https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9704-8531
ABSTRACT
This article introduces readers to the special issue, which is on Sexuality, Violence, and Regimes: Speaking the Unconscious. It starts by presenting why the unconscious matters to psychoanalysis and beyond, before it moves to a short overview of the contributions it hosts. It continues with a conversation between the editor of the special issue and Lara Sheehi, who discuss, first, psychoanalysis, violence, gender, and sexuality, as well as how we understand the notion of regime(s) in both fields. They conclude by sharing thoughts on the opportunities and challenges the issue opened and confronted with.
The unconscious is not a psychoanalytic obsession or a bureaucratic form of speaking about psyche in psychoanalysis. It encapsulates what we are unable to articulate in “conscious” terms, often because it is violent, as well as a reminder of the radical possibilities of psyche and constitution of self/ves. While in psychology and mainstream forms of psychoanalysis there is a focus on how the “ego” may be able to speak and reconstitute its register so to be more adaptable and well-functioning, there is a growing amount of psychoanalytic academic work that illustrates how the unconscious speaks about regimes, multiple and interconnected forms of violence, and sexuality, among others. The unconscious matters because it exposes personal and political dimensions of existence intimately linked with colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and ableism.
The unconscious, though, is not a mystic term or only a psychoanalytic register that we mobilize to make psychoanalysis more charming, appealing, or marketable. It is used, especially in this special issue, to expose, open, think, and conceptualize important questions around sexuality, violence, and different forms of regimes that remain excluded, hidden, or untold—even in the field of psychoanalysis. In this way, this special issue emerged as an urgent need to make space for questions that challenge regimes of violence, specifically around gender and sexuality, while thinking about them in psychoanalytic terms, or flagging them to bring them into the broader focus, scope, and register of psychoanalysis.
As such, the issue brings together the following contributions (in alphabetical order): Carter J. Carter presents “Whiteness Catalyzes Character Disorder and Mass Violence.” Carter invites us to think and dare to speak about the Whiteness of psychoanalysis, focusing on the issue of mass shootings in the United States. Lea Habif in “Spotless Life” uses psychoanalysis to bring our attention to hidden stories from Mizrahi women’s encounters with the welfare and public mental health services in the state now known as Israel. Sophie Mendelsohn in “Undoing Shame: Women Writing and Political Disidentification in Postcolonial France” brings to the forefront how the population category of the harkis emerged during Algeria’s independence after France’s colonization. Harkis, the term for those considered traitors by their fellow members and anticolonial activists in France, took on the shame associated with assisting the colonizers. In her article, Mendelsohn focuses on how the “daughters of harkis” used writing as a political tool to turn shame into a politically subjective condition of existence. Kelly Oliver in “Affective Gaslighting and Rape Culture Compounding the Violence of Sexual Assault” explores gaslighting and rape culture, highlighting how current theories of gaslighting in feminist epistemology do not consider the affective dimension of gaslighting. Mariah Rafaela Silva and Luan Carpes Barros Cassal offer “Recognition and Desire for Life in Multiple Epidemics: COVID-19 and Violence Against the LGBTI+ Community in Favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” They analyze a report by the Observatório de Violência LGBTI+ em Favelas during the COVID-19 pandemic using a psychoanalytic lens, showing that the pandemic adds up to violence and police brutality to the LGBTI+ community already existent in favelas and intimately linked with colonialism. Finally, Alicia Valdés in “The Violence of Exclusion: A Psychoanalytical Approach Toward Intersectionality, Identity, and Hegemony” invites us to rethink from a feminist and critical perspective the Lacanian register of the Symbolic to depict how and through the Master’s Discourse specific signifiers are excluded. In so doing, Valdés argues that their exclusion paves the way for a Hegemonic Symbolic that is patriarchal and asks whether a feminist Symbolic is possible. The issue opens with a letter from Tehran authored by two anonymous authors who pose sharp questions on the role of psychoanalysis in the Woman, Life, Freedom! movement in Iran and it concludes with an alternate book review, namely, a conversation between Artemis Christinaki, Amrita Narayanan, and Avgi Saketopoulou on Saketopoulou’s thought-provoking book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023).
