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This episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland. Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast in Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt, justice, and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me is now playing only on Netflix. Wayfair's big sale is returning. Get ready for way day. For four days only, score up to 80% off all things home with free shipping on everything from October 26th through 29th, score Wayfair's best deals like up to 80 off area rugs, up to 60% off mattresses, up to 60% off bedroom furniture, and more exclusive doorbuster deals. So mark your calendar and shop Wayday starting October 26th at Wayfair.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?
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Streaming only on Peacock.
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I'm gonna need the name of everyone.
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B
That could have a connection.
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You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming.
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These nice people killing each other.
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All her fault. A new series, streaming now only on Peacock. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books and Psychoanalysis. I'm Cassandra Seltman, your host today. I'm pleased to be speaking with Jamison Webster about her new collection of essays, Disorganization and Sex, which just came out in June of this year from Divided Publishing. Many of you may already be familiar with Jamison's work, but I'm going to give her a proper introduction nonetheless. Jamison Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York, and is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is the author of the Life and Death of Psychoanalysis. Out from Rutledge, 2011, Stay Illusion with Simon Critchley, Vintage, 2013, Conversion Disorder, Columbia University Press, 2018, and Disorganization and Sex Divided, 2022. She writes regularly for Art Forum, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and Spike Arts Quarterly. So thanks for coming on the program, Jamison.
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Thank you, Cassie.
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So this book is different than your other books, especially formally. I don't see it as being beholden to one central thesis or argument. In fact, when I was thinking about my questions, I realized very few of them have to do with sex, even though the book is certainly tied together through this exploration of sexuality as a disorganizing force. So my first question is two part. What made you decide to do a book of essays? And how did you choose this title for it?
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You Don't Want to Talk About Sex. My publishers actually chose the title Disorganization and Sex. And at first I was kind of taken aback, but I grew into it, especially as I saw how they had put things together. So the idea was that they approached me asking me if I wanted to do something with them. And I said that I wasn't in the position to write another book, but. And they suggested that I had, you know, asked if I had unpublished or uncollected writings. And I sort of dropboxed them, all the stuff that was in the ether. And in part because they were saying that, you know, they go looking for some of my more public facing writing on the Internet and whatnot, and might it be interesting to collect those together. So I assembled everything, and it's not the most pleasant thing to clean out one's closet, but they actually made it a kind of lovely process. And they found this theme kind of going back to one of my earliest papers, which is the first essay in the book on Desire and Freud. And they saw this theme emerging from there in terms of the disorganizing force of sex and the way that this impacts psychoanalytic training and the way we listen to patients and the critique of culture. So I have them to thank. It wasn't. It wasn't me.
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B
Your writing style, especially maybe in this book, even More than others, draws on the discourse of the patient as well as the discourse of the analyst in its kind of use of poetic free association. I'm thinking of the associations to the letter ck and it kind of reminds me of Lacan saying he writes about the unconscious unconsciously. So I was wondering, how do you separate these discourses? Or is it possible to.
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I mean, in a way, I try not to separate them so much, insofar as being a patient is so intrinsic to becoming an analyst. And the. What you discover as a patient informs eventually how you come to listen. And it's the experience of analysis that. That gives you a sense of what's possible, which is also why you have to go as far as possible, which is a big part of kind of what Lacan brings up in the Big middle essay. But in terms of keeping the dreams, my own dreams, dreams of patience, the speaking of patients, the speaking of the analyst, trying to keep that at the forefront is really important to me. In one sense, there's. I think the bigger question isn't so much whether it's the analyst speaking about analysis, the analyst speaking about patients, or patients just speaking, but whether when you write, you're writing for psychoanalysts who you see as, I don't know, engaged in like an insular discourse about what it is that they do, or whether you're writing about analysis, which can include analysts, but not necessarily it includes everybody. And there's a certain kind of writing that I like doing about psychoanalytic theory that I feel like is probably just speaking in a way to analysts or psychoanalytic theorists. Like, insofar as I would push things really hard and assume a lot on the part of the reader versus like speaking to a public audience. But I also begin to blur those clips a lot lately, or I sort of begin to assume a certain kind of knowledge on the part of the public and also distrust thinking that analysts have any particular knowledge in general. So this book, I think, or this collection of essays, I don't know, plays around on that frontier because it really mixes it up. I don't know if that was your experience.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the public, there's kind of this question throughout the book, it seemed to me at least that what psychoanalysis can do for the collective, if it can do anything outside of the one on one relationship and the dyad, it comes up in your response to Preciado, who has kind of a complaint about this, and also in your critique of institutes. So what can psychoanalysis do for the collective outside of analysis?
