On Identity and the Political in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Weaving subjective musings with theoretical speculation, this paper explores various themes on the question of identity. I consider identity as identification with a social location, where that social location is a function of groups. As such, identity is inherently contingent, a relational affair, a soft assembly. Though not a particularly psychoanalytic concept, identity is currently being tasked with considerable work in psychoanalysis: functioning as a hinge between the dual registers of the personal and social unconscious. Like any symptom, the term identity both obscures and indexes, signaling the urgent need for a radical revision of theory. The more we use the contingency of identity-how we find ourselves identified (by others as much as by ourselves) in this place and time, whatever this might be-rather than its fixity, thought to transcend place and time, the more that the concept of identity can be used in a specifically psychoanalytic way to help us explore the terrain of the political, which I distinguish from the terrain of politics proper. These ideas are employed to consider the current moment in psychoanalytic organizational life, which takes place under the sign of a fundamental paradigm shift (that is to say: catastrophic change).

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