It is worth noting that although all the articles are written in English, there are quite a few of them that have their abstracts translated in Arabic, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and one paper is fully translated into Spanish. This issue took seriously the challenge to move away from the hegemonies of Anglo-Saxon registers and thus to engage with authors’ native tongues, even if even this approach was not able to fully translate papers. There is a lot of work to be done in this domain, especially if we understand, gendered or otherwise, how academia and the production of knowledge are so embedded in colonial histories, neocolonial agendas, and hierarchies of culture and language.
In order to further challenge, even a bit, the hierarchies of academic production, as special editor, I also made the decision to engage in a conversation for the introduction to the issue instead of a “traditional” introduction that matches what we imagine academic introduction pieces look or read as. What follows is a short conversation with Lara Sheehi, an attempt to “walk around” the issue and its challenges and limits together.
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Lara, given that you are a well-established scholar and psychoanalytic clinician who draws upon queer studies, a critical and activist form of psychoanalysis, and are explicit about your politics and how the latter inform your academic and clinical encounters:
I want to ask how you would discuss the intersection of psychoanalysis, violence, gender, and sexuality from your work and political standpoints, given that the latter became the main signifiers of this special issue.
That’s a fantastic question. I see it, first of all, as an ethical imperative of ours to consider and discuss these intersections in coherence with psychoanalytic theory and practice. If our call is to be expansive in the ways that we understand how violence gets lodged within people and the myriad of variables involved in that, I don’t see a way in which us not talking about these intersections can be helpful in any way; or how not talking about it might contribute to meaning-making of the way these issues become lodged, their impact, and their present and after-lives within people, and in interplay with their surroundings.
Clinical work is intimately interwoven, for me, into this question and is not divorced from psychoanalytic practice, theory, thinking, and knowledge production. For example, I don’t think that it is a controversial statement to say if we understand the world as being constructed by a series of violent structures—and by that, I mean, look at the state of the world currently, whether it’s climate destruction or colonialism or imperialism or gender-based violence via patriarchy; if you’re talking about the context of the United States, poverty and mass shootings—I’m not sure how we can see those things happening, even as a backdrop (let’s say we think about them as a backdrop not as a front-drop), and not contend with how these happenings, these real-world events, have a psychic effect on people. And so that’s part of the way that I see this special issue coming together: This intersection of violence and gender and sexuality is central to our question both clinically and in terms of how we produce theory and knowledge about it.
In terms of gender and violence, I don’t think we have to reach very far to see the global context of how intimate this question is for people daily. Of course, the question, in my mind, always commutes between the daily experience of the individual, and the context of the family, relationships; and from there, we can then zoom out in concentric circles of larger structures that might perpetuate the possibility or the condition that this violence would or could even happen or could continue to happen.
It’s very clear how you bring together the psychic effects of different regimes, including imperialism, gender and sexuality, and violence, among others, in people’s lives. How about the regimes of psychoanalysis? Do you think that psychoanalysis can overcome its own regimes? But let us start with how we understand what “regime” means in psychoanalysis.
If anything, I think this is where thinking about ideology is helpful—when we need to talk and expand on the practice of different regimes, as you call them, and schools of thought.
This is where psychoanalysis, as a theoretical framework or method of thought/analysis, helps us; that is, even if unconscious, when I speak about the ideological framework of psychoanalysis, I am referring to a largely understood-as common sense, agreed-upon parameters of functioning, which include functioning within training, curriculum, an expected clinical skill sets and expertise, and, if we think critically, how those come together to reproduce patterned social orders that don’t disrupt the status quo, whether through training or how one is expected to do clinical work. Maybe that is what you refer to as a “regime,” a set of expectations that produce an expected end product.
That is where the beauty of psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing comes in. Psychoanalysis has taught me about the contradictions of psychic life, contradictions that live harmoniously, meant to stabilize certain modes of being and moving through the world. So why wouldn’t we also understand that as being applicable to the practice or the discipline itself?