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It's always my question, and I don't ever really have a very good answer. I mean, I feel like that's something I come across all the time where people ask, you know, is it just this like, one on one relationship where you fix people, if that's even what we're doing, like one by one by one by one, is there something that psychoanalysis has to say to politics or the social or collective forms? That's not just critique, that's perhaps contributing to fixing things. And that's important to me because it's not, you know, as if psychoanalysis wants to come in and say, what's wrong with everybody? And we don't even do that ourselves. So I don't know that we should put to the world per se. But is there a way of speaking from the position of an analyst that can do something. And Preciado, for example, is very, very angry about whatever forms of normative psychoanalysis, historically speaking, and what they've done to marginalized people. Of course, for Preciado, trans. Is. Is first and foremost, but you know, just anyways, the colonizing, privatizing, normativizing forces of analysis. And I kind of asked Preciado because so much of what he wants to do in his own writing I don't see as so different from analysis, which is to speak to the body, to speak to questions of change and trying to push at the very edge of what's possible through. I mean, Preciado does it through writing. He also does it through performance or kind of collective activities. And you know, that's where whether psychoanalysis is engaged in the arts or engaged with itself institutionally, that I think that it should be much more radical. And the critique of institutes which is present in all my work because it's part of my frustration and experience as a psychoanalyst is say we need to do better. And insofar as people want to become analysts, engage with analysis, I don't know that the institutes that we have are a very good representation of what's possible.
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B
Right. Which made me wonder, is there a better model for the institute and for the transmission of psychoanalysis?
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Well, that big centerpiece in the book, which is basically like a line by line reading of Lacan's paper as variations on the standard treatment, which is like 1954, so it's a long time ago now, was his proposal eventually of a different model of analysis. I mean, really towards the end of the paper, after he goes through the fact that it's not just him, but many psychoanalytic theorists, very famous ones, Glover, Balint, people that are unlikely allies of Lacan that have said this is not working. There's a. The institute's basically instruments of power at this point, and gatekeeping of power and mystification and obfuscation and the sedimentation of psychoanalysis into a knowledge that you then shove into the heads of candidates that this cannot be what psychoanalytic training looks like. Psychoanalytic training is based on an experience of analysis. It's based on experience of the limits of knowledge and a needing to force transference into a relationship where you work on something and that that transference isn't exclusive to analysis. It's certainly something that takes place in the classroom and it's certainly something that takes place in politics. I mean, this is Freud's impossibles The psychoanalyzing, governing, educating, and that analytic institutes, above all else, should understand that transference needs to become an interesting radical working relationship, and not just in the interests of sedimenting power and institutionalizing forms of knowledge. And at the very end of that essay, he says basically that they should learn everything. Astronomy, linguistics, theories of dialectics, ancient philosophy, literature, playwriting, who cares? Poetry, rhetoric. And that it shouldn't just be this, you know, 54 credits in diagnoses and clinical listening, and nothing that I know that exists today looks like this. There's critiques of the institution, there's institutions that have tried to dismantle power structures, but the kind of openness and ideas of playing with, I don't know. The collective forms does not exist. It doesn't exist.
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B
Do you think it exists outside the United States? Or it's really nowhere. Maybe that's just a wish or a fantasy.
