Book Review Essay: “Bitextuality, or, Two Contemporary Writings on Psychoanalysis and Sex” A Review of Thomas Olver’s “Radical Freud: Reconstructing the Bisexuality Thesis” and Lauren Elkin’s “Scaffolding”

What makes an intervention into the history of psychoanalysis? How can one intervene on the history of a discourse that describes one’s history as itself an intervention? At what point in an intellectual or historical lineage does an intervention take place, and how does one’s generational placement inflect the medium and instruments through which one can make it? Who can make an intervention, and what does sex have to do with it?

In Lauren Elkin’s novel Scaffolding (2024), Florence, a psychology student and feminist in Paris in 1972, is sleeping with Max Weisz, a fictional Lacanian psychoanalyst with whom she attends Lacan’s seminars. “When I open my legs to his tongue, I feel I am making a real intervention into the history of psychoanalysis” (p. 195), she muses, in the first person. There are other first persons in the novel, divided variously by time and proximity: Anna, a Lacanian psychoanalyst in Paris in 2019, whose recent miscarriage is keeping her from seeing her patients and who instead spends her time renovating her kitchen and avoiding going out with a neighbor to protest femicide and sexual violence; and Henry, Florence’s husband back in the 70s, a paralegal who’s not sure he wants to give Florence the baby she is intent on getting for herself. Anna lives in what was once Henry and Florence’s apartment (Anna’s husband David has a flat in London, where he’s gone for his own work as a lawyer; he is the only one of the foursome who does not get an internal narrative, possibly because he’s not living in the apartment that confers a narrative “I” to its inhabitants); the apartment had originally come to Florence from her grandmother, whose aesthetic she mimicked in designing the kitchen that Anna will renovate fifty years later in a complex act of mourning. Anna does not know Florence, though she meets a man who is implied to be the latter’s son when she buys the apartment and learns that the woman who preceded her there had been a feminist Lacanian psychoanalyst who did her training analysis with Lacan. Anna’s training analyst did her training analysis with Lacan too. “Quite a lineage” (p. 14), she says, in free indirect discourse, to the son when they discover this convergence at the apartment’s closing. Anna is still in love with Jonathan, an old flame and Max Weisz’s son, both of whom thus make cameos in both of the novel’s plotlines; her adolescent contact with the latter, in his person and books, was what made her a Lacanian.

What is shared in this novel—passed around, taken up for a time, renovated, retained—are apartments, and kitchens, and bodies, and lovers, and predecessors, and analysts, and professions, and names, and words. Every person who takes up the pronoun “I” makes an intervention into the history of language from their own specific positioning, which has to do with the culture in which they find themselves, with their relation to previous generations, with their sex. If my “I” is that of a female psychology student in the 1970s, what intervention can I make? What do I have to teach about desire, and to whom? What I can’t do with words I can do with my body. What about if I am a female analyst in 2019, or a female theorist, critic, and novelist in 2024? What kind of intervention is Elkin making into psychoanalysis, with this novel? If a pronoun is a home for the ghosts of all its previous speakers, what determines and results from the particular way I take it up?

Lacan is the psychoanalyst of interest here because he theorizes the unconscious as the haunted house of language, the complex point of intersection between private and public property. He also theorizes sex (not just sexuality, but sexuation, which is his name for what sexual difference has to do with embodiment and fantasy structure and epistemology) as a radical hole in knowledge, indeed as a homology for and effect of the rift between signifier and signified in language. That my “I” is not mine is a name for being sexed, and this is the navel of knowing, the place of the radical disjunction that is sexual difference and human sexuality as an effect of the unconscious. To Lacan, it is this radical split of sexual difference that inheres in any subject and between any people and that in one way or another inflects any political or theoretical radicalism; his “formulas of sexuation,” which depict (among other things) two differently-sexuated relations to language and knowledge, are a spin on the idea of constitutional bisexuality, the “bi” standing for the subject’s bifurcation around a radical hole that then gets replicated in any couple or other social configuration. This is then what is given shape by the novel’s structure, which sandwiches chapters that alternate Florence and Henry’s first-person tellings in between chapters with Anna’s: a couple’s split narrative—never the twain shall meet—bookended by the narrative of a woman who’s split off from her couple. People can live in the same apartment, they can use the same pronoun, but they have no real access to each other; all they have are different ways of telling the same story.

