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Racial loneliness is a phenomenon experienced by individuals of color in predominantly white settings, including the predominantly white clinic. This paper identifies key psychoanalytic underpinnings of racial loneliness, drawing upon theory from Klein, Fanon, Layton, Eng and Han, and Okun. In doing so, this paper explores racial loneliness and its treatment implications. Through a deepened understanding of racial loneliness, the isolation and exclusion of clinicians of color within psychoanalysis is interrogated. A clinical vignette is deployed to explore the effects of racial loneliness on treatment, identifying unique challenges in the realms of countertransference, self-disclosure, and identification.

This paper introduces and evaluates the Lacanian idea that racism can be conceptualized both as a mode of enjoyment (jouissance) and as a reaction to the perceived “theft of enjoyment.” Despite the distinct analytical advantages of this conceptualization—which grapples with racism not merely as discourse or socio-historical construction but in its affective, embodied, sensuous, and fantasmatic dimensions—the “theft of enjoyment” hypothesis can nonetheless be critiqued as: (1) guilty of a depoliticizing psychological reductionism; (2) conceptually under-differentiated and overly inclusive in its field of reference; (3) inattentive to different modes of enjoyment; and (4) conceptually decontextualized, cut off from the associated psychoanalytic concepts that necessarily accompany its proper application. Responding to these critiques, and by way of a defence of the analytic value of this hypothesis, this paper argues that: (1) jouissance is more a sociological than a psychological concept; (2) the notion of enjoyment must remain empty of definitive contents if it is to serve as an anti-essentialist variable of analysis; (3) three inter-connected modes of jouissance should be distinguished (bodily excitation, libidinal treasure, and the surplus vitality of the other); and (4) a series of psychoanalytic notions (drive, fantasy, object petit a, superego) should necessarily accompany any rigorous analytical application of the notion of jouissance to the social field.

This paper addresses the unique aspects of video games as a medium to explore how games might be interpreted in an analytic setting. By emphasizing the role of enjoyment in playing games, this paper reassesses earlier approaches to games in analysis and proposes a more comprehensive framework for considering the analysand’s interaction with games.

This paper stems from psychotherapy work with patients who ‘neglect personal hygiene’ in homelessness and chronic mental health settings, and consultancy to staff groups tasked with patients’ ‘social inclusion’. Psychoanalytic theory has largely eschewed exploring internal psychic states communicated by odour and, equally, the meaning of marked societal hostility towards malodorous individuals. The paper looks at historical and anthropological notions of ‘dirt’ and the construction of the ‘unwashed’ as a social category in the formation of bourgeois society. Psychoanalytic ideas of unconscious bodily and psychic communication are described. Case examples explore how troubled relations between body and mind result from early abuse/neglect, where the internal world is suffocated by trauma and ‘dread’ which cannot be contained and processed. From a psychosocial perspective, taking up a role as ‘unacceptable’ is the paradoxical condition of belonging for many members of the social whole. The paper suggests that invasive smell confronts us with our repressed knowledge of that which is ‘rotten’ in the emotional and sociopolitical environment in which ‘the unwashed’ exist. An example from organisational consultancy traces profound disturbance in institutional dynamics that occurs when the malodorous individual seeks to claim shared social resources. The author questions the prevalent view that ‘being smelly’ is an attempt to withdraw from social and psychic contact, rather than a meaningful communication which is within the scope of psychoanalytic thought to understand.

Working with two short data extracts, this paper explores the productivity of Bion’s understanding of dreaming and Ogden’s talking-as-dreaming for thinking about difficult moments in pedagogic encounters. Education valorises what Bion called the Waking-state; this paper explores the ways in which this preference may incur costs to learning, and why maintaining a connection to dreaming in the classroom might be important.

This paper develops a psycho-social understanding of difficult and disabling life transitions, particularly in relation to old age. The paper brings together a biographical case study and theoretical analysis that draws on three sources: the work of Deleuze and Bergson in continental philosophy, Winnicott in psychoanalysis, and Turner in anthropology. By linking experience, theory and practice, I show how different, but related concepts, at different levels, may shed light on some puzzling behaviour common in old age. More broadly, I point to the value of such theoretical work for understanding and managing traumatic affect and life transitions.