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I can't. I had lots of fantasies about outside the United States, too. I don't know. There's institutes that I know of. There's like this, the sort of famous Uruguayan model that really like, didn't have a training analysis system. There's the institute that Laplanche runs that runs very, very differently, where basically you do your analysis for whatever, five to 10 years, and then you can just join as a member of what's essentially like a research society so that it's not this kind of hierarchical training model. You know, there's really interesting institutes in the U.S. or alliances of very, very small groups of analysts, because of how huge the US is, like the Northwest alliance of Psychoanalytic Societies, which is covering, like, Oregon and Washington State. There's Pink, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, which is like the only institute that I know of that is an IP institute that has Lacan studied within it and really branches very, very different theories from relational theories, declining theories, to Freudian theories, Lacanian theories. But even if you create a more diverse and eclectic set of knowledges, it doesn't mean that you're experimenting so much with what it means to be a candidate and then an analyst and then a training analyst and then a supervisor. Right? And I think this was Lacan's question, was how to mess with that which creates real problems at the same time that we understand that there is a difference between being someone who's starting their own analysis, starting to treat an alazams for the first time, has supervised, hasn't supervised, has been the analyst for someone who's a candidate to become an analyst, as opposed to just patients that these are differences. Right. But that don't just amount to differences in power, status or something so reified as age, you know, the older the better. And I just don't know that we're there yet trying to think these things, although we are, even in the last 10 years of my life as an analyst. We do know that there's. There's a lot of critiques of the Institutes going on at the moment.
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B
Right. The hierarchical model seems to just arouse so much transference to the Institute. And I wonder why we don't analyze our transferences to the Institutes.
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Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, my experience in the many Institutes that I've been around in is that the idea of transference is used with reverence, on the one hand of the transference, and then on the other hand, as a way of dismissing people. Oh, it's transference. And both of these are a problem because, you know, and Lacan, for me, is one of the few people to like, really take apart transference. One of the things that he says about it is that psychoanalysis understands that it's something very unique that arises in the spontaneous act of wanting to speak to another person who you presume knows something, and that that presumption is precisely what makes speaking in the direction of going where you don't know possible. Because otherwise you just say shit that you know. So when you presume that someone might know something, you speak differently. You speak towards an emptiness, as it were, or towards the future, let's say. And when you do that, you make something possible. What you make possible, psychoanalytic speaking, psychoanalytically speaking, is repetition, repetition tied to sexuality and trauma. That repetition is not an eidetic repetition meaning the same, which is a huge mistake with transference. As if in this amazing situation of evoking a spontaneous speaking in the direction of an unknown, you would just do the same old thing. You don't do the same old thing. You do the same old thing with a difference. You bring something up and you repeat it in the new context of speaking to this new person in the new time that you are speaking something old in a new frame that makes something possible and creates something new, creates something in the frame of the book. Disruptive, disorganizing, shocking, surprising, but also with great force and creative potential. And the person who is in the position of receiving this speech is in. Also in the position then to say that they heard that, and in saying that, they hear that new thing that comes to birth, comes to light, makes it real, has the Potential to make it real. It is difficult, I think, for one to recognize what oneself is doing, is what's so important about there even being another. And so if that's what's important to us, then is our way of thinking about transference, is our way of creating training, is our way of institutionalizing ourselves, doing that. The best service that it seems to me is the only important question. And it's a question that isn't even asked by the institute. You know, what is the vibrancy of our institute? Like, where are we failing with respect to this? What new is coming to light? What are we learning from our students? What do our students bring to the table? Do I feel excited about what's happening in this institute? Do I want to teach this course again? Why am I teaching this course again? What do I want to say in this course that I'm teaching again for no money, Just to have that space be possible within the question of what it even means that we're doing with each other, especially since we have to put in so much unbelievable time. And my experience is that it's not what this doesn't happen. We go on autopilot for some reason. And I've had questions like, are we tired? You know, because we're all a bit overworked? Is it the fact that the institutes are these, like, impossible structures that don't make any money, that have no money to give, have no money to be made, are just like basically indentured servitude that makes you just want to, like, clip, go, and not really think these difficult questions, because it's just too hard, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of legal questions for institutes that they're freaked out about that probably also make it very hard to think about these things, like what. What is hemming us in? And here again, the question of desire and disorganization is very important because the institutes just start to go into this mode of ruthless bureaucratic bureaucracy, like organizing for the sake of organization, for the sake of the continued existence of a thing, without ever wanting to disrupt anything, trying to create, like trying move all the disruptive forces to the outside. Which is why the most interesting candidates who are trying to disrupt things often get severely punished by institutes which. Which we all know. We all know this.
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B
Right? And. And there's kind of something about acting out too, or being punished for acting out. And this question of action. You extol the theatrical and ironic aspects of acting out against a lot of psychoanalysts attitude towards action. So I wanted To. And you have your chapter on action psychoanalysis. I was wondering if you can say more about both the importance of action in analysis and also what are the boundaries and limits, if any, around it? Can one contain action? Or is that something they even want to do?