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In Radical Freud: Re-Constructing the Bisexuality Thesis, Thomas Olver (2025) explicitly refuses the first person, or so he says. In this book, he writes, “I avoid using the personal form of address” (p. 4), though his grammar here clearly contradicts his message; instead, he prefers to “write in an abstract manner that does not require personalisation of statements” (p. 5) except when strictly necessary. Early on, Olver quotes Nietzsche as saying that “there are no facts, only interpretations” (p. 6), and he seems to proffer this as a central mantra of the book; but then, on the same page, he writes that evolution (one of the poles of historical discourse that the book claims is the corollary, and apparent contradictor, of emancipation, the book’s abiding concern) “is simply a statement of empirical fact” (p. 6). Throughout the book, Olver performs a complex balancing act around matters of knowledge and the style of its transmission, that is, around questions of interpretation and fact, of the first and the third person: to the extent that, unlike fiction, a work of critical theory must at least implicitly ground itself in one or another epistemological anchoring point to justify its claims, this is the tightrope that any work of theory must walk. But Olver makes it—and often its conflicts and difficulties—explicit, perpetually renegotiating his terms, widening his scope of inquiry beyond his original theme (to a critique of the economics and media of late modernity, for example) and extending his methodological considerations to such matters as the capacities of the English language or the building blocks of plotting in narrative. These expositions then refract back on both the book’s methodological precepts and its content, as bisexuality becomes a nodal point for rethinking not only evolutionary science and social emancipation but also epistemology itself.

Radical Freud is remarkably ambitious: part intellectual history of the development of the psychoanalytic field, part the suggestion of a new metapsychology, part social theory, part utopic imagining, part close reading of Freud. In fact, the Freudian text is ultimately the anchor from which Olver proceeds, the basis of his claims and his final reference point; yet, as he writes, his “embrace of Freud’s work is not an appeal to his authority” (p. 10) but is rather a testament to the place of close reading in the construction and reconstruction of theory. If such a basis for a monograph is ultimately tautological, so be it: this book performs a close reading of Freud because Freud’s writing is what constructed psychoanalysis. To base a metapsychology on “what boils down finally to a single sentence in The Ego and the Id” (p. 2) is, from a certain perspective, entirely unjustifiable, and, from another, perfectly justified. In fact, there seem to be two epistemological principles running throughout the book; on the one hand there is the “relativism of knowledge” (p. 5) that Olver writes is his guiding principle, in keeping with Freud’s own method (and an epistemological mode that would certainly not preclude the first person, which Freud was himself wont to use), and on the other is Olver’s stated intention to “determin[e]…which aspects of reality are constructed by humans and which part of reality is actually empirical” (p. 9; a mode that would). It is this split vision around which the book is perpetually dancing, and it is here that the book runs into some trouble, as evidenced by the parapractic sentence (“I don’t use ‘I’”) above.

Indeed, the status of the “empirical” (not to mention “reality” and “actually”) is, ultimately, undefined and indefinable; the trouble with a methodology that perpetually interrogates its own first principles is that, in its attempt to find “a way to determin[e]…the veracity of a discourse” (p. 8), it will inevitably land on some bedrock, a signifier unattached to a signified, a moment of pure preference or choice, like the choice of neurosis or sex. That there is no outside on which to stand, no primal guarantor of a discourse, no way to avoid being interpellated by one’s own claim—these things will inevitably speak. You can’t refuse the “I” without using it. But you can’t help but admire the tenacity of Olver’s procedure: in its own way, it is extremely ethical. To my mind, the problem is not that the book admits of a split methodology—a kind of epistemological he said she said—but rather that this conflict goes unstated. If it had been spoken, it might have emerged as what I will suggest it is, that is, a form of bisexuality.

Olver’s reading of Freud, his tracing of a psychoanalytic lineage, his metapsychology, and his social theory all rest on his “reconstruction” of what he calls Freud’s “bisexuality thesis”: the foundation of Freud’s radicalism that, Olver writes, subsequent generations of analysts either misinterpreted or forgot or rewrote entirely and that Olver intends to resuscitate. What follows is a meticulous reworking, and elaboration of the consequences, of what Olver claims is a Freudian thesis of universal bisexuality that is distinct from the bisexuality that results from the full form of the Oedipus complex. (In other words, Olver claims that in Freud, there are, appropriately, two bisexuality theses, one Oedipal and one non-Oedipal or pre-Oedipal; his interest is in the latter.) If Oedipal bisexuality follows the familiar trajectory of object cathexis followed by loss followed by identification, and is further bound up with the situation of rivalry that characterizes Oedipus, pre-Oedipal bisexuality—which Olver locates in a key sentence from The Ego and the Id in which Freud posits “a bisexuality that is not…developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry” (Olver, 2025, p. 78)—presents an alternative to Oedipal rivalry already lodged in humanity. This original bisexuality then “stands in a dialectical relationship to the theory of the Oedipus complex, both in the theoretical descriptions and in the manner in which the child itself emerges into adulthood” (p. 63; in other words, human development and the theoretical constructions that account for it follow the same narrative principle, though where the line is between the one and the other would be impossible to parse); pre-Oedipal, non-rivalrous bisexuality and Oedipal rivalry thus, throughout the course of a human life, “exist in dialectical relationship, with each seeking to negate the other” (p. 101). Yet to the extent that this situation is “colored by tensions introduced by socially constructed values … that shape sexual aims and objects” the Oedipal, rivalrous, “reproductive always trumps the non-reproductive regime” of “unfixed, free-ranging bisexuality” (p. 101).

