Life in Common: On the Enigma of US

Abstract

LIFE IN COMMON: ON THE ENIGMA OF USI will start, right off, in good psychoanalytic manner, by looking backwards: some thirty-five years ago in this case, to the words of someone I suppose we could call an unquestioned master of psychoanalysis, André Green in 1986:Rigidly maintaining its classical stance, psychoanalysis could on the one hand attach itself to an embalmed and stiffened corpse, failing to pursue a critical evaluation of its theories as challenged by present practice. In this case it would be pledged to the mere safeguarding of its acquisitions, without ever calling into question the theory sustaining them. The alternative is a psychoanalysis which, periodically renewing itself, strives to extend its range, to subject its concepts to radical rethinking, to commit itself to self-criticism. In which case it must run the risks entailed by such self-examination, from which the best as well as the worst may emerge [pp. 286-287]."Present practice," in our current moment, is confronted with a series of social ruptures that have deeply unsettled the supposed sanctity of the consulting room and challenged institutional psychoanalysis to "extend its range." If such disturbances have the uncanny potential to make what has remained invisible finally appear, troubling what had long been taken as the unquestioned and natural order of things and revealing, through the disruption of that placid, taken-for-granted surface, the mechanisms and the history that lie behind it, then we live in a time of seemingly unlimited potential. The disruptions have come fast and furious. If the political upheaval of 2016 made painfully evident just how violently riven we are as a nation, what has become increasingly clear is that the election of