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A
Right, right. Yeah, I like that. That's the first time that, that it was a talk that I gave a long time ago at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, the former NYU institute. And it was on the. The kind of low walled question of therapeutic action, like what's the action of analysis? And they wanted me to talk about Lacan and I went to his like, not so well known seminar on the psychoanalytic act. And in that, in that seminar he, he says that he. What he finds interesting is that the way that Freud thought about action, which at first was the reflex action, right? Like hot, and you pull your hand away. And he says, but that's not really an action insofar as it's just. It's pure reaction, right? And Freud goes from the reflex arc to the idea of thinking. So first it's hot, you burn your hand, then you pull your hand away from the hot flame, but then you think about things like, oh, things are hot and they might burn me, and so therefore I should stay away from hot things. And hot things are kind of scary. And maybe I'm scared of all hot things. Maybe I'm a hot mess. And thinking for Freud is. Is sometimes thought of as trial action, like on the way to action or just not action. It's pure inhibition, right? It's to stop action, which is what thinking is. So he says, you know, this is the first model. You have a pure reaction and then you have the pure stoppage of action. None of which are action in the sense of what we mean, which is to act with decisiveness or with desire or the sexual act, to really, you know, act sexually. Here we have simply total reaction and total inhibition. So how do we think of the act? And he says the closest that we might get in Freud would be the slip of the tongue. The, like, the, the, the, the bungled action, as it were, you know. And then by virtue of that, of course, Lacan talks about the, the truth. He's always talking about the trilogy, the original trilogy of Freud, which is the symptomatic acts, the dream, the symptom, the slip of the tongue and the joke. These are the places where we understand a more radical. And I think Lacan would say, and this is important to me, dignified action, not thinking, not reaction. That psychoanalysis gives us a model of this, of these half acts that analysis helps us seize as our true action that we don't know. And I think, you know, when I read Low Walt, when I reread Lowell's famous paper, I think he says something like this also. And he actually very interestingly says something about this with respect to the idea of transference, that transference is this, it's the linking of something very crucial in the mind from one sphere to another. And that these are not known links and that this is the action of analysis. And that analysis, all analytic theory, all analytic work has to work on not resisting this linkage that happens without our knowing. It happens on this unconscious terrain. And that's what we might actually be quite scared of, that we might want to like think and inhibit our way out of. And so I saw this kind of beautiful connection between, between low walled and Lacan. And it was to really say that this is the sphere of analysis and that when you are with a patient, they make you very anxious about what they're going to do or what's happening to them or what they're not going to do in order to help themselves, quote, unquote. But it's the analyst's job to resist this and to wait for the unconscious connection, the unconscious act to emerge out of what can often look like very, very chaotic actions. And you know, of course, I gave this case, that's probably one of my most difficult cases with respect to the question of action, because you just want to stop this woman who, you know, you feel is doing crazy things and how important it was not to do that and to wait for the transference and the unconscious act to emerge and to make itself known. And I think institutionally we have real difficulty with this, despite the fact that we might be very good with it in the comfort of our offices and with our patients. And I find that kind of funny. And I often find actually that universities especially that are dealing with undergraduates who we all know are like wild and having a wild time. They just got out from home and all of the rest of it. Undergraduate institutions deal with acting out much better because they're dealing with young kids and they just want them to, in the best of cases, learn to funnel themselves into whatever their, you know, the, the, the, the goal of a good liberal arts education, which is to think about what it means to be a human being and do that despite all of the chaos of being a young person and trying to tolerate it as best as possible and keep them safe. And you would Think that that would be kind of our goal. Right. We have candidates that are undergoing analyses and taking apart themselves in their lives. And they're people who are starting to see patients, stirs all kinds of things up, and they're undertaking a pretty radical pot, stirring, disorganizing education. And this is good. All of this is good. It's difficult. It's good. Why don't we create a container and a frame for it and do what we do the best, which is to help them keep doing it and not stop them.
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B
Right. I'm thinking about that case study that you call her Thea. And this idea of, you said, keep them safe. And then there's also this idea of taking things as far as possible that keeps ringing in my mind and how to navigate, let's say, the analysts or the Institute's fear about death, about things being taken to the point of death. Because then there's the end of analysis and the end of action, and there's nothing left to work with.
