Raluca Soreanu

There is a ‘phenomenological gap’ in psychoanalysis around the problem of psychic splitting. This means there is deficit of precise descriptions about what is being split in the psyche; about the process of splitting; and about the psychic life of the fragments that result from the splitting. Not all these fragments map on to the three Freudian agencies: id, ego and superego. There are kinds of splitting that make demands from us and that point to a need for a metapsychological revision. In dialogue with Sándor Ferenczi and his original formulations on psychic fragmentation, I address this phenomenological gap, and work toward a metapsychology of fragmented psyches. I arrive at a phenomenology of the scene of trauma, which I formulate in terms of distinct moments, which can be described in spatial-temporal terms. In other words, psychic fragments resulting from the scene of trauma have distinct space-time orientations. 

On this backdrop, I focus on a surprising ‘passivity’ related to traversing the scene of trauma, which is profoundly connected to a radical plasticity of the psyche. The fragments resulting from the scene of trauma make a new arrangement, a composition, a relational ensemble. I show that Ferenczi constructs a whole new series of terms, which are both clinically and politically interesting: cooperation, conciliation, endurance of suffering, selflessness, appeasement, adaptation to renunciation, self-denial, compromise. In The Clinical Diary, he experiments with a particular modification to the sphere of the dualism death drive/life drive. He renames them the ‘drive of self-assertion’ and the ‘drive of conciliation’. The ‘selflessness’ he evokes, including the ‘selflessness’ of organs, emerges in relation to the scene of trauma. The ‘drive for conciliation’ appears as a new basis of the reality principle. To survive, as any sort of individuality, means to practice a kind of politics of self-limitation. This offers the ground for a fruitful revision of the ideas of ‘resistance’ and ‘passivity’. 

Keywords: trauma theory, psychic fragments, splitting, phenomenological gap, Sándor Ferenczi, drive for self-assertion, drive for conciliation, queer phenomenology, orientations, inclinations 

In this article we explore the conditions of possibility of an unusual photo album, the Angyalföldi múzeum albuma, assembled in interwar Budapest, as a montage created around life in the asylum. The album is an interdisciplinary, multi-referential, multi-temporal creation, containing a heterogenous ensemble of elements that hold together in interesting relations. Working collaboratively – an art historian and a psychoanalyst – we named it ‘the Dream Album’, as it is structured like a dream, and it also has the capacity to stimulate free-association. How did this improbable object come about? What are its implications for the politics the presentation of the asylum and for reimagining the relationship between mental illness, art and society, but also between society, psychiatry and psychoanalysis? We start by discussing montage as a theory of the subject but also as a distinct epistemological orientation, where meaning emerges from the juxtaposition of fragments and in the gaps between fragments. Montage was also relevant in the context of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis, particularly in the work of Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, who reflected on creativity of psychic fragments. We reconstitute the milieu in which the photo album was produced, in Hungary of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the radical aspects of the psychiatric imaginary, and on the idea of ‘breaking down the walls’ of the asylum, which influenced the production of the Dream Album. We discuss the contents of the album, and show the relationship between the inside and outside it portrays. We explore its complicated temporal texture and the possibilities of ‘reanimation’ and ‘reliving’ that it opens through its composition. Finally, we reflect on the ethical implications of the surprising materiality of the Dream Album, and of its politics of representation of the mind. 

In this panel Raluca Soreanu discusses her book Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018), with commentaries and questions by Endre Koritar and Marina Ribeiro. 

Description

Are crowds capable of mourning or working-through political traumas? What is the psychic work involved in public morning and how can make we make sense of new political symbols that emerge in ample scenes of protest? Drawing on the Brazilian Uprising of 2013 and its aftermath, I write about a semi-spontaneous mourning, a mourning that is not an effect of a state policy, of a planned ceremony, with a designated time and place. It is a mourning that happens when smaller or greater crowds are formed, and when they symbolise together, when they produce rhythms and forms of synchronicity. It is a kind of mourning that occurs through speech, but also through synchronised vocalisations and movements. It is a kind of mourning that occurs though creating symbols, which are very precise in their connection to the collective wounds left by the years of torture, persecution and silence of an oppressive political regime. I write about a symbolising crowd, capable of complicated constructions, of overlayered references to different historical times, and even of making interpretations. 

