Apparently a straightforward elaboration of anatomical difference, >gender< is symbolically tied to many kinds of cultural representations, which, in turn, set the terms not only for understanding the relations between women and men but for organizing self-experience. Consequently, problems of self may come to be coded in terms of gender, and those of gender, in terms of the self. Using a clinical example, I speak of gender less as a determinate category than as something resembling a force field, that is, as a set of complex and shifting relations among multiple contrasts or differences. This multiplicity, in turn, generates some technical recommendations about gender and splitting. Recapturing split-off parts of the self therefore requires inhabiting its transitional spaces, including that in which gender is not a given but is in question. Moreover, I suggest, counterintuitively, that gender identity both seals the package of self and preserves all the self must lose and thus bridges undifferentiated archaic depths and selfhood. In transference and countertransference, both patient and analyst must also enter this paradoxical space, where they alternate between being gendered and being gender-free.
Psychoanalysis and politics intersect variously. Some psychoanalytic writings have critiqued society, whereas others have applied socially critical insights about class and race to illuminate transference – countertransference enactments and other clinical matters. The hegemonic politics of psychoanalysis, less intentional but equally influential, define maturity and mental health by idealizing of some psychological and behavioral traits and some clinical stances (especially authoritarianism), and by demonizing of certain categories of persons (notably nonheterosexuals and people of color), certain types of practice (e.g., social work), and certain sorts of ideas (e.g., that clinical and theoretical practices are political practices, too). One way to redress these problems is to reclaim the marginal – homosexuality and queerness, affect's presence in politics, and the political in the psychical (in which instance, the concept of multiple self-states may be useful). Any such effort requires recognizing and articulating one's own subject-position, that is, one's own class, race, gender, or sexual location.
A clinical moment
(1991)
The way analysts talk, behave, and feel in relation to money is replete with an uneasiness that is the surface manifestation of a deep, psychocultural contradiction between money and love that cannot be thought, willed, or wished away. For the clinical project to succeed, this contradiction can and must find a temporary, reparative resolution in the paradox between love and hate. This essay takes up the question of money in the spirit of the Marx-Freud tradition, in postmodern perspective, and through several languages, not only psychoanalysis, but social theory, anthropology, and less centrally, feminist theory as well. It addresses money's unconscious and emotional resonance, and its cultural meanings money's clinical and theoretical vicissitudes in the context of cultural symbolism and economic change, as well as the class position of psychoanalysis and the psychology of class itself and money's relational meaning in transference and countertransference.
Recent contributions to the psychoanalytic literature suggest that the classical focus on psychosexuaiity has been lost. This charge is both wrong and right. After briefly surveying the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking on sexuality and reviewing the concept of libido, this essay retrieves the word Lust from the footnotes to which Freud consigned it and remodels it into a new idea. The proposition is put forth that a postclassical theory of sex compatible with contemporary clinical and theoretical practice can emerge once sexuality is rethought in the ambiguous, potential space between Lust and libido.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
This symposium addresses a psychoanalytic lacuna: race. The papers it comprises, drawn from both clinical and academic precincts, pick up the thread of social commentary that runs through the psychoanalytic fabric. Here Psychoanalytic Dialogues joins other like-minded efforts to position the psychic and the social, the clinical and the cultural, in the same discourse, and to consider the painfulness of political inequity amid therapeutic intimacy. These essays demonstrate the clinical and intellectual benefits of the engagement with the disciplines characteristic of psychoanalysis in the previous generation. They also reveal how the evolution of psychoanalytic practice itself potentiates recognition of psychoanalytically marginalized dimensions of society and culture that constitute subjectivity and inform everyday clinical life.