Luc Tuymans, Child Abuse, 21 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches (55 x 65 cm), 1989

Hatred of Psychoanalysis: On the Psychosomatic vs. Organic Problem in Psychoanalysis, and its Relationship to the Conditions of Possibility for Psychoanalytic Abuse and Malpractice1 [Last edit: 8/8/26]

For Barbara Freeman

“Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak?” — Mao Tse-Tung, “Oppose Book Worship”, 1930

“Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will never hurt me.” — English language nursery-rhyme

Since publishing “Not Nothing, Not Enough” in Parapraxis magazine, I have heard from five other people who had similar experiences, at times with slightly lower stakes (e.g. onsetting Crohn’s disease or unknown pregnancy that was denied by the analyst to be an organic symptom, instead of cancer). I also went through the proper avenues, reporting my psychoanalyst to the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) where she is faculty, and IPTAR, where she is seeking employment. The former stonewalled me—the director, Lisa B. Bialkin disavowed any responsibility and questioned the veracity of my claims, condescendingly implying that they were the result of a mind addled by organic illness. My exchange with IPTAR is in abeyance. My former analyst is also still on the masthead as an editorial advisor of Parapraxis magazine. These proceedings have helped me start to answer the question I concluded the essay with: was this a case of one bad apple, a minor body problem in psychoanalysis, or a total crisis of legitimacy? After ruling out the first option, my question is, how big of a body problem, or how small of a legitimation crisis, does psychoanalysis have?

Psychoanalysis claims that the human animal can get sick in two ways: organically, in which case, the biomedical sciences intervene—one must take immunosuppressants for autoimmune disorders, chemotherapy for cancer. Or, humans can get sick psychosomatically—the human body can experience psychological conflicts that signify through symptoms, and psychoanalysis is equipped to treat. There seems not to be much systematic treatment of where, in the constellation of potential symptom arrangements, the sovereign claim of the psychosomatic ends and the organic begins, or vice versa. That’s not necessarily a problem, and this is probably impossible, or at least too impractical to develop—it would likely reinstate the old requirement for analysts to be trained medical doctors, and the field has basically moved in the opposite direction. No matter, the issue seems to be suitably patched with practical advice—as many analysts have told me, analysts are taught to rule out organic illness first. And this may work; however, this is, ultimately, up to the whims of analysts—they have the potential power to narrate symptoms based on their own interests. That’s not a problem as long as the interests of the analyst and analysand are not aligned—psychoanalysis knows they can’t be—but occupy enough of a shared topography upon which analyst and analysand can collaborate to fashion a frame. My conceit is that the friction between the organic and psychosomatic registers a fault line, a space of slippage between tectonic plates under that terrain. If I’m persuasive, then psychoanalysts can be conscientious of that fault line and attend to it however they like—they already, hopefully, know that there is no such thing as a riskless relationship.

What are the interests of psychoanalysts? To me, there is only one incentive analysts are almost guaranteed to follow: they seek to legitimate psychoanalysis. It’s how they make money, it’s a set of narratives that orient, and confer value on, their sense of being-in-the-world. It’s also common sense to assume institutions are interested in their own continued, uncompromised existence. There is a second, but less guaranteed incentive: that analysts seek to alleviate suffering, for various reasons. I can only speculate—it could be instrumental to the main goal of legitimating psychoanalysis, they could genuinely be kindhearted people, they could feel some kind of debt to society—who knows? There is also a possibility, also impossible to comment on schematically, that individual analysts might be in the field for antisocial reasons—for instance, to sadistically revel in the suffering of their analysands, or to enjoy having power over them. This kind of analyst would not want to alleviate, nor exacerbate, but prolong, the analysand’s suffering. This question can only be answered on an individual, case-by-case basis. To me, the only reliable, general assumption that can be made about analysts is that they seek to legitimate analysis, because my belief is that all people seek to legitimate the narratives in which they conceive themselves to be emplotted.

