WORMS 9: The PSYCHOANALYSIS SEASON

There is sometimes the sense that while writing we are tapping into something deep within ourselves; latent drives and yearnings often emerge on the page. We mine our lives, memories, traumas, impulses. We dig deep and bare all. Psychoanalysis, the practice of analysing thoughts, dreams and memories for what they reveal about are unconscious drives and desires, posits human behaviour as steered by what lurks in the shadowy refuges of the psyche. It can at times be dizzying, intricate and paradoxical. But it is perhaps this labyrinthine quality that makes its theoretical frameworks so tantalising for so many of the writers that we love. The winding maze of libidinal drives, signifiers, objects and fixations are ripe for experimentation, subversion and transgression. The writer and the analyst share the pursuit to extract and build narrative, to challenge perspectives and to make connections. They each favour multiplicity, long for meaning, yet relish in the slippery ambiguity that meaning inherently produces. 

However, in this day and age, we must ask ourselves,  who does psychoanalysis serve? Freud’s patients were mainly white, middle-class Europeans – their problems (though not unworthy of study) were wildly different from those whose lives are shaped by their marginalisation. Its beginnings, situated in this narrow breadth of experience, should be (and are) cause for concern. In the segment of WORMS 9 featured in Novembre, writer McKenzie Wark questions its very necessity: “To what extent is psychoanalysis a way that bourgeois subjects are made to find themselves interesting?” We ask further: how can we extract what’s useful from psychoanalysis’ troubled past? How might we syphon the principles of psychoanalysis from the clutches of the individual and repurpose its teachings for collective aims? What imprint does psychoanalysis bear on the literary notions of narrative, archetypes and subversion? Later in this series we’ll hear from Fariha Róisín, who’s book Who is Wellness For? excavates the ancient roots of non-Western practices of wellness and the way they’ve been severed by colonialism and co-opted by whiteness and capitalism, sold back to us as mindfulness apps and expensive yoga classes. We’ll also hear from Lara Sheehi who’s invaluable work with analysts and psychologists on the ground in Palestine draws from writer, psychologist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Katherine Angel will feature in Dispatch #3, wrestling with the impulse to be both a writer and an analyst.

As usual, we have no definitive answers to the various questions raised here. Instead, we have sought to delve into the particulars, the deviations and the alternatives. We have wormed our way into the recesses of the mind and have returned with more than we bargained for. It appears that psychoanalysis is having a bit of a moment in the literary spotlight. Arguably, it's always been there, but it does make sense that the impulse to dissect our inner workings would emerge in times of crisis, and these are times of irrefutable and unrelenting crises. Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, climate breakdown, the emboldened far right, the war on our trans siblings. Whilst neither literature or psychoanalysis are solutions, the principles of critical and reflective thinking—whether geared towards ourselves or the structures we live within—seem, to me, essential at a time when cognitive dissonance is a dangerous and prevailing force.

Thanks for being here, 
happy fertilising xxxxxx