It is unclear what “always” means here: whether it means that such a supersession is necessary, or whether it refers to the statistically predominant cultures whose “socially constructed values” both stem from and enforce it. It is also unclear exactly how overt homosexuality and bisexuality fit into this schema; though Olver is clear that what he is interrogating are not identity categories, he does have to grapple with the existence of them or at least with adult tendencies in sexual expression, and though at times exclusive homosexuality is aligned with the “reproductive regime” determined by Oedipus (presumably through the nuclearization of the family, though this isn’t spelled out), manifest homosexuality (whether exclusive, or in the form of adult bisexuality) is also aligned with the non-repressive, non-rivalrous social order that Olver imagines. These tend to be tricky points in universalizing theories, and in theories that aim to parse the lines of influence between the psychic and the social—lines that are of course impossible to disarticulate, but the attempts at which leave the reader in chicken-and-egg tangles that the text invites us into and then, inevitably, can’t lead us out of. Published at a time when social attitudes toward the “polyvocal flux” (p. 77) of sexuality that Olver mourns as the collateral damage of the Oedipal regime are changing significantly, and to the extent that Olver does at times venture explanations of adult sexualities that don’t fall prey to excessive Oedipalization, one would think he might have taken more into account current changes in the matrix of psychic and social that makes up human sexual expression. (It’s also not clear to me that in the current climate, Freud is quite as much in need of defending as he perhaps was for the past several decades; if anything, various articles in the last few years have hailed Freud as back in style among young intellectuals and influencers [see my 2024 essay in EJP, “Psychoanalysis and Culture, Then and Now”]. Though it couldn’t hurt.)

The book is equally ambitious in its suggestion of a metapsychology that might align with the originary bisexuality that Olver posits, and that involves theorizing a form of primary identification that is distinct from the later identifications that accompany the Oedipus complex. This primary identification is at times the corollary and result of, and at times equivalent to, primary narcissism: a “primary identification of the infant child with itself on the basis of a prior object cathexis with itself” (p. 99), both of which (the cathexis and the identification) are also at times termed “homosexual” by Freud and other theorists to whom Olver turns, resulting in the positing of a “pre-genital primary homosexuality” (p. 100). This is then considered a kind of “subject cathexis” that “lays the foundation for a model of the child in the perfect initial unity of the self, which is lost but then returns in the form of self-identification to serve as the model for all future objects” (p. 100); as well, the infant’s “primary object cathexis and subsequent identification with itself produces an emergent id-ego structure of sufficient standing to serve as a nucleus for later ego and superego developments” (p. 99). This is an interesting suggestion, and it is arguably the most successful element of the book, in that it offers an original interpretation of the relationship among primary narcissism, object cathexis, and identification (and thus of the formation of subjectivity in relation to objects); there are, potentially, important clinical implications here. A later exposition of the genesis of id, ego, and superego according to the signifier-signified distinction of structural linguistics (“the ego is the signifier of the id, and later the ego also becomes the contested signified of the superego as signifier;” p. 140) is also extremely imaginative and fertile ground for future thought.

At the same time, if “primary identification…reveals an object cathexis of self with self” (Olver, 2025, p. 98), it is once again unclear what this “self” is that, grammatically, precedes this cathexis and identification. Olver’s social utopianism—his imagining of a social order in which “our inherent bisexuality” (p. 127) helps us “make our own non-biological family by seeking out and cultivating bonds of non-rivalry that incorporate a range of mutually affirming and nurturing relationships and that challenge the narrow confines of parental injunction and biological reproduction” (p. 127)—is evidently matched by, and is the corollary of, a kind of originary utopianism, the idea of a “perfect initial unity of the self” (sometimes Olver calls it “primal unity”) that is lost but that “returns in the form of self-identification” (p. 100). Bisexuality here thus becomes affiliated with non-difference, with a perfect unity (what does this mean?) whose traces then appear in the horizontal, bisexual society that Olver imagines. In some strange way, this situation seems distinctly, like, asexual, as evidenced perhaps by Olver’s use of the term “immaculate identification” (p. 88) for the primary identification that precedes the Oedipal ones. There seems to be some idealism here, some urge to find a realm outside of the contortions, disturbances, and conflicts of sexuality in both the subject and the social, some space of immaculate relation and self-relation. Olver indeed repeats the notion that “there is no reason to prohibit something that does not exist” (p. 121) as proof of an originary bisexuality that exists before it is prohibited; as he insists, “prohibition must come after desire and not before” (p. 121). Given Olver’s self-proclaimed status as a dialectical thinker (and the many other dialectical thinkers who preceded him, whose methodology allowed the insight that, let’s say, the law produces the crime), this is a peculiar insistence. That human sexuality writ large might be inherently bound up with prohibition and restriction—that desire is necessarily the product of injunction—is an impossibility here, because it would cut against the immaculate idealism that undergirds Olver’s writing, and that posits a reified, “uninhibited, unsublimated” sexuality that is “fully bisexual” (p. 77): bisexuality thus coming to stand, paradoxically, for a state of perfect, untrammeled self-unity. Not that this idealism isn’t charming.