The same cannot be said for analysands, for whom the objectives are exactly inverted: the primary goal is the alleviation of suffering, and they are only interested in psychoanalysis’ legitimacy insofar as it assures them that they will reach their goal: “I don’t care if it’s legit, I just care that it works” is the reasoning of the analysand. In the event of the ambiguous symptom—and almost all symptoms are ambiguous—the nascent friction between these differing sets of priorities (the priorities of the analyst and the priorities of the analysand) can produce an entropic situation such as the one I experienced, which was unable to be accounted for by psychoanalytic discourse, which has not sufficiently grappled with the conditions of possibility for malpractice in the analytic dyad. This is an immanent problem to psychoanalysis. It is not a question of bad or good apples.

Put differently: we know that psychoanalysis is not a science, and that science is not a stable category. Certain situations of ambiguity or conflict activate an aspiration to scientificity, which is a legalistic claim to knowledge, authority, and the power-effects that might be bestowed on someone who might be able to wield scientificity in order to effectuate an outcome, which hopefully, but not necessarily, would be the alleviation of suffering (it could also be the extraction of money, for example). The ambiguous symptom is the event in which biomedicine, psychoanalysis, and illness are all nominated to contend for sovereignty to narrate the body. Doctors and analysts both, separately, litigate the same question from opposite corners. Doctors say, “you may or may not be really sick;” psychoanalysts say, “you may or may not be somatizing.” There is also a third party: illness—which we do not normally think of as an agent, but undeniably jockeys for position—if it could talk, would say something like: “part, or all, of your being, will belong to me.” The etiquette is that psychoanalysis bows out and lets biomedicine throw the first haymaker at this internal enemy, however it is unclear that psychoanalytic institutions are specifically selecting for magnanimity.

This could be mitigated with institutional reform, erecting structures of accountability, and establishing a zone in which the fact of this situation of contention could be formalized, however at present it doesn’t seem like there are many reasons for analytic institutions to do this when they hold all the cards and are accountable to no one. There are individuals within psychoanalysis interested in carving passageways between biomedicine and psychoanalysis—Solms, Kernberg, probably others—I don’t have any particular feelings on their projects, assessing them is up to psychoanalysts and other specialists. Having read bits of both, my gut says that psychoanalysis is antisomatic in its constitution beyond repair. However, psychoanalysis is an above-the-neck treatment, so my gut is not allowed in this essay. However, if it were, it would ask: “why there is not more scholarship in conversation with endocrinology, since research on the thymus gland suggests that this organ is involved in the production of the self-nonself sensation?” Or, “what is to be made of the gut-brain axis?” Most of the people I talk to who are “into psychoanalysis” normally talk about poetry, film, and art—my territory, as an artist-writer—not the thymus or the intestinal tract.

There are clearly many who correctly identify the friction between psychoanalysis and biomedicine, and seek to separate psychoanalysis further, and no doubt believe that this is the healthier option for everyone. Pulsion in New York, which I’m familiar with as an artist, seems eager to buttress psychoanalysis by building, or reinforcing, its bridges with art, the literary humanities, and poetry. I have critiqued the notion that art can, or should aspire to, enrich non-art fields, here.2 I have not yet learned of a cohesive movement, within psychoanalysis, to make it safer for the kinds of people that psychoanalysis finds thorny: the organically ill, the racialized, transgender people, and those for whom the nonreligious is a fraught, or possibly spurious, category. This is the broader impetus for my inquiry: the three things I see to be determining the present—proliferating ethno-religious warfare, transphobia, and widespread illness—are persistently uninteresting to Marxism and psychoanalysis, which are the traditions that my friends, perhaps unwisely, tend to yoke their aspirations for a better future to.

To recapitulate a final point from “Not Nothing, Not Enough”: dissent on the part of analysands is fraught from the start: from the perspective of psychoanalysis, analysands are axiomatically prone to mis-locate the causes of their pain, and therefore, unreliable narrators of the things that have happened to them that continue to cause them pain. I believe that my pain comes from psychoanalytic abuse, and cancer. However I cannot know this to be true. It could still come from an “oedipal triangle,” but I doubt that, because I just went on a lovely bike ride in pitch darkness with my father.3 In situations of ambiguity—a consequence of friction between discursive lineages—the compactor of power’s inertia flattens out apprehension of a possible structural flaw in psychoanalysis. Above all else, the show must go on. For this reason, the situation I’ve outlined here—the situation in which the organically ill are prone to slip into a methodological crack—will likely never improve.

