The Draw to Overwhelm: Consent, Risk, and the Retranslation of Enigma

In our own words: key terms and trends in psychoanalytic history

Inspired by the work of Fonagy (2008) and Dent and Christian (2019), this study applies a form of quantitative textual analysis to 300 terms of psychoanalytic interest in the PEP archives by tracking their historical prevalence in five-year increments using the aggregate number of articles featuring each term in the field's journals. Our results confirm some of the more well-known inflection points in the history and application of psychoanalytic theory, while also revealing some intriguing surprises. Psychoanalysis remains fundamentally a depth psychology, yet it has increasingly acknowledged the external causes of distress and trauma. Changes in the prevalence of terminology around psychopathology, defense mechanisms, development, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalytic technique are discussed.

Anti-Racist Racism: Trauma, Traumatism, Traumatophilia

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably turned into ancestors. But what if we got this wrong? What if trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed but a cause of becoming? And what if the tenet that trauma may be worked through is but a manifestation of a disciplinary spell?Introduction of the concept of traumatophobia invites readers to rethink the relationship of psychoanalysis to healing or repair, and to become attentive, instead, to what subjects do with trauma (traumatophilia). Traumatophilia involves a revivification of trauma, and that is easily confused with compulsive repetition or destructiveness. Traumatophobia, however, also courts psychic energies that can be psychically transformative. For transformation to be possible, however, we need to be working with a notion of psychic life that can be transformed. Careful consideration of a controversial sexual fetish (race play) shows how belated efforts of psychoanalysis to attend to racial trauma have generated new forms of racism: treating the Black unconscious not as a transformative and dynamic force but as housing only repressed representational contents. Considering race play instead through traumatophilia allows a race player's actions to be mined not for unconscious motives or for what past traumata, symbolized or unformulated, those motives carry, but to track their effects. Traumatophilic repetitions, it is argued, deliver traumatisms that may (or may not) be transformational. Questions of ethics are thus central to this paper's thinking, which is grounded in queer of color critique, Black feminisms, and Laplanchean metapsychology. Because traumatophobia preserves the world order (and thus white logics), readers are urged to consider the metapsychology of traumatophilia.

Sissy Dance $1: The More and More of Gender

In a scholarly yet playful conversation, the authors explore why analytic thought about trans remains so intransigently difficult. They propose that countertansferential responses to trans patients manifest not just in clinical work but also as blockages to psychoanalytic theorizing. They draw on extensive experience treating trans and non-binary patients, on teaching and supervisory work, and on analytic scholarship to think about why and how theorizing on trans stalls. Whereas in the social realm trans bodies are often hyper-sexualized, in metapsychology and the consulting room trans is notably desexualized. What is the cost of that and why does it occur? The authors locate the problem in the disaggregation of gender from the sexual, arguing that not only has this separation outlived its (once exigent) metapsychological utility, but that it is itself a defense against the anxiety of polymorphous perversity and psychic bisexuality that trans bodies can awaken in analysts of all genders, and especially in cisgender analysts.

Sex and Prediction Error, Part 1: The Metapsychology of Jouissance

Jouissance is one of Jacques Lacan's most impenetrable concepts. Yet it is essential to Lacan's view of sex. The term is sometimes translated as "enjoyment," but this misses key features of the concept, notably its "traumatic," excessive character. This excess points to a structural negativity within the subject (i.e., the real), an original split that cannot be remedied. In this first of a series of three papers, it is proposed that "surplus prediction error"-as understood within contemporary neuropsychoanalysis-is a neural correlate for jouissance. In part 1, jouissance is explicated within Lacanian metapsychology, primarily in reference to Lacan's real and symbolic registers. Jouissance is an excess enjoyment, outside of the binding, representational capacities of language. The real is the negativity or antagonism within the symbolic, the limit of language and meaning, the point where jouissance emerges. To clarify the relationships among these terms, their positions are traced in some of Freud's major concepts, including drive, infantile sexuality, repetition, and the unconscious. A basic understanding of jouissance is necessary for the rest of this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic project.

Consenting and Assenting to Psychoanalytic Work

The moment is opportune for a renewed look at what we understand about patient consent to treatment. Until recently, little reference to informed consent could be found in the literature, as though it has never been a preoccupation for psychoanalytic practitioners. Yet several post-Freudian authors offer reasons to suppose the risk of misunderstandings about consent. In fact, the very discovery of transference, replete with unrequited infantile wishes, implies that at some level, at some moment, in every psychoanalytic treatment there will be moments when "consent" will to some extent vacillate. A distinction, justifiable on etymological and intersubjective grounds, is made between patients' consent as a cognitive, somewhat passive, acceptance and patients' assent as an arduous, conflicted, partial disagreement with the symbolically limiting details of analytic work. It is in the discovery and working through of unexpected unconscious responses to aspects of the analytic setting and to the analyst that patients become "informed" of the unique risks to their psychic equilibrium the process poses, as well as its benefits. Instead of a static and unitary contractual event, informed consent in psychoanalysis is more properly conceived as a multilayered, repetitively posed, and necessarily ambivalent process of good-enough assenting over time.