SexInsteadof Shattering: A Critical Exploration of Bersani and Laplanche

Abstract

The term “ego-shattering” was coined in the late 1980s by the prominent literary critic Leo Bersani, whose writing on sexuality and psychoanalysis helped establish the theoretical foundations for a new academic interdisciplinary formation that, in the 1990s, would emerge within literature departments as the field of Queer Theory. While many clinicians acknowledge Bersani’s role in coining the term, there has as yet been a total absence of any substantive consideration of what it means for contemporary clinical psychoanalysis to import “ego shattering” from another, definitively “literary” and nonclinical, discourse. This article contextualizes Bersani’s term in his reading of Jean Laplanche, in order to observe how Bersani’s particular critical-theoretical agenda causes him to misread Laplanche, and to advance, as a result, an idea of “self shattering” that is fundamentally at odds with Laplanche’s metapsychological formulations.

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