Panelists: Gabriel Tupinamba, Vlada Asadulaeva (+ translation to Russian), Pavel Odintsov, Vlad Rostilov

For help in organizing and conducting the event so that it eventually took place and took shape, we would like to thank: Open Space (Telegram: @mskopenspace) for the venue and support, @angel_v_kedah (Telegram) for the illustrations, and syg.ma for publishing the YouTube video.

(The following text, machine-translated from the Russian text adaptation of the video and subsequently revised, differs from the video version)

Introduction

Psychoanalysis and politics are usually connected in two ways. Either psychoanalysis and politics are seen as two progressive forces that can be aligned, or they are seen as incompatible — psychoanalysis is viewed as contradicting politics as a reactionary formation (as some militants see it).

Instead of trying to immediately characterize their relationship, it is better to adopt a more materialist perspective. There is concrete politics built on the work of activists, and there is the work of psychoanalysts as practitioners of psychoanalysis. In terms of practice, political activity and psychoanalysis are separate entities.

Only in theory can politics and psychoanalysis be positioned in the same field. Only by starting from the premise that there is a distance between them can we then relate them, avoiding the assumption that they are inherently connected in some way.

If we approach psychoanalysis as a job, similar to any other, some questions about it can be clarified. Let’s make a comparison: take the work of a taxi driver and ask the same question—is the work of a taxi driver reactionary or progressive? Investigating labor from such a perspective makes little sense.

One thing is to create political organizations based on professional affiliation, such as creating a union of psychoanalysts and fighting for common rights, working toward a common goal. This is not a widespread practice, but in Brazil, we are trying to do this. Another thing is to politicize psychoanalysis, to imbue psychoanalytic practice with some political meaning. This is usually done either to claim that it generates certain political effects or to propose a possible correct way to practice it — including politically.

In the latter case, there are two options. For example, to promote greater access to it or to resolve ideological difficulties associated with the practice. In another case, political content may be introduced to hide these difficulties, creating the appearance of well-being and the absence of any significant problems.

To rephrase: there are different ways to politicize psychoanalysis. Some are aimed at improving our working conditions, improving our work as analysts, freeing it from the limitations imposed by capitalism. Another matter is the attempt to politicize psychoanalysis, driven by ideology, namely — when it is presented as something inherently revolutionary, to distract from the more pressing, material problems.

The Problem of Communicating Clinic and Institutions

With all that said, I would like to move on to the most difficult questions of the book I wrote. This is due to the fact that most of the discussions around it were related to the content of the first chapters, i.e., the critique of ideology in psychoanalysis — how psychoanalysts shield themselves with political ideas — but not its other main theoretical content. Perhaps there won’t be enough time or room to reveal it in all its details, but I would like to provide some context explaining why the discussion between psychoanalysis and politics becomes most important in these more complex chapters that delve into logic and mathematics.

A long time ago, Slavoj Žižek spoke, in the form of interpretation, about the possibility of outlining a connection between Lenin’s idea of how a communist party should work and the mechanisms of psychoanalysis. How did he explain it? The fact is that in the liberation struggle, the party acts as a mediator whose goal is to achieve a greater degree of freedom for everyone else.

What we find unsatisfactory in Žižek’s thought is its idealistic nature. It compares the mode of action of a political organization with that of an individual — the position occupied by a single person, the analyst, in clinical practice. If it is possible to establish a correspondence with the mentioned position of an organization that promotes the self-organization of people, the working class, then the other end of it should be located at the level of organization within psychoanalysis — not the clinical position.

This view helps to reveal a contradiction. In the clinic, psychoanalysis can indeed be said to help mediate the autonomous process of subjects gaining a greater degree of freedom — their own labor on the path to becoming freer. But at the level of its organization, psychoanalysis does not work this way — the level of freedom within it usually does not increase. On the contrary, psychoanalysis becomes only more closed off.

For the same reason, most people who benefit from psychoanalysis rarely join the front lines of its defenders. When they have gained something from their analysis, they are free to simply move on, to use their newfound additional freedom.

The situation is different for psychoanalysts and those who wish to assert the importance of psychoanalysis. They do not engage in such self-determination — their task is to defend certain positions. This is why some psychoanalysts can be so annoying and unaware of how closed of they are.

The last two chapters were written as an attempt to address this contradiction, where, on one hand, there is the circuit of clinical processes, and on the other — the circuit connecting the clinic to the analytic community, the space of a larger organizational order. They were written in order to find out: is it possible to change this predicament?