And when we talk about discipline, I mean it both as a field, and also in relation to how you become disciplined into a particular type of orientation to the work, to thought, to theory, to practice. This statement or observation should not be controversial.
So how is it that this does become controversial, that this regime, as you note, highlights this “controversy” and makes it that something is happening? I think that’s why I stick with psychoanalysis, because that is precisely what the process and method of psychoanalysis, as a theoretical thinking tool, teaches us: If the pulse is somewhere, if we think it is one place, there might be something else happening simultaneously that makes that one locale erupt.
When that question is asked: What is happening to make these statements, these observations, controversial? When you, Artemis, envision and bring this special issue, this edition, into being, out of necessity, that should be enough to tell us that we’ve hit on something sensitive.
What instead sometimes happens, though, is that this possibility, this knowledge, collapses entirely. And with that collapse, perhaps the regime you speak of becomes clearer to us.
Perhaps that space of collapse is where the clarity of the borders and the parameters that once were functioning unconsciously, or as a matter of commonsense ideology, become very clear, and in that clarity, they become quite rigid too.
Do you think that it is possible to traverse this kind of … I do not want to use the word phantasy, but how can we work with these regimes? What is our role when psychoanalysis becomes a form of regime?
It is a large question, and an important one. And one that I think this issue as you envision it, as I have been introduced to it by you and through the contributions, helps us answer. Perhaps, in my mind, we should first not be shocked by the fact that a regime exists. There is nothing exclusive to that process, as somehow belonging only to psychoanalysis, if we understand conditions in which the method, the training, and the theory comes\ to be, within larger structures.
We, as in psychoanalytic thinkers, academics, or practitioners, don’t live outside of that, and we don’t work outside of that, and I think we do ourselves a great disservice and actually threaten the field and do more harm if we think about psychoanalysis as somehow being able to exist outside the realm of ideologies, regimes, and structures.
I’m obviously not the first to say this! You and I, we are not the first people to grapple with these questions—we have many thinkers both in terms of our history and contemporary to us, some of whom are included in this very issue, who talk, struggle, theorize, and teach us about this. And that’s the beauty of it.
Second, the question of can we traverse this? I think we will always be in movement and engagement in our efforts to traverse this. And in many ways, very simply, how can we not be? It’s not a place to arrive because if we think about traversing as a product or an endpoint, we miss that things are always in intimate relationship with larger structures and conditions in our world, which themselves are always in movement and in relationality, and carry with them all sorts of investments and identifications.
So perhaps I would shift our question. Rather than asking: “Can we traverse this?” I would suggest asking, “What is needed to sustain attention and pressure so that these things don’t become fixtures?” To know that these things are going to shape-shift depending on where pressures are, sometimes where pressures have to be, and in that, we will change where our attention will hover, will linger, will be applied.
That is the only way, to me. I see the constant movement as the way to traverse. It’s always in the process, not in the product or the endpoint.
Definitely. Given that this issue devotes itself to these kinds of questions, especially around violence, gender, and sexuality in relation to psychoanalysis, do you think that it escapes from or addresses mainstream paradigms?
I think it’s bold in its question, in its call, in the way you imagined this issue and what you hoped it might come to take up, without being fixed in its end product. And I think of you specifically, and this is part of this knowledge production challenge: who is asking the questions, how we’re engaging in knowledge production, the respect that you have for the expansiveness of that.
You are intentional in thinking about your reach, who you’re thinking about. I’m saying this because these are very specific and concrete examples for us to answer your question of traversing, or whether psychoanalysis can “escape” mainstream paradigms. Oftentimes people will say, well, how do we do this?
I think there’s a way in which you, as a special issue editor, have really enacted that in challenging us about who are the people we think about even in reaching out to contribute to a special issue. Who constitutes somebody worthy of producing knowledge for the field? It is that same question: What is the work that’s already being done, rather than always reinventing the same old wheel?