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A
I mean, in the case with the. There's the drugs that emerge at a certain point, which are very important. And I talk about the pharmakon, you know, the kind of the poison that's also the cure. It actually comes up in the Preciado essay as well. And, you know, there's a moment in all analyses, we feel like the patient is here, they're working, they're talking to you. They want to come back. They might be in the middle of doing something dangerous, but you have to have faith that you would have a sense of whether the transference is holding or not. And I do say to her, I think I say in the case study, I'm not going to pretend that you're not hurting yourself because you're saying the drugs make me breathe, when in fact, actually the drugs make you not breathe. That's what the drugs do. They stop breathing. And I said, you know, let's talk about the drugs. I'm not telling you not to do drugs, but I'm not gonna pretend as if they're helping you breathe only when they're actually stopping you from breathing, potentially and literally. And I think that that's an important thing to say. But you don't just, you know, clamp. I don't clamp down. I don't believe in that. You know, I won't see you anymore unless you stop doing drugs. That I don't. I don't do that kind of a thing. And I don't think that if you had a patient, candidate, student, something who's in the middle of acting out that you wouldn't first try to make an interpretation to them by someone who they trust before you call in the brigades. But I think we, we like to call in the brigades at certain moments. I don't know, we must get really scared. We must get really frightened.
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B
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B
That's right.
- [29:44]
A
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A
Rated M for mature.
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B
An interpretation instead of an ultimatum.
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A
Yeah, instead of an ultimatum. Instead of a like, you know, handcuffing instead of a punitive moralizing remark. I mean, any of that. This is the question of believing in our medium which is really only speech, and to also understand the containing function of speech. It's interesting because you could say in light of our conversation that the analysts are acting out, because acting out means to go outside of the realm of speech.
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B
Right? And I'm thinking about chapter on ending your analysis with endings. And you write about Freud's most famous five case studies in this. And they're kind of. They're almost like poetry. They're vignettes, they're little short stories. And yet you never, I felt you never quite spell out for us what. What these have to do with the necessary termination of analysis. So I was wondering if you could spell it out a bit more.
- [31:11]
A
That was a funny piece. So that piece, I like talking about this because I can give the kind of backgrounds to things. I didn't really do it in the book, which just kind of has these. These chapters laid out. But that piece was for a 24 hour kind of conference at the Guggenheim, which was fun because it was like All Night Long to mark the show on Maurizio Catalan's end of his artist career, which he did end. I was sort of dubious at the time as to whether this wasn't some ploy on his part. And I don't know for Those of you who didn't see the show, he hung every single piece of his artwork from, like, a giant chandelier in the middle of the Guggenheim. And you would kind of walk up the spiral staircase, and you got to see all of them. And it was almost like a suicidal gesture, like he hung all his art and then announced the end of his career. And so I did this piece on the end of Analysis. And it was also the place that I met Courtney Love. I mean, I had met her prior, but I asked her to come speak at that event. She blurbed the book, which is why I brought her up, and I asked her to speak on the end. She didn't speak about Kurt Cobain suicide, which is probably the right decision to make, but spoke about how she's worth more as a rock star. She's worth more dead than alive, which is kind of a fascinating thing to hear her talk about, which is true, because we don't. We don't treat former musicians well in their old age. We like them to die young. So I just wanted to kind of talk about the ends of these cases, like, where they end. Like, where did Freud's cases end? And we know that Freud's cases are all kind of not cases or they're failed cases. The only kind of good case is the Rat man, in a way, like, successful case, whatever that means. But then he dies in. In World War I. So it's not a great case ending. And the other ones end terribly in. In one fashion or another. And I. I wanted to run through these endings both for what was so wrong about them, so that the idea of the, like, handshake into the halls of health was kind of displaced. But then also talk about what was kind of beautiful about them, their failed endings. And, you know, I guess what's not said but said kind of lyrically is, you know, just. Just have your. Have your end. Have your messy. Have your messy end of your analysis. Like, know. Know what that is. And the. Like, you know, welcome to my streamlined, beautiful, ordered existence as a cured person is certainly not the model we have, at least not from Freud. And to not be afraid of it, I guess. Also.
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B
Is it connected to this idea of the cut and cutting the sessions and needing to take some kind of action around separation?