In simple terms, our goal is to make psychoanalysis more popular in the sense of betting on a more active role for people who benefit from it in therapy, a role in the development of psychoanalysis, of what it will become in the future.

Critique of the Paradigm of Otherness

Thus, the foundation for the direction we propose lies in the grammar of psychoanalytic concepts discussed in the seventh chapter — or, let’s call it, the foundational logic of approaching psychoanalytic concepts. The key logic of developing psychoanalytic concepts for work in the clinic is based on the distinction between the Other and the One, between the Other and the Self, also known as the Ego. Otherness, the Other — are at the heart of how our concepts work.

Here, my intention was to show that while the concept of otherness undoubtedly helps us in clinical practice, it still has its limits. It hinders broader thinking about novelty and transformation.

It is not difficult to point out how psychoanalysis transforms the lives of individual patients — it is enough to observe how patients better cope with the question of otherness. However, it is much more difficult to reveal how this logic implies the possibility of another psychoanalysis. After all, Lacan did not allow for there to be the Other of the Other.

Otherness does not mean solely the experience of something external, something different. Take even such positive concepts of psychoanalysis as the Ego or identification, other exclusively Lacanian concepts — they are all built on this technique, on the use of the idea of otherness as the material for these concepts. Radical otherness in the sense of things we cannot integrate into the psychic apparatus, such as the recognition of the freedom of action of other people, or the way we relate to ourselves — all these things are presented as modalities of the Other, of otherness.

This strategy well demonstrates the instability of identity or the Ego, as they are based on the foundation of the external. However, when it comes to considering some more radical externalities, dimensions of more extraneous and simultaneously material things, otherness is difficult to reconcile with such an inquiry.

And now I will reveal why Lacan says that there is no Other of the Other. When we try to describe these more external matters, whose mode of existence is independent of us, and call them other, pure, absolute otherness — we run into a contradiction. If some material change occurs, and these things undergo some changes, then from our point of view, nothing happens: absolute otherness remains the same absolute otherness. The subjective idea of radical otherness turns out to be inadequate for describing structural transformations.

This is why Lacan says that there is no Other of the Other. For if we imagine radical otherness, the radical distance between us and what is happening, it becomes impossible to distinguish between objects. It becomes impossible to say, for example, that one is the other for the first, or that two structures, two situations differ. This is the impasse of Lacanian thought, its inability to speak about significant systemic transformations.

PASHA ODINTSOV: (to the audience) As an example, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine something very, very small, the size of infinitesimal quantities, some completely inaccessible object, inaccessible to our sight, our interaction with it — and suddenly it turns into something extremely large, something of supercosmic proportions, which we also cannot see in its entirety or interact with, because it is so large, so incommensurate to our ideas. It turns out that we have no resource to register, to notice this transformation, because for us it is as if nothing has changed. For Lacan, nothing would have changed: after all, first we were dealing with radical otherness, and then too… So, according to Lacan, these two things would be structurally the same.

GABRIEL TUPINAMBÁ: What a complex example! It’s difficult for me to add anything to it, so I’ll offer another, simpler one.

A patient comes into the office and says something that goes beyond theory, something we cannot relate to it — something other, unfamiliar to analytic listening, devoid of a therapeutic approach to it. In such a case, it is usually attributed to the Real, and therefore — inaccessible, so it is not necessary to engage or transform it. Or it is attributed to the dimension of fantasy, which the patient has simply not yet had time to work out.

For new in the clinic, there is no way to becoming new for psychoanalysis and its theory. For things that psychoanalysis already works with as marked as other, there is no other. That’s what I mean. But your example is very creative.

Let me give you yet another, better example. The task of democracy is to open space for otherness, for various views and forms of organization. But if you want something beyond democracy, something greater or newer, there is no place for it within democracy. And you will be called a fundamentalist.

Let’s draw an analogy: there is no Other of the Other in the same sense that for capitalism there is no democracy of democracy.

Before I move on to the essence, I will reiterate: my task is to push people to give the last two chapters of the book a chance. So that behind how complex and slightly nerdy it becomes in them, they try to discern some ideas. Within a certain profession, the profession of a psychoanalyst — an attempt to find a way out of this dead end.

Mathematics, Infinity, and Novelty

The starting point for me, was the idea of an alternative paradigm, better suited for thinking structures and novelty, as opposed to the paradigm of otherness. Namely — the mathematical paradigm of infinity.