Somehow, what emerges from this book above all is the productivity of rivalry. It should perhaps come as no surprise that this book is intensely rivalrous, with much of Olver’s ire directed at the post-Freudian theorists who misunderstood or diluted the latter’s radical message about sexuality—thinkers who end up taking on, in Olver’s discourse, the imagined place of Oedipus as the hypostatized agent of restriction and normalization. Though I am quite sympathetic to his broad message about the problematic transmission of Freud in subsequent generations, Olver casts such a wide net over the writers who have betrayed the father that inevitably he can’t perform close readings of all their works (the kind of close reading on which he otherwise bases his scholarly ethic), in the absence of which his engagement with them frequently rings as ad hominem attack. Olver further interprets these various strayings from Freud as acts of theoretical parricide without pausing to interrogate where he is thus positioning himself in this Oedipal field: as Freud’s sole heir, or as the good son, or as fratricide, or whatever. At this point in its history, how is it possible to make an intervention into the field of psychoanalysis without succumbing to one form of rivalry or another? Olver raises this question but does not model the possibility of a non-rivalrous form of scholarship, which wouldn’t be a problem except to the extent that his method contradicts his message. One comes away with the impression that Olver needs to posit the possibility of an originary perfect unity—and a resultant social harmony—as a kind of reaction formation against his own experience of scholarly rivalry and conflict, which is clearly quite productive for him: it has created this book. What if he had just embraced it?

Two of the thinkers who get the most heat are Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan. Putting aside my own personal predilection for these thinkers (or at least attempting to do so), which inevitably influences my reading, it does seem to me that here, as is the case with most rivalries, it is those who are closest who get the most animus. Olver warns that contemporary debates about gender “ignore to their peril that gender is always constructed and has no objective basis in reality” and “give scarcely any consideration to the destructive and incarcerating nature of gender” (p. 23)—a purely impressionistic indictment (which debates exactly are being referred to and where they’re taking place is unclear) that I’m not sure is true. In any case, it was Butler who popularized these ideas, which Olver introduces as his own by way of insisting that contemporary discussions have forgotten them, in the first place. In fact, the “non-biological” families founded on bonds of non-rivalry that “challenge the narrow confines of parental injunction and biological reproduction” (p. 127) that Olver imagines—those in which “a stranger may just as easily become a brother, a sister, a lover” (p. 127)—sound awfully close to the “families we choose” proposed by Kath Weston (1991) and explored by Butler and other queer theorists. Butler is further slammed for reading Freud as heteronormative, an argument that Olver claims admits many mistakes, including in “her [sic] incredibly loose and inaccurate adoption of the word melancholia, which comes from a transitional text by Freud (1917) and actually means clinical depression in English” (p. 46). Once again, this “actually” is perplexing to me, especially since the melancholia of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917/1957) is anything but a straightforward DSM diagnostic. In any case, Butler’s supposed misreading of Freud is a familiar complaint, and though I’m all for defending Freud’s radicality, it’s hard not to admit that he also had his more normative moments—and that a strong misreading can be productive, sometimes of an entire discourse. In other words, I’m not sure why the important project of defending Freud for the benefit of “a younger generation of psychoanalysts” (p. 34) who feel they have to “jettison with great fanfare” (p. 34) their association with him for the sake of emancipation itself requires jettisoning outright other thinkers who have an emancipatory aim.

