1. Please understand I speak as a lay person. I know so little.
2. All the key notions of psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic practice are subverted by queerness. Approaching a queer patient with therapeutic and conceptual tools developed mostly within a patriarchal, heteronormative framework will by necessity cause pain and (re)traumatize.
3. Feminist psychoanalysis is probably a godsend, but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t read it.
4. A queer person has a history in which the development of libido and the development of the death drive go hand in hand. I mean this in the most literal sense possible: our libido was never allowed, never possible. We knew this very early on, probably as babies. Our desire was always a forbidden desire that we absolutely needed to kill. (I realize a certain psychoanalytic thinking understands all sexuality this way; please spare me).
5. Terror.
6. Suicide.
7. Suicidal baby.
8. The queer baby dies in order to survive.
9. Love is tainted. Inherently. Even if we are deeply loved.
10. We are often not deeply loved. We are strange and don’t fit. Our bodies and minds betray us and those we love every day.
11. The patient-therapist relationship doesn’t fall under the terms of traditionally conceived power relations. Using this framework to relate to the patient will hurt the patient, whose longings have already been brutally punished.
12. A new understanding of the love between the patient and the analyst is imperative.
13. Analysts are socialized in a heteronormative, patriarchal society. They need to work hard at shedding as much of their conditioning as they can.
14. We, the queer people, are inherently monstrous. We are inherently unlovable. The therapist and the patient need to dismantle the conditions of possibility of this monstrousness, together.
15. An unusual openness is required. Rules must be broken. The house has already burned down.
16. We grieve together an irreparable sorrow. We grieve together a life lost. Healing can exist only through radical rebuilding. The master’s tools…
17. Queer psychoanalytic houses are made of plasticine and wind tunnels. No one is kept out.
18. The boundaries of the self are exploded. They can be affirmed only in love.
1. I started this as a way to keep in touch with my analyst.
2. I resumed this as a way to keep in touch with my new analyst.
3. Write is what I do.
4. I want to post book reviews here.
5. My analyst stopped reading my book reviews so I stopped sending them to her.
6. I don’t think she knows the role books play in my life.
7. This is not about her not reading my reviews. This is about her not knowing what books mean to me.
8. Here’s on thing: without books I wouldn’t have made it through childhood.
9. Without books I wouldn’t have made it through life.
10. I will post book reviews here. This is how I learn, by reading and thinking. This is how I keep alive.
11. I’ll send them to her and she is welcome not to read them.
12. I will review here the books I read.
13. My book reviews were really meant for her but when she stopped reading them they stopped being for her.
14. Is life being able to bear disappointments? I think it is. I wish I were able to find the joy though. Is there someone life gives you beside what it takes away?
1. Banana bread with choc chips, walnuts, yogurt and jenmagic. We brought some to the downstairs neighbors who are always in need of appeasing because of my nocturnal life.
2. Huge confederate flags at early voting sites in NC. God save us all.
3. The patriarchy is having a very good time in America. The white heterosexual patriarchy that is. A pox on it.
4. The day is ending well. Praise be to the Lord.
5. I do invoke God, the Lord, etc. with playfulness, but in reality I cannot imagine existing without faith in an everloving, tender, endlessly providing God who is my mother my father my sister my lover my friend.
6. Faith lives best in our actions, far from our mouths. It is for others to call us Christians.
1. I haven’t thought much about butch-femme dynamics. Maybe I am not particularly interested in them; maybe I find lesbian subcategories stressful. I am on the butch side of the butch-femme continuum, and I fit Ann Cvetkovich’s discussion of butch-femme healing (An Archive of Feelings, chapter 2, 2003) to an extent, but I’m not super butch. I am a little butch.
2. Sally Wainwright’s Gentleman Jack lends itself to butch-femme analysis. Since, as I said, I am not very knowledgeable about this topic my thoughts will be informed by other studies or by my general knowledge of queerness and, of course, by my personal experience. This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts.
3. There is no world in which Ann Walker (AW) could express the absolute delight she feels at seeing Anne Lister (AL) again for the first time since she was a young girl if
they were of two different genders
they were two men.
The endless latitude of feelings and expression of feeling allowed women is one of the blessings and one of the curses of lesbian existence.
4. A blessing because closeted lesbians, or even out lesbians in non-romantic female friendships, get to enjoy a high level of intimacy with women they are romantically/sexually interested in but who are not equally interested in them.
5. A curse because this intimacy, this closeness, is always in tremendous jeopardy — no one knows what will happen the instant the love that dares not speak its name is named.
