THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD

Finding, reflexively

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:11:46 +0000

“Finding” is almost always reciprocal, doubled, as the subject is incorporated into the structures that belong to the object it has found and is made to fit that object’s requirements and/or concerns. One is said to be gripped by an idea, defined—for better and for worse—by his or her membership in a family, a group, …

Winnicott, playfulness, theft

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 21:50:36 +0000

In a frank and frankly irreverent introductory passage to his “Primitive Emotional Development” from the mid-1940s, Winnicott wrote: “I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, …

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. …

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:46:42 +0000

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3). Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for …

Psychoanalysis/Trauma

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:37:06 +0000

A possibly significant but obviously significantly under-developed hypothesis, a hypothesis that has less to do with causes and more with surrounds, impressions, and movements: Moment 1 The sturm und drang ethos of the nineteenth century that fed the psychoanalytic (un)conscious, the ethos that stripped ancient Athens of humour and irony and rewrote its own history …

Freud would not have been happy with this one. Or, my, how things have changed!

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:44:49 +0000

I just finished reading L’avenir de la psychanalyse: débat entre Daniel Widlöcher et Jacques-Alain Miller (Le Cavalier bleu, 2004). This is essentially the text of a debate that took place in Paris in June 2002, at the time when Widlöcher was the head of the IPA and Miller of the AMP. Three of Widlöcher’s declarations …

Grandes Dames and Men in Suits

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:06:30 +0000

Two videos. First, Encounters Through Generations offers a glimpse into the workings of the minds of some of the most senior women analysts on the London scene. Inspiring. Second, what I can only refer to as Men in Suits (the actual title is “Psychoanalysis in the United States: 150 Years After the Birth of Freud”) …

Oh, but for the familial perils of supervision!

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:46:39 +0000

(or, Recipe for a Disaster) Ingredients: A: Analysand/Analyst-in-training knee deep in parental transferences T: Training Analyst of A above in the midst of a parental fantasy, NOT a counter-transference but a clinical dictum of the type that continues to grip the analytic community: analyst as fatherly/austere or motherly/empathic S: Training Supervisor for A above equally …

Affect-Time

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:09:18 +0000

This is the text of my presentation at the recent meeting of the ASCP at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. Keywords: subjectivity, time, affect, love Affect-Time I take my cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive synthesis, “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” (Anti-Oedipus, 16-22), the synthesis that grounds the subject in …

Symptom–1

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:25:09 +0000

Interestingly enough, the distinction between fantasying and dreaming and its accompanying language of the “dead end” were not without their parallels for Winnicott. In a series of talks he recorded for the BBC during the 1950s (collected and published under the title of The Child, the Family and the Outside World), and hence from the …