PUBLICATIONS:
JUST PUBLISHED:
Finite Freedom: Finite freedom: diffraction patterns in psychotherapy, in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society (2024)
[Get the full paper here]
This paper elucidates the work of science and technology studies (STS) feminists Donna Haraway and Karen Barad as their theories relate to the production of matter, agency, and knowledge in psychotherapy. Haraway’s and Barad’s work center on questions of epistemology and highlight the ontological and ethical dimensions of knowledge production. Haraway and Barad articulate a diffractive methodology which attends to the situatedness of knowledge and the materiality of perception, articulating the conditions for an ontological-epistemological-ethical entanglement which situates agency in the entanglement as a whole. I will begin by illuminating this aspect of their work, which will then be interwoven with the life of another STS feminist, my patient Marianna. My clinical entanglement with their work will borrow and hopefully resonate with the focus of this special issue on academic freedom.
Psychoanalysis Against Fascism: Fascism, Terrorism, and the Fascist and Terrorist Within
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 15(1), pp. 48-63. 2018.
[Get the full paper here]
In this paper I explore how we can open a psychic space to resist the intra-psychic impact of social violence and the psychological pressures of our contemporary culture.
My paper was referenced and nicely summarized by Dr. Jacqueline Karen Andrea Serra Undurraga in her paper What are our psychotherapeutic theories and practices producing? (The European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 2023):
"Shomron-Atar (2018) uses Deleuze and Guattari to think about how psychoanalysis can stop being complicit with what they call fascism. Shomron-Atar is wary of using concepts as hegemonic categories – e.g. developmental frameworks – that make us think that we can grasp the client. In this grasping, we might think that we recognise something in the client but without any risk to ourselves and any challenge to our approach. ‘It is the unwillingness to be transformed by the other that is fascist’. (Shomron-Atar, 2018, p. 61)"
RECENT PRESENTATIONS:
TWO paper presentations at the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), 2019 Annual Conference, Rutgers University, October 2019 on the subject of DISPLACEMENT:
1. Title: Transothering: Enjoy your displacement!
Abstract:
Extrapolating from a schizoanalytic, Deleuzean framework, our role as others to patients is to join them in going beyond overlapping sensibilities and making the not yet sustainable possible. The therapist as other travels towards the inassimilable in the patient and creates a holding environment where the unfathomable can be attended to with curiosity. This pull outside is set in motion by the therapist when he or she functions not as a knowing, reflective, or dialogical other but as an Other-function, whose role it is to pull the patients’ gaze beyond the logic of the situation.
Deleuze criticizes theories that reduce the other to a particular object or to another subject. Deleuze suggests that the other become a function, a bend in the patient’s sensibilities that pulls the patient’s desires toward unimagined possibilities of life. This is a horizon of excess, discomfort, and overwhelm or, with a more hopeful perspective, a horizon of joy, excitement, and feeling alive.
The schizoanlytical therapist’s goal is not comfort, or discomfort, but to develop the ability of the emotionally and socially enlivening capacity of the patient to be such an Other-function to other people in their lives. The therapist acts as a guide beyond the territories of sensibility of the patient, into domains that may not be sustained by the social environment of the patient or the cultural environment in which the patient and therapist meet. It is an existential meeting but not of recognition of a pre-existing self. It is a holding, but not a containment, of difference and not of self or same.
In rhizomatic form the presentation will weave the schizoanalytic notion of the Other-function with the thousand, tiny, magic moments in therapy in which the therapist and patient meet in the terrain of differences.
2. Title: Displacement in Itself
Abstract:
'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
"Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
How can we help another person go somewhere new? If we beckon they follow us they will repeat our same or some representation of their same or some intersubjective dialectic of these sames. If we frustrate their journey to an other's same they will collapse into subjectivity and eternally repeat the same. We both have to become displaced, but not displaced from any person/place, but displaced in displacement itself. This is the mind-boggling schizoanalytic solution: displacement in itself - not in semantics or meaning (no explanation possible), but in material time and place (the eternally returning non-place of the durational present). The task of the displaced then becomes not how to be me/them in a new place nor what to transfer (Who/where are we going to transfer or countertransfer to if we aren't coming from anywhere and we don't know who we've been?) but how to (continue) to be different in the sameness of another place.
