They would have transitioned me: third conditional TERF grammar of trans childhood

Some of the most virulent public trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourse in the UK follows the grammatical form of the third conditional: if I had grown up now, I would have been persuaded to transition. This articulation of the hypothetical threat of a transition that did not happen but is imagined, in retrospect, to be not just possible but forcibly enacted plays an important role, both politically and psychically, in a contemporary political landscape that is threatening the livelihoods of trans children. Interrogating this discourse via an analysis of an open letter by J.K. Rowling, and a documentary by Stella O’Malley, this article asks: what might we learn about contemporary transphobia in the UK if we took seriously the grammar of TERF discourse animated by trans childhood? It argues that while the third conditional grammar of TERF discourse could articulate a politics of solidarity between cis and trans positionalities and politics, its potential for a shared political standpoint is routinely interrupted by the defence mechanisms that are oriented by the psychic life of the child. Interrogating these defence mechanisms at the level of the cultural, the article traces out paranoia (as reading practice and psychic state) as well as projection, as two main modes of TERF engagement with trans childhood. The article thus engages with the range of real and fantasmatic impossibilities that haunt the trans child both in the present and the past, and it contributes to the growing body of scholarship on trans childhoods. In doing so, it makes the case that public discourse on trans children should desist from hypothetical third conditional claims, and instead find ways of embracing trans childhoods unconditionally.

The stream of life: from frozen babies to the birth of psychic life

This article describes the work with a flexible model having Esther Bick’s infant observation model in mind. Having to solve the problem of the many babies in orphanages who had been abandoned and were often sick, I worked out with the psychologist a model of intervention using the knowledge the psychologist had of the approach of infant observation, but adapting it to the context of the orphanage. I helped the psychologist observer to use her countertransference to contain the babies’ distress and interact with them in order to give them the possibility of feeling loved and understood, in order to make space in their minds for introjecting a good object. On behalf of the observations that the psychologist, whom I will call Ling, had with babies Bea and Sally, we can say that the dramatic distress of their being abandoned by their families has been worked through because the psychologist was able to give a loving space with significant interaction. The sessions reported in this article give a portrait of the inside world of despairing babies, and document the evolution towards being able to keep in mind a good enough object that can help them survive.

“A point that escapes Darwin”: Crises of colonial self in the nature essays of Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson

This article shows how the colonial nature essay both spoofs and affirms crises of the European self in British India’s post-Rebellion era (1857–1947). Authored by English civil servants who took to naturalism as a hobby, the nature essay’s exaggerated misadventures with quotidian animals such as ants, beetles, and mosquitos parody British accounts of the 1857 Rebellion, while dehumanizing caricatures of uncooperative servants reduce Indian society’s complex hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and race to buffoonery. Taking as a case study two of the genre’s exemplars, Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson, I read the colonized animals and people in these texts as agents who destabilize the material and psychic life of empire. Historians and postcolonialists agree that censorship, paranoia, and violence defined British rule over India between 1857 and 1947, yet they overlook the everyday life of empire. The nature essay’s peculiar synthesis of humour and science grants surprising insights into how colonial agents understood themselves as Raj hegemony shifted into its final stages. As the nature essay’s colonized people and animals thwart the daily work of empire, they also reveal the colonial class’ failure to confront its anxieties about the sahib’s political and epistemic stability as a rational, post-Enlightenment agent destined to master the colony.

Conclusion

This is a survey of the intersecting problems of politics, aesthetics, and criticism. The identification of poetic personae, artistic play, and ironic reserve cannot be the ultimate target of criticism. An analysis of art executed in purely aesthetic terms elides the political dimension more generally. And this move specifically fails to grapple with the self-serving politics of “art for art’s sake.” The glorious plenitude of art needs to be considered next to its partner, the glorious plenitude of imperial power. These two ineffable marvels are in communication with one another. And the artist is the one who has crafted the dialog. When we move past the terms of the debate set by the artist we can find a psychic life of power that is complicated and disturbing. Talk of the mastery of the master-craftsman hides this from us. It hides both the political complicity and the painful paradoxes that must be lived in order to embrace the glory and shame of complicity. Such talk hides the way in which artistry captures, reflects, reproduces, intervenes in, and celebrates the socio-political milieu more generally. Or, to the extent one does discuss the above, an overly sentimental discourse of “resistance” is allowed to guide the discussion. We finish with an appraisal of the problematic politics of intertextuality and allusivity as critical obsessions. The narrowness of such a research agenda can itself become politically complicit by offering a bibliophilic hiding place for people who have something to hide.

