Umbr(a): Utopia

by Joan Copjec, Joseph Jenkins, Juliet Flower MacCannell

We maintain that the invention of psychoanalysis discovers its true specificity at the precise point when Freud, having listened well to the appeals of his analysand, refuses to concern himself with making her 'happy again,' with recalibrating her relation to reality so as to help her finally achieve her 'full potential.' We can read this specificity at the outset, in Freud s early Studies on Hysteria , which concludes with these words of 'encouragement' to the 'Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.' One might say - and this would be to say nearly the same thing - that psychoanalysis arrives at the domain proper to it (and only it) when Freud, rather than respond to his patient's demand to simply get rid of her suffering - to excise, annihilate, or at least cauterize the symptom that stands between her and the world in which she recalls she once took so much satisfaction - instead allies himself to her symptom, positions himself as its oblique addressee. In so doing, Freud absents psychoanalysis once and for all from the normalizing schema of 'therapy,' a schema oriented toward the elimination of what is beyond the pleasure principle - today we call this orientation 'biopower' - and makes of it a practice oriented toward the subject's construction of a knowledge about the jouissance which alone marks her singularity. The promise of psychoanalysis, then, is neither personal happiness nor a happy return to the shared norms of the social field, but the articulation of a singular truth that opens up for the subject a horizon for creative action.

178 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2008

About the author

Joan Copjec is a philosopher, theorist, author, feminist, and prominent American Lacanian psychoanalyst. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo.