What follows is a bit of inside baseball, disregard if it bores.

I recently received a flattering invitation to participate in a conference on trans studies and psychoanalysis. These are topics about which I have a bit to say, have done a bit of reading, and had a bit of experience, so it seems fair enough. I was invited to give an “artist’s talk,” and again, fair enough.

I have studied psychoanalysis a fair amount over the years, but at the end of the day I am neither an analyst, analysand, or scholar. I live instead in the hazy fourth orientation, where psychoanalysis is a form of culture. Soon I will write about that fourth orientation, something about which I find it difficult to balance courage and despair. You can’t really live there. One has to hold it at the right distance.

as Winnicott says in The Use of an Object:

If psychoanalysis could be a way of life, then such a treatment might be said to have done what it was supposed to do. But psychoanalysis is no way of life. We all hope that our patients will finish with us and forget us, and that they will find living itself to be the therapy that makes sense.

It’s fine, just talk about the book.

That is probably the right thing to do, but for some reason this “artist’s talk” concept really irked me, and I chose to write back to the organizers with a number of reservations, which I thought I would also share here, with some modifications to keep names out of it:

Dear [Organizers],

This sounds excellent in many respects, but at the same time I would like to speak to a few mixed feelings. I feel lately that I have been withdrawing from a lot of engagements, and you could say that writing the following out is my sincere attempt not to do that. I hope that you will give it some thought and you are welcome to forward it to any other organizers or participants who you think might have something to say about it. 

Firstly, I am a bit curious about the composition of this event. It seems to me almost as if there is an expert track in which non-trans people talk about trans life through a lens of theory, together with an implicitly non-expert track of trans artists whose bodies and experiences provide a sort of raw material? Even as I respect real cultivation and expertise, something seems to me rather off about this. I don't feel that I know more about e.g. endocrinology simply because of my experience of hormones running through my body, but I do think that in regard to psychoanalysis and trans theory, there is not such a chasm of knowledge or interest here, and I am wary of taking up a conversation on inherently alienating terms.

In that spirit, I have a few thoughts which I would like to share on the topic of trans/psychoanalysis:

- Trans theory seems to me to have been institutionalized in a frankly decadent period of "high theory" and of superficial textual transgression (much of which reads like ChatGPT doing Derrida), such as we see now exemplified in e.g. Duke UP. I find this to be a disaster, though a disaster for which no one in particular is to blame, not even those who produce theoretical work which I find distasteful or to misrepresent issues. Let there be fiddlers in every style. But it does mean that I find it by no means certain that psychoanalysts who have often mishandled trans life (though see my last point) should now rectify that through a reconciling dialogue with trans theory. Even as I am happy to see a reconciliation between psychoanalysis and trans life, which I think is ongoing, I do not wish to lend that particular subfield any representational legitimacy.

- Following on the difficulties one identifies with trans theory's being lashed to then-current academic fads and now drowning with them, I am somewhat concerned about binding a new trans psychoanalysis either to the school of Lacan (which I find often cultish) or to the new Laplanche renaissance (which I find often superficial). In the Lacanian setting, I am not so sure I want to be a part of keeping Saussure on life support for another generation, or that I want to bet on continuing political progress in Lacanian circles even as I fully support those who, already belonging to those circles, make principled interventions and attempt to improve their conditions. For what it's worth, if I had to carry a psychoanalytic flag (and I don’t) it would be that of Bion or of Loewald, not Lacan.

- Side-note related to the former, I think that the truth here is that in all generations, psychoanalysts tend to be good liberals, and broadly to express a commonsensical liberal decency. Of course this decency accommodates a range of views, but the range has shifted in a decidedly more trans-affirming direction. So much the better. But I believe that in certain subfields of philosophy and psychoanalysis, there is a strong disavowal of this dependence on social developments. This hubristic relationship to rational self-authorship means that progress can only be conditioned on its reinscription as jargon and struggle can be only be recognized conditioned on its reinscription as intradisciplinary debate. So that in this milieu one moves slower, or progress is rejected outright, simply because it comes from without. Now that the political winds are blowing in a decidedly more negative direction, it seems to me that under these changing conditions it is all the more important that we maintain a realistic sense of our relationship to "secular" politics. I think that Lacanians have found this exceptionally difficult, whether that is because of "Lacanian Marxism" or the mathemes or some other factor, I am not sure.

- I think that as regards trans there is an interesting division between work addressing the disciplinary conscience of psychoanalysis: i.e. we have been too hard on trans people, not curious enough, too normative, etc. and on the other hand, work addressing the problems which arise for trans analysts and analysands. In the former case, and unfortunately this is very allied to the approach of trans theory, we can find an extreme anti-normativity which seems to me to be an empty short-circuit. Suspend misjudgment by suspending all judgment. I am finding that these anti-normative approaches are inadequate to the dissatisfactions and complexities that trans people have in our own lives, in our aspirations, in our "mixed feelings," in the clinic, in our transferences... By the way I don't consider this to be a matter of standpoints, there is plenty of fashionably anti-normative work by trans people which could be said to miss this distinction as well, either by denying internal divisions in the patient and attributing them entirely to a repressive establishment, or by celebrating incoherence—"the patient is at war with himself, and I am rooting for both sides."

I think that in order to participate I would need to speak to all of these issues and a few more in my own voice and to find some explicit frame of discussion. Perhaps a conversation over email will turn out to be that frame, or perhaps it would be helpful to convert the "artist's talk" into something more explicitly dialogic.

Unclear that they will write back, but writing out these thoughts has been a good exercise. Only, why wait to be invited? Perhaps we ought to be starting new conversations. We might then begin to play a bit of outside baseball.

Simply Press Send,

Jackie

PS I participated in another trans conference, about which I felt similarly ambivalent, last Spring, and recorded my comments here on the newsletter. In that case I found participation worth it. I have moved on from some of these thoughts but stand by it enough to link:

https://buttondown.com/jackie_ess/archive/trans-counter-studies-what-may-i-do-what-must-i-be

PPS André Green says a lot of interesting things about Lacan in this interview, thanks to ZP for pointing it out a few years ago https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/for-the-love-of-lacan-4/