This is as far as I feel comfortable going, writing from a position of credulity and fairness towards psychoanalysis. My view is that psychoanalytic social theory has already been proven moribund for its inadequacy to account for racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural difference in the world—in other words, it is Eurocentric. Psychoanalysis is not unfamiliar with this critique, and will tout the decolonial psychoanalytic lineage inaugurated by Fanon as a counterexample. As an artist, I study lines, which are kind of like lineages. I understand lines to be confusing, since they are the enactment of the act of delimitation as such, which always provokes an experience of vertiginous, groundless terror (improving at art is the experience of becoming accustomed to, and eventually wielding, this experience of groundlessness and the arbitrariness of delimitation that is immanent to the attempt to signify). Lineages are scandalous for all of us. Those who work within the lineage of psychoanalysis, as scholars or as practitioners, can become mystified by the question of whether they are modifying, sanctifying, patching, propagating, rescuing, extending, revitalizing, or superseding and therefore rendering obsolete, the overall project that inaugurated the discursive lineage in the first place.

This is not to say that there are not interesting attempts being made in a Fanonian lineage, which to me is not necessarily a psychoanalytic lineage, because Fanonism may prove to have been a supersession of psychoanalysis, because the supersession of psychoanalysis may start with psychoanalysis’ immanent body problem. Our apprehension of his contribution need not be synced up with the lifetime of Fanon. For instance, psychoanalysis is able to claim Fanon but does not claim Wynter, but Wynter draws from Fanon’s sociogenic principle. In other words, lineage is unstable—as all delimitations are—and is constantly getting re-litigated. I seek to push that process of re-litigation forward with this text—it is a provocation. I understand Parapraxis Magazine’s efforts to address questions related to racial and religious warfare in their Palestine Issue as an expression of their attempt to practice fidelity to the genocidal war in Gaza, and I regard that attempt as admirable. However, my sense is that their aspiration to meet the moment, also ricochets back onto and into the premise of their project—which is that psychoanalytic social theory has meaningful, useful things to say about racial and religious warfare. My conclusion from their editorial response to the catastrophe, is similar to what Balibar said about the relationship between war and Marxism: that war exerts a “deconstructive effect” on psychoanalysis, “stretching it to its limits and showing that it could not really give an account of those limits.”4

I began to think along these lines when I attended a Parapraxis seminar, and brought up the problem of settler consciousness in Israel and the United States—my question was acknowledged, but the core participants seemed much more interested in conducting exegesis on the margin notes of Sigmund Freud than taking on the problem of how racist attitudes are successfully inculcated in the youth in order to ensure their reproduction across generational timescales. On the question of what is to be done, the essays in Parapraxis are dissatisfying and weak: we are implored to “work towards a future where human rights and dignity are truly upheld for all”, to “move through melancholy”, to “heighten contradictions”, to “insist on the dignity of the cry.” As someone who singlehandedly moved around $10k to Gaza while battling blood cancer, I’m left asking: “is that it?” In collaboration with two other artists, Raza Kazmi and Adriana Ramić, I’ve figured out a method—hawking drawings at below market rate on Instagram—that generates cash, cooking gas, and medicine. Ultimately, if the best the psychoanalytic method can offer is an inventory of concepts used to write aporetic theory-poems about war, it will prove itself superfluous and redundant: we already have the discipline of poetry for that, and most poets I talk to concede that the best poetry has already been written. If Parapraxis were to announce its goal to steward a process through which the psychoanalytic scaffold would be re-combinated like tinker-toys into something that can measure up to the problems of racial and religious warfare, then I would happily partner with them—however it is unclear to me that that is the case. An investment in a lineage and the historical necessity for new ideas can, in some situations, be at odds.

