The Politics of Self-Authorization: A Transcript

Below is a transcript of a Zoom meeting conducted by the members of the panel on “The Politics of Self-Authorization” at the “Psychoanalysis <> Politics” conference—conversations which took place several months after the conference, in response to EJP’s intention to publish reflections on the event by participants and audience members. Here, we reflect on our experience of the panel and of the conference as a whole, and particularly of the final conversation among the audience as it was prompted by members of the “chorus,” who acted as plus-ones throughout the conference (one intended chorus member, Gabriel Tupinambá, sadly wasn’t able to join us because he couldn’t to get an entry visa, clearly for political reasons.) Along with many others who were there (some of whom are writing their own responses in this issue), we understood the final moments of the conference—in which the audience, sometimes aggressively, took the organizers to task for their at times real, at times imagined failings—as a kind of interpretation of the event as a whole, a performance of many of the themes about political and institutional life, authority and authorization, and collectivization that the conference put to question (Eric Santner called the scene, “A Father is Being Eaten.”) In particular, this concluding tableau—to the extent that it featured an audience made up largely of early career clinicians and psychoanalytic candidates making their voices heard to and against the conference organizers, who were themselves a psychoanalytic generation removed—raised for us many questions about psychoanalytic transmission, the place of protest in psychoanalysis and in culture, and the current state of the psychoanalytic field.

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Emma Lieber

I guess to open it up, I’d like to think about what remained from the event. I’m curious to hear what has been percolating for you around the questions that were raised at the conference, and by virtue of the structure of the event. Certainly, a lot of what we were asking about was the question of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis and institutions more broadly. I have a question about what kind of intervention our conversations made. I mean, there is something notable just in thinking about what we’re doing now. The Group for Independent Formation sent out this call for written responses by people who participated in the conference, and we’re the only panel that said, we want to get together again as a group and record ourselves in conversation, and contribute that to the issue. We also, notably, were the only panel that met over Zoom several times in advance of the conference. So, in a way, that’s already a mark of some kind of an intervention that this work has made for us, by a conference that tried as much as possible to be organized around spontaneous speech. There’s something interesting there. And certainly, I’m very interested in the question of the small group form, and what that has to do with psychoanalysis. So that’s something that I’ve been thinking about, and I think is manifest already.

Fernando Castrillón

I could speak a little bit about the remainder. I like the way you put it, Emma, that really speaks to me. So we spoke so much about self-authorization and one of the things that’s become more clear to me as a result of both the conversations we had formally at the conference, and also on the side, is that as much as, for example, I think we all appreciate the whole idea of self-authorization—its connection to the institution, what it means for the practice of psychoanalysis, for writing—that there’s also a semblance of self-authorization that is very widespread now, socially. And I want to make a real distinction between those two sets of “self-authorization.” What I mean by this kind of more widespread version of “self-authorization” is a really idiotic, reckless kind of posturing, which is essentially almost a lack of empathy or care for anybody else. It’s something along the lines of, and this is very Trumpian, “I don’t care what the fuck y’all say, this is what I’m saying, and this is the truth.” Regardless of facts, regardless of what has been said before, regardless of anything else, including history. “I’m gonna say this thing, and it’s true, because I say it is.” That’s a very reckless kind of thing, and I’ve heard a real uptick in that since February 2025. And for me, it’s important not to mistake those two things, as they’re easily confused.

Jordan Osserman

Are you hearing that particularly from psychoanalysts (as well as the rest of the world)?

Fernando Castrillón

Not so much from psychoanalysts. Just more in general. I hear it from patients. I hear it on the street, even though I’m here in Berkeley. It’s this bizarre kind of posturing, and it shows up even in the case of mass shootings, or the assassination or murder of Charlie Kirk. It shows up there as well.

Marisa Berwald

The event made me think a lot about groups. Our panel was on institutionalization, but we were also talking about groups. And I thought about it since then, both because of my interactions with and feelings about my own institute, and because I’m thinking about it in my own work, but two things sort of came up for me about that event. One was that, in our group, we met together a few times before the event. And for some reason, I had it in my head that that was part of the procedure of the event itself. But it really wasn’t that way. Other groups didn’t necessarily meet beforehand, though the organizers and the Group for Independent Formation met a lot. So to me, that introduces an element of each person speaking independently and individually, as ones. But not necessarily in a way that improves the rigor of psychoanalytic thinking because people are focused on their own contributions. Not just that event, but I thought about the event we organized at Pulsion, too. I also thought about the roundtables as small groups speaking and thinking in time. And there was a small group that developed in the event itself. Sort of in the moment of the event. Of the people who are there, who are contributing and speaking from the audience. Then, at the end of the event, there emerged more mass feeling, where it seemed like the whole rest of the audience—those who had not taken part in any of these configurations of small groups—objected to an exclusionary element they perceived in the event, which they called privilege. The objection interested me because I found in the event something else that I’m looking for as someone who wants to learn something psychoanalytic in an event, or have an experience of gaining something experientially.

I also thought it was interesting that the chorus, which was supposed to act as a plus one in the event, or an interlocutor from outside of the event of sorts, and so another type of small group, seemed really disrupted by the absence of Gabriel Tupinambáa—it was like his expulsion from this group invoked a scary big Other of the state that maybe isn’t actually so threatening in some ways, and prevented him from becoming a member of the chorus by not letting him into the country because of his alleged radical political activity. It feels really threatening because of its unprecedented nature, where we are all like, “They can do that?” And then the chorus went almost mute after that, until at the end it seemed to voice an undercurrent that had in fact been running through the event and became activated in the audience.