The twentieth century for mathematics was marked by the discovery of various kinds of infinity, some of which are larger than others. From which it follows that it becomes possible to speak simultaneously and in general about some areas of difference and transformations, as well as about other, larger structures, without leaving the same description logic.

Moreover, in this discipline, we also find axioms — a special operator used in the transition from one kind of infinity to another. The product of this procedure is new axioms.

In the book, I wanted to show that if we try to translate the ideas of psychoanalysis into the language of these other terms and place the concept of infinity in place of the concept of otherness, the possibility of investigating larger transformations in psychoanalysis immediately arises. And the idea of the axiom can refer to the idea of a new contribution of patients to psychoanalytic theory.

Another feature of axioms is that they assert the existence of something new but do not refer to any consequences, do not define this novelty — all this the researcher still has to find out. Exactly the same with new ideas in psychoanalysis: their significance is not to guide, but to prepare us for new phenomena in clinical practice.

This, in general terms, is the essence of the final part of the book. This cannot be called the politicization of psychoanalysis per se. It is rather about connecting what happens in the clinic, the transformations unfolding in it — with the profession as a whole, the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, turning them into transformations of this second level. The question takes on a political dimension when we try to develop steps for them to actually happen.

Practical Steps for Transforming Psychoanalysis

In the last couple of years, after the publication of the book, along with discussing the ideas proposed in it, I began collaborating with an association of psychoanalysts aimed at transforming the psychoanalytic community and the ways in which we connect our work not only with theory but also with access. That is, entry into the clinical space and psychoanalytic therapy.

Let me briefly explain our work: now we are sending out questionnaires and collecting data from psychoanalysts about their working conditions in Brazil. We receive hundreds of completed questionnaires, from which we will draw conclusions about the main current obstacles to psychoanalytic practice. The plan is not to limit ourselves to writing articles for journals, but precisely through the questionnaires — to invite all respondents to participate in a forum. There we could discuss together how exactly we should organize ourselves to improve general working conditions, putting pressure on institutions.

As we have found, the greatest resistance from psychoanalysts is to the question of power, which is due to them not being used to think in this way. Claiming strength or power is uncomfortable for them. But if we are not capable of organizing into a force, if it is uncomfortable for us to engage in transformations, then where do we get the idea for how to practice analytic listening in the case of analysands with similar concerns?

This is all I wanted to say today. Thank you. Let’s move on to questions.

Alienation of the Analysand and the Materiality of the Analyst’s Labor

QUESTION: There is reason to believe that psychoanalysis will never become a more horizontal practice until the analytic community recognizes that in psychoanalysis, no work is done on the part of the analyst. In fact, only the analysand works. Lacan always repeated that in analysis, the work takes place on the side of the analysand — or rather, on the side of their unconscious. The analyst is a projector, a wall on which the patient’s unconscious is projected. But the analysand receives no recognition for this work. The analyst, in turn, can appropriate the analysand’s labor and write an article or a book that will then glorify them and grant them symbolic capital. Let’s recall that with Freud, who, for example, did publications of the cases of the Wolf Man and others. That is, we are dealing with what could be called, in Marxist terms, alienation. Would you agree that psychoanalysts should pay attention to this issue?

GT: My answer will have two parts.

It is true that in analysis we find an asymmetry. The analysand has their own area of responsibility related to a certain transformation, over which the analyst has no power, as they do not produce it. The analyst facilitates, serves as a mediator. And this is one of the best things about Lacanian psychoanalysis — this aligns it with the ideas of political organization, where activists facilitate the self-organization of the working class.

But by denying the analyst the right to call their activity labor, we conceal the material reality of the practice. Analysts work, sell their labor for money, pay bills and taxes. Unequal distribution of resources and power dynamics persist here: for example, patients who cannot pay for analysis don’t undergo it. Therefore, we should not confuse the level of the work of the unconscious in the office and the level of the labor activity of analysts.

Lacanian communities use this incorrect fusion to mask class relations in psychoanalysis. The real contradiction arises where we try to improve conditions for analysands and their autonomous transformation. Therefore, we need to insist that analysts do indeed labor. For class relations in psychoanalysis are one of the main levels of resistance to improvements.

