{"title":"A Crucial Misunderstanding: Equating the Categories of Diversity and Difference","authors":"L. Fiorini","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037313","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the erroneous equation between the categories of diversity and difference and proposes to intercross Ferenczi’s “confusion of tongues” with Laplanche’s distinction between diversity and difference. Confusion between infantile sexual theories, adult sexual theories, and psychoanalytic theory is pointed out. The aim is to work with at least three variables: anatomical heterogeneity, gender difference/gender diversity, and psychosexual difference. Their intersections are always conflictive and impact on the construction of subjectivity. This model of triadic thought goes beyond binary thought (masculine/feminine and phallic/castrated dichotomies) and demands the inclusion of nonbinary logic. It is underlined that the category of difference is a symbolic operation that should be distinguished from sexual difference. This distinction is fundamental to exploring the symbolic field each subject can construct. In the context of multiple itineraries of sexuality and gender more visible in contemporary societies, the goal is to face the theoretical/clinical problems that arise if those distinctions are ignored.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45026611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mass Trauma and Cultural Amnesia: A Case Study of a Society’s Untranslatable Excess","authors":"Deborah Liner","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037315","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay draws upon Laplanche’s intersubjective theory of the origins of the unconscious and extends his concept of the traumatic impact of enigmatic messages upon the infant to the social surround. The author considers the Polish horror film Demon as dramatizing the transmission of societal enigmas and the destructive impact of a country’s failure to remember or integrate past injustices and crimes. The possibility of societal mourning and recovery of memory is conceived of in terms of Laplanche’s formulations of inspiration and the translation of après coup evocations.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48123744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revival of the Fundamental Anthropological Situation: Supervision, Intromission, Trans*, and the Sexual1","authors":"Nicolas Evzonas","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037314","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article focuses on conflicts stemming from the vertical and hierarchically ridden transmission of psychoanalysis through the supervision process. Drawing on a Laplanchian framework, the author argues that the intromission of violent signifiers emanating from the supervisor is liable to alter the supervisee’s idiosyncratic functions and attack their thinking activity. To illustrate this argument, the author recounts his own supervised treatment of a transgender adolescent during which the supervisor–supervisee transference lapsed into a sadomasochistic relationship and a folie-à-deux, leading to the premature termination of both the therapy and the supervision. An initial interpretation of this experience explores the theoretical bias associated with transgender subjectivities, which blinded the supervisor and made him irrationally aggressive. A second post hoc reading of this case reveals the therapist’s own blind spot: his overidentification with the patient and his ensuing need to protect the latter from pathologization. Accordingly, the failed supervision may be viewed as an attack on the third-party function linked to the patient’s psychic organization. Finally, the countertransference madness to which the therapist succumbed with his supervisor can be understood as the unbinding of repressed infantile sexuality and the reenactment of paradoxical messages intromitted to the patient’s body ego by his parents.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44077794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Challenge of Too Much: Inviting Laplanche’s Theory into the Realm of Couples Therapy","authors":"Robert Bartlett","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037308","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Several of Laplanche’s key ideas—enigmatic messages, après coup, the fundamental anthropological situation, translation, and the hollowed-out transference—may be applied to the context of couples therapy. A case of one couple is presented to illuminate how Laplanche’s concepts, in their emphasis on the intersubjective, developmental, and relational nature of unconscious communication, may complement already existing theories of couples treatment.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49136856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whiteness and Fog: Thinking About Traumatic Narcissism in a Racialized Context","authors":"Andrew Asibong","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037317","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Starting with the memory of a scene featuring Sidney Poitier and a baby in the Western Duel at Diablo (1966), the author reflects on the potential function of certain moving images for people who have been affected by parental narcissism in their early years. He considers this phenomenon auto-ethnographically and in its specifically racialized context, arguing that, if we are serious about deepening our psychosocial understanding of the workings of both “traumatic narcissism” and “parental negation,” then we need to engage emotionally, politically, and aesthetically, with the “psychose blanche” of spectrally internalized whiteness.