And then it triggered a more mass hysteria from these younger people in the audience—it might be strong to say it this way. But I thought, of course, this would happen, but then ultimately it bothers me because there’s a kind of devaluation of what we could be. I have mixed feelings. In the moment, I had a sort of satisfaction of being like, of course, that’s what would happen at the end. I think I’ve gotten more disturbed about it afterward, because then at my own institute, there was a kind of mass group dynamic that I felt had a negative impact, inasmuch as it became difficult for people to express their own opinions.

Emma Lieber

I want to hear other responses. I think there’s a lot here. There’s a question in psychoanalysis, obviously, about the subject, about the dyad, and then there’s a question of a small group, a chorus, and then mass psychology, and this question of what can create a through-line at an event, or what makes an event properly psychoanalytic, or what creates the possibility of a psychoanalytic education in the formal structure of an event. There’s something also important in this question of the mass shooter and the kind of blatant rejection of authority that you speak to. Like what you were saying, Fernando, this idea that I’m a radical individual, and nothing else matters, and no one else matters. That’s just the obverse of authority. Right? It maintains authority. It maintains the fantasy of the primal father, it maintains the fantasy of objectivity, it maintains fact. And so it doesn’t actually follow the psychoanalytic logic of self-authorization, which happens with others, because it’s just stuck in the binary of sovereign self and sovereign other, which is also the binary of mass psychology. So I think there’s an interesting question to be asked: what is the group formation that isn’t stuck in that binary?

You know, Marisa, it sounds like you were sort of tracking the event along these various vectors. Like, when did it slip into mass psychology? What does the hysterical intervention have to do with that? What is the role of the small group? And how do all of these constellations work with each other?

Jordan Osserman

Yeah, I have also reflected a lot on the role of the audience in that event. I think what Marisa just said about us having this small group that has met many times is quite different from when someone gives an individual contribution. I think one of the things that the small group does is create a kind of intimacy and a way for us to think differently.

One thing I thought was both unique about this event, and may have raised problems for us, was the fact that it was run by a small group, one in which there is no criteria for entry. Perhaps that had something to do with the audience’s position. Normally, a conference is run by an institution. And there are ways that you can join that institution. Probably most of the people who go to the conference have no interest in joining that institution anyway, but they know there is a way in.

So, I wondered if something of this “hysterical reaction” of the audience had to do with the fact that there’s a small group of people, called the Group for Independent Formation, and they’ve been doing all this fascinating work, and they want to have an event where they share ideas with other people. And then those other people are sort of wondering: what is this group? How does it run? What’s the membership criteria?

Does this setup produce all these reactions of envy, hatred, and exclusion?

Marisa Berwald

Yes, it does seem like there is something about the Group for Independent Formation that could cause these reactions. Also, though I am often in favor of small groups, they do operate on a criterion of exclusion more so than do institutions, where perhaps criteria for inclusion still can be exclusionary but are more clear. Lately, I’ve been to a number of events where people whom I would think would go, like colleagues, do not, or, like at my institute, at the recent symposium, a lot of the candidates didn’t go. I wonder if it is in some ways because they feel excluded in ways that seem to also prevent conversations in psychoanalysis on certain topics from growing.

Jordan Osserman

I think maybe that also connects to the question of psychoanalytic formation: people’s experiences of being rejected from an institute or other training organization. I have my own experience of it, and I have some friends who’ve recently gone through it, and it produces a particular kind of upset, because the attempt to join a psychoanalytic institute usually involves some kind of interview, which can feel quite exposing—intrusive, even—not unlike an analytic session. To receive a rejection after this experience can feel like: my God, this person has seen into my soul, and decided that I’m not worthy.

I think those dynamics are always at play when a psychoanalytic organization hosts anything. But then, what does it mean for this Group for Independent Formation to host an event? A group which says (or implies), we’re not interested in admission or rejection—we’re simply a group of people who have been working together.

Emma Lieber

I mean, I’ll just say from within the group that it’s not as though we’re unaware of these transferences, or what the effect is, and I think that’s part of what we find interesting and important. It’s a very live question that is carried throughout our meetings. What is the effect of this group? What is its place in the field? What is its value? I think we’re aware that something that we want to transmit is simply that we’re a group of people who want to work together. And that we’ve created a context where work can happen, for whatever reason. Like, work is possible in this particular setting. And thus, that part of what we’re transmitting is merely that such a thing is possible for others. Is it a question of inclusion? Exclusion? I don’t know, but to indicate that it is possible to find a group in which that kind of work can happen seems important. And theoretically, anyone can do it. I mean, there’s an Oedipal dynamic, obviously, but I think part of what we’re saying is like, no, you can’t get into this bedroom, but you can make your own.

Jordan Osserman

And I think one of the reactions to that might be, ” How dare you!, in this world where it’s so impossible to do something like that.

Fernando Castrillón

Yes. Well, right, and I think it highlights one’s own unwillingness or supposed incapacity to actually create a bedroom of one’s own with other people.

Emma, what you said really struck me; this distinction between the kind of self-authorization we’re talking about in psychoanalysis, and then this reckless posturing that I’m calling out.