PO: I would like to add an example to this discussion. In the Lacanian community, dubious economic ideas are expressed when they hide behind the proposition that analysts do not produce any work. For example, [Jean-Claude] Maleval writes that psychoanalysts are not obliged to pay taxes, for example, value-added tax, precisely because they do not labor and do not create any added value.

This is another side of the work of the mentioned ideologeme, which in this case is intended, however, not to exploit analysands more actively, but rather to hide, to remove the relations of analysis from the socio-economic plane.

Also, in my opinion, we are confusing things when we say that the analyst is nothing more than a screen onto which the fantasies and unconscious of the analysand are projected. It sounds as if this is a very easy profession, and all that is required is to attend sessions and mostly remain silent. But choosing the right moment to intervene in the analysand’s speech, to emphasize something in it — that is the most difficult thing. It requires a lot of preparation and education, supervision, as well as financial resources that will go into all these things.

So the mistake consisting in the idea of the position of the analyst as a screen for projection contradicts the material truth of the situation.

Psychoanalysis and Activism

QUESTION: Gabriel, thank you for your message. Let me also thank you for raising the question of how Lacanian psychoanalysis can be positioned in relation to politics, and political activism in particular. This question has been painful for me for a long time, as I am both a patient and an analyst.

I have two questions so far:

Could you elaborate on your experience in Brazil?

You propose a way to consider the analyst and the analysand as one, resorting to the Marxist model of the family as a productive unit. In the analysand, you see a future analyst who, in the process of analysis or at its end, will necessarily contribute to psychoanalytic knowledge when presenting it to the community. But what do you think about analysands who do not intend to link their future, their life, with psychoanalytic practice? For although we sometimes say that any analysis has the properties of a didactic one, in reality, the situation often looks different.

GT: Thank you for your questions, Elena.

Regarding the first point, my experience in Brazil: I have been working as an analyst for about ten years. I started clinical practice from within political activism, starting from participation in it. It was related to the occupation of buildings, as it is also called, squatting. Then I moved to private practice, belonged to a number of Lacanian organizations, and at the moment I am not a member of any.

It is difficult for me to determine what specifically you would be interested in learning more about. But I will say that for the last five or six years I have been working towardscollective organization among analysts — not based on their theoretical orientation, whether Lacanian or Jungian, but rather on improving working conditions and making the daily work of clinicians easier. Here in Brazil, many analysts work under quite unstable and precarious conditions. If there’s something specific you’d like to know more about, feel free to ask.

QUESTION: Could you describe how you combine your work as an analyst with political activism?

GT: In my case, the two became intertwined when I encountered a very specific issue in Brazil. I wanted activists to have access to treatment as comprehensive as what I had experienced. Many political organizations offer short-term psychotherapy sessions or group therapy, but rarely is there talk of 'indefinite' analysis. This is difficult to implement.

My desire was to change this, to provide the opportunity for 'indefinite' analysis, similar to what I had, which also included the prospect of becoming a psychoanalyst. This issue ultimately pushed me to write the book.

This brings us to the second question. If we look at this problem, transforming theory to a certain level of revolutionary thinking won’t solve it. The challenge is to figure out how psychoanalysts can maintain their practice while accepting patients who cannot afford treatment. How can we respond to the demand for economically accessible, "cheap" psychoanalysis?

And the second point: at the same time, how can we learn to ensure free association in working with people unfamiliar with psychoanalytic culture or who do not belong to the middle class? How do we follow the rule of free association when gunshots are heard outside? This is not easy. Or how do we navigate racial tension? This requires work from both the analyst and the analysand.

I’ll conclude my answer this way: why do I resort to the critical tools of feminist Marxism? Labor is not an attribute of the individual. It is created through the simultaneous efforts of many people. This includes domestic labor, reproductive labor. All of this suggests that we still have much to learn about the nature of labor, the different aspects of work that various fields of knowledge explore. Psychoanalysis does not have specific tools for this.

At this stage, two solutions suggest themselves: either the analysands unconsciously influence the situation themselves, as I described in my answer to the first question, or we as analysts must desire this solution more strongly, holding onto the possibility of analysands continuing their treatment. Instead of declaring analysis having ceased.

It’s not that every analysis is didactic, but that every analysis could become such. And the presence of such a horizon in analysis correlates with the effectiveness of treatment. In response to this, patients establish a relationship with analysis.

