“The first is the one that takes an interest in psychoanalysis as an additional set of ideas that can help Marxism account for specific social phenomena”
“The second is the type of project that seeks to highlight that psychoanalysis, as it currently stands or in some variation, has political merit of its own, carrying some emancipatory potential”
“a third strategy, in which the challenges that both psychoanalysis and Marxism pose to modern philosophy are taken seriously and renewed interpretations of the modern cannon are proposed, seeking to disrupt our common understanding of very basic notions such as “reality”, “consciousness”, “freedom”, etc”
“what could we actually do with psychoanalysis when we are organizing together, planning and strategizing, sharing and protesting, thinking about what went wrong and about our next steps collectively?”
“The natural place for psychoanalysis within political life seems to be – as the name suggests – as a powerful analytic tool that can increase our capacity to explain phenomena like the effects of mass consumerism, the structure of the modern family, the functioning of ideology, the logic of populism, the subjective consequences of neoliberalism, etc.”
“These two methodological commitments - to practice, before theory, and to inward division, before outward distinction - could in fact be used to delineate a different research project, one that uses a healthy dose of historical materialism to look past the idealist picture that psychoanalysis offers of itself and then, bringing this down-to-earth psychoanalyst into the political meeting space, tries to offer a concrete set of tools for militants to employ”
“by looking into how psychoanalysis effectively works, we might come up with new ideas for how to do things together”
“Like most services, psychoanalysis is a work that involves some social interaction, but what is quite singular about it is that the thing being worked on at the analytic session is mixed up in this very interaction: its patterns, repetitions and underlying presuppositions. Transference is the psychoanalytic name for the type of relation that is established between analyst and analysand, a relation without which there simply is no psychoanalytic process.”
“Transference is not only interesting as a point of departure because it specifies the type of interpersonal interaction that takes place within the clinical setting. It is also the only of the “four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis” proposed by Lacan – the others being repetition, the unconscious and the drive – that actually overlaps with the concrete limits of an analytic process”
“When we are in an analytic session, we are within a transferential relationship, but after that session transference does not continue with everyone else we meet (though we supposedly still have an unconscious, are still trapped in repetitions and still find strange forms of satisfaction everywhere)”
“As Marxists – and especially Marxists interested in epistemology – transference should stand out as one of the few psychoanalytic concepts that refuses ideological generalizations, remaining steadfastly rooted in what people do and how they relate within that specific space and practice”
“Psychoanalysts also have good reason to value this concept as a potential new bridge with political thinking: even though political theory has often offered to find a home for Lacanian concepts with little traction in our actual work – like the “logic of the non-all” or the “discourse of the university” – most of what we actually know as analysts has to do with the handling of transference”
“Here we need to consider another important piece of the puzzle, which is free association. Though the “golden rule of psychoanalysis” – the imperative to say whatever comes to your mind – does have some prescriptive punch, instilling some courage in those people who might otherwise be very reticent to mention the thoughts and associations that cross their minds during a session, its role in analysis is much more structural than that, and much more paradoxical. That one is invited to “speak freely” before their psychoanalyst constitutes, in fact, an impossibility: if you decide to do just that, you are not really doing something unconstrained, but actually doing exactly what you were told, while if you decide to focus on saying what you think is objectively important or what you think your analyst really wanted you to speak about, then in fact you acted freely, since no one asked you to speak about this rather than that”
“Free association is perhaps the defining trait that separates the clinical setting from the rest of the world, it encloses a space where the normative commitments between the patient and their analyst get muddled and what is demanded of the speaker is no longer clear”
“In summary, transference is the name of the relation, composed by analyst and analysand, that enacts in the clinical space a piece of the patient’s own “inner language”, as if their subjective world would suddenly get distorted and stretched in order to stitch that strange and paradoxical interaction, prompted by free association, into the fabric of the analysand’s psychic life, integrating it with other representations, images and affects”
“At the core of the analytic practice there lies, then, this triadic structure: the paradox of free association, the establishment of a transferential relation and the possibility that, from within this actualized dynamic, previously indistinct differences, or overly fixated ones, might be transformed”
“Though it already seems quite useful to know, as militants, that one can train and learn to occupy a critical posture that is premised on listening rather than speaking and that recognizes that some interventions are only possible in the measure of our availability to inhabit other people’s languages and work with their distinctions, rather than ours, there is a small detail that prevents us from simply importing these analytic insights into political practice”
“there is a limit to what sort of thing can be “transferred” into clinical practice, a limit that we do not want to merely extend into our politics”
“In psychoanalytic literature, this juxtaposition between the “cardinality” of the analytic setting and the fact that transference actualizes only dual relations – which are, generally, amorous ones – is explained by inverting the terms: only love relations become treatable in the clinic because that is in fact the nature of all subjective bonds!”
“But any psychoanalyst knows that there are traumas that the clinical practice cannot touch: there are events and situations that, like the libidinal traumas that emerge in clinical work, did appear to the patient as an intense and unknown experience but that, unlike these amorous connections, cannot have their relational structure reproduced within the clinic”
“Psychoanalytic transference has a limit. So now we come to the crux of our hypothesis. We have extracted two general principles from our discussion of this particular practice. The first we could call the principle of composition: analysts interact with the patient’s unconscious by accepting to, through transference, to become a “surrogate” part of that unconscious world. The second, the principle of homogeneity: one can only intervene in a certain type of relation by instantiating relations of the same type”
“Is there, after all, something like an organizational analysis?”
“Recent work by the Subset of Theoretical Practice, a communist research collective, might give us useful tools to sketch an answer to this question. What is perhaps counterintuitive about their approach is that rather than beginning with psychoanalytic concerns and then looking for ways to export them out of clinical practice into militant life, they have instead found a way to think about political organizing in general that, once constrained by very specific conditions, might define a practice that looks a lot like regular psychoanalysis”
“The basic idea is that, to conceive of something from the organizational point of view means to consider that how things are composed – how they are put together, who and what is part of it –, what they get to interact with – what kind of things it gets to change, and what gets to change it – and what is made intelligible to them – what differences “count” and what traits are irrelevant from its standpoint – are three sides of the same question”
“What this proposition does is that it adds specific content to the organizational discussion above: rather than abstractly say that how organizations are composed affects what they get to interact with and “see” of the social world, we can now more concretely state that depending on how an organization composes together affinity, property and value logics, it will be able to transform some parts of social reality rather than others, and it will be able to consider some things as information rather than others”
“If our underlying hypothesis is correct, then our organizational practices are, very much like a clinical setting, a privileged site for paradoxes of political freedom to emerge”