It’s not for nothing that in my experience, the two scariest movies I saw when I was a kid, was The Exorcist (it freaked me out, especially since I grew up Catholic and was therefore convinced that something like what is in the movie can happen), and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the sense that you wake up one day, and you’re like: “People are not what I thought they were, and they’ve been taken over by something”). And the reason I bring this up has to do with that moment towards the end of the conference, coming from one of the crews of younger folks, when they started accusing the organizers all of a sudden. That was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment for me. I thought to myself, “Hold on. Those are not the people I’m seeing. That’s not the Emma I’m experiencing at this conference.”

This intervention on their part, to mark a distinction in that particular way, speaks to me of a paternal resuscitation, the setting up of a daddy. And to my ears, that kind of resuscitation marks the fact that nothing is changing. This is the same crap as before. There’s nothing here of interest for me. I will not hide the fact that I didn’t look kindly on what happened at the end. I thought it was preposterous.

Case in point: there was this comment by this one person who said that because of the organization of the conference, he couldn’t go to the bathroom to clean the blood off his teeth, because his gums had been bleeding, but no one took the time to tell him, and my thoughts went directly to: “Seriously!? You can go clean your own mouth.” And I think there’s something to the fact that he “couldn’t” clean his mouth. You don’t have to wait for anybody else to tell you to do it.

Emma Lieber

Well, there’s probably a lot to say about the mouth and the woundings of and by the mouth there. But I have to say, I actually had a totally different response. I thought that what happened at the end was totally appropriate. I mean, I had my own personal difficulty with it, because of what set it off, and the particular dynamics of the chorus, and a lot that had preceded the event that people didn’t see. But I actually thought that this was the natural end to whatever we had been doing for the weekend. And precisely that it did something. I mean, I’m interested in this point-counterpoint, Fernando, because it’s actually surprising to me that you had that response.

Fernando Castrillón

Yeah, but then again, I was a graduate-school professor for 18 years, and I dealt with this kind of nonsense for many a year. Not necessarily in my classes, but I saw many colleagues go down in flames with this kind of stuff, and also myself being pegged as a patriarch again and again, regardless of what I said or what I did. And so for me, it was an experience of: “What! Again with this nonsense?” I thought it was just a California thing. No, you guys got this nonsense over here, too, in New York, right?

But how is it a natural end?

Emma Lieber

Because group psychology is inevitable, I think that’s part of what Marisa was saying. I think there’s something interesting to discern about the specific dynamics of the weekend, and about when one structure or group formation tips into group psychology, for example. Like, the mass is inevitable, the hysteric’s relation to the mass is inevitable. And because I do think that the audience was pointing and responding to something real, even if they couldn’t name what that was.

Marisa Berwald

I would say that part of the mass formation is a re-creation of the father, and with a guilty conscience for having murdered the primal father, which creates this particular imaginary complaint against a father who acts as such. This is the hysteric complaint, which the setup of institutes initiates by creating a transference onto the institute as a father figure, the competition for the attention of which works against working together. But maybe, as Emma says, institutions set up this way also work as a kind of scarecrow or dummy. The content of psychoanalysis is just so provocative that it’s going to cause symptomatic reactions on the group level, and in particular, those who seek to get rid of something. I mean, I definitely see that having the fortune of being a part of an institute that just formed, and having been there a bit before it formed. Each year, it appears something needs to be formed, and in the formation of that something, something else needs to be gotten rid of or dispelled. This anxiety emerges in the formation of a new group of people working psychoanalytically for the first time.

In the event you picked a topic that was very on the nose, psychoanalysis and politics, and in a good way, but it is also bound to bring up these dynamics. Thinking about the first panel and Fred Moten’s comments about the anthropologist, I can’t quite remember, but he speaks about an anthropologist who makes a racist exclusion in the way that he writes about a tribe, which in fact challenges his “objective” research. In what is represented, there is always something excluded, which often works in a racial way. In this event on psychoanalysis and politics, all the panels touched on that question, including the interview with Eric Santner and the panel on fascism. And then these dynamics got enacted, which also demonstrates the principles of group cohesion and exclusion. It would be interesting to think more about if and how the topic of psychoanalysis and politics provokes this. I’m not sure if that is the same as what happens in California.

Fernando Castrillón

And yeah, I certainly hear this part, the “Well, it was always gonna end like this. It’s gonna go into this kind of mass psychology.” And I’m remembering this comment you made early on in our conversations, Emma, in response to my saying that I’m only an analyst in the consulting room, only when I’m listening to somebody’s dreams, you noted: “No, I’m an analyst everywhere.” And that stayed with me. It was really helpful for me.

Emma Lieber

So grandiose.

Fernando Castrillóon

What am I actually not admitting to myself is that I took your words as a prompt for something. And I’ve done some soul-searching on this question. And I think my sense is that just like in the consulting room, I want more. I want something more than the drop into mass psychology.

At the same time, I think you’re absolutely right, Emma. Yeah, it was gonna go to this place. Why are you so surprised, Fernando? It seemingly always goes to this.

At the same time, I’m holding open an expectation of a difference that could possibly come to be. This is our job as analysts, right? The transference is a repetition made palpable. However, we’re trying to engineer it in some fashion for there to be a difference that’s introduced into that repetition. As such, the transference starts moving, doing something else. It’s that same logic as applied to this situation. So, I get it that it would have gone this way, into mass psychology, and also, I expect more. As an analyst, my stance of wanting more, always more, engenders the possibility of difference.

