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Better Identity Politics
Abstract
Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship. My commentary focuses on two of the paper's major threads: the interplay of subjective experience, intersubjective space, and collective forces, and the ethical dimension of the psychoanalytic project. From the outset, the meeting between Ara and Suchet is not only a meeting of bodies and minds, but also a meeting of collective histories and politics. Suchet finds, and in her account powerfully demonstrates, that addressing her patient's trouble requires an exploration of how collective traumas and political narratives infuse the possibilities of intersubjective exchange and subjective meaning. In my commentary I trace and elaborate on the trajectory of this analytic process, contemplating the ways in which identities and identifications involve both familial and social attachments. I attempt to highlight Suchet's contribution to our understanding of how what happens, and is made meaningful, in the register of collective identification and experience, forms the very substance of subjective and intersubjective life, and should be therefore formulated as an intrinsic aspect of the analytic endeavour. Turning to Suchet's engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I consider her drive to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of psychoanalytic discourse. Following the same drive, I add some ideas developed by Theodor Adorno, as means of illustrating the trouble and the potential for reconciliation inherent in the experience and politics of identity.
This article presents our collaboration as supervisee and supervisor at the Changing the Conversation Conference held in New York City, March 2019. We address racial enactments in supervisory dyads, the absence of institutional holding, and the barriers to speaking candidly about these experiences. We locate these struggles in race as a “forcefield,” in which experiences of difference collide in ways that can both transform and threaten cherished aspects of identity. In the process, we reflect on how legitimate concerns about confidentiality can, in this context, mask analysts’ desires to protect their access to normative privilege, institutional power, and facilitate avoidance of their own racialized shame.
The political is understood as an essential, irreducible aspect of our self-representations and an undeniably consequential factor in our difficulties in living. It can thus no longer be considered taboo in psychoanalytic theory and practice. I examine challenges of working with political material, especially as treatment conducted during the highly partisan, embattled Trump Era may instantiate fierce complementarity or collusive concordance in the dyad. I argue that we can neither ameliorate patients’ suffering nor widen and deepen understanding of their lives if we don’t help them discover how their (and our) embeddedness in particular historical and sociopolitical webs of competing interests hold them (and us) in place. Psychoanalysis’s disavowal of sociopolitical impacts is historicized, and its gradual theoretical relegitimization is traced. The relational turn’s emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity, intersubjectivity, coconstruction, mutual recognition, and advances in cognizing social inequities offer theoretical scaffolding and strategies of engagement.
The paper engages the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his critique of ontological thought and knowing, to examine some of the basic premises of psychoanalysis. The author argues that, viewed through Levinas's notions of The Other and of ethics, traditional psychoanalysis represents an ethically problematic discursive position since it conforms unambivalently to socialknowledge-power structures. The author suggests that psychoanalysis is inherently a conflicted discourse. He traces the development of psychoanalytic awareness to the concerns of otherness in the shift from one- to two-person psychology and in the thought made possible in the relational school. Bringing together Levinas's critical-ethical considerations and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjective relations, the author argues for more awareness of the ethical implications of different aspects of analytic theory and practice, and against the limitations of Levinas's extreme ethics. He concludes in suggesting deliberate ambivalence as the best-possible theoretical and clinical position. © 2007 William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
jessica benjamin is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City who also teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminisms, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon, 1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (Yale University Press, 1995), and Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1998). Her current work is on the problem of acknowledgment of personal and social trauma.
The paper engages the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his critique of ontological thought and knowing, to examine some of the basic premises of psychoanalysis. The author argues that, viewed through Levinas's notions of The Other and of ethics, traditional psychoanalysis represents an ethically problematic discursive position since it conforms unambivalently to social-knowledge-power structures. The author suggests that psychoanalysis is inherently a conflicted discourse. He traces the development of psychoanalytic awareness to the concerns of otherness in the shift from one- to two-person psychology and in the thought made possible in the relational school. Bringing together Levinas's critical-ethical considerations and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjective relations, the author argues for more awareness of the ethical implications of different aspects of analytic theory and practice, and against the limitations of Levinas's extreme ethics. He concludes in suggesting deliberate ambivalence as the best-possible theoretical and clinical position.
This paper explores the dilemmas that arise when treatment is offered in circumstances when spiritual and ethical survival comes into conflict with physical survival and material well-being. Through an exploration of the author's experience in South Africa's war of liberation, this conflict is explicated. Although these experiences are now historical, it is argued that they are pertinent at the current time as the West, following 9/11, finds itself encouraged to think in terms of war, as notions of both a war against the West and a war against terrorism have become part of many public discourses. Questions that may arise for us as relational analysts and as individuals as a result of this are flagged, and although no easy answers are proposed, the importance of this exploration is highlighted.
In this powerful and wonderfully accessible meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and “unformulated experience,” or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated. it is not an instrumental task, he holds, but one that requires openness and curiosity; the result of the process is not accuracy alone, but experience that is deeply felt and fully imagined.
Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
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