Research Boundaries and the Function of Psychoanalysis as a Discipline

QUESTION: From a clinical psychoanalytic perspective, do we have the right to evaluate social processes and assign 'diagnoses' to societal actions, given that psychoanalysis, in my view, was created as a tool for individual work and as a field of human knowledge that becomes real only in the moment of communication between the analyst and the analysand? That is, it materializes only there.

GT: I’ll start by saying that many disciplines engage in the analysis of society and contribute to our knowledge of it. These disciplines usually either describe their own segment of reality, delimited in their practice, or develop metaphors applicable across multiple fields.

For example, physicists can tell us about gravity, energy, that is, describe the physical properties of the world. But we can also borrow this idea, the concept of energy, as a metaphor to solve problems in other areas. And we must be able to distinguish between these two modes.

I believe psychoanalysis can be useful in both modes. It has the resources to describe the state of its own practice. It can tell us if something new is happening in the clinic or if something is hindering our attempts to improve it. But it is also capable of producing new metaphors that members of other disciplines can usefully borrow in their work.

However, we must be cautious in our use of metaphors. There is no 'global libidinal economy'. All of humanity is not connected to libido as some New Age version of all-pervasive energy, as if all people were attuned to a certain frequency. It’s about offering images appropriate to the tasks at hand.

I don’t think it’s possible, based on clinical material, to make such global conclusions or present social diagnoses to society. Also because, in analysis, patients undergo transformations in the artificial space of the clinic, that is, they behave differently than in everyday life. Based on this material, it’s impossible to generalize about the state of society as a whole.

In conclusion, I’ll say that in many disciplines, including psychoanalysis, there is a tendency: when our own theory fails to create novelty within our field, we usually turn to other areas for help. For some time now, psychoanalysis has been trying to prove its significance by building the importance it has for the knowledge of other disciplines, rather than its own.

Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

QUESTION: I would like to thank Gabriel for the political gesture within the Lacanian theoretical field. This gesture is not only a critical test of the limits of theory but also an important material gesture of creating something that did not exist before.

It seems to me, as it does to many, that in such a re-establishment, considering the political sensitivity and positionality of theorists and analysts, the question of the binarity of the gender matrix in psychoanalytic theory remains important — precisely from within the Lacanian field, not from outside. At the same time, it seems that gender and feminist theory can serve as tools for theoretical inspiration.

And here we can talk about the epistemological arrogance of psychoanalysis, blocking interdisciplinary dialogue, as it is outlined in the book. I would like to ask how Gabriel sees the possible renewal of the binary matrix of psychoanalysis, considering existing critiques, and how, in the context of those critiques, we can view his revision of the formulas of sexuation in the book, the translation of otherness into infinity?

What can such a gesture give us for the problem of gender, for attempts to overcome the theoretical crisis of gender as it has emerged in the clinic and culture?

GT: Initially, the book was planned to have a chapter on this topic, but I decided to wait, as it seemed to me that these issues needed to be more deeply tested in discussion with other groups, different feminist initiatives: is this approach suitable for launching a discussion?

But I agree that the existing dilemma can be considered, as I do in the book, in light of the limitations of the principle of otherness and its predominance in studies of gender, sex, and sexuality.

First, I’ll say that this problem is represented differently in theory and practice. At the level of theory, psychoanalysis does adhere to a kind of binary division, where it deals with the categories of male and female. In clinical practice, this is much less pronounced. So I would prefer to prioritize the clinical perspective.

Considering the problem in this dimension, we can outline it as I have done before. Imagine a patient in the clinic, and the patient speaks of an otherness unlike sexual difference as we are used to thinking of it, different from it.

In this case, it turns out that our analytic listening does not have the resources to work with this. It cannot determine whether this is a fantasy or something new. In my opinion, we can maintain sensitivity to the difficulties people experience when they desire, love, and enter into relationships with others.

I believe it is possible to think about these difficulties without tying them to any division, binary or otherwise. Instead, let’s assume that these difficulties, like the difference in the subjective way of desiring and loving someone, arise simply from the fact that this someone is not you.

And then the clinician will be obliged to listen to patients, paying attention to how this difference and these difficulties unfold in each individual case.

And as a digression, I’ll say: in daily practice, psychoanalysts very rarely use Lacanian theory of sexuation. It doesn’t offer much to the clinician. Much more could be said on this subject, but a worthy continuation of the discussion will be ensured, I think, if we change our concepts and approaches.