In addition, this connects to something that I recently wrote about. I take what this particular crew of people spoke at the conference both seriously and not at all seriously.

And the reason I say that is based on my direct experience. For a lot of the conference, I was more in the back of the room. And the folks that we are talking about were right in front of me. They were on their phones most of the time. Scrolling, laughing, etc. And the whole while I’m thinking, “You guys are not paying attention here.” So they would grab little snippets of the conversation. It was like a recreation of the sort of social media atmosphere that most everybody lives in now, which I would describe as scattershot. You get news here, a little emblematic saying over there, something you can’t really disagree with, because it’s some vacuous truism. You combine it all together, and all of a sudden, they have a “position” they can put forth, but what is obvious is that it is not a considered opinion. You are just vomiting up something that you put together in a slapdash manner. In other words, it’s posturing. And that, in many ways, speaks directly to my upset about all this. These folks, at least from my vantage point, weren’t really there. And now they want to intervene?

Now, I don’t know how much that part connects to what we’re talking about. Maybe there are always mechanisms like this. Maybe the fact of mass psychology is premised exactly on the basis of people not really being at an event or part of a process.

But, as an example, when Eric Santner was talking, I found it stunningly interesting, and the way that Jason ran the interview brought out material that was of great utility for the conference. And I looked at the crew in question sitting in front of me, and they were scrolling on their phones. You can’t listen to Eric and scroll on your phone and pretend that you’re getting something from what Eric is saying. I’m sorry it doesn’t work like that.

Marisa Berwald

I don’t know that could have happened in the context of this event, but I also think about how most of the audience who did not participate, and so also were likely less familiar with the Group for Independent Formation, were a part of a younger generation. And that the younger generation is always going to be rebellious, and it’s our job to receive that and bring it in. People from the audience asked some good questions. There was a response. I think that it’d be interesting to look back and transcribe what happened there, because much of it consisted of a response from what seemed like a group of younger participants and a response from people who had participated more actively as a kind of pushback, but much of it was not really combative.

There’s also this question of education and class and interest. What does it take to understand Eric Santner? I have no idea, because I went to the University of Chicago as an undergrad. So I definitely can understand Eric Santner. Part of that is an educational difference, also a willingness to listen to what is difficult to understand. What does it take to have the patience for that? Maybe this goes back to what Fernando is saying, if you’re looking at your phone, or you have the attention span of 5 minutes because you listen to Taylor Swift, who says she makes her songs like social media with a shift or a pop every 5 seconds, maybe you have no chance. What does it take to have the patience to listen to something that you don’t understand? Almost as a sermon, what makes someone want to listen to something that is just beyond what you can really, no matter how well you’re trained, comprehend. That’s also being asked of the audience in an event like this.

But then, lastly, it’s also important to build up a sense of working together internally. Like when I am organizing a psychoanalytic event, I’m suggesting let’s have our own faculty, and let’s do a series of workshops that lead up to the event, and keep the price low so people don’t feel like they have to pay to see their friends and supervisors, because I think it is important to generate internal conversation and not a spectacle. In that way, I am kind of being tribalist. I really think it’s important for an inner group, not necessarily a group of 4four, that organizes the event, but a larger, smaller public, to be working on stuff that then gets transmitted.

Jordan Osserman

I was trying to think about when I have attended other events where something similar happened. What came to mind was when, several years ago, my training organization held a conference on trans and psychoanalysis—possibly the first to occur in the United Kingdom. One of the presenters, Dany Nobus, gave a paper that really riled people up. It was a critique of a neoliberal version of trans politics that treats transition according to a consumerist model. It was not accusing the majority of trans people of doing this, but rather criticizing how neoliberal politics can co-opt transness in a particular way, which is harmful to trans people as well.

So in theory it should have been something that trans people and their allies were fine with—even if the argument was perhaps not incredibly original, and could have been better grounded in existing trans scholarship and whatnot. But it produced a massive negative reaction, particularly from younger people, who saw Dany as incredibly transphobic. And people spoke about the conference afterward like it was disastrous—not solely because of Dany’s paper, but that played a large role. I think it didn’t help that he kept addressing the audience as “ladies and gentlemen,”—but on the level of content, surely that’s not so bad! There was something, it seems, on the level of form itself—or perhaps the mere fact of attempting to host a conference on this theme?

I’ve never been to a Tavistock Group Relations conference—although in my department we make our students do it!—but I wonder if something similar is at stake there.

Emma Lieber

It is. I’ve been to one, and it’s wild.

Jordan Osserman

Do you think that the end of the weekend mirrored what happens at one of those?

Emma Lieber

Yes, precisely because there’s no content at the Tavistock conferences. I mean, in Tavistock, there is zero content whatsoever.

Jordan Osserman

So that wasn’t the point for our conference, obviously, and I think a lot of other things were achieved. But I guess it does make me wonder, along the lines of what Fernando was saying, about wanting something more: Did this conference provoke a kind of desire for the type of work that the Group for Independent Formation is doing? And they couldn’t figure out what to do with that desire?

Fernando Castrillón

That’s really interesting, Jordan, because I thought about that as well. My takeaway is that something like the Group for Independent Formation is inherently and massively anxiety-provoking for folks. To take on something as the Group has done is quite a thing. You have to rely on internal and relational resources in a way that you don’t necessarily have to if you’re going to an institution.

