Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic

264 Pages·2016·2.28 MB·English

by  Agnieszka Piotrowska

Psychoanalysis and the
UnrePresentable
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about
translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academ-
ics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of
essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary
scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought
through completely.
Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult –
if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoa-
nalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen.
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching trauma,
Sense and gesture, Impossible poetics, Without words, Wounds and suture and Auto/
Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption,
the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael
Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are
difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about.
The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including
those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, aca-
demics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and
film studies, filmmakers and artists.
Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award winning documentary filmmaker and
theorist, best known for her film Married to the Eiffel Tower (2009). Her new work
in both practice and theory focuses on post-colonial relationships in Zimbabwe,
including an internationally acclaimed documentary film Lovers in Time or How
We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in
Documentary Film and the editor of Embodied Encounters: New approaches to psychoa-
nalysis and cinema, both published by Routledge. Her new monograph Black and
White: Cinema, politics and the arts in Zimbabwe (Routledge, 2016) combines prac-
tice research with theory. She is co-coordinator of the Psychoanalysis in Our Time
research network.
Ben Tyrer teaches Film Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Out
of the Past: Lacan and film noir (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and has published widely
on psychoanalysis and cinema.
Piotrowska and Tyrer together run Psychoanalysis in Our Time, an international
research network funded by the Nordic Summer University.
This anthology sets out to “do the impossible” in interrogating the paradoxes
of unrepresentable and unspeakable experience. Drawing together an impres-
sive array of writers from diverse fields including those of clinical practice,
film and literary studies, post-colonial theory and cultural analysis, it weaves
a complex matrix of ideas grounded in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers
as diverse as Freud, Lacan, Bion, Malabou, Winnicott and Meltzer. The essays
are lively and compelling, offering new perspectives on themes such as
trauma and embodiment, silence and invisibility in the digital age of media,
the psychodynamics of touch, voice, gesture, love, grief, adoption and anxiety.
A wide range of textual material embracing literature, cinema, poetry, lan-
guage, meta psychology and metaphysics, provides the basis for philosophical
and psychological commentary that is often astute, and the daring inclusion
of creative work premised on personal experience acts as an emotional coup de
foudre. Piotrowska and Tyrer have curated a cracking compendium, one that
seduces and challenges in equal measure, and one that will surely become
essential reading for anyone interested in the riches of psychoanalytic enquiry.
—Caroline Bainbridge, Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis,
University of Roehampton, UK.
This is an important collection that speaks to contemporary events with
compassion and poignancy. Piotrowska and Tyrer’s Psychoanalysis and the
Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic is simultaneously wound and suture.
It both opens and seeks to comprehend the cultural fault lines that exist
around trauma, abuse, race, image and language itself. These diverse, and at
times provocative, essays, allow for an outpouring of the unconscious and the
experience of pain and anxiety. It is the inability to speak with the inability
to be silent that suffuses this radical collection and yet it is these same tensions
in this book that serve to heal the cultural body.
—Luke Hockley, Professor of Media Analysis,
University of Bedfordshire, UK and author of Somatic Cinema (2014).
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Psychoanalysis and
the UnrePresentable
From culture to the clinic
Edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Piotrowska, Agnieszka, editor. | Tyrer, Ben, editor.
Title: Psychoanalysis and the unrepresentable: from culture to the clinic /
edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008666| ISBN 9781138954977 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138954984 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315666655 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis.
Classification: LCC BF173 .P77527 2016 | DDC 150.19/5—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008666
ISBN: 978-1-138-95497-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-95498-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66665-5 (ebk)
Typeset in BemboStd
by codeMantra
contents
Figures xi
Contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction: Representing the unrepresentable 1
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer
Part i
approaching trauma 5
1 The body locked by a lack of meaning 7
Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær
2 Trauma without a subject: On Malabou,
psychoanalysis and Amour 20
Ben Tyrer
3 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable
in clinical trauma 39
Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu
Part ii
sense and gesture 51
4 (Un)Representing the real: Seeing sounds and hearing images 53
Thomas Elsaesser
viii Contents
5 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial
discourse – From Lessing to Marechera and Veit-Wild 74
Agnieszka Piotrowska
6 Pointing at the other 94
Goran Vranešević
Part iii
impossible poetics 109
7 Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem? Some
remarks about Paul Celan 111
René Rasmussen
8 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 118
Pia Hylén
9 Duras and the art of the impossible 130
Carin Franzén
Part iV
Without words 141
10 Representation without language: Freud and the
problem of the image 143
Annie Hardy
11 Understanding without words 158
John Miller
Part V
Wounds and suture 169
12 Rethinking the primal wound, trauma and the fantasy of
completeness: Adopted women’s experiences of meeting their
biological fathers in adulthood 171
Elizabeth Joyce
13 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 185
Per Roar
14 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 203
Richard Rushton
Contents ix
Part Vi
auto/Fiction 217
15 Unnameable 219
Anna Backman Rogers
16 Each day at a time – A daily intervention into loss 222
Myna Trustram
17 The scent of philosophy 231
Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen
Index 237