This article is based on a presentation given on April 10, 2022, as part of a panel during the international conference” Sabina Spielrein and Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis”.

Psychoanalysis has the capacity to explain how and why people join together and against each other. If we understand identity and identification, if we understand belonging, we might be able to see how we could free ourselves from the visceral forces that pull us into mad, warring factions, making us destroy each other when we could be neighbors.

For a long time, I have been interested in belonging: in how we are forced but also need to belong in communities, in how collective identifications form our subjective identities, in how belonging is the subject-matter of our very sense of self.

This paper contemplates two notions that I have been exploring in relation to the frontier between subjects and collectives. The first is what I call homo-nationalis, the subject formed by and along the organizing principles of nationalism.

This article proceeds from my continued exploration of the relations between the subjective and the collective, and from the assumption that the subject, and subjectivity itself, are always a reflection, an iteration, an embodied instantiation of the social universe in which they emerge.

In recent years, psychoanalysis has become more aware of, and concerned with, the ways in which social forces affect the development and experience of subjects directly.

This article contemplates the tension between apathy and hope, between the dystopic and the utopian as drivers of the human condition, and our theories about it.

We tend to think subjectivity, and the subject, as somehow discrete and distinguishable, self-defining, even self-sufficient. The subject as owner of his own essence, capable of charting his own course, willful, and at least in potential free.

A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, because this particular view solves for psychoanalysis some basic problems that it does not have the conceptual repertoire to address.

Mi amigo Marlowe tiene cuatro años. Jugamos mucho juntos. A veces jugamos como harían dos niños; nos perseguimos por toda la casa y luchamos.

The great French Philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, expressed the fundamental paradox of the human condition such: “subjectivity is structured as the other in the same.” (Levinas, 1981, p. 25) Psychoanalysis is founded on a similar premise, that there are in each of us matters and forces that are other to the conscious and deliberate self.

Does being a psychoanalyst imply that one should hold a particular political sensibility? This article aims to approach this question in the aftermath of Donald Trump having become the president of the United States and the reverberations of this event, both political and personal, in analytic spaces.

Neo-liberalism is now a dominant ideology and sociopolitical-economic organizing principle. Following Nancy Hollander’s (this issue) illuminating foray into its psychological demi-monde, and in full agreement with the understanding that the subject contains and reflects the social, my commentary aims to elaborate on neo-liberalism’s subjective and intersubjecrive correlates.

Immigration is in the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis. Immigration as a dramatic instance of the always precarious social and political registers of human living.

This discussion reflects closely on Dominique Scarfone’s call to consider psychoanalysis as a practice founded on ethics, and to rely on this premise in charting a fundamental common ground such that has eluded psychoanalysis for most of its history.

My friend Marlowe, who is just shy of 10 years old, is a master of Minecraft (to the uninitiated, a video game in which you can build entire universes, populated by various kinds of creatures, for your own creative pleasure or, in the combat mode, to survive).

En psychanalyse, la relation entre la sexualité et le genre est l’essence et la métaphore du fait même d’être humain.

It seems to me hard to believe now, but I recall reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the 5th or 6th grade. Reading was always one of my greatest pleasures, and my mother, although she kept hoping that I spend more time outside, “like the other kids,” is herself a book lover, and so she would go to the public library once a week to replenish my pile of books.

This article tells the stories of 2 little boys, one a contemporary boy who falls off his bicycle in New York City, the other the mythical biblical hero Samson.

My friend Marlowe, who is just shy of 10 years old, is a master of Minecraft (to the uninitiated, a video game in which you can build entire universes, populated by various kinds of creatures, for your own creative pleasure or, in the combat mode, to survive).