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A
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think everyone loves to beat Lacan around the bush about his deciding when the session ends and the clock not deciding when the session ends. And I always say, I don't really want to talk about this because I don't practice the short session or variable length session actually is the right way to think about it. But his idea was that. Was that it brings the abruptness of ending, the not control, the lack of control one has over ending the ending at a point that's always incomplete. That's never this like trying to get to the complete, trying to get to the tying things up, trying to get the pure package, pure gift, to allow that to be part of the analysis. Because he felt like you could kind of operate under the illusion of the totality, like the end being this great totality, this image of fruition. He sometimes talks about it as like the acorn becoming the great oak tree, as if that's what we're doing and as if we don't know that the end is so unbelievably messy and that we disintegrate and that, like, we lose our minds and our functioning and that our body wears away. And we will not see the end of our projects, and we will not see the end of all of our goals. And it will be even more a coming to bear on the what was not done than the image of what's done. And to really put that side of the coin forward. Because the imaginary sense of wanting the totality is ruthless and will make dying very difficult. And having lost my father now a couple months ago, I think none of us are prepared for how unbelievably messy and disorganized death is. And then there's all the paperwork. That's cheerful.
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B
Well, I think in a way, you made an interpretation to me, because I was with this chapter. I'm asking you for more of a perfect package. You're giving me something abrupt around ending, and I'm wanting more for you to tie something up for me.
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A
Well, good. There you go. Take that.
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B
Well, now that we're thinking about death now, I do want to talk about sex. I want Roddick to come back in.
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A
Good.
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B
But I was. I guess my question would be about kind of just about what's. What's happening with sex now. But if it's anything different than before. But after I read your book, I saw the new Cronenberg movie, the Crimes of the Future, and it centered around this one liner, which is that surgery is the new sex. Yeah. So it brings to mind, of course, Freud's famous analogy of the psychoanalyst as surgeon. But it made me want to ask you, what do you make of this in terms of what might be operating in the unconscious? What's with all this cutting and surgery? And what does it all have to do with sex?
- [37:38]
A
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean the surgery in the book comes up around Preciado, who wants the analyst to trans surgery themselves. And I was like, you know, I was interested in the surgical metaphor and, and there's a long history actually around it that I started to kind of dig around in which is Freud's use of surgical metaphors and then his abandonment of surgical metaphors. And the way he thought about the surgical metaphors on the one hand was, you know, like the removal of dead tissue, necrotic tissue, the precision, the scalpel, like precision of the analyst, but also the necessity for sterilized contained environment under which to perform the surgery. And then the medical model was something he wanted to get away from. So he abandoned a lot of these ways of thinking about this. And this actually comes up in the first paper where he's using these kind of crazy mid whiffery gynecological images that always seem to make the patient a woman who has to be invaded by a male doctor. And so there's something important one that he gets rid of that heteronormative objectifying discourse, anatomizing discourse, and then medicalized discourse. But Preciado on the one hand also wants to get rid of all those things that's part of his beef. But then also wants to bring back this kind of medico, surgical, biological, hacking stuff. So, you know, I was saying what do we do about this? Like what do we do about the kind of contradictions and what was important to get rid of? But now what are we returning to? And I think the fact that the materiality of sex, that when we talk about sex, we are talking about a body, we're talking about enjoyment and the literality of enjoyment and the fact that today's world affects our enjoyment. Was that. Is this more than before? I don't know. It's really hard to say. But it's also very difficult not to feel like we are in a new reality with the phones and the technology which is like plugging right into our bodies and that we're having a very hard time separating ourselves from this. And that in and of itself seems to necessitate something that feels surgical, feels like cutting, feels like cutting ourself off. All these apps that are designed to stop us right from going on our phones, from just like giving in to that enjoyment which affects our subjectivity. It's not just that it takes up our time or takes up our attention, but that we don't even know where we are anymore. And that it's literally affecting democracies, it's affecting politics in this country. So there is something very important about getting back to the materiality of that and that this seems to be, or I'm venturing, at least in the book, that this is a sexual question and that this is something that we're hearing from patients all the time. We're hearing about this difficulty with. With being sexed, with enjoyment, with the way they get lost in it and the way that they're also radically separate from it at the same time. And that they don't know how to be inside of their sexuality. And there's a mirror of this a bit in discourses about the kind of sex wars that are going on. Like me too. Toxic masculinity, the kind of, you know, attack on, I don't know, white male heterosexuality, all of which I agree with. But that the attack on it makes it impossible to be inside and always on the outside at the same time. So I wanted to kind of reintroduce these back into the old fashioned psychoanalytic conversation about sex and to do so through cases and theories and preciado. And. Yeah, I don't know. Does that answer your question?