6. Women can actually get quite far along the physical intimacy road as long as that love, the one that dares not speak its name, remains unnamed.
7. Or at least they can in a fairly repressive, homophobic society. Because, the more that love is assumed not to exist, not to be possible, the easier it is for everyone to ignore it.
8. In cultures that accept same sex love, it may be harder. Girls who get too close are immediately capable of telling themselves that this is too homoerotic, too gay, and will pull back if they don’t want to go there, or can’t go there.
9. Intimacy is almost always erotic. We are all well trained to channel this eroticism into socially-approved feelings and behaviors. Close female friendships — friendships in which women spend a lot of time together, touch a lot, disclose a lot of person stuff, talk a lot — will tend to the erotic. Straight women are trained to channel this eroticism in socially-approved ways. So are lesbians.
10. In order to do so, lesbians who long for more must live in a perpetual state of (self-)denial. This (self-)denial is multiform. At its outermost end, that means treading the intimacy line so as to satisfy desire without threatening the other; at its innermost end, it will entail hiding one’s own desire to oneself.
11. In an extremely homophobic society this state of constant self-denial comes with great agony. In a less homophobic society (say Miami in 2020), when the possibility of finding a partner and living a lesbian life is there, there is less agony because there is hope.
12. But you have to get there. You have a find a woman who returns your love. You have to find a woman who accepts to live openly with you. You have to find a woman who is brave enough and gay enough to live out her sexuality.
13. The road to finding this woman is full of emotional hide-and-seek, and disastrous misreadings and ruinous declarations.
14. AL is phenomenally assured in who she is and what she wants, and also in the viability and righteousness of the fulfillment of her desires. When she first approaches AW she does so with exactly the same calculus that leads to heterosexual unions in her social environment. This calculus takes into account financial benefit, compatibility in social class, desire to achieve a comfortable and stable domestic situation, and finding the other person at least moderately appealing. AL would be quite fine with obtaining all that with a woman she is not in love with but who is not distasteful to her, because, just like her heterosexual counterparts, she would be counting on growing fondness. She could never marry a man because her distaste towards men, romantically speaking, is absolute.
15. The show doesn’t make clear whether AL likes men in non-romantic contexts. Almost all her positive interactions in the show are with women (unless the men work for her), but we know that she studied with men abroad.
16. This is a complicated point. Women who are not interested in men romantically but enjoy them in general, as friends for instance, can still marry them, either because of heterosexual social pressures or for other reasons, and be more or less okay. But now my mind goes to Gertrude Stein, who only liked the company of men and deeply disdained the company of women. Yet I cannot for the life of me imagine her married to a man. Her devotion to Alice was absolute.
17. And now I go back to AL: does she enjoy women socially? We do not know. Wainwright shows her mostly engaged in flirtatious/romantic/sexual interactions. Maybe she will let us know in the next season.
18. AW, who is a femme and therefore better able to disguise herself, is, luckily for AL, also fairly clear about her desires. She knows she doesn’t want to birth children, which I take to be the show writers’ (Wainwright hired lesbians for writing and historical consulting) way of telling us that she doesn’t like having a penis in her vagina (this seems a safe way for AW, who is not only a woman of her time but also traumatized by rape, to talk about sexual intercourse). We also know that she has always refused marriage and that she does not desire to get married at all. We do not know if she has loved any woman other than AL, but of course we wouldn’t know because —
19. she herself didn’t know that she had always been in love with AL (see above re: infinite capacity of lesbian denial). We, on the other hand, immediately recognize in her ecstatic welcoming of AL back into her life the lesbian desire we will be proven right to see.
20. Not only that. We absolutely rejoice in the fact that AL may have found, not a possibly straight woman she must endeavor to conquer, but, maybe finally, another lesbian!
21. Which takes us to a key motif, both within the show and possibly for the spectator herself: the devouring lesbian who “cannot be trusted with women” because, with evil lures, she invariably manages to seduce them and utilize them for her own perverse desires. (Representations of this trope abound; the first that comes to mind right now is the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal).
22. The trope of the voracious predatory lesbian (always older, as lore would have it) rests on a true feature of (female) sexuality and two mainstays of patriarchy.
The true feature of female and maybe all sexuality is, as I have discussed above, the erotic component of intimacy. In other words, people who love each other love each other, and sex, in all its manifestations, is a component of love. That women may be more in touch with all this is simply a feature of our culture.
