Breaking apart the splits that glue us together: Disruption as therapeutic action

Abstract

Drawing an analogy among the splits in US Constitutional democracy, in Communist totalitarianism, in our field, and in many of our patients’ psychic foundations, the essay advances the idea that the disruption of fundamental splits—often fastened together by keystone selfobjects—is vital for an emancipatory psychoanalysis. My argument is that to heal our democracy, and to help many of our patients heal, our praxis must cultivate a generative rupturing of the psyche/social status quo that goes beyond the incremental work that often characterizes what we do, and builds upon the promise of Winnicott’s “breakdown experience” and Fanon’s decolonial praxis. The author further considers resonances across her conception of “feminine law” and the vaginal signifier as the zero of the signifying chain, Koichi Togashi’s “psychoanalytic zero”, and Hortense Spillers’ reading of the black feminine as the zero of the social order. This zero, she argues, acts as a site of rupture and radical transformation, enabling alterity, contradiction, and the operations of a disordered apres coup temporality. Clinically, this manifests as desperation and desire coalescing as a liberatory force, infused with ethical charge, with the potential to dismantle archaic oppressive structures and alliances. The essay concludes that that we are at the brink of a collective, paradoxical experiment in constituting ourselves as fully human in which we reclaim an alienated (material) dimension of human subjectivity, surrendering to the other-than-human, for the sake of joining liberty and love, present and ancestral truths, in a relationship that doesn’t require splitting.

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