Clinical psychoanalysis I am less ready, and less equipped, to dismiss than psychoanalytic social theory, because I am outside the church. Additionally, I met an amazing Lacanian analyst, Barbara Freeman—who unfortunately recently passed away. So I had to define clinical psychoanalysis as the outcomes generated by psychoanalytic clinical practice and institutions. I write from the non-scholarly, non-practicing position of a possible victim of some kind of psychoanalysis—possibly, bad psychoanalysis; however, to me, it remains to be definitively concluded that I did indeed have a particularly bad psychoanalyst, not merely an ordinarily mediocre one. Similarly, whether or not I am a victim seems also up for litigation, because I don’t feel like a victim, I feel like a canary in darkness. My only available data are conversations with psychoanalysts, and my own experience. This has lead to my personal position of hatred, that I would throw my entire weight behind, let’s say, if I were to receive a positive test tomorrow that would spell oblivion: I hate psychoanalysis, which has begun to appear as a hermetic, priestly, phatic, fortressed discourse that subjects those it harms to gaslighting and dismissal. It resembles a middling, protracted genre of hypnosis that refuses any more interesting tools or heuristics than chatter. My experience has been that one covers more ground by integrating a compass, a straightedge, and poison. Jamieson Webster strikes me as brilliantly savvy rather than brilliant, but she is ultimately correct in her intuition that psychoanalysis needs a boost, else it will calcify into a glib secular mysticism. She has this in common with Lacan, who, of all people, understood that psychoanalysis needed a redemptive rescue rope, which is why he framed his own friction with the state of psychoanalysis in his moment in a religious grammar of excommunication and heresy. My hatred for psychoanalysis is not only based in what it has done to me and others, nor is it aimed at the history of the discourse, which remains generative and useful, but for its present abeyance, mediocrity, and consignment to produce theoretico-poetic plate-spinning while sickness, stupidity, and catastrophe proliferate.

I intend to nominate the hatred of psychoanalysis as a valid position to have for someone who wants the world to have net less suffering. It is unclear to me that psychoanalysis is ameliorating more suffering than it is causing, and that things would not improve if the institutes all shuttered overnight. To clutter the world with noise when it is in dire need of a signal is a type of crime. I mean to enter into the discourse the possibility that it might be time, in light of the looming extinction of the species, for a new nonscience of desire-in-aggregate, which might be synonymous with an ambition to modify psychoanalysis to such a degree that it looks less like the past and more like a non-annihilated future.

A note on “illness”

A friend asked if my critique is limited to the “specific to the situation of illness.” I don’t view illness as a specific condition, but a name for the fact of the instability of the human body—in other words, illness and debility are processes that we are all undergoing, all the time, at different rates, in fits and starts. For me, someone floored the gas relatively early, contributing to my posture of impatience and impiety.

This text is in search of peer review. I would like to credit the Mimbres School for the Humanities for directing me to the relevant literature that informed my thinking on this topic.

^{Frank Stella, Marrakech, 77 × 77 in. (195.6 × 195.6 cm), 1964.}

Negating “Identity Politics” into “Critique of Color” (On “Identity Art” and “Identity Politics” in the Art Field) [Last edit: 8/26/26]

“light is menaced from within” — Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” (1963)

For Paul Gilroy

Preamble

If someone dismisses an artwork using “identity politics” as a rationale, they are making a racist dog whistle. Not everybody who uses this term is a racist—things can get confusing in discourse. However, “identity art” does not exist. There exists only art in which the artist’s biography features in more and less oblique ways. There is no artwork without a living artist, which is to say, biography is a precondition for every artwork made in history.1

Recognizing that every human animal has race and gender is not a regression to an underdeveloped way of thinking. Rei Terada’s Metaracial discusses this: from the standpoint of the racialist Hegelian, any talk of race is a sign that one is speaking to “insufficiently politico-historical people who, for whatever reasons, adhere to an incorrect understanding of reality.”

There is no known nongendered or nonracial position. This is the most tendentious claim I’ll make here. Of course, I concede that the crusades, 1492, the colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian peninsula, the transatlantic slave trade, the codification of scientific racism in 19th century Europe, the era of high imperialism, the advent of industrial genocide as an aim of war, are all important coordinates for tracking the ascendance the race concept in history. And I do not intend to trans-historicize the race concept. When I say there is no known nonracial position, I mean to say that since the existence of what we now call the “population” crests the horizon, which Marshall Hodgson has argued is a pretext for the concept of history, I have not encountered a situation absent of any of the constitutive or prototypical elements of the race concept, in particular, the legal category of the slave, which is thousands of years old. My education has focused on studying race, not gender; however, the fact of sati suggests to me that patriarchal power, and its output, gender, are both quite old. My view is that both terms and phenomena transform, modify, and are modified in time, but that history can still, in certain circumstances, appear patterned into nameable phenomena. I do not believe that the slaveries of the past and the racisms of the present have nothing to do with each other.2 I refer to empirical materials on race in premodernity, for instance, Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, not to trans-historicize race, but to argue that its ontology remains persistently enigmatic into the present.