What I kept on wondering in that Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment was: What exactly is being named here? What’s being called out?

And I couldn’t quite figure it out. The complaint, as I heard it, was that the organizers didn’t allow this or that, or they didn’t do this or that. It sounded like something about the logistics of the event was somehow oppressive, but I quickly realized: that’s not it. Because that reasoning falls flat on its face the moment we actually open it up for discussion. So clearly it’s something else. And I don’t know, at least in my estimation, if that real thing was actually ever named.

If we had the opportunity of a do-over (!), my intervention would be to ask: Can we focus on what is actually at hand, without putting it on this or that?

My sense of it is that it has to do with what the Group for Independent Formation points to or serves as an S1 for. A possibility that is very tough to enact, especially in this climate. And while it’s always been difficult to do, anything like that will always breed a kind of, well, mass psychology. There was this kind of banding together that occurred in the moment. My sense is that future conferences by the Group forof Independent Formation will tend to have this kind of thing occur.

Emma Lieber

I think that’s true. I also think that something was named. I think that the symptom of the Group for Independent Formation was being named. Given that the audience isn’t privy to the group, they couldn’t have known that they were naming it. But I do think—and again, I won’t get too much into the details—that whatever happened around the chorus was symptomatic of a certain kind of anxiety that the group bears about its relationship to the outside, and that is related as well to our questions about how we’re all positioned in the field in different ways, and about our sexual politics. How that symptom interacts with the anxiety that this kind of group inevitably provokes is an interesting question.

Marisa Berwald

I wouldn’t say that what happened at this conference didn’t have anything to do with the content. Remembering the content: The first panel spoke about myths, and about Totem and Taboo, and also reconfiguring Totem and Taboo. Myths, as psychoanalysis is based on, as based on the murder of the father. It also spoke about what myths include and exclude as a foundation for certain types of thinking, psychoanalytic and scientific, for example. During the panel on fascism, Avgi Saketopoulou spoke about how liberalism can be fascist, which was certainly an anxiety-provoking way of discussing things. In general, she acts as a lightning rod in psychoanalysis. So it’s interesting to see how the content of the event also played out in what happened in the event, like the complaint that came up about the idea of being used, that others are being used, that the audience is being used. That is a kind of racial thing that comes up a lot, especially with respect to psychoanalysis, that also has to do with the return of these foundational myths, the return of certain politics, that psychoanalysis emerged in response to but also as a way of censoring and repressing.

Emma Lieber

I think you’re right. It didn’t not have to do with the content, but what was interesting was that whatever exploded was formally enacting what the content was about. I mean, going into the event, what we were worried about was the Palestine panel. Talk about a lightning rod: what was going to emerge from this? Wasn’t this going to be the thing that created a huge conflict in the audience, or make something really explode? And what was so interesting was that in and of itself, it didn’t create any kind of explosion. But then there was this explosion that formally mimicked all of these things that we’re talking about around victimization and group organization. It happened, but without actually taking on the content of any of the panels.

Marisa Berwald

Yeah, and I keep on remembering that panel and forgetting to mention it as I’m listing the panels.

Jordan Osserman

It sounds like there’s a theme here. You asked what remains…

Fernando Castrillón

Well, it strikes me that this conversation is part of what remains. At some level, it’s great that we’re going into what happened at the end. And then I think about how I want to attend to so many other aspects of the conference and our panel. I would want to speak more about that without focusing so intently on what happened at the end.

Because there is also this consideration that they’re still being used by us. Because in the process of trying to ascertain what is speaking through them, we don’t hold them accountable or recognize that they have agency.

This rendition of yours, Emma, that’s very striking to me, that somehow they’re actually enacting the very things that were being spoken about. And that it’s not a reaction per se to the content. When I hear you say that, I think, yeah, that’s an analyst speaking there, since this is the kind of thing that you see in the consulting room, and it occurs on a regular basis in social formations.

So it’s not a recriminatory pronouncement demanding that they be responsible. But it also holds open the possibility that they could have also made a turn. We could have made a turn. It’s part of what I was saying earlier about expecting a difference within the repetition. I’m expecting more, and I don’t want to give up that analytic position of always wanting more. Because it feels like, at some level, without taking that position, we are absolving the situation. They have agency, right; they could have handled it differently. They could have not allowed themselves to be caught up in something. And I think we all have that experience.

And again, I think it’s our place as analysts to hold that position. It’s almost like at the end of every session with my analysands, I’m dissatisfied. Even though it’s been a great session, that has to be my position; it’s a constant dissatisfaction on my side with what happened, even if it was great. It could have been more. Failed differently, failed better than the previous time.

Marisa Berwald

Also, sometimes it’s intolerable what happens. We can think about an event that ends with the feeling of the intolerable. Like intolerance. Because I think that was there at the end of this event, too. Especially with questions that were voiced, like “Why did I come here instead of going to volunteer?” Maybe there was something lost in translation there, in the purpose of a politics and psychoanalysis event, which aims to look outwards towards the world: How to extend such thinking to places that don’t have to be called psychoanalytic, once it’s in translation, to the context where people are working and thinking about other issues. I thought the Palestine panel did that very well.