In this paper I would like to explore what Delueze describes as the "the [therapeutic/trasnformative] power of beginning and beginning again" in my experience working with people permanently living in “vacationland” (Maine) as well as through Philip K. Dick's recurring struggles to survive displacements in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
ANOTHER PAPER at the Psychology and the Other annual conference, Boston, October 2019
Titile: Deleuze as Charon - How to Traverse the Gates of the Other into the New
Abstract:
Extrapolating from a schiaoanalytic, Deleuzean framework, our role as others to patients is to join them in going beyond overlapping sensibilities and making the not yet sustainable possible. This is can be our response and responsibility towards the trauma that results from inassimilable experiences. The therapist as other travels towards the inassimilable in the patient and creates a holding environment where the unfathomable can be attended to with curiosity. This pull outside is set in motion by the therapist when he or she functions not as a knowing, reflective, or dialogical other but as an Other-function, whose role it is to pull the patients’ gaze beyond the logic of the situation. Deleuze criticizes theories that reduce the other to a particular object or to another subject. Deleuze suggests that the other become a function, a bend in the patient’s sensibilities that pulls the patient’s desires toward unimagined possibilities of life. This is a horizon of excess, discomfort, and overwhelm or, with a more hopeful perspective, a horizon of joy, excitement, and feeling alive. Contemporary psychoanalysis tends to treat the other as a mirroring, dialectic, or metaphoric relationship of self and other-self - all of which pre-suppose the ideal parameters of the patient's self, rather than allowing the patient to expand beyond their boundaries and beyond the comfort of the therapist. The schizoanlytical therapist’s goal is not comfort, or discomfort, but to develop the ability of the emotionally and socially enlivening capacity of the patient to be such an Other-function to other people in their lives. The therapist acts as a guide beyond the territories of sensibility of the patient, into domains that may not be sustained by the social environment of the patient or the cultural environment in which the patient and therapist meet. It is an existential meeting but not of recognition of a pre-existing self. It is a holding, but not a containment, of difference and not of self or same. It is a taking of turns to ferry into the unknown.
This paper is part of a greater project of applying Deleuze's theoretical critique of psychoanalysis to contemporary therapy praxis - focusing here on Deleuze's (1969/1990) notion of the Other-function and the therapist as an Other-function. In rhizomatic form the presentation will weave the schizoanalytic notion of the Other-function with the thousand, tiny, magic moments in therapy in which the therapist and patient meet in the terrain of differences.
MORE PRESENTATIONS:
Hassidism Against Terrorism: Speaking In A State Of Constant Overwhelm
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2017.
The Dreamreality of a Schizoanalytic Psychotherapy.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2016.
Almost Crazy: The High-Functioning Psychosis of Annie and Hu.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS), New York, New York, March 2015.
What We Live By: Becoming Love in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2014.
A Therapy to Come: Through a Door and There May Also Be a Chair.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, Jersey. October 2014.
Psychosis in Waves: A Genealogy of the Anti-psychiatric Movement.
International Society for the Study of Psychosis and Schizophrenia (ISPS), Rishon LeZion, Israel. December 2013.
What is Psychoanalysis? (I): Concept Therapy.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2013.
Movement Without Movement: The (Film) Setting of the (Analytic) Setting.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2013.
Gendertrauma: The social-relational investment in incest taboo and transgression.
University of California, Los Angeles Center for the Study of Women: Thinking Gender, Los Angeles, California, January 2012.
The Trauma of Gender and the Gender of Trauma.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2012.
The eye of the story: Film genre and Technique in the analytic session.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2012.
Dr. Derner: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Institute.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey. October, 2012.
Inclusion, Exclusion, and Illusion.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2012.
Immanent and Extensive Object Relations: De-coding Michel Tournier’s Robinsonade through Gilles Deleuze’s Melanie Klein.
Division of Psychoanalysis (Division 39), American Psychological Association, 32nd Annual Spring Meeting, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2012.
She Who Makes a Beast of Herself, Gets Rid of the Pain of Being a Man: Post-Humanism and the Trauma of Solitude.
Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), 11th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies, Buffalo, New York, March 2012.
The politics of solitude: the seduction and ethics of eating one’s self.
Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 2011.
Beyond Ambiguity: How Much of a Woman/Man Am I Not?
Universidad Del Claustro De Sor Juana Queer Studies Easter Symposium, Mexico City, Mexico, April 2009.
המגדר של קפיטליזציה -היפר ואל לערפול מעבר (Beyond Ambiguity and Toward the Hyper-Capitalization of Gender.
Sex Acher (Other Sex), Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, May 2008.