- [41:59]
B
It's a start. It begins to. But it's making me think about your chapter on male sex, sexuality and genitality also. And I'm wondering if you can say more about that, because I found that to be an interesting chapter in the last section of the book.
- [42:19]
A
Yeah, that was splicing together like an essay that I wrote about masculinity, toxic masculinity, for Richardson magazine with this like, amazing set of photographs that were taken of male hazing ritual in colleges. Like, you know, the way they like, tied each other up and like, threw up and peed on each other and jumped on each other in piles, like this kind of incredible homoerotic, weird, sadomasochistic scene of masculinity or what's, you know, like thought to be like, you know, real, real white male stuff and to think about masculinity and it. Just looking at those photos and then writing this essay, I was brought back to Michel Montrel, who talks about how Jerry rigged masculinity is and. And how in a lot of the complaints about how men, you know, want this kind of primal father status, this like uber man status. That's the law and the exception to the law at the same time that we miss the longing in them and the wish for some kind of transmission to take place from man to man to help Them understand what it is to be a man. And she says, you know, I could go in the direction of, you know, interpreting men in relationship to this father complex. But I really hear something else. And I saw that in the pictures. And then there's my editors, really, who Jerry rigged this together with thoughts on forensic and genitality, where Forensic. Forensic's theory in the Thalassa book, which is just utterly fascinating to me, is that all the genitals are nothing. They're like an aberration of evolution, right? We couldn't be fish in the sea spouting fluids, sort of pretty much trans or bisexual, that we had to create sexual differentiation in these ridiculous things called genitals, where one went inside the other in order to reproduce the species. And this ridiculous nothing aberration, all our wishes and our holding ourselves together and idea of who we are and where we came from and where we're going to go is at this place of nothing. So we have to identify with these ridiculous genitals and their fluids, create an image of ourselves and our future. And he calls this catastrophe. He calls this genital catastrophe because it amounts to nothing. It comes from nothing. It comes from evolutionary chaos and catastrophe. And it ends in what? It ends in detumescence or just post coital nothingness. And this is Forensic's answer to Freud's beyond the pleasure principle. And I think it's so funny because everyone's like, oh, nice guy. Forensic had a bit of problems in his personal life and had his beef with Freud, but he's so great and he really thinks intersubjectively and about the analyst countertransference, but he's not. He's really weird. His theory is very, very strange. And I love this part of him. And I want. I wanted to kind of bring it to the forefront, both in the strange materiality and that he thinks about, and his bringing, I don't know, this catastrophic element to the foreground. And thinking about how we all are facing it, the extinction of the species, the climate change catastrophe. For forensic, this would 100% be all of us phylogenetically going back to something we actually already know. There already was climate change. In the climate change to come, we all went through somewhere in our genetic history, the ice age, which led to the creation of our genitals, in facing the extinction of the species, are also turning away from our sexuality makes a huge amount of sense, which was, you know, kind of this underlying part in the book, which is that we. We are all wanting to turn away from sexuality at this Moment in which the world is facing, you know, real catastrophe. And Freud, Freud says that neurosis has its origins in that. No, no, go ahead.
- [46:43]
B
No, and. But then when you're saying that, I'm wondering how come we don't go the other way and become erotomanic? Why isn't this catastrophe and ending in extinction arousing a turn towards sexuality?
- [46:59]
A
But it is, I think, well, real. I don't like the term real sexuality, in terms of the real opening of yourself libidinally to the other, I think is where you can't go when you're under this much pressure. I mean, that's a very, very basic psychoanalytic principle. So the inhibition of sexuality, the rigidifying, frigidifying of sexuality or erotomania, which is like a forced, a forced forcing of sexuality, is where we go. And I think we're in both poles. I think that's what's so weird about at this moment is that we're both hyper connected and totally isolated. We're both frigid and erotic. Right. We're both lost in our own minds and totally outside of ourselves. And to be inside, just to go back to our very original question in this interview, to be inside the psychoanalytic act, to be inside desire, to be inside sexuality is, is an overturning of that polarity that like combined polarity. So I would say both frigid and erotomanic.
