On Not Breaking Windows

We were in our final discussion of the day—an experiment in sharing our impressions of all aspects of the conference experience, not only the presented ideas but what it felt like to be in the room. A member of the chorus spoke, I believe, for the first time all day—asking the organizers why she needed to be there—a poet—to bear witness to this event. Others tagged on—this was supposed to be unlike traditional academic conferences, but it failed to subvert the power imbalance. The same people spoke, they said. Over and over. Someone questioned whether they should have gone to volunteer instead. Perhaps this was a waste of their time. Someone else wondered where the sense of community in the room was. A long-time analyst friend of mine sitting near me in the back found a space in the discussion. Her voice calmly filled the room. She connected our discussion back to fort/da (Freud, 1920/1955) and asked the room what each of us brought and what each of us would leave behind.

My heart rate had been climbing, and as my friend finished her remarks, I shot up from my seat, surprising myself. I had none of my friend’s ease as I implored the room to follow their desire right out of this room if they didn’t find it there. “Our organizers,” I said, “certainly brought a great deal.” This sentence was punctuated by grateful applause that seemed to explode almost robotically from people’s hands, as everyone shifted their attention again to the organizers at the front, as if so many of us were ready now to re-enter society from the throes of this spontaneous crowd.

Several people thanked me after. They were grateful that we could conclude with some gratitude for our organizers. I wondered, however, if I had just done the most un-psychoanalytic thing: Had I just silenced the room? Out of deference to leadership?

Willy Apollon’s (2025) understanding of the feminine is that aspect of one’s subjectivity that can only pass through the act. This, of course, does not refer to femininity in a conventional sense within the social link, but that part in each of us that throws the rock through the window. The masculine in us, by contrast, not only picks up the pieces but makes something new within the social link with the fragments that remain. In a word, it is ethics.

In that moment of jumping off my seat, I felt as though I were moved by something greater than me, but I cannot say that it was the feminine or the masculine. No, it was something closer to identification, and perhaps that was gripping all of us in the room. (Freud [1921/1955] observes in Group Psychology that identification is ambivalent and fickle and can quickly turn into a wish for removal.) I organize events as part of my career in higher education, and to a lesser extent, through my studies at my psychoanalytic institute. The labor for any event is enormous and much of it undervalued and invisible, and for an event this thoughtful, I knew the investment was extraordinary. I felt for Mom and Dad, okay, and myself by extension.