The Politics of the Navel: Psychoanalysis and Affiliation

Abstract: This article examines psychoanalysis’s relationship to collective affiliation and group identity via its association with two foundational figures, that of the Woman and the Jew. It begins by exploring reportage on the war in Ukraine as it has touched on these figures (often with conflicting and self-contradictory messaging), and it argues that we need psychoanalysis to approach these problematics. It then goes on to explore psychoanalysis’s historical relationship to both femininity and Jewishness, and it suggests that reexamining psychoanalysis both as a Jewish science and as a discourse that takes femininity distinctively seriously, via the frame of the conflict in Ukraine, might do something for our vantage on psychoanalysis itself as a historical, political, and ethical development. Ultimately, its claim is that the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis, Jewishness, and femininity suggests a model of affiliation and relation based on the critical category of the navel, whose mechanics might offer new ways of imagining the collective life of psychoanalysis itself.