- [48:13]
B
Right. And, and there's this real, which is Trump.
- [48:18]
A
He is the person who should not be named or spoken about ever in interviews. I'm going to say it, then I'm going to stop. But we're not going to talk about him anymore.
- [48:24]
B
So this idea of erotomania and, and frigidity and the last in Frenzy's book makes me think about how much there's really a wish to get rid of the genitals, especially in Preciado. I think it's not the can the monster speak, but his newer book, it's kind of a manifesto for dildos, an anuses and against the genitals.
- [48:50]
A
It's actually his first book, the counter contra Sexual Manifesto, but it was most recently published. Yeah, no, there's a. There's a desire to get rid of the genitals because they are the sign of catastrophe. But I think the psychoanalytic stance would be okay, but we need to, we need to do that not as an erasure of catastrophe. If we're doing that, then it's, I don't know, hallmark catastrophe and not as a fanciful attempt to just bypass it. As if, you know, the dildos and the anus is going to make up the difference.
- [49:35]
B
Right. Or that they're egalitarian. We all have an anus. We can all buy a dildo or find one.
- [49:42]
A
Right, right, right, right.
- [49:45]
B
Well, since we're coming to towards the end of our time, before I let you go, maybe you can let us know what you're working on now, if it's a continuation of these ideas or something radically new as we hope to get an analysis.
- [50:05]
A
What am I working on? Well, I just was working on two pieces, one for the Times on adolescence, and I weirdly went back to Erik Erikson. I mean, weirdly for me, but I discovered that Erik Erikson is very weird in the same way forensic is weird. And I got very excited about what he had to say about America. So I'm writing a little bit about that and adolescence. I mean, adolescence is Erikson's thing, but the identity diffusion versus identity and what he. What he says about America is fascinating, which is that we have to move. We, like, we. We didn't realize the whole American dream was about endless movement. And that this is also built into our history in terms of the, like, pushing towards the west, you know, the sort of frontier. Frontier America. But that we. Right, right. Manifest destiny. But then we collapse the minute that you. You don't. You can't move anymore. And he says, like, there's just, like, psychosis beckoning for us. And so I kind of. I kind of loved this idea. And he makes the brilliant statement that, like, we hate old people because they can't move anymore. And he goes, but they solve this problem with RV culture. It's so. It's so. It's so brilliant and so weird. It's such a weird thing for psychoanalysts to say. Anyways, so I was just playing around with him, and maybe I'll do something more. And then I was writing about a child as being beaten through the lens of abortion, thinking of a child as being aborted, which came up in a recent talk I gave on masturbation fantasies. And I wanted to think more about that. And hopefully I'm gonna write a longer version of the piece that I did in the New York Review of Books on breathing. That's also what I'm thinking about. And that. That also speaks to Forensy and Thalassa, because part of the great genital catastrophe is not just having genitals, but also having to breathe air.
- [52:15]
B
This reminds me also the masturbation fantasies. There's no sex in. In them either. They're just. What are they? Odorless farts.
- [52:24]
A
They'Re beating. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So in the. In the book, there's an article on masturbation fantasies which were. It's actually where a lot of this thinking on that had come from. And we collected some anonymous fantasies and there's no sex in them. There's farting, there's washing, there's massaging, there's passing someone around and abusing them, but there's no sex per se. And there's very beautiful, fascinating uses of language in the masturbation fantasies that really feel encoded into it beyond the haver of the fantasy, which surprised me, that that could even come up in an anonymously reported masturbation fantasy. But then beyond that, there was something this great wealth of infantile sexuality like teaching, passing, massaging, holding, caring, passing. I don't know, it's so funny to me just to have these verbs that are replacing the act of sex sexuality be these things that we do with children, right?
- [53:27]
B
There's no, no penetration in any of them. And really not. Not so much with the genitals.
- [53:34]
A
The genitals have come out of. Well, with that, Goodbye, genitals.
- [53:43]
B
It's been. Goodbye, genitals. Goodbye, Jameson. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast and thank everyone for listening.
- [53:53]
A
Thank you. Thank you, everybody.