Awry: Journal of Critical Psychology

Strange Bedfellows

Bethany Morris — 2022-05-29

Introduction to the special issue ...

Critical Psychology, the Unconscious, & Traumatic Ethics

John Roberts — 2022-05-29

In this article, from Foucauldian and hermeneutic perspectives, I examine a modern form of ethics that follows a conceptualization of the unconscious related to the trauma of repression, as expressing a divided subject, which will necessarily elude the positive and adaptationist frameworks of normative psychology. I further suggest that, inter alia, subjectification through discourses on dissociation – manifest in Janetian theory, natural science psychology, and interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis – and related techne enjoin the subject to consolidate its experience through autobiographical identity or interpersonal expression. In contrast, the discourse of repression – as evident in classical psychoanalysis as read through Lacanian theory – and its related practices enjoin the subject to embrace its temporal destitution, to engage with the logic and politics of its desire. Finally, I suggest that differing conceptions of nonknowledge as the unconscious, refracted through traumatic subjectivity, serve rival tasks touching upon sanctioned foundations for governance.

A Lacanian Critique of the Empathy Cure

Stephanie Swales — 2022-05-29

The cultivation of more and better empathy has become a popular solution to the social problems of violence and xenophobia. Recent self-help books promise to teach us how, via empathy, we can reduce misunderstandings and conflicts so that we may love our racially or religiously different neighbors as ourselves—while at the same time competing with them in our neoliberal age. Psychology as a field has championed the benefits of empathy, devoting much research to the topic. Employing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the practice of critical psychology allows us to understand when and why empathy fails as a proposed curative factor in social efforts to reduce hostility toward otherness. For instance, hatred can be seen as a passion from which we derive jouissance, rendering it difficult to relinquish. Lacan’s notion of the structure of subjectivity along with jouissance, extimacy, and the capitalist and master’s discourses will be employed in this paper to critique psychology’s view of empathy.

Towards a Political Psychology

Daniel Bristow — 2022-05-29

In this paper, the authors inquire into whether psychoanalysis has the potential to traverse the social and economic determinants that organise the conditions for and situation of the individual. Through historical excavation of the roots of psy-systems and the wider psy-complex, the authors alight at crucial junctures in which radical routes were opened up, and that have been subsequently either ill-taken, snuffed out, or—on occasion—followed; it is the potentialities in these that the authors return to, and set out the beginnings of a theoretical heuristic towards in the latter part of the essay. Through interlocution primarily with the radical communist writings of the earlyWilhelm Reich, and the rigorous psychoanalytic formalisation of Jacques Lacan, the authors aim to return to Reich’s concept of a ‘political psychology’, that takes psychosocial structure seriously. From this point, they set out some of its coordinates, against the dictates of diagnostic and statistical administration, the deflections and disenfranchisements of neoliberal responsibilisation, and the capitalistically motivated injunctions of the happiness and wellness industries.

Embracing paradoxes

Claudia Di Gianfrancesco — 2022-05-29

In the last decade, cognitive and social psychologists have increasingly been interested in investigating the psychological mechanisms at the root of conspiracy theories (CT). This article offers an interpretation of current Covid-19 CT by analysing the “documentary” Plandemic via political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. While this philosophical perspective allows the authors to engage with fundamental questions concerning the paradoxical nature of CT, the adopted Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective is employed to examine the psychic motives behind conspiratorial beliefs. The Lacanian concept of jouissance is identified as particularly helpful to understand the link between the individual psyche and the collective, socio-political dimensions inherent to CT. Shifting the focus on the unconscious rather than the self-evident, rational mind, the authors offer a philosophical and psychoanalytical reading of CT that is in line with critical psychology’s agenda to problematize traditional psychology’s assumptions.

A Liberation Psychoanalytic Account of Racism

Robert Beshara — 2022-05-29

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been a theoretical resource for critical psychology since its formal inception in the 1970s. In this essay, I critically review some of the major Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of racism, particularly over the last 30 years, in an attempt to expand these accounts through a liberatory framework. My two-fold aim with the theoreticomethodological praxis that I am calling liberation psychoanalysis is: (1) to decolonize Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and (2) to historicize racism within a psychoanalytic reading that is dialectically materialist. Decolonizing psychoanalysis does not entail canceling it; on the contrary, metonymic decolonization is the name for critical yet sympathetic readings of modern fields of knowledge (e.g., psychoanalysis) from a Global Southern perspective, the ultimate goal of which is worlding.

Knowledge and Truth in Contemporary Society

Iris Aleida Pinzón Arteaga — 2022-05-29

In this article,we investigate the relationship between truth and knowledge in the so-called “post-truth era” by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Drawing on contemporary examples, we isolate two problematic disjunctions. The first one is epistemological: it concerns empiricist versus historicists accounts of science, and its relationship to truth. The second one is political: it concerns the distinction, articulated around the signifier “science”, between the politics of truth and the politics of post-truth. By unpacking Lacan’s statement that psychoanalysis operates upon the subject of science, we claim that the distance between psychoanalysis and science with regards to truth is ultimately a political one. Building on this, we mobilise Lacan’s theory of discourse to argue that the binary opposition between politics of truth and politics of post-truth reveals a failure to think contemporary political issues precisely as political.

Ideology Between Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry

Cecelia Opatken-Ringdal — 2022-05-29

Since the late nineteenth century, patients who fall under the “borderline” category have presented challenges to both psychiatric and psychoanalytic institutions. In this paper, I delineate the complicated social relations of production encapsulated in the history of the borderline group of patients beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, ending with the solidification of the diagnostic category “Borderline Personality Disorder” in the 1980 publication of the DSM-III. Although some histories have explored the socially contingent aspects of borderline, none have recognized the more radical potential of this diagnostic category in critically analyzing the diagnostic systems of normative psychiatry. I add to the dynamic history of the diagnosis by exploring the ways that borderline, as an object of medical-scientific study, has challenged the project of European scientific medicine in ways that might help us understand the latent contradictions within this project itself.

