I recently had a proposal for a talk turned down. I had not expected it to be accepted: it ran against the grain of what the conference seemed to want, and its argument may initially have seemed obscure.

Still, if anything holds together what I write and what I do, maybe it is whatever whoever’s on bass does in a certain kind of group. What follows—in the manner of Paul Chambers, if only—is that.

If anybody wants a talk?

“All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”: Psychoanalysis and Creativity  

How can we say ‘we need others to find ourselves’ without recognising that the refusal of personhood, for instance under racialized slavery or because someone is a woman, continues to shape the conception of individual subjectivity?

My title partly repeats Hortense Spillers, writing on Psychoanalysis and Race, quoting Charles Mingus, who introduces a recording of All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother by saying ‘It means nothing’, then playing a fabulous improvisation of All the Things You Are. For Spillers psychoanalysis means nothing for anyone whose personhood has been refused. But she does not leave it there. Psychoanalysis might mean something if we flipped it, like Mingus does, out of its standard form.

Despite Freud’s emphasis on plurality, fluidity and deferral, psychoanalysis keeps returning to a self that is only itself, the subject of a corpus juris; and this body of laws is topographic, creating thresholds, an inside and an outside. What is more disturbing than treating somebody as an outsider, a nobody, as nothing?

I’d point to the epigraph at the head of Freud’s On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), the paper this conference’s organisers quoted in their address to us:

 Fluctuat nec mergitur (On the coat of arms of the city of Paris).

The coat of arms of Paris shows a ship: tossed by the waves, but still afloat. Freud describes repression (Verdrängung) as the ‘cornerstone’ of psychoanalysis. In German, Verdrängung is also a nautical term: the displacement of water which keeps a ship afloat. Creating the space to keep afloat involves displacement. Psychoanalysis is ‘my creation’ – meine Schöpfung. Schöpfen is to draw, to scoop water from a well. The well becomes erschöpft, exhausted, once it is drawn dry. Creation is also a taking; a depletion. Disturbance is unavoidable. Freud knows this, shouldn’t we? In Repression (1915), he compares this disturbance to ‘ordering an undesirable guest out of my drawing room and my refusing, after recognising him, to let him cross my threshold at all’. A footnote: ‘I must set a permanent guard over the door which I have forbidden this guest to enter, since he would otherwise burst it open.’ That undesirable becomes unrepresentable.

This is the refusal Spillers describes; one psychoanalysis recreates unthinkingly.

The others we need and the selves we must find are ana-psychoanalytic. The ana-lysis of psychoanalysis takes us to a loosening of the psyche (Greek ana-, a going back, and lysis, a loosening); like the ana- of Nicolas Abraham’s anasemia (sēma, a mark or sign), which takes us to a reading of repression that lets us understand what was refused in translating Freud’s Verdrängung from German to English. Ana-psychoanalysis could take us, like Mingus does, towards psychoanalysis as a social psychotherapy: a practice no longer imagining the disturbance it treats as only interior, but turns, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, to face the social wreckage of the past – now.