The Popularity of Psychoanalysis

QUESTION: Building on one of your theses about the language of psychoanalysis: I work in transactional analysis. One of Eric Berne’s ideas was that he wanted to make transactional analysis more comprehensible to non-professionals.

As a result, there are two discourses of transactional analysis: professional and non-professional. While the former develops, the latter reproduces the same ideas from works written in the sixties and seventies.

Now, as a professional, this diversity seems problematic to me, as it leads to a blurring of the content of categories. What do you think about this in the context of psychoanalysis?

GT: So, I’ll say that I don’t know much about transactional analysis theory or its current state. If there is any professional literature on this issue, I would be interested in familiarizing myself with it.

Therefore, in my answer, I will focus on Lacanian psychoanalysis and a somewhat different situation. This distinction is due to the fact that, for certain reasons, Lacanian psychoanalysis remains committed to the idea of personal analysis as the main path to becoming an analyst.

The analyst and the analysand are not so distant figures if we assess their skills or status. Lacanian psychoanalysis as a discipline, in fact, does not share the view that the required knowledge and skills are acquired by the analyst through training. It is believed that the analyst receives training through their own analysis.

This speaks to the potential for psychoanalysis to gain widespread popularity. For me, this aspect is very important, as what I conceptualize in the book as theory is not new, not invented by me. It has already happened, I see it in the work of many clinicians.

We are dealing with a practice that was sometimes developed in silence, truly without reflection in theory. Given this, it seems to me that we should hold onto this already established, more open to people practical approach.

The current professional discourse of psychoanalysis, the notorious official discourse, in my opinion, is too static and therefore unable to work with novelty.

To summarize, I’ll return to what I concluded my message with. Most of the problems not addressed by theory find expression in the daily practice of psychoanalysts. And now, it seems to me, we have a chance to improve theory if we include questions of class struggle, material difficulties that we as analysts face in practice.

Here we have a better chance than in attempts to reinvent theory driven by revolutionary or other political intentions. I find this feature of psychoanalysis (characteristic, at least, of Lacanian) remarkable — the presence of this gap.

I’ll add that working as a psychoanalyst is not the most highly skilled labor. It’s amateurish. There are difficult cases, yes. But generally, even an amateur can manage. And this makes it open to a great many people. Perhaps more than some analysts would like.

Žižek and New Signifiers

QUESTION: Žižek and Lacan proposed theories of so-called "new signifiers," the question of their establishment. What do you think about this conceptual line? Is its further fruitful development possible?

I also noticed some conflict, as today you spoke more about the material side of things, while the book also offers some theoretical solutions and structural considerations of problems. How can these two directions — developing theory and paying attention to material problems — be combined?

GT: It’s good that you asked, because the fate of the question of "new signifiers" is indicative. Here’s what usually happens in theories where transformation is thought of in terms of otherness or language. In general, this is true in the case of those built on difference above all.

It should be clear that Žižek advocates precisely for the necessity of establishing novelty — due to the lack of means to describe radical transformations within psychoanalysis. But the plea to establish this novelty and the plea for order over time become too indistinguishable. And suddenly you start complaining about protesters and activists: you say that they leave a mess, that we need to return to a past point.

In this situation, it’s impossible to say whether we’re talking about the old order or some new, merely imagined one, as we lack the discursive means to describe it. So I really see a problem here: something pushes non-orthodox Lacanians to sometimes align with a conservative platform. They do this not out of malice, but because the theory is too closed off — it does not allow for anything fruitful in such discussions.

PO: I’ll propose another aspect for the discussion. Perhaps it would make sense to slightly expand the previous remarks on organization into a collective in respects to the problem of masses. Because we know what Lacanians say about this: when protesters try to organize, they say, this is essentially something bad. Since any organization of the masses and other forms of solidarity work as phantasmatic formations — and by entering into relations with them, we subject to oblivion the notorious radical loneliness of the subject along with the aforementioned framework of radical otherness.

If I understand correctly, the idea is this: Žižek wants to invent something new, while maintaining allegiance to the past Lacanian logic of signifier. In an attempt to point to the possible appearance of this new, he uses the old paradigm. And the contradictoriness of this line of thought, our associated difficulty, stems from this.

GT: Exactly, I meant this connection. But let’s dwell on this question a bit more. To change something in this position, we will need to develop a theory that preserves the function of speech that the category of the signifier gives it. But along with this, we will also have to define other paths that speech can follow in analysis.