Enlightenment and Psychoanalysis

Vitor Bicudo Oliva — 2022-05-29

This article examines the proposition of “Our God, Logos” written by Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) in light of the concept of “enlightenment” as understood by Adorno and Horkheimer. We show how some current forms of clinical practice in psychology and psychoanalysis wager on the “disenchantment” of the unconscious as a course for the treatment. In dialogue with critical psychology, we show how, in intending to eliminate the unconscious from the analytical scene, these practices operate in favor of an ideological project that seeks to establish, in the insurrectional place of the unconscious, the politically compromised instance of the ego. We also propose, as a counterpoint, a Lacanian rereading of the Freudian Logos which recalls that the notion of Logos specifically refers to the function of speech [parole] and points to dimension of the “saying” [dire]. Thus, we ask what "(en)lightning" can mean for a psychoanalysis that is critical of a belief in an illuminated reason which would occlude the unconscious and at the height of the forgotten saying behind what one says.

Against the Bedrock

Brendan Moore — 2022-05-29

This article identifies and offers an alternative to a trope shared across multiple genres of writing on therapy for transgender people: the bedrock. That metaphor, derived in part from Sigmund Freud’s own argument (in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” [1937]) that a sexual difference rooted in biology is the “bedrock” of all psychic phenomena, is influential in psychoanalytic accounts of transgender being and often implicitly present even in non-psychoanalytic clinical writing. I take as exemplary cases two recent nonpsychoanalytic manuals on trans-affirming therapy, and two recent articles on psychoanalytic therapies with trans patients and theories of trans being. Despite their differences, each of these articles formulates or depends on a theory of a “bedrock” to trans experiences in order to demonstrate that trans patients are not confused about sex and gender. I propose the prepositional “against the bedrock” as a counter-metaphor which might articulate how patients, cis and trans, only confuse sex precisely

A Response to Humanistic Psychology

Benjamin Ramey — 2022-05-29

Humanistic psychology developed in large part as a reaction to psychoanalysis as practiced in the United States during the early-to-mid twentieth century, whichwas critiqued by humanistic psychologists as being reductive, and dehumanizing. The holding environment in which the client can be “authentic” without judgment forms the basis of the humanistic stance. Humanistic psychology’s roots are found in existential psychotherapy, however, it has deviated from those roots and developed into something uniquely American and amenable to capitalist exploitation. Writers within the humanistic tradition regularly cite psychoanalysis’ shortcomings as the impetus for their work but do not demonstrate an adequate understanding of psychoanalytic practice. With this misunderstand a loss is produced, a loss of the transmission of analytic practice as begun by Freud. We hope to move beyond the misunderstandings and difficulties encountered by humanistic psychologists through critique, first using Buddhist psychology and then by a return to the fundamentals of psychoanalysis. We conclude that our critiques are especially relevant as humanistic psychologists seek to use their theories to position themselves as leaders in struggles for social justice.

A Hermeneutic Reading of Psychoanalysis as a Response to Psychological Reductionism

Eric Vogan — 2022-05-29

While psychoanalysis and philosophical hermeneutics have their own respective developmental histories, each has in common, within their respective fields, three particular “tensions” which, in many ways, organize their history and development. These tensions include: epistemology versus ontology, explanation versus understanding, and (hermeneutic of) suspicion versus trust. In order to explicate these “tensions” as they organize philosophical and psychoanalytic hermeneutics, the author will offer a historical exploration of philosophical hermeneutic development. Through this unfolding, insights which connect the development of philosophical and psychoanalytic hermeneutics will be offered. This exploration also implicitly offers a psychoanalytic hermeneutic which can be used as a response to the mainstream paradigm of psychological reductionism. As such, a psychoanalytic hermeneutic orientation towards meaning, context, history, relationality and phenomenology offer methods for a countering and re-framing of both psychotherapeutic process and method.

Clean, Death, Revolt

Jacob Glazier — 2022-05-29

The global compulsion to ‘get clean’ has never been more palpable. This discourse of quarantine, as I call it, has mistakenly relied on a form of biopolitics in order to achieve this end. In doing so, the trademarks of subjection, those like docility, internalization, and self-policing, have reached a heightened state in functioning to keep the ‘psychosis of dirt’ at bay. Relying on the archaeology of critical psychology and psychoanalysis, I hope to show that playing in the dirt does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. In fact, it may even be the case that being dirty establishes bonds of closeness, affinity, and communion. Julia Kristeva (2014) goes so far to suggest that being dirty in this way - integrating those aesthetic forms of abjection - organizes new political action, what she calls a politics of intimacy or a sensual politics. With the rallying cry Revolt! we are reminded of the work that needs to be done in order to better understand the destructive and threatening potential of the negative, bound up in the word dirt as well as others, and invited to refine and embrace this power.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Japan

Chris Bell — 2022-05-29

The following is an interview with Dr. Luke S. Ogasawara, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and director of the Tokyo Lacan School. Dr. Ogasawara studied psychoanalysis in London and Paris during the 1980’s and obtained a Diplôme d’études approfondies (DEA) from theDépartement de psychanalyse - Université Paris 8 in 1988. In this interview I speak with Dr. Ogasawara about Lacan’s comments on the possibility of conducting psychoanalysis in the Japanese language, apophatic ontology as a foundation of psychoanalysis, the concept of sublimation in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the effect of globalization on the Japanese language, and mental health in Japan.