The first mainstay of patriarchy is that women are for men and when a woman seduces another woman she ruins her for all men, who are rightfully entitled to her through birthright.
The second mainstay of patriarchy is that men get to seduce women freely and abundantly, whether they (men) want them or not, whether they love them or not, even whether they like them or not. In other words, it is a sport and a habit and simply second nature. Moreover, they don’t just seduce them with spirited, flirtatious conversation and “accidental” brushing of fingers, but with all those other ways we are coming to recognize as sexual harassment or outright abuse. It is men who are entitled to this seduction of women. It is for them to practice. It is their province alone.
23. I was surprised by my own reaction to this show. Alongside the intense delight, the suspense, and the pain I felt, I also found myself somewhat squeamish about AL’s forwardness, the way she went about finding a companion, and the lack of compunction she had about getting AW to love her. I had to think hard about this feeling of distaste. Was it coming from a lifetime of timid lesbianism — from internalized fear and disapproval? Or was it the product of an ethical code about the way we should all relate to each other?
24. Then I thought about Jane Austen. I thought about eligible bachelors and unmarried young women, about poor relations and parsons in search of a wife, about more poor relations and the out-of-their-league men they aspire to. Love, when it happens, is a felicitous side occurrence. The main goal is marriage. Settling down, as AL’s aunt would have it.
25. When AL sets out to get herself a wife she does it in exactly the same way as men and women of her time and class set out to get themselves spouses. We don’t feel distaste at Elizabeth Bennett’s plans on her eligible bachelor, nor at Bingley’s decision to cast his lot with the calmer Bennett sister of compatible age.
(Next installment: Did she have to have sex with her though?!)
1 There is struggle. Days are struggle. Nights, thankfully, are not, typically.
2. Prazosin. Magnesium. Nights saved.
3. How to delay rage: you tell yourself that if it’s worth raging about you can raise it the following day.
4. Rage passes.
5. On weekends you miss your analyst with the fierce sweep of passionate love.
6. Slowly she grows in constancy.
7. No one can work with me who is not willing to love me. Also not scold me. As a child I got lots of scolding and I used it as love (love in the currency of reproach and punishment). Now, scolding chars me.
8. My first analyst taught me how to take the love the was offered me. It was brutal work.
9. May the helpers be blessed. May the full-time helpers be blessed. May the healers be blessed. May the healers receive abundant gratitude and may generous gifts be bestowed upon them. May God make their lives easy and sweet.
10. May their mistakes be forgiven and they shortcomings accepted with love and gentle humor.
1. Every time I see any info at all about the Coronavirus I have a feeling of great longing. I know it’s selfish. I know many will suffer. But I long to catch it and die.
2. There are so many ways to die and many, many ways to keep living.
3. Hope: Every Black artist who did art in America during legal segregation. Everyone who does art at all while part of a group that is targeted by hate. (Jackie McLean was the son of a mixed Black-White couple, I think; I like the title of this album). (Psychoanalysis is art).
4. Hope: My dog near me when I wake up in the morning.
5. Hope: Anne Carson’s playfully stating something and immediately undermining it, because life is too serious a business to be encapsulated by platitudes. Ex:
From Short Talks
6. As long as psychiatry
Is rooted in power imbalance
Is predicated on patients’ inability to judge for themselves what they want/need
Is financed by pharmaceutical companies and regularly uses pharma-controlled (mis)information, to the point that APA’s conferences are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies (!)
Is coercive and regularly uses law enforcement, in a unholy alliance of medicine and police/judicial authority, to wit:
involuntary hospitalization in psychiatric units (coercion breeds abuse, invariably)
involuntary drugging inside those facilities (even when drugging is oral, patients have to demonstrate they have taken the drug or be punished)
use of punishments/rewards (“privileges”) in such facilities
the patients cannot leave of their own volition, and when they leave they might have to abide by physician-dictated guidelines (stealthy parole)
forced outpatient treatment, including
forced ECT and forced use of antipsychotic medication, which is court mandated and enforced by police (court hearings are nominally democratic but the voice of the patient is invariably overruled by the voice of the physician
forced attendance of day hospital (see above re: psych hospital’s overt and non-overt abuse of patients’ human rights)
The police are deployed to people who express mental distress and are deemed “a danger to themselves,” often with intense traumatization and brutality.
The phrase “danger to themselves” is a meaningless and authoritarian construct used solely to give some people power to dismiss and abuse some other people. It is often coupled, with or without reason, with “danger to others.”
it is an oppressive system and it must be resisted.
inside(r) psychoanalysis 