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There sure is a lot of psychoanalytic writing. Every year, every day, more to say, destined for the PEP archive, shards of observation, case studies, dream fragments, author bios, and, now more than ever, keywords, offered as magic signifiers to wend you through the mists of signifiers representing themselves to other signifiers. If things go as planned, DIVISION/Review will publish this one too, and it can join the ranks, a barrel of signifiers rudely representing themselves to the other signifiers, so much so that it even seems beside the point to say anything other than that this article too can mark the billowing expansion of an archive that nothing can stop. I certainly could not stop it any more than I can stop myself from adding to its bulk, keyword by keyword.
But who, if they are honest, hasn't at some point wanted it all to stop or at least take a long holiday? Stop the relentless filling of journals. Maybe not stop it permanently, once and for all, but just for a spell because, let's face it, even a global pandemic did nothing to slow it down. Apparently, for the psychoanalytic publishing industry, a pandemic constitutes not a moment to pause and reflect said industry's relevance, but rather a beckoning for special issues, reflections on the pandemic and teletherapy leading to teletherapy conferences on teletherapy, which are themselves written up to become articles, announced by abstracts, concluded with author bios, always author bios with ever-growing lists of awards, positions, institutions, and publications.
Even if it once made sense to tackle the bulk of psychoanalytic writing, to make one's way through it in something approaching a comprehensive way, that is no longer the case. We can be pragmatic and insist that the bulk of writing is not a problem in any way other than to those antiquated people who still aspire to such a denounced form of mastery in the dreaded university discourse. Still, in the social imaginary, the archive calls up the fantasy