THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD » Body and Sign

desire, briefly

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:37:10 +0000

Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker (as Soul or Drive) of what it means to be a subject, nor a predicament suffered by that subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing superordinate law (as History or Structure). Rather, the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of simultaneity, both logical and chronological. …

Findings

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:39:24 +0000

I begin with the activity Winnicott terms play, the play that unfolds between child and “found” object. My premise is that this activity is not an event that the detached and adult Winnicott has merely observed in his young charges; it is also the object the analyst has “found” and with which he himself has …

Body and Sign–Pinning–3

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:27:15 +0000

Clinically, we have understood and practiced the pinning of word to place and of psyche to soma as exclusively gendered. We have adamantly organized our notions of law and desire, of history and identity, around those physiological traits that mark us as male or female. We have glorified these traits, sanitized, disavowed, decried, and sanctified …

Body and Sign–Pinning–2

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:58:19 +0000

I would like to focus on the title of Cixous’s contribution: Savoir (thank heaven the translators of the text into English chose not to mess around with it!). “Savoir” references both the French for the verb to know as well as the verb voir, to see, preceded by the feminine declension of the possessive article, …

Body and Sign–Pinning

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:07:56 +0000

I want to pick up on the Body and Sign exchange with parodycenter but from a slightly different perspective. I’ve been re-reading a non-clinical text from 1998 by Hélène Cixous, herself no stranger to the ambivalences and complexities of psychoanalysis. Savoir is a relatively short text in which Cixous articulates not only new ways for …

Body and Sign

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 04:52:44 +0000

For the longest time, sign language was considered a kind of pantomime, a crude iconic code lacking the sophisticated complexities and potentials of language. Its speakers were often relegated to the realm of the childish, pathological, or primitive because of their supposedly restricted capacities to communicate and therefore to think symbolically. William Stokoe has since …