Aggression, the death drive, and unbearable politics

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou for a frank conversation about politics, psychoanalysis, and the politics of psychoanalysts and of psychoanalytic institutions. Recent years have seen multiple psychoanalytic schools, museums, and other entities invite lecturers and panelists to discuss ongoing events in Israel and Palestine, only to then variously cancel, alter, or otherwise walk back those invitations. Avgi, who has both witnessed and been on the receiving end of such “disinvitations,” joins Abby and Patrick to reflect on their significance on multiple levels. In what ways do these events reflect how institutional psychoanalysis has responded to the genocide in Gaza more generally? How do such events play out as communications, both in terms of the language and rationales invoked by people involved, and in terms of what they implicitly convey as unspoken norms? If we see such “disinvitations” as enactments, then what are the underlying fantasies and anxieties they express? What is their immediate social and political context, what are their precedents, and what deeper histories and traumas might underwrite them? Avgi leads Abby and Patrick in a conversation that expands into topics including: the question of what is or isn’t “outside” the consulting room and what does or doesn’t get considered “political”; our fantasies about our capacities for tolerance, both in terms of distress and in terms of dissent; the uses of anger, the pathologization of affect, and the stakes of “making a scene”; tokenism, inclusivity, exclusion, and professional ethics; the weaponization of analytic concepts and intellectualization as a defense; transphobia, anti-Arab prejudice, anti-Semitism, and the impacts of oppression and historical traumas; the many meanings of resistance; the clinical encounter and Laplanche’s idea of “translation”; the creation of new spaces for psychoanalytic education and community; and much, much more.

Selected Texts Cited:

Avgi Saketopoulou, “Just Say Genocide: The Problem of Truth Sadism” in Battleground

Avgi Saketopoulou, “Against Transantagonism: A Metapsychology for the Flourishing of Trans Children (Or, Did you all think pronouns were enough?)”

Avgi Saketopoulou, “Genocide and the Screen of Irreverence,” in Petrucelli, J. and Schoen, S. (eds.), Proceedings of William Allanson White’s Conference on Irreverence

Edward Said (with Christopher Bollas and Jacqueline Rose), Freud and the Non-European

Franz Kafka, “On Parables” 

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

P-HOLE (Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education) https://p-hole.com. 

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