2024 Spring Meeting Information

This year, sex returns from beyond the divide, into our Division. We, the steering committee, are revisiting our field’s most radical disruptions–reckoning with infantile sexuality, Freud’s insistence on human “bisexuality,” the universality of “perversion,” and insights about the impossibility of sex and overdetermination of desire. Psychoanalysis forced a confrontation with the permeating force of sex in psychic life and of sexual violence in social life; sex, however, has largely moved to the periphery in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Sex has been sacrificed, severed from clinical theory, to make psychoanalysis less subversive, apolitical.

Even worse, psychoanalysis has betrayed its original commitments and weaponized desire, using categories of pathology and perversion as violent tools of dehumanization. The ousting of radical desire is not part of the “natural” course of psychoanalytic theories; it has been forced by Nazis, capitalists, colonizers, and homophobes who have used psychoanalytic theory to justify ideologies of hate and dispossession under the guise of clinical expertise. As such, desire has been willfully misinterpreted along the way, rendering (certain) desires as dirty, pathological, or fearsome and subjecting desire to correction or abjection. Psychoanalysis took part in a long history of not only making “normal” desires a signal of moral distinction, sanctioned and prioritized, but also subjecting “abnormal” desires and the bodies that express them to violence and humiliation. While analysts ran with Freud’s abandonment of seduction theory, morphing theory into a license to deny and justify sexual violence, psychoanalysis also became a tool for protecting sexual sadism and violence. When the subaltern cannot speak, they also cannot make a “good victim.”

Alongside fascists and bigots are their liberal sympathizers who have, from the time of its inception, claimed that psychoanalysis will only survive as an apolitical handmaiden to power. Without an intentionally political psychoanalysis, desire has been cannibalized by a market that promises wellness for a price, whitewashes healing, and criminalizes sex work. Under the guise of liberal politics, white feminism and the Orientalist gaze have insisted on rescuing black and brown others. “Smash the patriarchy,” they say, “we can liberate you from a less enlightened existence and make you a happy colonized subject.” Long before Roe v. Wade and its demise, subaltern voices warned that the neoliberal subject’s “right to choose” was not enough to guarantee liberation. It appears sexual liberation (or any liberation movement or practice) is always at risk of becoming a white bourgeois stand-in for a deferred antiracist, anticapitalist revolution and decolonization.

We invite submissions that dig up, get in a conflict with, and tend to psychoanalytic theories and histories of sex, sexual difference, desire, and jouissance. This conference will honor the legacy of those who have used psychoanalysis to disrupt normalizing forces and defend radicalized desire–within and outside of our field. We recognize the vast geographies of psychoanalysis; and, as we convene in Washington, DC, the proverbial belly of empire, we will examine a psychoanalysis that is a global assemblage of theory and geopolitics, discipline and resistance, professionalization and generativity.

CO-CHAIRS

Jessica Chavez, Ph.D.

Jessica Joseph, Ph.D.

STEERING COMMITTEE 

Safia Albaiti

Natalia Báez-Powell, Psy.D.

helen DeVinney, Psy.D.

Nicholas DiCarlo, LCSW

Justin Hopkins, Psy.D.

Roshan Javadian, Ph.D.

Jasmine Kaleka, Psy.D.

Razzan Quran

Joseph S. Reynoso, Ph.D.

PROGRAM CHAIR
Stephen Anen, Ph.D.

CONFERENCE COORDINATOR
Heather Kennedy

CONFERENCE ARTIST

Conference art created by Jess X. Snow 

Still from Safe Among Stars (2019), a short narrative film starring actress Poppy Liu, composited by cinematographer Noelia María Muíño González