Abstract
In the context of looming ecological disaster, rampant inequalities, neo-fascist eruptions, and war it has become difficult to imagine new forms of personal and social emancipation and radical democracy. True structural political change, it seems, would have to begin in deep intra- and inter-psychic transformations capable of reconfiguring hierarchical and domination-seeking individual/social relations into novel forms of horizontality and mutuality. In 1932, Sándor Ferenczi, psychoanalyst once closest to Freud, then rejected by Freud and the IPA for returning to the so-called “seduction theory” and for advocating “mutual analysis,” and revolutionary trailblazer of contemporary trauma theory and treatment, labeled the sort of abuse adults perpetrate against children “authoritarian abuse.” The wording also echoes the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in Ferenczi’s time and place, thus linking individual psychic with politically abusive trauma. In his late work in particular, Ferenczi searches urgently for ways of undoing traumatized bonds to authority and hierarchy and finding, via “mutual analysis,” new and provocative conceptions of subjectivity. Ferenczi, whose psychoanalytic thought I translate into the realm of politics, is the most profound analyst of trauma understood as psychic shattering that provokes submissiveness, auto-hypnotic identification with the (authoritarian) aggressor, and masochistic compliance. The traumatically shattered and split psyche, assaulted in “authoritarian abuse,” veers away from “alloplastic adaptation” – transforming the external world to undo unbearable authoritarian abuse – to “autoplastic adapation” – undoing and adapting the self to unbearable power. Only through a conception of “mutuality” can new emancipatory forms of subjectivity be conceived.
Presenters
Elizabeth StewartAssociate Professor, English, Yeshiva University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ferenczi, Subjectivity, Mutuality, Authoritarian, Abuse, Trauma, Compliance, Fascism