Lacan is decried as another of the prime de-radicalizers of Freudian thought, a purveyor of an “intrinsic conservatism” (Olver, 2025, p. 112) and also of homophobia—accusations that are leveled but not really substantiated. In fact, one can’t help but think that Olver is doing to Lacan what he accuses Butler of doing to Freud: that is, reading in a conservatism “against which she [sic] can be seen to rebel” (p. 46). One of Lacan’s sins is his positing of a split subject, which rankles Olver: as he writes, “the word split has a semantic meaning only in relation to the word or concept of wholeness” (p. 105) whereas the “dialectic of the subject” (p. 105) that he proposes instead as an effect of universal bisexuality—a subject in a state of “permanent becoming” (p. 4)—“shows that there is no split subject, only a developing subject always emerging from the dialectic” (p. 105). Never mind that Lacan’s split subject in no way rests on the assumption of an original wholeness, or that it is in fact Olver who posits the latter in his theory of primal unity. Never mind as well that the term “dialectic of the subject” is a Lacanian one (from his “Mirror Stage” essay; 1966/2006), as is the term “subject” (speaking subject, subject of the unconscious) itself. Olver further takes aim at the Lacanian dictum that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” a “popular and well-known” (p. 133) mantra that “is actually an incorrect paraphrase of a far more complex statement from the third seminar” (p. 132) but which “popular cliché” (p. 134) Lacan then himself “adopts…in later seminars” (p. 134). If I understand correctly, Olver seems to be saying that Lacan appropriated a phrase coined by his followers that was a misreading of his own earlier ideas—though how one could determine this is perfectly unclear. And in any case, the statement that “the unconscious, which tells the truth about truth, is structured like a language” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 737) appears in “Science and Truth,” published in 1966. What is happening here?

Part of what is happening is that Olver has his own theory of language that he pits against Lacan’s and actually claims to be the inverse of the Lacanian theory: a “primal language” (p. 135) that “predates the advent of human language” (which thus becomes a “secondary form of language”) and that proceeds “(inversely to Lacan’s model) from the unconscious to the world” (p. 132). Without getting too deep into the specifics, I’ll say that in order to theorize this primal language, Olver rehearses much of the ground that Lacan covered (Saussurean linguistics, and babies’ babbling, for example) but reverses the order of operations. But is reversal really theoretical advancement? Olver knows about the theory of the mirror stage, which he claims is “hackneyed and highly problematic” (p. 134) without saying exactly why; if he had elaborated this more, he might have better avoided the impression that what’s at play in his relation to Lacan is good old fashioned mirror stage competitiveness. Not that Lacan wasn’t subject to a good dose of this as well, not to mention Freud himself, who, as Olver writes, probably never developed his idea of primary identification—only using the phrase in a piece of writing once—because another analyst had coined the term first. (Olver meticulously and impressively reconstructs a set of exchanges between Freud and two other analysts in the development of this notion as an explanation of its avoidance in Freud’s subsequent works, though he doesn’t draw out the implication that “Brother Freud” [p. 42] appears to have been no stranger to intellectual rivalry.)

The last object of Olver’s animus is the clinic of psychoanalysis itself. He consistently takes aim at analyst-writers whose theoretical conclusions are too grounded in the contingencies of the clinic: “an inability to recognize Freud’s subtleties” by such writers “may have something to do with the clinical background and orientation of much of the scholarship because clinicians have very different expectations compared to an investigator focused on the theoretical and metapsychological dimensions” (p. 37)—that is, compared to Freud, who, we must remember, “remained not only a clinician but also a theoretician” (p. 37), and, implicitly, compared to Olver himself, who is not a clinician. And yet, where else could Freud have drawn his theories, but from the clinic? It is a curious thing, to write a book about the emancipatory potential of Freudian psychoanalysis while dismissing almost entirely its practice. Olver admits his “overall scepticism on the matter of clinical treatment” (p. 154) which proceeds from the assumption “that there is a preceding pathology. However, psychology and psychiatry in general and psychoanalysis in particular show the inverse to be the case: the clinical intervention is the pathology it produces” (p. 154), as evidenced by the pathologization of homosexuality in the DSM. As undeniably horrible as that was—and as right as Olver is in asking, “if the DSM was wrong about something as simple and self-evident as homosexuality, how can a diagnostic approach ever be accepted as the authority on any other ‘mental disorder’?” (p. 154)—it does seem to me that Olver is setting up a conservative straw man in psychoanalytic practice against which he can be seen to rebel. Who at this point really identifies the practice of psychoanalysis with the DSM?

Once again, Lacan is a prime target here: “It is striking how Lacan’s work is so firmly entrenched in the language of psychopathology and diagnostic classification” (p. 158), Olver writes, yet most Lacanians I know would strenuously refute this, and would point out that the Lacanian schema of differential diagnosis in fact insistently refuses pathologization, thus revealing a similar refusal in the original Freudian paradigm. In other words, Lacanian structuralism is meant precisely to discourage pathologization and the nomination of “mental disorders.” Whether or not this is successful is I suppose up for debate, and it seems to me that in order to make the above claim one would need to engage in it—but Olver doesn’t enter into the fray of this argument in any depth (instead, he simply writes that “not only does Lacan’s approach validate the simple form of the Oedipus complex to the exclusion of homosexuality, but it also assumes and promotes a crude and harsh alignment of biological sex with socially constructed gender” [p. 158], two claims that could also be quite fiercely argued).