Sándor Ferenczi’s ideas are deeply important in making sense of both collective trauma and collective creativity. In dialogue with Ferenczi, I talk about quality of social action which I call Orphic sociality. This refers to socialities of radical mutuality, socialities of connection, socialities of psychic resonance, putting bodies and body parts in new forms of contact and new juxtapositions. In collective Orphic moments, something that is very likely to be destroyed, crushed, killed off, or damaged can be spared, through small acts that appear to us almost as effects of clairvoyance. We can understand such acts by referring back to Ferenczi’s ideas on the Orpha fragment of the psyche, which captures a particular kind of traumatic ‘wisdom’. By looking at the Brazilian Uprising in 2013, I trace a collective that is able to create symbols, to mourn and to traverse Orphic times. 

In the past decade, free psychoanalytic clinics around the world have intensified and pluralised their practices: they enlarged their access, they experimented with new psychoanalytic dispositifs, they diversified their relations with other emancipatory movements, and they also explored forms of relating to one another. Is it thus possible to think of free psychoanalytic clinics as a social movement? To engage this question and to make sense of the creativities of free psychoanalytic clinics, I theorise ‘infrastructural thinking’ as a particular kind of orientation to action that puts fantasy and the unconscious at the centre of collective life. Infrastructural thinking means a capacity to consider multiple transferences and ambivalences, as well as new fantasies on gain, accumulation and redistribution. Infrastructural thinking is also linked to an engagement with and practicing of groupness. I argue that in the free clinics, there is a keen awareness and elaboration of questions having to do with groups, collectives and the social bond at large. In some instances, the group is practiced as a method, while a mode of relating ‘from-group-to-group’ becomes possible, constituting a transindividual form. This is in contrast to mainstream psychoanalysis, where a disavowal of the group and groupness has marked our practice, restricting the group imaginary and limiting innovations of the frame that include the group. Finally, infrastructural thinking allows crucial connections to be made between the psychoanalytic frame, and a ‘clinical ecology’, referring to the broader relationship between mind, nature, society and forms of suffering. Drawing on ethnographic and archival material, I construct a ‘scene’ for observing infrastructural thinking at work, in psychoanalytic free clinics in Brazil, in the 1960s and 1970s, and up to our times. 

Are crowds in protest capable of mourning or working-through political traumas? What is the psychic work involved in public morning and how can make we make sense of new political symbols that emerge in ample scenes of protest? Drawing on the Brazilian Uprising of 2013 and its aftermath, I write about a semi-spontaneous mourning, a mourning that is not an effect of a state policy, of a planned ceremony, with a designated time and place. It is a mourning that happens when smaller or greater crowds are formed, and when they symbolize together, when they produce rhythms and forms of synchronicity. It is a kind of mourning that occurs through speech, but also through synchronized vocalizations and movements. It is a kind of mourning that occurs though creating symbols, which, are very precise in their connection to the traumatic marks left by the years of torture, persecution and silence of an oppressive political regime. Ultimately, I write about a symbolizing crowd, capable of complicated constructions, of overlayered references to different historical times, and even of making interpretations. In dialogue with psychoanalytic thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Sándor Ferenczi, I show that under certain conditions, the street and the square become privileged places for public mourning and working-through, because they enable rhythmic attunement, the return of polysemy and the pleasure of analogy.

In this paper, I propose the idea of ‘clinical ecologies’ to explore the way psychoanalysts imagine and practice the boundaries of their own craft. The clinical ecology that I discuss refers to a relationship between mind, nature and society, which puts suffering at the centre of a reconfigured social bond, and which shifts the focus from symptoms and their treatment, to creating a frame and method to rethink race, class, gender, and coloniality. I ask what happens when we imagine an ecology that starts from the suffering, and which thinks about the suffering itself in a psychoanalytic manner. To make sense of how psychoanalysts think of boundaries, I draw on the idea of elasticity, which is central to Sándor Ferenczi’s thinking, and on notions of non-linear temporality in complexity theory. 

The paper focuses on the case of a free clinic in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s and 1980s, an autonomous collective that offered individual and group psychoanalysis to marginal subjects, as well as experimented with ‘play groups’ for children. Drawing on interviews and archival research around the practices of this unique and creative collective, I observe how boundaries were imagined: they are boundaries between the free clinic collective and the mainstream institutionalised psychoanalysis; the boundaries between the private consulting room and a public and often itinerant psychoanalytic practice that followed the subjects in their own territories; the boundaries between the individual and the group, as the group became a key arena of experimentation in this free clinic; the boundaries between the fantasy-full time inside the clinic, and the oppressive and ‘empty’ historical time outside its walls. Ultimately, I argue that the clinicians offer a new arrangement between time, space, money, suffering, and their interrelations, and thus open up a futurity pertaining to a new ‘clinical ecology’. In our times, a re-arrangement of these relations is bound up with our own survival.