Individuals excluded from ‘the social contract’ are subject to a certain irruption of the traumatic, understood as subjective disorganization resulting from the emergence of that which is outside sense and outside signification. Such subjects experience the loss of a discourse of belonging and of being afforded a place in society. The lack of narcissistic gratification, along with the exclusion from group ideals and values, foster a fragmentation of social ties and produce disruptive effects in subjectivity. This paper discusses the possibilities afforded by psychoanalytic listening to subjects who have experienced social exclusion as traumatic: those who suffer extreme poverty and social exclusion within neoliberal economic models. Examples are drawn from clinical work with young people who live on the outskirts of the city of Sao Paulo and who have had the experience of living in the streets. Rather than attuning to this sort of listening, it is not rare for those in some social agencies and in some forms of psychotherapy to mistake apathy, loneliness and muting for structural characteristics of the subject rather than as the effects of exclusion and the reproduction of a form of social violence. This misrecognition precludes the creation of a symbolic elaboration that could provide a symptomatic shape to that which is experienced as traumatic. This paper argues for the possibility of listening to subjects silenced by exclusion.

Walkerdine's ‘Video Replay’ paper analysing a working-class family's reactions to watching a video of Rocky II was pathbreaking: it underlined power relations implicit in participant observation, challenged the differential between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and developed a framework for understanding viewers’ engagement with film. The paper also makes a transcript of the video-viewing available for subsequent analysis. This commentary rereads the transcript in the light of the contemporary context and my affective responses to the material. The reading draws attention to identifications at play among family members, film characters and researcher, as well as to the ways this family's establishing a harmonious domestic scene allowed violent material to be viewed in relative safety. Fantasy is perceived as having constitutive effects. This reading moderates some of the deterministic implications of focusing primarily on signification.

This paper brings Donald Winnicott's views on hatred in the countertransference to bear on pedagogical relationships between teachers and students in classroom settings. Specifically, the paper explores the ways in which teachers' affective dynamics shape their identifications with students. The question of objective vs subjective hatred is raised as a problem of ethics in teaching.

This paper employs Lacanian theories of language and temporality in order to dissect the workings of emotional abuse. Because emotional abuse varies greatly and can be difficult to describe, this paper attempts to discern the internal mechanisms that allow abuse to function: specifically, how the abused partner is trapped by the linguistic and emotive techniques of the abuser. Lacanian psychoanalysis can help show how the internal dynamic of abuse works, and how it repeats itself through the continuous immobilization of the abused partner.

Enactments of palliative care entail an excess of dissociated pain and anxiety that conforms with the unconscious injunction of our liberal individualist society to “Be Well”. In this paper, I suggest that palliative care rituals serve as society-level unconscious defenses that Westerners use to ward off any form of emotional discomfort. This paper follows a patient, starting with a “zombie” dream presented in her initial session, through the first 6 years of her psychoanalytic treatment as she moves through this palliative care system.

Weight cycling, the process of losing and then gaining weight repeatedly, is presented negatively in both the mainstream obesity and critical health studies literature. In this paper, I present an alternative perspective through the use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory coupled with the qualitative method of autotheory. Specifically, I contest the notion of weight maintenance, suggesting instead that repeated weight loss and gain can be seen as the maintenance of the subject’s desire – something that has an ethical basis in psychoanalytic terms.

This paper argues that processes of sublimation underlie experiences of ecological grief. In contrast to the role of sublimation as an ego-object relation in fantasies of visually representing and externalizing loss, this reading of sublimation identifies the value of internalization and of the ego’s relationship to itself in three analytic scenes: Freud’s death drive; Heimann’s ego capacity; and Searles’s human/nonhuman conflict. While grieving implies that environmental loss is recuperable, these relations of sublimation conceptualize destruction in the nonhuman environment as beyond human recuperability, and this notion of irrecuperable loss informs our understanding of the psychical aspects of environmental consciousness.

In the following paper, the author offers a name (“sympathetic subsumption”) and a psychoanalytic and socio-analytic explanation for the process by which a victimizing individual or group re-directs sympathy toward itself, even as it victimizes an other or others. In most cases, sympathetic subsumption involves ambivalent identifications with and tenuous idealizations of past and present victims and victimizers. The result of sympathetic subsumption is the displacement of sympathy for manifest victims, allowing acts of victimization to occur with diminished emotional resistance. Thus, individuals and groups make use of sympathetic subsumption to facilitate attacks upon others and to avoid conscious confrontation with real anxieties and terrors that arise in group settings.

This paper explores the function of the maternal phallus in the construction of human subjectivity, confronting omnipotence and castration as the two terms punctuating the subject’s journey from primary to secondary process. The rape of the maternal phallus is posited as a foundational psychic event eliciting the advent of repression via the introduction of the term of castration. This paradigm is examined across a variety of metapsychological and mythological references and an array of clinical situations including fetishism, psychosis and hysteria.