Despite his skepticism about clinical practice, Olver advocates a clinical approach—if it must be done—that follows from Freud’s “focus…on supporting the ego” (p. 160) and that is “by definition an integrated approach because it is the ego that has to integrate and manage the demands of the two other agencies and of reality” (p. 160). Such a clinic would thus do justice to the “attainment of a balance” (p. 157) that is the dialectical work of “the ongoing synthesis of bisexuality of the subject and the object” (p. 157). Thus the ego, as the site of the synthesis, balance, and integration that the bisexual subject suggests, is, Olver writes, Freud’s preferred ally in clinical intervention, yet “very little of the clinical practice carried out in the name of Freud and psychoanalysis has been loyal to his radical vision of bolstering the ego” (pp. 159-160). This is an odd claim, since the ego psychologists did precisely that, and their vision of analysis as a process of bolstering the ego and encouraging the achievement of balance, integration, maturity, and mental health has sometimes been seen as quite conservative—a kind of normalizing practice that aims to paper over the inevitable disruptions, conflicts, and convolutions of the unconscious and of sexuality. At least, this was Lacan’s position—Lacan who consistently aligned himself with the Freud of a sexuality that remains unintegrated, a sexuality that is “merely soldered together” (Freud, 1905/1953, p. 136), a sexuality that must be perpetually constructed and re-constructed anew. Such is Lacan’s radical claim, to a Freudian sexuality of incurable bifurcation, whereas Olver’s sense of the radicality of Freud’s sexuality seems to be the inverse: that of integration, balance, and egoic self-unity. An interesting argument might be had here about what exactly constitutes radicality. It might further be pointed out that for Lacan, the ego is precisely the seat of rivalry.

Certainly, my preferences in this implicit debate are clear, though it’s hard not to admit that Olver has written a provocative and passionate book, whose defense of “the permanent becoming of the dialectical self” (p. 4) can be quite appealing. His intention to outline and promote the subtleties and value of Freudian thought, and his dedication to tracing the construction and lines of dissemination of Freudian theory, are inspiring. In building a case against clinicians, Olver also gives an anecdotal account of listening to a progressive psychoanalyst argue for the expulsion of “prejudice” from the psychoanalytic field and realizing that this insistence bore some resonance to the field’s earlier intention to expel homosexuality—“the way she was using the term prejudice struck me as precisely a placeholder (unconscious?) for the way the term pathology had previously been the predominant focus of the psychoanalytic discourse after Freud” (p. 155)—that makes one think he could make a rather good analyst. But without any real faith in psychoanalytic practice or any other post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinker, the only vehicle for emancipation that Olver leaves us with—the emancipation that he insists is so vital—is reading Freud, or Olver. And this, I think, is just not quite enough.

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In his “formulas of sexuation” discussed in Seminar XX and elsewhere, Lacan (1975/1999) figured both man and woman as subjective positions, that is, as logics and fantasy structures by which subjects are organized; the formulas are written as a kind of table divided into two sides, with the man’s side on the left and the woman’s on the right (they are read, then, according to Western reading conventions, from man to woman). According to these schemas, masculine logic, as encapsulated in Freud’s myth of the primal father, posits a figure who is spared castration—that is, a founder who is self-identical, undivided by the unconscious, unalienated by and within language, outside of the transferential scene, unmarked by lack or desire, and thus capable of full satisfaction—and whose status remains an ever-present possibility, as though one could become the master one has posited as one’s forebear. In other words, to be a man means to be organized by a fantasy that it is possible to speak without being spoken, to write without being written; that is, that one’s speech could be unmarked by the first person, that it might be possible to accede to objectivity.

By contrast, for Lacan, feminine logic and structure know well that all speaking subjects are subject to castration: that the Other is lacking, that there is no outside from which to explain or know anything, nowhere solid to either commence or arrive, no position from which to speak or be that doesn’t already serve as evidence of one’s own position in the scene. That to be a speaking being is precisely to perform one’s castration, lack, non-possession, desire; that the lack in the Other—in the symbolic order, which in truth has no founding or primal guarantor—is the guarantee of one’s own desire. That knowledge is relative; that, in a sense, one can only speak as oneself, but also that one’s self is in no way a pre-given fact, that whatever we can call a self is in fact determined by the speaking that at once proceeds from and precedes it—a very particular way of understanding the personal register of articulation. In a sense, femininity understands that any act of speaking about the world is also a form of, let’s say, autofiction. These divergent orientations toward speech and knowledge also make for different erotics: if the man’s logic is accompanied by an erotics limited by the phallic function and concentrated in phallic fantasy, women’s erotics offer an enjoyment unlimited by phallic teleology, what Lacan calls a beyond of or supplement to phallic pleasure.

