The Win

Academic critique culture cultivated a fear in me of being honest in my writing, had me censoring myself to be palatable, shrinking my affective register so that a message lands with a conservative and pacifist audience (despite what psychologists like to market themselves as)

But this time, I decided fuck that, I need to write with my heart. I already left, so this is my chance to get my last official PSA (psych science ass-whooping) out, even if it shakes foundations, assumptions, and makes readers uncomfortable. I received feedback today and turned out like this:

I am WOW-ed too. My thinking has only gotten riskier with time as I’ve followed black radical thought (I now personally see how and why it gets institutionally marginalized by academia). But I also consider myself lucky that I have found fellow supportive thinkers and avenues for my critiques to land and be nourished and shared.

The Fight

In my mind, this connects to the message of a podcast I listened to recently that detailed the difficult journey two psychoanalysts had fighting their field, trying to get fellow researchers and practitioners to stop producing violent and constraining theorizations of gender. This is what they had to say about the need to shake disciplinary foundations and try our best to avoid co-optation:

“As psychoanalysis does its interdisciplinary reach out, It's like, oh, how are these, as we're reading feminist theory and queer theory, like how is this congruent with psychoanalysis? And so again, it takes it in, but it doesn't let itself really be radically transformed, right? It leaves its meta-psychology intact. Like psychoanalysis, its foundations have to shake, right?

For psychoanalysis rests as much on queer and trans theories, especially queer and trans and color critique, right? This is not so that psychoanalysis is just like, oh, how does this fit? It's like to undo what psychoanalysis understands about itself, the categories it thinks in.”

And the importance of allowing our affective registers to lead in these efforts:

“Like, I'm not just ambivalent.

I'm not very angry with psychoanalysis. I'm very angry with the damage that psychoanalysis is doing in the name of protectionism. And it's part of what energizes me to do the work that we're doing and to push back.

And I want to say to people who are listening or perhaps analysts or candidates in training, there's nothing wrong with being angry with this field. And to still love it, there's nothing wrong. There's a lot of things that psychoanalysis is doing wrong.

And anger, you know, I'm thinking of Audre Lorde's famous essay and the uses of anger, like anger here is a form of relation. Anger need not be seen as, you know, like, okay, we're forever divided. Anger is a way of making new relations or transforming the relations that exist.

It's not a betrayal. In fact, in some sense, it's a betrayal to deny one's anger, to swallow it because of the comfort of the other person, you know, you're speaking to. Like, I can't say that I'm angry. I can't speak my anger.”