Psychoanalysis<>Politics: Special Issue Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

This special issue of EJP is dedicated to the conference, titled “Psychoanalysis <> Politics: The Impossible Relation,” that was staged by the Group for Independent Formation in collaboration with the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, in New York in February 2025. (See here for the event webpage.) This was the second conference organized by the Group for Independent Formation on, most broadly, psychoanalysis in extension: that is, on the complex dialectic between the field of psychoanalysis and whatever we might consider to be extrinsic to it. The field of psychoanalysis is changing in important ways, no doubt in relation to the contemporary political landscape and the rise of global fascism. It is, therefore, a moment ripe for addressing the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary culture. In particular, the conference’s title (which employs Lacan’s “lozenge” to designate a non-relation between two terms that acts precisely as a result of its uncertainty) was meant to suggest a certain unknowability that subtends the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, as well as the extent to which this relationship is something that must be created in each psychoanalytic or political scene. That the conference took place just one month after Trump’s second inauguration both underscored and intensified this atmosphere of essential uncertainty, as well as the question of what might be created in answer to the specific ways in which the collective and the unconscious are collocated in the contemporary moment.

Our hope was that the conference itself would be one scene in which something new could be created, a new inflection made or permitted to emerge. To this end, we organized panels (on “Founding Myths,” “Psychoanalysis’s Palestine Problem,” “The Politics of Self-Authorization,” and “New Fascisms”) that would approach the lozenge of the conference’s title while speaking directly to the contemporary moment, with invited speakers who we were confident would be thoughtful, creative contributors. Crucially, we asked that the panelists not read papers, but rather that they speak extemporaneously, in roundtable format, in order to see what might be born of their engagement in real time. Instead of keynote speakers, we conducted two interviews (with Eric Santner and Silvia Lippi) in which the discussion was also spontaneous. We asked the audience members to speak as analysands, or as analysts-as-analysands: that is, as those who speak not to have a final word or say their piece, but in order to provoke more speech, by surprise (for themselves, for the other). In conducting a conference in this way, we wanted to enact the psychoanalytic ethic (involving speech, and the moment, and the creation of the new) in the context of the collective.

But psychoanalysis also contains within it an ethic of reading, and we wanted to pay homage to this as well. We thus chose to project excerpts from key texts that catalyzed the Group for Independent Formation’s conceptual development of the conference, so that attendees could read alone and together, at specific moments in the proceedings. Now, over a year after the event, in asking some of the conference’s participants and audience members to produce the written documents that we asked them precisely not to produce in advance of the conference itself, we hope to transmit something of the effect of that event, with its dialectics between the collective encounter and solitude, speech and writing—dialectics foundational to both psychoanalysis and politics, and to their interrelation.

The Group for Independent Formation was founded in 2016 to support its members’ analytic formations: for some of us, formation has occurred entirely outside of an institute; for others, the Group has supplemented differing levels of institutional engagement. The Group’s activities initially focused on intensive reading and clinical discussion, in conjunction with members’ work in personal analysis and clinical supervision. The Group’s ethos is founded on Lacan’s concept of self-authorization: that becoming an analyst is not something bestowed by an Other, but is rather a self-authorization that is a function of analysis itself in the context of a dialogue with “some others.”

The Group more recently has focused on transmission: conferences and events serve as catalysts and anchors for the Group’s own continued work, while also aiming to foster community and enlivening dialogue unbound by institutional parameters and allegiances. Both of the Group’s conferences have been preceded by a long course of study among members. For the “Psychoanalysis <> Politics” conference, our readings included Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Dolar’s “Freud and the Political,” Derrida’s “Geopsychoanalysis and…The Rest of the World,” Santner’s My Own Private Germany, and Lippi’s and Maniglier’s Soeurs: Pour une psychanalyse féministe, among other texts. Our central questions for this event addressed the new possibilities for collectivity and the challenges posed to psychoanalysis, often by a younger generation of analytic workers, regarding the field’s stance—in public, in the institute, and in the consulting room—toward ongoing crises (political, humanitarian, ethical), in the form of Gaza, re-emergent fascism, racism, and the complacency of the old liberal order, among others.

The conference included not only panels and keynote interviews, but also the structural addition of a “chorus,” three people who would function as commentators and perhaps critics of the conference’s proceedings. Testimonies about this choral act and its echoes are found in several of the conference’s participants’ and audience members’ written responses in this issue, as well as in the post-conference roundtable.

The Group has produced an emergent ethics, if not yet a politics: To first speak without provision, to then subject that speech to a reading both close and harebrained, and to transmit askance and in echoes. The chorus for this event arrived as an idea without provision, and the defiles that produced it are long lost. Psychoanalyst Gabriel Tupinambá, performance artist Ethan Philbrick, and poet Ariana Reines accepted the call to compose the chorus. (In the end, Gabriel wasn’t able to join us because he couldn’t get a visa to enter the United States from Brazil, clearly for political reasons: a crisis that echoed throughout the event.) It was the radical atopos of the chorus that innervated a series of group parapraxes, including our failing to include the names and biographies of the chorus members on the conference program and website. And it was this series of bungled acts and botched hospitality that facilitated the choral act and the conference’s climax, the echo of its primal scene and the murder of the primal father. The choral act: from within the performance, the act shifts its level of reference, unbinds a previously bound force, and brings about the collision of opposing forces.

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The special issue begins with the introductory remarks four of us read aloud at the start of the conference (Jason Royal gave opening remarks extemporaneously), which unspool some of our guiding threads, provide insight into the work we did leading up to the conference, and served to kickstart each day’s free-wheeling discussions. This is followed by a transcript of a post-conference discussion among participants in the “Politics of Self-Authorization” roundtable, which addresses the experience of the panel and of the conference as a whole, with an emphasis on the final, rapid-fire exchange among the audience as it was prompted by the choral act. The core of this issue follows: a double-barreled dossier of short reflections on the conference (and everything that happened before, after, and in the midst of it) that the organizers solicited from a selection of audience and panel participants and which were collected several months after the proceedings ended, followed by an interview with Gabriel Tupinambá on the labor of psychoanalysts in the U.S. and Brazil (a conversation we wished we could have had at the conference itself).

Inspired by the dust kicked up by “Psychoanalysis <> Politics,” Silvia Lippi’s written response takes the form of an open letter to psychoanalysis, one that breaks, once again, the field’s silence on Palestine and explores the possibilities of shame as a response to genocide. Finally, we end with a “daisy chain” of reflections by the members of the Group for Independent Formation, which touches on love, politics, the end of analysis, the form of the small group, and whatever else came up—a document composed by having each member associate to the texts written by someone else before them, and therefore an exercise of collective authorship.