Emma Lieber

That question—why am I here rather than going to volunteer or otherwise work for political change?—I thought that was the question of the event. That was when I started crying. One could see that as the parricidal fuck you, but it was also genuine, and an extremely important question. I don’t think the person who said it was saying she shouldn’t be here; she was saying, why am I here rather than doing that, and, what is the value of this? Which was the question of the event writ large: what is the value of us coming together and doing this? What is the value for psychoanalysis, what is its value for politics? We’ve invited contributions from the audience to the issue, and we’ll see if there’s been a difference or an intervention. You don’t know if a difference has been made right away.

Marisa Berwald

When we originally convened on the question of self-authorization, which also seemed to rotate around a question about the roles played by institutions in psychoanalysis, we spoke a lot about group processes. And in our last meeting, we spoke about the group processes that emerged at the event itself. I’ve continued to think about how the group forms around an element of expulsion, influenced by Freud’s Mass Psychology, maybe more simply put, the creation of an inside and outside to the group. Perhaps this happens in particular in psychoanalysis. Yet, psychoanalysts are also perhaps super-egoically aware of these processes, and therefore, they think they don’t have to engage in these processes and politics of group formation. In fact, maybe it’s quite the opposite, like the more you’re exposed to human psychic activity in its raw and disturbing forms, the more you need group identifications to defend against that exposure. But it’s not something you ever really hear in the manifest discourse of psychoanalysis. What you hear instead is we subscribe to blah blah blah tradition and various critiques of forms of education or cultism.

Emma Lieber

So, against what is the group a defense, for psychoanalysts?

Marisa Berwald

Psychoanalysis evokes these primeval moments in human existence, in which a need to expel on the individual level constitutes the subjects. So psychoanalysts, inasmuch as psychoanalysis undoes repression, get exposed to this kind of psychic material in its raw form, or more abject form. So maybe the anxiety that provokes, in fact, leads to greater needs to form these kinds of insulating groups. Groups that are more so us versus them. What seems evident is that in psychoanalysis, there are a lot of politicized groupings, versus just groups of people who work together. And maybe that has a psychic explanation that comes from the nature of psychoanalytic work. You know, whatever psychoanalysts expose themselves to that and its effects, we’re not usually talking about that very much.

Fernando Castrillón

I gotta say that I really like what you’re saying here. I think that connection is absolutely crucial because it goes directly to what we’re exposed to and what we’re willing to enter into and engage with, which can often be really damn difficult. And I notice that we constantly downplay that with a kind of imperative to: “Toughen up and just deal with it,” or the “it’s not so bad” or “this is just what we do.” And while this is true in its own way, it’s also true that what we look at and what we engage with on a regular basis can be quite horrific. Thinking back, for example, to this case of Dominique, or working with children, which for me was quite difficult. For nearly 4 years, I worked with children in analysis almost exclusively. Fortunately, I was in analysis at that point, and I brought a lot of it into my analysis, and I’m really glad for it.

Post-analysis, it’s been groups, cartels, or seminars that have allowed me to find a way of locating myself in the work, so I can attend to the difficulty that arises from that exposure. I seriously appreciate the points you’re making, Marisa.

Emma Lieber

But I think it’s an interesting question. What do analysts need from groups? This is the premise of self-authorization, or the idea of the cartel: the idea that a small group has a psychic function. Self-authorization as a psychic procedure requires some others, at least in some small formation. But then, in what way does the group somehow become the site of some reenactment? It seems to me, Marisa, you’re saying that there’s some kind of fantasy of protection that the group provides for psychoanalysts, but then it becomes just one more site of exposure and conflict.

Marisa Berwald

I’m actually saying something even worse than this, which is that maybe this conflict is necessary. Institutes, in particular, are not necessarily groups. At their outermost point, like in their organization into APsaA or the IPA, they act like nationalities or states. What I’m saying is that it may be necessary to have an institute to expel an element of “an other,” for psychoanalysis to function. At that level, it’s often a sort of racialized, but I use the word racialized extremely loosely, element. That’s how a group becomes a necessary formation to mitigate anxiety. It provides a way for humans to enter into civilization that mitigates anxiety. And psychoanalysts in particular are exposed to a lot of anxiety, and so expel something from the group that is, in fact, a psychoanalytic thing.

Jordan Osserman

This reminds me of the Mladen Dolar essay, “Freud and the Political,” that was linked to the conference itself. Summarising Althusser, he writes that psychoanalysis and Marxism “both deal with a truth that is itself antagonistic,” and therefore, “every piece of knowledge means taking sides” (Dolar, 2008, p. [20]). So there is something inherent to psychoanalysis itself that will involve divisions, factions, expulsions—it would be a sign of the neutering of the field if it didn’t.

I wonder if that’s what you’re talking about, Marisa? Personally, I’m fascinated by splits. There’s a Facebook group called Leftist Trainspotters. It’s a group of people who gossip about the many small Marxist, Trotskyist groups, which are about to split, which are going through internal crises, all of that. It’s farcical, but as Dolar suggests, there’s a Real at stake.

There’s always the temptation, whenever a group—a psychoanalytic group, a leftist group, a religion—goes through a split or internal crisis, to ask: why do they always do this kind of thing? Don’t they have more in common than divides them?

But there’s a difference between the structural analysis of why this kind of thing always happens, why it repeats, and the analysis of the issues at stake in any particular eruption. It can be hard to figure out at which level one should situate oneself.

