with an aporetic moment of decision: to unify with the force of urbanity or lose everything to its power.