In your approach, there was an intentionality to say: If we understand that regimes function like this, is there a way to counter, to intersect, to have, let’s say, a queer entry point that doesn’t preclude possibilities, that doesn’t function on the always-already? The always-already that necessarily includes who is writing and whose voices are needed or sought after. What parts of the world are thought about? What’s the actual topic of inquiry that’s “allowed—not allowed?” I think you have really been intentional in troubling that.
This issue is looking at psychoanalysis but also uses psychoanalysis in a different way to understand political issues around violence, regimes, gender, and sexuality.
I am also interested in asking what else you think could be done, as one thing that we really tried doing differently in this issue is to overcome the Anglo-Saxon centrality of language, and thus to include more than one language and communication wherever authors wanted and had the energy and time to do so.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that in terms of both language and what else could be done?
In being co-editor of this journal, in the way that it was set up by the labor of those who came before me, some of whom remain co-editors with me, I have learned to always look at these special issues as exercises of enacting the type of world that we’re thinking about, not as a sidebar to psychoanalysis, but as central to its work. Not as an endpoint, but as a starting point, and perhaps as a living experiment to see what happens when you dare to disrupt an as-is process.
There’s also a way in which, through this special issue, you’re opening up possibilities for what can emerge—I don’t know whether it’s been done before, and that came to be because you and I both have native languages that are not in the English register and we had a conversation early on about what it means to always commute with an Anglo register as the primary method by which we communicate academically, professionally, and in publishing.
We have extreme competency in English because we have been asked to function in that way as a measure of our universal competency in our expertise, in our field. What came about from our conversation, another way in which you opened the door for other things to emerge, is that we recognized, intimately, the failures of that method—which we can think about as a form of violence if we are thinking about violence as being part of larger structures that historically have erased indigenous languages, stolen languages from people, and asked a particular type of subjectivity to be fronted at the expense of other parts.
Psychoanalytically speaking, what is the psychic impact of that ask, of that task, of that benchmark and expectation, whether it’s on that individual or historically or structurally, or generationally?
So, to come back to your question, “what can be done” is to always think in these layers constantly.
We’re thinking on an individual level, but we’re commuting from the individual to the structural even in this act, in our conversation here, a departure from a traditional introduction, as you also envisioned, in your entire orientation to this special issue. It is a great “live” exercise because sometimes people wonder what they might possibly do, how could a special edition actually be part of our process of enacting the world we want to live in?
In our conversations together about this issue, what has emerged is that one: Recognize that it can be. These interventions are among many, but they can be among the interventions we make, rather than write them out of possibility.
Then, because it’s a segmented process, revisit it. Intentionally ask: What is, what has been the impact?
Has there been an impact? What are the ripple effects of this?
How do we keep the momentum going? Ask ourselves questions about what needs to be done to make sure this act, these interventions, are not just performative.
And this does not apply only to this one moment, this one act, this one special issue. These are ongoing questions, and again, like psychoanalytic practice or clinical work, the questions emerge and may repeat as the process happens.
So here you and I are talking at this moment, but maybe we’ll be having an entirely different conversation, hopefully, once this is out in the world.
Reading again and again all the papers in this issue, I came to think about the dangers of psychoanalysis and politics, in the sense of dangers around and about psychoanalyzing politics. What do you think about it?
We have seen this, for instance, with psychology clearly, how it becomes a form of a regime in how people learn to experience themselves, individualising suffering and pain, pathologizing them, and depoliticizing inherently social, political, and structural issues in every domain of everyday life. Is this also a case for psychoanalysis?
I think there’s a lot of conversation happening around this right now, which I don’t think we can escape, especially with the state of the world currently.
What I think, and what I always do, is also not exclusivize our method of thinking or theorizing and understand that psychoanalysis itself also emerged as part of a particular political moment and its retreat into the clinic was also part of a political moment, the condition of the world as it was configured in that moment. So, the question of whether or not psychoanalysis exclusively or naturally or essentially belongs just in the clinic is also up for question.
Is that the state of affairs now? By and large, yes.