One of them will have to refer to the establishment of new axioms. The process of their establishment, as it seems, will be associated with the emergence of something new — something that cannot be explained by the logic of the signifier. At the moment, psychoanalysis does not have such a distinction.

And I’ll answer the second part of the question, concerning the supposed conflict: I don’t think there is any pronounced conflict here. I just think that the book is not the most suitable means for engaging in politics. In the book, it’s more convenient to propose some theoretical questions and discuss them.

When you engage in politics, in my opinion, it’s better to do so by interacting with people and gathering for discussions. So some of them did not make it into the book. Here, it seems, the question is more about the compatibility of theory and politics. And based on the perspective proposed in the book, I believe they are rather compatible.

PO: So, I would also like to ask a couple of questions. While I was listening to the answer to the last question about the material side of the discussed transformative practices and about theory, a thought occurred to me. Because from the outside, it looks as if the book preaches the idea of returning to Freud again.

This is his idea: the discipline must be reinvented with each individual case. And this fundamental function of the case — and, accordingly, the category of analytic experience — seems to have in it the conditions for an attempt to revive it. If only with a curious injection of Marxism.

To elaborate: according to this, on the one hand, we have the clinic and the cases that take place there, which should push us to rethink theory along with how we understand and practice analysis in general. However, there should also be cases that did not take place, which, apparently, did not find a way to realize themselves as a case. And we must strive to overcome this situation.

It resembles the well-known problem called "survivorship bias." And within this very bias, we build theory based on things we know, while we should also keep in mind everything we did not get to know. And also ask ourselves: why, what were the conditions that did not allow us to hear this unaccounted speech? How to explain that the rule of free association does not extend to those who live where there is gunfire, people who have suffered for years under authoritarian regimes, all other forms of oppression?

This is roughly, as I understand it, the shift in thought that your call is leading to. First, it’s a repetition of Freud’s idea about psychoanalytic theory — the idea that it, being radically open, is supposed to restructure itself in response to any clinical case. But this idea also needs to be made even more radical: so that in the restructuring of psychoanalysis, we must be attentive to cases that did not take place, which were not allowed to happen, be it for political or any other external reasons.

It seems to me that this is an excellent direction for development.

GT: Let me reinterpret what was said just a bit. On the contrary, it seems to me that the point is not to account for all those cases that did not take place, but undoubtedly in the fact that there are many cases that find their way into the clinic, but do not exist in theory.

Many people live in non-standard conditions, so analysts have to experiment a lot. Let me remind you that in the Lacanian analyst community, no one raised the question of remote analysis until economic reasons forced everyone to do it. And immediately online analysis became something normal, while some had been practicing it for some time — and for this they were looked down upon.

Therefore, I would redefine this conflict as follows: on the one hand, cases whose existence is allowed, and they are integrated into theory; on the other hand, cases that, although they take place, we do not talk about them and do not even know how to do it.

This problem is really important for the future of our discipline. Also, this question is illustrative in terms of how politics and ideology invade psychoanalysis, as it is they that maintain the aforementioned boundary beyond which cases from already established practice that are not admitted into theory cannot step.

Therefore, in the clinic, psychoanalysts are not so committed to binary schemes on the topic of sex and sexuality. They know how to adapt, including economically. Therefore, they know well the price for their practice, their financial instability. In theory, all these things simply dissolve.

In conclusion, I’ll say that this is actually a typical problem faced by people of all professions. Almost everyone has to deal with the tension between what is actually professionally required of them and what exists in the eyes of the market and the state.

PO: I completely agree. By the way, this is exactly what we encountered with Vlad during several meetings discussing different chapters of your book, which we have been conducting for the past couple of months.

We discussed monetary relations with different clinicians, and this drama was quite palpable. When we discussed questions in the abstract, these Lacanian analysts, clinicians, reproduced all the known dogmas, boiling down to the fact that for the analysand, payment should be tangible. It should be some significant amount for the patient, as in analysis money works as a privileged signifier.

At the same time, they made various practical remarks, retellings of cases from practice, which demonstrated the inconsistency of the previously stated theoretical principles. For example, they shared how their work is structured: that is, they practice both free analysis and some even pay the analysand if necessary. One clinician admitted this about himself and some of his immediate colleagues.

The conflict between what people do and what they think they do is indeed evident. Some analysts reported that they do not accept any forms of payment except cash, as cash has a special value. But during COVID, they immediately accepted bank transfers. And this felt like some kind of hypocrisy.

