Apophenic Reading and the Politics of Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT Psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding how phenomena like parapraxes, fantasies, and dreams are indices of unconscious processes. In this way it is a particularly suspicious undertaking, linking surface clues to what, by definition, cannot be known. This essay attends to the suspicious and skeptical registers of psychoanalysis to sense a resonance between what is made visible and invisible in the making of “nation” and “human.” There is a secret history of psychoanalysis, in which it is bound up with political agitation, socialist movements, and skepticism of human exceptionalism. What about the suspicious method of psychoanalysis is threatening not only to psychic but to political repression? By tarrying in this secret history, and the strange, symptomatic ambivalences in psychoanalytic texts, this article suggests that the politically serviceable roots of psychoanalysis could be returned from their repression in the present day, to answer to contemporary abolitionist projects.