Film Screening and Panel Discussion:

Mourning, Knowledge, and the Voice in A FANTASTIC WOMAN (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)

Janice Lieberman, PhD, Isaac Tylim, PhD, Anna Fishzon, PhD, LP

Sebastián Lelio’s 2017 film, A Fantastic Woman, testifies to the violent forms the search for knowledge can take, and the importance of mourning and sublimation for the subject.  The mesmerizing trans mezzo-soprano Marina Vidal, played by the mesmerizing trans mezzo-soprano Daniela Vega, has an adoring older boyfriend, Orlando (Francisco Reyes).  They are in love; they celebrate Marina’s birthday and discuss a trip to Iguazú Falls; they go dancing, return home, and have sex.  In the wee hours, Orlando wakes up in distress and collapses, it turns out, from an aneurysm.  The frightened Marina rushes him to the hospital but he cannot be saved. 

Twenty minutes in, and Orlando is no more.  His death is sudden and unexpected.  He had not put his affairs in order, nor established a place for Marina in his will and within his family.  The remainder of the film is about Marina trying to mourn Orlando, to attend his wake and funeral despite the resistance of Orlando’s son and ex-wife; to care for their dog, Diabla; to grieve and memorialize the fullness of the man she knew.  In essence, to bury him.  In order to do this, she must be acknowledged by others as his partner and his beloved.  She must be recognized as a woman and as his woman.  

The main preoccupation of Marina’s various enemies—Orlando’s family, the police, and the medical examiners—is the question of what is down there, between her legs.  In a sense, it consumes Marina and Lelio, too, as both she and the film work hard to resist an easy solution to the issue of her sexual identity, an identity not reducible to genitalia.  

No other post-Freudian theorist has taken a more radical, almost categorical, view of psychosis than Jacques Lacan. His early experience of psychiatric training under Clérambault and at the Sainte-Anne Hospital had a profound impact on his reading of Freud. Lacan’s theories of psychosis have led to innovations around technique and the analytic setting that are little known in the United States. If psychosis is not on a spectrum with neurosis as a Kleinian, for example, might view it, then what implications does this have for thinking about patients “on the verge?” Where and how might we locate the question of madness in classical analysis using Lacanian theory and technique? Join us for this two-part series where we will discuss psychotic states, from untriggered psychosis, to breakdown and addiction, to what Lacan called psychosis proper, and the extreme mechanisms that set the stage for psychotic breaks, delusion, and paranoia.

For a better sense of Lacanian views of psychosis you might be interested in the following interview with psychoanalyst Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz (UK) by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler (also published in Division Review): http://www.the-site.org.uk/members-news/patricia-gherovici-manya-steinkoler-interview-dorothee-bonnigal-katz/

IPTAR-Q and the IPTAR Clinical Center present a daylong workshop on queer theory and its thorny relationship to psychoanalysis. All of the presenters are IPTAR members or candidates who are deeply invested in thinking about how Freudian psychoanalysis intersects with queerness as a mode of thought. Sam Semper, Co-Director of the IPTAR Clinical Center, will moderate the workshop. There will be four talks before lunch, in which each presenter will take up in their own ways the challenges of crossing queer theory and psychoanalysis in order to reconceptualize: notions of self as gendered and sexual (Brian Kloppenberg); queer temporality (Anna Fishzon); Foucault’s criticism of the modern incitement to speak sex as the truth of the self, a criticism in which psychoanalysis is deeply implicated (Ann Pellegrini); as well as trans and race in spaces both queer and psychoanalytic (Yukari Yanagino). After lunch, Max Malitzky will present an in-depth case along with his supervisor, Alan Bass, in order to show some of the ways in which the non-normative and non-essentialist modes of queer theory inform Freudian analytic practice.

This presentation will highlight similarities and differences between Lacan’s approach to psychoanalytic technique and both Freud’s approach and that of numerous contemporary analysts from non-Lacanian traditions. Whereas in Lacan’s approach the unconscious remains fundamental, the royal road to it is neither 1) the analyst’s countertransference, projective identification, self-disclosure, or intuition, nor 2) the analysand’s affective states. With his reformulation of the unconscious as the “subject supposed to know” and his reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic setting, we will explore Lacan’s innovations in technique with neurotics, including punctuation, oracular/poetic interpretation, scansion, the variable-length session, delayed use of the couch, and then focus on nonmeaning as opposed to understanding. The role of analysts as “giving what they do not have” as opposed to what they do have will be explored at length.

Contributors to the issue, as well as other psychoanalytic candidates and early-career clinicians, will discuss some of the themes brought up in Issue 7 relating to questions of psychoanalytic training and institutional psychoanalysis: transference within the institute, matters of pedagogy, the transmission of psychoanalysis, the evaluation of candidates, the role of the state in psychoanalytic training, the training analysis and its place in the birth of an analyst. Most broadly, we hope to provide an arena for candidates and early-career clinicians to theorize the candidate's position, as well as to articulate something of the problem represented by the speaking candidate.