Needless to say, part of Lacan’s suggestion is that this feminine position is also in some fundamental way constitutive to and privileged by psychoanalysis, which asks us to speak in the first person and further asks a question about the beyond of the phallic function. Yet these two logics are also disarticulable from each other; they exist in some kind of reference to or conversation with each other, though subjects do tend to make certain choices about their preferred position. In any case, that sexual difference might be understood as a radical hole in knowledge or bifurcation of logical modes—that it is impossible to speak or know except from within one or another sexuated position—means that, when it comes to sexuality, all we have are different ways of telling the same story.

What kind of writing about psychoanalysis and sex is necessary today? Interestingly, in 2024 and 2025 at least three novels (to my knowledge) have been published with psychoanalysts as protagonists: Scaffolding, Parallel Lines by Edward St. Aubyn and The Psychoanalysis of Dr. Seele by Leslie Stein. It is interesting as well that Elkin, who previously had written works of cultural and art criticism (and memoir), should turn simultaneously to psychoanalysis and to fiction. Is there something of a return to psychoanalysis happening in the fictive mode? Is there further something here about placing the psychoanalyst in the first person, taken down from some seat of supposed omniscience? It is not coincidental that the two analyst “I”s that Elkin’s book features are women. What intervention into psychoanalysis will such writing make—writing that those of us within the field might view as a kind of supplement (though in no way subordinated) to the traditional forms of Theory produced by analysts and analytic researchers?

It is perhaps too schematic to claim that Olver’s largely third person work of analytic theory and Elkin’s first person analytic novel chart the divide between the two sides of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, especially since both works inscribe both logical modes into their text; to fit the anti-Lacanian Olver neatly into a Lacanian schema is maybe too dirty a trick. At moments in reading Scaffolding, I had the odd experience of wondering how much of Lacan Elkin had actually read (in her acknowledgements, Elkin cites the authors of Lacanian theory that have informed her writing); some descriptions of his thoughts on the ethics of desire seemed to me a bit off, a reaction I’m ashamed of. Such is the lure of mastery. Because of course, what I was reading was a work of fiction: the first person at issue was not the author, even less than anyone is ever in possession of their personal pronoun; the “Lacan” at issue was not Lacan, even less than anyone who appears in writing is ever themselves and despite the bibliography.. By contrast, Olver writes at the beginning of his book (in order to assure us that his text wasn’t produced by ChatGPT, perhaps a necessary move these days) that everything we are about to read is his own. Where the scales of my own epistemological bisexuality tip may be fairly clear, but for all of my preference for feminine logic (my love of literature and first person writing; my distaste for certain scientistic discourses of knowledge; my need to bookend the paragraphs on theory that I do write by paragraphs on fiction; the way I turn to novels for relief, probably above all from my own forms of scholarly rivalry, from the one-upmanship of book reviewing, from how much I get drawn into the game, and, yes, from all the penis envy), who is to say that the first person actually provides any more access to anything? Who is to say that the third person isn’t its own form of self-baring?

***

At a certain point in Scaffolding, Anna starts sleeping with Clémentine, her neighbor. She has already been sleeping with Jonathan, her ex and Clémentine’s current partner, whose name, in Clementine’s conversation, precedes his appearance in the flesh: Clémentine speaks of her boyfriend on her frequent visits to Anna’s apartment (before any of the sex starts), and Clémentine thinks of her ex Jonathan, until one day he appears in her apartment complex and the two Jonathans turn out to be one. Names may be shared, but so are bodies, and somehow, that both are the case is what makes nothing ever our own; it’s not so much that you have your Jonathan and I have mine, as that no Jonathan is proper to any of us. What then can happen between women, if this is the case? What can happen when they leave the realm of all the male lawyers? After months of sitting in her apartment brooding, Anna is finally convinced to accompany Clémentine on her outings with other women protesters; it turns out that the signs with enigmatic phrases decrying sexual violence that Anna has been seeing throughout Paris (the buildings are speaking, “the city is screaming”; p. 375) are being put up by Clémentine and her group at night (the phrases are the actual ones that the “colleuses,” a French feminist activist group, put up in signs around Paris in 2019; Elkin cites them at the end of the book). But being same-sex does not make for harmony, and there is trouble among them, as Clémentine explains to Anna:

We don’t agree about everything, she says, like some of them have kind of a fucked-up idea of what feminism is, some of them are, let’s say, more inclusive than others? Her eyes widen at the word inclusive, it is clearly important to her to include, she wants me to know this. I think that’s always been a fundamental part of feminism, I say, hasn’t it? Women coming together to try and organise and, at moments of social crisis, take advantage of the disarray to push for their rights? In spite of our differences? Feminism can’t accomplish much in isolation.