People with disabilities face multiple forms of social exclusion, discrimination, and oppression, including in the domain of sex and sexuality. From a critical psychoanalytic viewpoint, social responses to persons with impairments are strongly unconsciously mediated, and often dominated by projections based on archaic anxieties about dependency, vulnerability, and shame. Where disability meets sexuality, these defenses may be more prominent still, resulting, for one example, in the prejudiced myth that people with disabilities are disinterested in, or not capable of, sex. Using this theoretical stance, this paper examines how the developmental role of family and societal influences on the social constructions of sexuality and disability are internalized, resisted, and negotiated by two South Africans with physical disabilities. Data are drawn from interview material elicited via photovoice methodology. The interview narratives and photographic images are used to explore how sexual oppression may be internalized, creating intra-psychic barriers to inclusion for this already structurally disadvantaged group.

In this paper, I pose the question of how a traumatic past may be represented through a strategy of intergenerational, interpsychic displacement. I present the case of one reader who uses poetry and art to respond to a difficult text: Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories. In my examination of this reader’s encounter with difficult knowledge, I turn to Bion’s concept of the caesura as a means of investigating between affect and representation, memory and its screen, self and other, past and present, revelation and concealment.

This paper explores the relation between transference and free association in the production of data in sociological and social research. Drawing on Laplanche’s notion of the analyst as a provocation for the transference and Lacan’s understanding of the analyst as cause of desire, we map transference as a condition for free association and theorise an ‘enigma of participation’ in research. We develop these ideas through a discussion of two astonishing moments in recent research interviews. We propose that free associative interviews can be understood as sites of transference that help us to glimpse the unconscious in social and political discourse and offer insights into the (im)possibilities of subjective change.

In this paper I make a preliminary sketch of the field of psychoanalytic psychosocial practice. I do this by looking in detail at four accounts of clinical work which claim to be psychosocial. I start by describing one vector of this field which I use to distinguish between the clinical accounts, whether they believe a psychoanalytic psychosocial practice can be done within the existing psychoanalytic framework, or whether a more radical clinical approach is needed which would fundamentally change the way psychoanalysis is practised. In exploring this vector in more detail, other differences between the authors of these clinical accounts emerge: how they understand the connection between psychic and social reality, how they understand neutrality, transference and countertransference, and how they conceive of the aims of psychoanalysis. Further elaboration of the different ways of understanding these elements and their connection with each other would be needed in order to take further this preliminary mapping exercise.

In this brief paper, the terms “safe space” and “trigger warning” are considered through an engagement with two related concepts: “intersectionality” and “ignorance.” It is proposed that two of the necessary states that make for safe, non-triggering learning environments are “intersectional awareness” and the “expiration of ignorance.” Moreover, while much of the rich literature on the intergenerational transmission of psychological states has focused on the sequelae of trauma, here the intergenerational transmission of psychological strengths is considered too, not only as healthy adaptation but also as a facet of personality that can trigger another person, despite intentions to the contrary.

This paper reflects upon the debates over the use of trigger warnings in educational spaces from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. The writer posits that underlying the debate is a dissociative mechanism that results in psychological splitting. Dissociation is used to defend against formulating and acknowledging students’ traumatic experiences, especially minority students, e.g., women and people of color. This dissociation is coupled with a patriarchal order that often frames educational pedagogy, and deems different human qualities as gendered and hierarchal. Rationality is equated with masculinity and valued, while emotionality is equated with femininity and devalued. Hence, educational spaces often privilege rational knowledge and diminish the role of emotion and intuition. This can lead to discussion of the latter becoming unwelcome and inappropriate. The writer argues that, in order to create educational spaces that foster critical thinking, and not mere reproduction of knowledge, the integration of the dissociated and devalued aspects of the experience is imperative.

Lasch's (1978) study of the 'culture of narcissism' is discussed as a model socio-psychoanalytic inquiry. However, in fragmented societies, the search for an encompassing diagnosis is less useful than a strategy of identifying states of mind active in specific situations. In studying more malignant phenomena, paranoid states are important, especially in their combination with narcissism. Hofstadter's (1964) essay on the paranoid 'style' is a key reference point. Comparing Lasch and Hofstadter invites a consideration of broad issues concerning the relations between culture and psyche, and between leaders and followers. The paper ends with a short commentary on narcissistic and paranoid states of mind in the case of President Trump.

Psychoanalysis has a central yet contested position in the emergence of psychosocial studies as a new ‘transdisciplinary’ space. Psychoanalysis potentially offers a vocabulary and practice of crossing boundaries that seems to be at one with the psychosocial project of understanding psychic and social processes ‘as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process’ (Frosh, 2018a). The intersection ‘psychoanalysis, culture, society’, with its promise of an explicit engagement with social, political and ethical relations, and its traversing of disciplinary boundaries across the arts, humanities and social sciences, should therefore be crucial for the psychosocial project. This paper will consider where we are with ‘psychoanalysis, culture and society’ in relation to the ‘psychosocial’ – and what this means for a world much in need of more fluid, trans/disruptive boundaries.