Emma Lieber

Leading up to the conference, a lot of the work and reading that we were doing was around the question of a feminine group, that is, a group that’s organized according to a non-segregative principle, and according to an aggregate of one-by-one singularities. According to a certain reading of Lacan’s sexuation formulas, a feminine group isn’t possible, and maybe this kind of aggregate isn’t a group proper. But we were interested in what his formulation of femininity does to the question of collectivization and in what way something of femininity could inflect a collective. Is a collective possible that doesn’t function according to a principle by which something has to be expelled in order for something to be constituted, as in the primal horde? Our next chunk of work will be on the question of the neighbor: the neighbor as a principal of connection that may offer other possibilities, where there isn’t necessarily a clear delineation between inside and outside, a clear line where the neighborhood stops. Of course, our question will be what this has to do with psychoanalysis.

Jordan Osserman

Have you seen it work anywhere?

Emma Lieber

I’m getting more involved in the life of my institute, for example, and this is a real question: is it really possible to function according to a principle of singularity? Is it possible to train and authorize analysts in a way that respects radical difference? It seems to me that this feminine principle, in Lacan’s conception, would be an ethic which perhaps one can only approach asymptotically. But, what would it do to still insist on that ethic—what would it do to a group formation that inevitably is still going to take on a kind of exclusive principle? This is largely the reason I’m participating in the institute, for now: to see if standing for this principle, while knowing full well its impossibility, will have some kind of effect.

I only really see it work in small groups. I don’t like large groups.

Marisa Berwald

Inevitably, something psychoanalytic itself is expelled, or like something about human nature, something unable to be thought about or censored. I like thinking about it as an inevitability, because then instead of wishing it weren’t true, where there’s some like utopic solution for that, you can just try to think about how to mitigate it. Because I think every form has its problems, like I actually think small groups, even though maybe in some ways they seem to work better internally, externally, they can cause a lot of paranoia, even more so than an institute where it’s kind of clear who’s in or who’s out, or it’s your choice, if you’re in or out. Because small groups, as was pointed out when I was discussing this with a friend of mine, work much more so on the basis of exclusion, as it consists of these members and that’s it, versus if you apply to an institute, or you become a faculty at an institute. The bounds of inclusion are wider at an institute. So I think it’s interesting to think about those processes at any level, and how they work at any level. But I also think you know, there’s this other thing about it that I think we came across when we were trying to talk about what happened at the event in terms of groups. Which is that you are also always running the risk of interpreting in a way that potentially is or could seem like not a great use of power. Something about this emerged at the end of the event, and we can think about what element or object was being represented. We can also think about whatever emerged as having a basis in a notion of equality, as the complaint that equality was missing at the event.

Emma Lieber

Something paranoiac emerged, and something erupted. But that was also when love emerged, after that rupture. I don’t know how much longer you were there, but people were sticking around. People were not leaving. They really wanted to stay. And it seemed to me that at that moment, a collective did get constituted. We were killed, and we survived, and there was a moment of a kind of collective constitution that did happen following the paranoiac moment. To some extent, the question of the collective is a question of space, which is clear. Like, what are the bounds? What is the geographical demarcation point? And, I agree, obviously, a group is clearly and necessarily exclusive in terms of space. But, there’s also a way of thinking temporally, about how a group morphs, when it constitutes and de-constitutes, and what can happen in the wake of its composition and decomposition. And I think thinking temporally about a group and its effect can open things up more.

Jordan Osserman

Could I ask you to say a bit more, Emma? How have you seen the feminine “one-by-one” actually function in the small group, in a way that’s different from a masculine exclusionary principle?

Emma Lieber

In the small group formations that I’ve been part of, there’s no clear principle of inclusion. There’s something about the constitution of a group that happens by desire, and continues itself by desire, not according to any regulations, and sometimes dies away by desire, and then reforms in another permutation with other members who come along the way, and do their thing for a while, and then shift in some other way. I think a small group is capable of this. Part of what’s happening now with the Group for Independent Formation, for example, is that there are some other groups that are forming in consultation with us, according to a similar principle. What will the relation be among these small groups? There’s some kind of relation being formed, and we don’t know what it is. But there’s something that opens up temporally in this way of doing things that is closed in an institute formation and in a masculine collective.

Jordan Osserman

I wonder if one aspect of that concerns how work actually happens in a small group, in a way that it sometimes can’t in a large institute. In my experience—more in activist groups than psychoanalytic ones, but I think it’s relevant nonetheless—when a group is working, questions of inclusion/exclusion get put to one side. And then, when it comes to the point where the group says, we need to set some rules about how we work—we need a form, a constitution, and so on—that’s when, perhaps, we move into this “masculine” territory. I do think it is important, at times, to do this—to define yourself as a group and the principles or rules by which you operate—but in my experience, that’s when the trouble starts.

In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, has been involved in setting up a new left-wing political party. It has had the most tragicomic beginning—or lack of beginning—imaginable.

Last summer, when it was first announced, it did not yet have a name, any policies, a constitution, anything. All we really knew was that this was going to be the new Left party. It was, in essence, a void. And in a number of seats around the UK last summer, it was polling in first place against sitting MPs! The void was winning.

And then, they tried to actually get the party started, and it nearly collapsed. One of the two co-leaders, Zara Sultana, opened a membership portal before Corbyn and his team approved it, then Corbyn declared it was a data breach, then Sultana called his whole team a “sexist boys club,” and the two comrades were threatening to sue each other.

Although things have settled down a bit, and they’ve had their founding conference, I don’t know if the party will ever really take off or reach the levels of support they did before they were actually founded.