Says the woman who’s isolated herself for months! Anyway what I meant wasn’t just about coming together but about who we allow in, who we’re fighting for and with. It feels like feminism has always been about extending freedom to the greatest number of people, but there are some women who seem to have forgotten that. They’re saying they have the right to say these hateful things, these things in bad faith about what a woman is, they think they are speaking common sense, *we all know what a woman is*. They just make me really angry.

They’re claiming freedom of speech?
They are, but their speech is hate speech and that *isn’t* protected. You know what Jonathan is always saying. First they came for the trans women, and I wasn’t a trans woman, etc. It just feels like the front-line fight against fascism. (Elkin, 2024, p. 298)

Lacan’s formulas of sexuation chart something of not only subjective, but also collective constitution as it relates to being sexed. The masculine side of the formulas describes not only a fantasy of the primal father that obtains in masculine sexuation, but also the collective of men that forms around this shared fantasy, men whose belonging is legislated by their shared identification with this model of masculinity: that is, a collective founded on a similarity that eases the friction of an ever-present rivalry, every man a son in relation to the primal father. But on the other side of sexuation, women cannot be grouped into a collective whose lines of inclusion and exclusion are in any way clear. As opposed to masculine collectivization, which organizes itself around a shared identification that guarantees a single collective identity and thus a straightforward basis for exclusion (the primal father might be a president, or a founder, or an originator of a discourse; for analysts and analytic researchers, it might be Freud, primal analyst around whom we organize ourselves and for whose legitimation we jockey), women come to the group one by one, bringing their solitude with them. Perhaps it is the solitude that is shared, the solitude of loss and of private renovation that then comes to mobilize any collective action. In any case, there is no knowing what a woman is, no saying who belongs and who doesn’t, no delineation of a constitutional exclusion, and this presumably inflects feminine politics, and any feminine radicality or emancipatory action that is true to its name. How there can be anti-trans Lacanians (and there are plenty) is baffling to me.

Meanwhile, scaffolding is going up around Anna’s building and it’s hard to tell whether it’s protective or invasive:

That day the cranking and thundering begin, as the scaffolding is screwed into place. The metallic grinding and drilling of something into something – into what? building? I always thought of scaffolding as something supportive that goes around or next to something else, but there is always at least one point of damage, they can’t just pile it up free-standing. The clanging, the echo of metal being screwed into metal. The unidentifiable thrummings and clackings and clangings, things being hauled up, sawed, arranged, set. The deep deep sound of metal penetrating metal. Metallic violence has taken over our windows, the sonic area of our home. The sawing sounds like an engine revving. Throughout the day the level rises, the noise comes and goes, and soon the top of a yellow hard-hat is peeking through the window. I feel like I should say hello, but I don’t, I am too shy. I can see their shadows on the curtains, the hand with the hammer, striking, like the murderer with a knife in some slasher film. I wonder how many scaffolds he will build in his lifetime. (Elkin, 2024, p. 113)

Henry describes his work as a paralegal as “an honest job … I provide support. That’s what I’m good at. It’s what makes me a good husband, too” (p. 114)—but when does domestic support turn damaging? When does the home turn uncanny, haunted by death? When does sex get violent, as in this primal scene of erection and penetration and screwing and grinding, replete with the sounds, as is true of any primal scene? How many will he drill in his lifetime? How many will I? The violence of men and women in this novel is also the violence and legacy of the Third Reich, as nearly all of the novel’s characters, save Anna and Clémentine, grapple with being Jewish in France, with intergenerational trauma as it plays out in psychic and relational and urban geographies and as it varies generation to generation and relationship to relationship. Florence’s grandmother was in the camps; Florence has a recurring dream that her grandmother used to have and also her kitchen; Henry, suspecting Florence’s adultery, fucks a French woman who is literally named France (Marie-France, “Marie-fucking-France”; p. 216), a Jew fucking France (“I am Henry son of Yitzak and look at me now”; p. 216); Jonathan says he can’t date French women because of what the French did yet he keeps doing so. How does history make sex? How does the impossibility of sex, of sexual difference, of sexuation, make history, a history of violence, a violence that can’t stand difference, that can’t stand that nothing is ever ours, that can’t stand that we have no real access to each other, that can’t stand that all we have are different ways of telling the same story, hence all the grinding and drilling of something into something? When does utopian or revolutionary action, an intervention into history (Naziism, Communism, May ’68) turn deadly? How does violence get displaced, down the generations and across geographies, as we are seeing now in Gaza? Where, now, is the front-line fight against fascism, in France, in Europe, in America? What role does psychoanalysis have to play—a psychoanalysis that, throughout the generations since Freud, has undergone countless permutations, entered countless geographies, taken on countless positions vis-à-vis other discourses and institutions of knowledge (medical sciences, the humanities, the arts) and been taken up in countless forms of writing and transmission, and whose emancipatory potential we are in need of now as much as ever?