I’m not ruling out that a nonracial position may exist in the deep past of human history, or far in the future, but we will likely not reach it, because of climate change rendering the human animal extinct, due to us transgressing the ecological corridor that is the pretext for human existence.3 Part of this is due to our monetary-legal-military regime sometimes called “capitalism.” Part of this is due to hubris.

That some artists make work that appears more “ethnic”, “gendered”, “cultural”,—or whatever other term you want to use—is not an error. It is not a regression to an adolescent way of thinking. This is encoded Hegelian racism—the sense that nonwhite people, and their modalities of expression, are “anterior” or “underdeveloped” in history. Dean Kissick’s emphasis on how “identity art” looks “old” is an example of this.

Mediocrity in art has no correlation with any artists’ ancestry. If a nonwhite or nonmale artist makes an artwork that appears trite, cliché, formally not compelling, familiar, otherwise unsatisfying, it is fine to identify it as such, perhaps with a more modest comment like, “it’s just not my cup of tea.” Or, “it’s derivative of another artist.” You must do so without executing the move of condescension I’ve outlined here.

Why? Because racism remains a disgraceful stain on the world. The hostility to “identity politics” is a displacement of the shame we feel for that stain, onto the victims of that stain.4 This specific conversation has been going on for at least a decade—it’s my hope that we can wind the whole thing down.

Art and Alterity: A Brief History Lesson

There remains the question of where all this “identity art” discourse came from. At the turn of the 20th century, art changed—nobody disputes that, and the causes have been surveyed most clearly by Christopher S. Wood’s A History of Art History, in part because he understands art history as propelled by the pressure of the figure of the other, who creates visually but does not make “art”—the pressure of pre-raphaelite painting, of South Asian art, of African sculptural objects, the revelations of Lascaux and Altamira, and Art Brut, are all examples of this dynamic of challenge-and-integration in Wood’s narration of art history.

Alterity was the first of two forces that propelled modernism forward. Modernists were preoccupied with the figure of the “primitive”—which does not, and never has, existed—they were mistaken. “The primitive” is a romantic figuration generated by a dazzling misapprehension of the Darwinian event: someone who is almost Man, but still slightly Ape. Modernists had a special curiosity about Africa as a place where dark-skinned people and dark magic—“fetish objects”—came from. To read the writings of modernist painters is to find a fascination with visual forms associated with African, Iberian, East Asian, South Asian, Indigenous American, and other “other” people. There is a wealth of literature litigating whether their fascinations were lurid, violent, nascent-utopian, earnestly cosmopolitan, or something else. To me, it was all of these, in different situations. For instance, I find Ad Reinhardt’s curiosity about Islam, Zen Buddhism, and the connotations of color, to be a generative contribution to our tradition. He does not seem only or predominantly motivated by orientalist fetishism. On the other hand, I identify Wyndham Lewis’ engagement with the fact of alterity, for instance, in Paleface, to be avowedly white supremacist—Lewis would not have disagreed with this. No doubt this fascination of art for racial difference continues to produce effects in the present; it is a given that popular culture is obsessed with black cool. Meanwhile, critics of identity have a negative obsession with identity politics as an impediment to them getting what they want: class struggle (Liu) or “Good Art” (Kissick). This is also an expression of their fascination with the identity-body-biography-race problem—it is a shame that it is mostly negatively polarized, contemptuous, and condescending in tone.