The funniness about the void aside, it strikes me that one of the problems with this party may be that they put so much focus on how they were going to construct the organization itself—who would be in charge, what would the structure be, how would it understand democracy participation, and so on—and so little on what they were actually fighting for. It was all factional infighting and airing of dirty laundry: they weren’t doing any of the actual work that a left-wing organization is meant to do. It goes back to my point—when real work is happening, these issues may be less important.

Fernando Castrillón

As I’m listening here, I can’t help but think that there’s also a backdrop that perhaps we’re not bringing in enough or recognizing or naming enough, which is that we’re talking about groups and small groups, and the one-to-one versus this exclusionary logic. But we’re talking about institutions and groups, and it ain’t like it used to be in the sense that at this point, we’re witnessing a full-scale hollowing out not just of institutions, but the possibility of them, precisely because of the crisis of the social bond. It’s hard to trust each other now. It’s hard to trust what is producing a thing. Difficult to say who is saying a thing. The attribution of responsibility for any given statement has gone scattershot because of AI and other factors. And again, this is impacting not just individual institutions, but the very possibility of having institutions. Which makes me wonder how much does that show up in that moment, or in those moments at the conference that we’ve been discussing? Because there’s an anxiety about this, which is intimately connected to the question of: How do we be with each other when the social bond, which was already flimsy and highly problematic, is being torn asunder?

Marisa, you put on the table this logic of exposure leading to exclusion, which seems to be a necessary one for groups. That makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a kind of sacrifice. The pound of flesh that has to be given over so that a group can actually occur.

And for as much as that’s a normative aspect of group functioning, it’s at the same time, a cheeseball move. It’s going for the nuclear option every time, so as to be able to constitute a group.

And I think we see this with subjects. We see this with ourselves, that we’ll enact that function. When we’re in real anxiety, we’ll go to the nuclear option every time. And, trying to constitute a group along those lines to me seems rather disastrous. Is that all there is? Is that all we have recourse to in our quest to form groups?

But it does seem like that’s almost all there is now. There’s not really much left that holds the group together. I don’t want to lose sight of that, as this seems to be a crucial undercurrent that we are all living through at this moment.

Marisa Berwald

Yeah, I’m just thinking about it. When you were talking, I was thinking about this new institute that I attend, which ended up forming on the basis of providing education for Licensed Psychoanalysis candidates. That’s a New York-based designation. There’s an economic need for that in large part because of some of the forces you’re talking about, Fernando, which are that the culture industries no longer provide incomes for people that are sustainable. So this institute has a legal designation that might allow these people to earn a middle-class income when they graduate. It’s not necessarily authentic to a more idealistic idea of a psychoanalytic institute, as a place where you develop psychoanalysis. And at this institute, it does not always feel like there is time and energy to develop the field of psychoanalysis, at least clinically and theoretically, so where will that come from?

With this problematic, I think about how the “feminine” could mean creating a space for this kind of development, versus a space created by these structural, economic, and legalistic demands. There’s also a problem with the “masculine,” which sounds something like, “Who is responsible for creating the conditions by which a space can be made?” This also seems like a big problem in general, or at this moment, and in psychoanalysis in particular. Like, for example, with institutions that are mainly composed of older psychoanalysts who are now end-of-career, there seems to be a lack of ability to pass the torch. In psychoanalysis, this seems like a perennial problem. Sometimes I think of that as a problem with responsibility; the next people need to be able to take the torch, and it’s everybody’s responsibility to create the conditions for that, and they’re not always created. Perhaps the nuclear option is a reaction to not having this feminine space, and no one taking responsibility for creating the conditions for it.

Jordan Osserman

Do you think that this problem is due to the requirements of licensure, or is that just one factor?

Marisa Berwald

I don’t even know if it’s a problem, like to me it’s not a problem if the space to develop a field of practice develops eventually, and I think it could over time develop, but it’s notable to see the institute operate mainly as an educational institution, to see what’s not there, or possible right now. There has to develop a collaborative project, but it will take time to see if gathering the resources for such a project is possible, which could be material resources, but I think have much to do with time, space, energy, and things in rather short supply. Perhaps these are the elements needed to pass the torch to another generation, and maybe something else as well, something that needs to be invested in the next generation, or they need to invest in, beyond resources available.

Emma Lieber

Of course. I mean, the institute can do various things. It gets you licensure, it introduces you to a certain vocabulary. It gets you access to Pep-Web, so you can read texts. It gives you syllabi so you can decide which texts to read, and it introduces you to some of the people whom you’re going to want to work with. But you have to then make those spaces in which you can really work yourself, and the work is going to happen elsewhere. I don’t think the institute is useless. It does various things that are necessary, and I don’t think it’s necessarily even uninvolved in the moment of self-authorization, though not in any straightforward way. It’s not nothing to me that I graduated from an institute. I mean, to the extent that institutes exist, and people train there, I do feel some responsibility for a certain kind of transmission to the next generation of analysts in that context. But part of what I’m trying to transmit to the next generation of analysts is that you have to create your own space to do this work, that in fact, as Fernando referenced, the institute might be a kind of dummy against which an analyst might define herself, or that its function is, among other things, to create an outside in which work can happen. In my teaching or supervising or whatever, I’m always trying to say, “this is how I’ve created space to do this work, and these are the texts that are interesting to me, and now you have to go do it for yourself.”