ORAGE MYSTIQUE DE FRANÇOIS DE CUREL : MISE EN QUESTION DE LA « PIÈCE BIEN FAITE »

François de Curel, dont le théâtre est tombé quelque peu dans l’oubli, est considéré comme un représentant de « pièces à thèses ». Pourtant, malgré un certain attachement de l’auteur à la tradition classique, on lui reprochait de saborder les fondements mêmes de l’art dramatique. De fait, en étudiant Orage mystique, force nous est de constater qu’il tourne résolument le dos aux principes régulateurs de la fable, principes hérités des conceptions aristotéliciennes. Si le premier acte du drame semble obtempérer aux contraintes formelles d’une « pièce bien faite », dès le deuxième, l’écrivain brise le déroulement de l’action linéaire pour se focaliser non sur la dynamique des événements, mais sur la vie psychique du protagoniste. Ce faisant, Curel semble proposer le nouveau paradigme dramatique, où, au lieu de conflits interpersonnels censés pousser l’action en avant, nous assistons à des affrontements intrasubjectifs se déroulant dans la psyché du personnage central. François de Curelis considered a representative of “problem plays”, though his theatre has fallen into oblivion. However, despite the author’s attachment to the classical tradition, he was criticized for scuttling the very fundamental dramatic art. In fact, when studying Orage mystique (Mystical Storm), it is clear that he disregards the regulatory principles of the fable, principles inherited from Aristotelian conceptions. If the first act of the drama seems to comply with the formal constraints of a “well-made play”, in the second, the writer breaks the course of the linear action to focus not on the dynamics of events, but on psychic life of the protagonist. In this way, Curel proposes a new dramatic paradigm, in which intra-subjective confrontations develop within the psyche of the central character, instead of interpersonal conflicts meant to push the action forward.

Symbols of the songs by Leela Benare in Vijay Tendulkar’s play Silence! The court is in session

The current study explores and sheds light on the trials and tribulations of an independent Women, Miss. Leela Benare, in Vijay Tendulkar’s play Silence! The Court is in session. Here Tendulkar dwells on gender Discriminations. Till the commencement of the mock- trial, Benare is the most cheerful, talkative Character. She makes comments on her own independent life, on the behaviour of her fellow actors, she Sings and shows her vitality and assertiveness even in the second act when the mock trial with her as the Accused begins. In this context her songs are relevant to the structural design of the play as well as these Highlight the mental agony and pangs of a deep rooted mother. In Silence! The Court is in Session, though the dialogues of the characters are set in unvarnished prosaic terms, four songs and one poem have been used in order to add lyrical flavour to unvarnished language of reality. Tendulkar has these songs sung by Benare, the protagonist of the play, not by other characters. A song is no doubt a lyric that expresses a set of emotion, feeling and ideas and thereby exposes the psychic life of the speaker. The four songs in the play, of which two are derivative and the other two are composed by the dramatist, are set in Benare’s mouth in order to equip the woman with the right to narrate her life in lyrical terms.

Descriptive and analytical psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey as theoretical source of phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl

The article contains the critical reconstruction of descriptive and analytical psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey and its influence on the phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl. Dilthey describes three fundamental features of intrinsic psychic life, which make it different from external physical world: 1. Immediacy — psychic life is directly perceived as intrinsic process; physical world is indirectly perceived as external reality. 2. Connection — psychic life is organic connection of interrelated experiences, physical world is conglomeration of the separate facts. 3. Value — psychic experiences use to have the value to us, physical facts can be irrelevant to us. According to Dilthey descriptive and analytic psychology is possible since the psychic life is directly given as organic connection of experiences, which have a special value. The main method of psychology should be description of the psychic experience. Dilthey sketches out three main direction of this description: 1. Description of the main types of the psychic processes. 2. Description of the main connections of the human experiences. 3. Description of the special parts of the human experiences. On one hand, the phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl is grounded on the descriptive and analytic psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey. On another hand, Husserl criticizes some crucial points of Dilthey’s conception. First of all the founder of phenomenology and phenomenological psychology points out the connection of the notions “understanding” and “induction” in the psychological conception of Wilhelm Dilthey. On the contrary, according to Husserl the method of understanding should be based on the concept of intuition, which plays an important role in his phenomenological project.

Contribution to the Study of the Dynamics of the Self (I)

The author retraces, by means of a patient’s short analysis, the reshuffling of the forces at play in his psychic life. The article is about the continuity of the dreamlike sequences, which have highlighted the evolution of the patient’s ability to reconstruct a link with his objects, despite the influence of a narcissistic sector of his personality that hindered its development. All of this clinical material has enabled the author to support her theory of the balance between life drives and death drives, between reality-ego and narcissistic ego, which share the entire psychic organization.

Freud and the algorithm: neuropsychoanalysis as a framework to understand artificial general intelligence

The core hypothesis of this paper is that neuropsychoanalysis provides a new paradigm for artificial general intelligence (AGI). The AGI agenda could be greatly advanced if it were grounded in affective neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis rather than cognitive science. Research in AGI has so far remained too cortical-centric; that is, it has privileged the activities of the cerebral cortex, the outermost part of our brain, and the main cognitive functions. Neuropsychoanalysis and affective neuroscience, on the other hand, affirm the centrality of emotions and affects—i.e., the subcortical area that represents the deepest and most ancient part of the brain in psychic life. The aim of this paper is to define some general design principles of an AGI system based on the brain/mind relationship model formulated in the works of Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp. In particular, the paper analyzes Panksepp’s seven effective systems and how they can be embedded into an AGI system through Judea Pearl’s causal analysis. In the conclusions, the author explains why building a sub-cortical AGI is the best way to solve the problem of AI control. This paper is intended to be an original contribution to the discussion on AGI by elaborating positive arguments in favor of it.