I think that’s what many of us are pushing up against to say: These parameters are not natural. They are not organic. That’s not necessarily the only purview of psychoanalysis. Even though we also can note how it has been mainstreamed and regularized in that way—but again, to return and say, that regularization also happened as a result of a certain sociopolitical matrix.
I think there are many of us that say actually the use of psychoanalysis, as a method, as a theory, to understand the world and its conditions and how those conditions impact people, while not exactly the same as how it is used in the clinic, is an essential part of our work.
Do you want to add anything else, because I know that we focused a lot on psychoanalysis, but I am equally aware that this special issue speaks also about issues of gender and sexuality and violence in the broader sense.
I would comment from an editorial perspective that there’s something that felt very pressing at this moment, to us all. We are a journal that is based in the United States and at this particular moment with all the legislation that is happening here, legislation intimately involved with issues of gender and sexuality, whether that relates to autonomy or the violence of the state in response to that or the rise of fascism and how fascism has always understood gender and sexuality as within its purview of control, part of its property; this is the backdrop for the urgency for an issue that might take these questions up.
The pulse of this special issue then comes to note, as we just mentioned, that this is also a particular moment we’re in. And that we have a responsibility to respond to, or engage in, or make space for that moment and its reverberations when it saturates and infiltrates so many people’s lives.
I want to ask you the same question as this special issue editor: of where the urgency came for you? Especially as there were no guidelines around what the parameters of that would be or what the specific concentration of your call for papers would be.
What’s your sense of how it came to have the form it does now?
For me, it came first as a way of leaving behind psychology and engaging more psychoanalytically speaking with questions of violence, gender, and sexuality. However, and while engaging closely with psychoanalysis, I came to deal with similar questions and critics, like those I had with psychology (i.e., individualism, pathologization, struggle to embrace psyche as an inherently political landscape, power relations, elitism, etc.). It goes without saying that there are theories, researchers, and activists that use psychoanalysis in a different way, a way that we see perhaps in this special issue.
But there is also a question about how we understand the psychic effects of violence, including violence that manifests and expands in issues around gender and sexuality as you mentioned before, not as an individualistic psychic “malfunction” but to create the space for and about liberation that I believe is a psychoanalytic aim?
And while violence around gender and sexuality is one main aspect of this special issue, it is just an aspect of it. I believe you and I can both understand and see violence in the everyday lives drawn in poverty, racism, sexism, colonial frames, and capitalistic cyclones, but equally exploitation, violence, and alienation in the very way we see, think, understand, and articulate knowledge in academic institutions, psychoanalytic institutions, training programs, and so many more areas of our life.
For me, this special issue emerged as a need to open the question around psychoanalysis, violence, gender, and sexuality, and question how we think about these signifiers, what we do with them, and what else could be done.
How can we move “onward”?
How do we make a space that is not academically bureaucratic to think in? Can those of us who work at academic institutions make space to think outside the academic box and register? Our fights require not only theory but space to think, reflect and act, act in our work, in our unions, in our streets, our neighborhoods, right?
So, again, it was a way to open that discussion further, “experimentalize” with how we can do things differently, taking on board the inclusion of and work with languages that are outside the Anglo-Saxon register and opening the floor for people to write in their own way around and about psychoanalysis. As we will see, some authors chose to be very psychoanalytically informed, whereas others chose to work with psychoanalysis in a different way, as an aspect among many others to touch upon issues of violence, gender, and sexuality.
And there is a question here about how we make each of these signifiers open and most importantly make them speak together. As, if we don’t, we endanger, how can I say this, foreclosing them perhaps?
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Artemis Christinaki
Artemis Christinaki, Ph.D., is an Honorary Research Fellow in Education within the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at the University of Manchester. During the preparation of this special issue, she was a lecturer in Global Health at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI). Her Ph.D. research critically explored the politics, or the role, of psychosocial support in the refugee camps of Greece. Her main research interests lie at the intersection of migration and refugee studies, critical social theory, critical psychology, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism.
Lara Sheehi
Lara Sheehi, Psy.D. (she/her), is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program, where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the president of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and is on the advisory board for the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network.