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48961169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Otherness and Our Sexuality: Laplanche Clinically","authors":"D. Silverman","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037303","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Laplanche is a serious scholar of Freud’s work and offers challenges and explanatory dissents where he believed Freud went astray. He has presented his theoretical position extensively but never provided clinical examples. I use the limited case material of Mrs. C and extrapolate from Laplanche’s theoretical ideas to clinical work. Laplanche’s emphasis is on infantile sexuality, on the erogenous zones, on the “polymorphousness “of the body. Infantile sexuality emerges from the sexual unconscious of the (m)other. The unconscious features of tender caregiving by the mother have an erotic, seductive quality. This provides enigmatic messages to the infant, and excites and stimulates the infant to make the communication meaningful. Laplanche called this the “fundamental anthropological situation” that occurs in all of us. The analytic situation, in many ways, invites a repetition of the seduction, as the analysand needs to translate the unconscious enigmatic messages of the analyst.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43899129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bad Future, Bad History","authors":"Lauren J. Hegarty","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037316","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay deploys theories from Jean Laplanche regarding the fundamental anthropological situation and the notion of afterwardsness, or après coup, to explore the 1978 film Germany in Autumn. Through these conceptual filters, the article examines the fictional representations within the film, the actual persons behind the making of the film, and their relationship to German remembering and forgetting of the events of the Nazi regime.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46900978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Second Confusion of Tongues: Ferenczi, Laplanche, and the Trauma of Social Life","authors":"E. Rozmarin","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2037312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2037312","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In recent years, psychoanalysis has become more aware of, and concerned with, the ways in which social forces affect the development and experience of subjects directly. Yet as a discourse and theory of human development, contemporary psychoanalysis still lacks sufficient accounts for how the social becomes psychological. Freud’s psychoanalysis offers the concept of the superego as a means of explaining how social realities and norms enter and play a part in the psychological life of the subject. But if we were to disengage this useful concept, the superego, from the now problematized notion of the Oedipal as its raison d’être, we are left with an empty construct, and a phenomenon to which new developmental accounts need to be attached. I suggest in this article that psychoanalysis provides us with two major conceptual frameworks up for the task: Ferenczi’s seminal notion of “confusion of tongues,” and Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic message. Reading Ferenczi closely, I suggest that although he speaks explicitly of one confusion of tongues, his body of work implies two confusions, the second more general and perhaps more profound. I use this reading to expand both Ferenczi and Laplanche beyond their original field of reference, the play of sexuality between adults and children, to the more general question of how our relationships with our parents function as an intimate socialization mechanisms. I argue that as both Ferenczi’s notion of the confusion of tongues and Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic message are concerned with the enigmatic and potentially traumatic differences and attachments between adults and children, they are well suited to account for how we all become social subjects, that is, the subjects of social power.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47021235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Troubling Apprehensions of Gender-Based Violence in South Africa: Fanon’s Sociogeny as a Psychosocial Lens","authors":"Peace Kiguwa, Garth Stevens","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1996733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1996733","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Threading across different discursive, cultural, and political moments of the postapartheid context, gender-based violence, inarguably, is a phenomenon that must be read contextually and as contingent upon intersecting configurations of power that are tied to historical, political, and material fractures of our colonial legacies. Three immediate intersecting threads of analyses are undertaken here: (1) how extant knowledge archives on gender-based violence discursively reference spatial geographies and frozen temporalities of violence that result in the implicit racialization of gender-based violence and the psychological pathologization of its associated subjectivities in South Africa; (2) using Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, we read gender-based violence through a psychosocial lens to address this problematic; and (3) extending Fanon’s idea of psychopolitics, we argue that the trauma, racial alienation, and toxic gendering of society within coloniality is reflected in a neurotic structuring of the psyche itself.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42652470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Memories from Piñones: Unapologetically Blackly Beautiful Women","authors":"Maricruz Rivera Clemente","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1996742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1996742","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This is a multilayered account of being a Black person in the historically Black-majority town of Piñones in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico through the eyes of the author and other Black women. The author seeks to interrupt and counter predominant perceptions of Black women and their roles in the community. The presence and effects of internalized anti-Black racism are studied and analyzed in dialogue with the work of Frantz Fanon. Also crucial is the formation of community-based responses to the persistence of racism, including the creation and ongoing work of the Corporación Piñones se Integra (COPI).","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46308073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}