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 f…

Why a conference on psychoanalysis and politics now? In a way, it hardly makes sense to ask this question, since everyone is thinking about politics right now. Obviously, the specifics of the current political moment are on our minds. But part of what we’re hoping to avoid here—and this bears on our central question about the relation between psychoanalysis and politics—is falling into …

In his essay “Freud and the Political,” Mladen Dolar extracts a theory of the political from Freud’s writings on mass psychology, burning through the fog of concepts that have settled on the field of “psychoanalysis and politics” and introducing a usefully simple distinction (Dolar, 2009). Politics is the construction of collectivities. It is therefore everywhere. Politics is the busine…

[Audio Recording, Mingus, 1964] Mingus: I don’t think I should improvise, man. It’s not like sitting at home, I can tell you that. It’s not like playing at home by yourself. Other man: Well, what can we do for you? Mingus: [guffaws] * We have asked you all to speak here without provision, to associate, if not freely then at least under more foreign constraints, to improvise, as an assoc…

In a February session of the 1943 meetings of the British Psychoanalytic Society, during the so-called controversial discussions, Winnicott famously stood up and remarked, “I should like to point out that there is an air raid going on” (Grosskurth, 1986, p. 321). The intervention was recounted by Margaret Little and not included in the society’s formal record. The session in question wa…

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 pan…

More than anything, what has stayed with me about the conference is the final discussions between participants and audience, discussions which couldn’t help becoming ironic enactments of all that was in question throughout the event, especially the question of how we draw the boundaries between politics and psychoanalysis, between theory and practice, between thought and action. It seem…

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 …

I craned my neck trying to see the man lying on the floor with his cello. This was at the end of Day 1 of the Psychoanalysis <> Politics conference, as part of the intervention by Ethan Philbrick. As one of two members of the “chorus,” Ethan’s task was to hold space for the non-intellectual, “stupid,” disruptive. I was delighted that the energy that had built until that point thro…

On February 22, 2025, I biked from my home in South Brooklyn to 81 Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn. There, I attended the Group for Independent Formation’s conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics: The Impossible Relation. Today, October 12, 2025, I entered a nursing home dementia ward in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my younger brother is celebrating his 37th birthday. Two spaces, two aff…

Conferences exist. Many know this. Everywhere something is done. Some one does it. When it is finished, it’s done. Some do things. In conferences people do things. Everyone who belongs to a conference does things. Everyone does it in a way that’s natural to them. It is not always completely natural. Sometimes it is completely natural and sometimes it’s not. Some are doing it in a confer…

Exteriority of the Unconscious If there were no myths, origins would be inaccessible. Sigmund Freud understood this and therefore resorted to two mythological constructions: those of Oedipus and the primal father (Freud, 1953a, 1953b). The first grants access to the birth of each subject, while the second leads to the threshold of culture. These two Freudian founding myths are inseparab…

At the conclusion of the Psychoanalysis <> Politics conference, as attendees were milling around, mingling, making for the exit, or sidling up sympathetically to the organizers who had just been subjected to the extended exercise in mass cruelty that was the closing discussion, I shared a look with one of these organizers from across the room, a friend of mine and sometime fellow …

The Analyst as Co-Resuscitator I think of how unusually parched my throat was when it was time for me to speak on our PSA <>POL Palestine panel, an instant desertification that came over me from nowhere. When the panel was done, an attendee told me, “I had this pit in my stomach when you started speaking, I didn’t know what you were going to say.” In Whither Fanon, David Marriott …

Loren Dent: A notable propensity among younger trainees in American psychoanalysis is their repeated return to institutions that often prove disappointing. This ongoing attachment, despite persistent frustration, suggests a broader collective challenge: difficulty or reluctance in moving beyond unsatisfactory institutional frameworks. There seem to be at least two distinct dynamics at w…

This land is mine, with its multiple cultures. Canaanite, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Arab, Ottoman, English, and French. I want to live all these cultures. It is my right to identify with all these voices that have resonated on this land. For I am neither an intruder nor a passerby. –Mahmoud Darwish   Shame, shame –Gilles Deleuze   The first time I heard psychoan…

How does one make one’s life among others? Something important happens at the juncture in an analysis—in a life—at which one begins to make decisions by way of lateral associations. It seems to me that part of the effect of an analysis is to promote intra-generational ties, as well as to broaden one’s conception of what and whom a generation comprises, and how it interacts with those pr…

Epilogue Having spoken without notes or text at the opening of the conference, my speech is lost to time. There is no record of it to pass along. But I do recall foregrounding the invitation to spontaneous speech, as mentioned above. As is probably clear from some of the accounts presented here, the invitation was met amply. This conference took on a life of its own: As a group, we’ve c…