The second force that propelled modernism was history. Modernism was fueled by conflicts over whether or not art and life were changing toward a shared horizon, and the particular shape of that future. There was, more or less, a shared consensus, a shared hope, that there would be a convergence on an unmediated world, illuminated by promising new discoveries in science, technology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Two World Wars, Hiroshima, the Shoah, Vietnam, counterinsurgency against Black Americans and decolonization movements around the world, and the collapse of the Soviet Union obliterated this aspiration, and artists were correct to throw in the towel on the grandiose idea that art had a guaranteed relationship with utopia. Today, there is a longing for an assurance that artistic progress and social progress be tethered together and synced up. This should be scrutinized, so that it does not metastasize into an irrational longing for a mystified past in which we knew they were synced up. We have never known that: again, modernist painting registers not the fact of, but the polarities of hope and doubt about, this synchronicity.

Unfortunately, like other forms of reactionary nostalgia, the desire for harmonious, nonracial consensus manifests as a backlash against philosophies of difference. I’m not sure exactly why this happens, but it might have something to do with the way that race organizes not just space—into ghettos and concentration camps—but time—into a “tribal” past and a “utopian, nonracial” future. We already know the past was not “primitive,” because “the primitive” is a false concept generated by racism. Whether the idea of the “nonracial future” will materialize, whether that is a realistic or desirable goal, is a question for politics. Those who affirm that it is both realistic and desirable must contend with the possibility that the nonracial future may be a false concept generated by racism, just as we know “the primitive” to be. We should unlink utopia from being necessarily coupled with nonraciality.

The caricature of the philosophies of difference erected by critics of identity politics, is one of condescending dismissal, not good-faith engagement, which would start with the understanding that philosophies of difference were developed in part as an attempt to come to terms with, and practice fidelity to, the catastrophes of the first part of the 20th century. Critiques of discourses are fine and necessary, however, unless one is vigilant to the possibility that they are animated by racialist metaphysics—i.e. being racist—the knife of reason that cleaves discourses apart slips and cuts the perceived personification—or perceived wielder—of those philosophies: the “critic or artist of color who is irrationally obsessed with color,” who reads post-structuralism, black studies, gender and sexuality studies, who takes gender and race seriously as autonomous problems, not as mediations of a primary class antagonism that propels history. Some Marxist critics of “identity”, such as Catherine Liu, seem to believe that race is an ideological phantasm propagated by the “professional managerial class” in complicity with the bourgeoisie to impede the development of class consciousness and class solidarity. Class is, in their view, realer and truer than race because the universal faculty of human reason is in the process of apprehending the truth of dialectical materialism. My view is that that is an interesting 19th century German idea that I disagree with because it is too woo woo for me. To me, Marxism cannot monopolize the claim to being a world-changing discourse, because there is too much countervailing evidence of other discourses that have changed the world—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. My view is that race and class are both technologies of arranging space, time, and the population, engineered by people with power in an attempt to ensure specific, often violent outcomes, will afflict certain parts of a population more, and others less. In other words, class and race are two different ways of managing a population using language and violence. To what degree this conception is compatible with Marxism, I’ll leave to the Marxologists.

Concluding Remarks

Why are darker-skinned peoples, or discourses associated with darker-skinned peoples, continuously available scapegoats when people are attempting to account for the existence of all kinds of problems—not just social problems, but in this case, art problems? We return to the entangled enigmas of light, color, and desire, and are confronted with the persistent, ongoing victory of “light” over “dark,” which visual art—since visuality is the sense privileged by both racism and philosophy—should or could be, equipped to investigate, if it wanted to. It would substitute in a “critique of color,” a potential Darby English has elaborated on, and cast out the continued scapegoating of the “artist or critic of color.”

That the critique of color—the inquiry into the racial ordering of the world—is a friend, not an enemy, to art is not only authenticated by the history of modernist painting. “Identity” is not not related to race. “Identity” is a name for the varied ways that the human animal practices fidelity to shared geometries, narratives, and color relationships that carve up space, time, and the population—patterns in fashion, rhythm in dance, shapes and colors in painting, nadirs and peaks in shared stories of suffering and overcoming, interval and pitch in the blues and the adhan.5 Art, as a research program into how to arrange geometries, colors, texts, and intervals into forces, is the best tool to effectuate modifications of “identity,” if we agree that it does indeed require modification. Personally, I’m fine with who I am, but I understand that some wish not to be who, or what, they are.

I would like to credit the Mimbres School for the Humanities for directing me to the relevant literature that informed my thinking on this topic.