Perhaps we shouldn’t attribute this to the personal qualities of the analyst but rather derive it from the aforementioned ideological structure, this gap between theory and practice.

GT: Yes, I agree completely.

Psychoanalytic Practice in Extreme Conditions

QUESTION: I lived in Palestine for a long time and recently moved to Ukraine, where I noticed many similarities between the two. As I’m an analyst, me moving was driven not only by my social and political nature but also by my strong desire to place my practice at the center of people experiencing boundary situations — such as places where war is ongoing, where people are going through intense experiences today.

I work with both people involved in combat and those living in difficult conditions. Individuals from these groups often come to analysis later, though, of course, most have other concerns at the moment. I am already working with some of them, and during sessions, especially with military personnel, they rarely touch on their current experiences, preferring to focus on other topics.

Can you explain this? Does it seem to you that when we don’t have access to the object of such boundary experiences in real time, we as analysts are missing something? Is this a solvable problem?

GT: You’re talking about extremely complex things. In contexts like these, involving boundary experiences, two issues are often conflated. There is the question of how analysis can accommodate difficulties related to social oppression and extreme disaster. There is also a similar question concerning political movements.

These are not necessarily the same kind of problems. Why people don’t talk about violence or the shocks they’ve experienced doesn’t necessarily align with why people don’t talk about their role in political action or their personal political expectations.

In particularly desperate circumstances, these two points seem to intertwine. Brazil has a long history marked by episodes of violence, dictatorship, and torture. The murder rate in favelas, comparable to modern war zones, shows that this past is still present. It’s common for personal analysis to either exclude or be unable to adequately address these experiences.

The situation is different with questions of political involvement and the difficulties of political mobilization. Many analysands, at least in Brazil, believe it’s possible to address collective issues in personal analysis. So, through interventions and interpretations, the analyst may need to steer them in the opposite direction, recommending that they express their concerns in a more suitable setting.

For clinicians, especially when working with activists, it can be quite challenging to navigate between these different dimensions, as violence and politics tend to blur everything.

The work becomes even more complicated with the presence of a third issue: when pure catastrophe intervenes in the case. This, manifesting as social crises and natural disasters where the subject is not directly targeted — unlike police violence, torture, or political obligations — can come, for example, in the form of a flood.

In such conditions, it can be difficult for the analyst to orient themselves. At times, I’ve felt that as an analyst, I need to loosen my grip and simply be with the analysand. Perhaps offer some help.

This way, it’s possible to preserve the analytic connection for the future. I can’t give you an exact recipe, but I’ll say this — it’s very important to be able to distinguish between these three levels. This understanding should help each case unfold properly.

PO: I’d like to clarify something about the analyst’s tactics in cases of natural disasters. Does it mean that the analyst should refer analysands to be with their family, friends, or local community so they can return to analysis later? Or did you mean that the analyst should not rigidly maintain the analytic position and instead try to support the analysand?

GT: I’d say the second. A couple of years ago, I worked with patients living in an area hit by a major flood. Many people died, and many lost their homes. These analysands wanted to continue analysis in conditions where they were practically waist-deep in water. And it was clear that these were unsuitable conditions for addressing the tasks of analysis when their immediate problems were not at least partially accounted for in the process.

I’m not just talking about acknowledging these circumstances, but I, like many others, also tried to help them where possible. When the situation changed, we continued as before.

Understand that attempting to work in such conditions unmistakably signals resistance to the catastrophe, but not its psychic processing. When you’re waist-deep in water and discussing your relationship with your father, something is clearly off.

QUESTION: Doesn’t it seem to you that by giving money to the patient or helping them find shelter, you make the continuation of analysis impossible? And then, at this cease of the analysis, would you need to refer the analysand to another specialist?

GT: In short: of course, it’s possible. This is the case in most professions. Suppose you sell bread, and it should be obvious that by helping someone at that moment, you’re not working as a bread vendor. On another day, you continue your work without issues, selling bread to these people. And people are capable of distinguishing between these two modes.

The problem arises if you take this step out of countertransference, out of some kind of identification. But it’s the psychoanalyst’s task to maintain analytic distance. If to assume other positions and to return to the analytic one provokes resistance, the analyst has to be able to handle this difficulty.

Returning to analysis may not be easy, but it’s not impossible. It’s precisely the situation where psychoanalysis becomes an obstacle to the intention to help others that should make us reflect.