A Memoir of the Future of Contemporary Psychoanalysis: The Gentle Jouissance of Giuseppe Civitarese

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing, and the more affects we allow … the more eyes we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our “objectivity” be.

Civitarese is a contemporary proponent of the (mostly) Latin American tradition of psychoanalytic field theory, and he combines this perspective with Bionian and post-Bionian psychoanalytic work. To borrow from Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), there is much more continuity between Civitarese's The Intimate Room (2010) and The Violence of Emotions (2013b) than the impressive caesura of separate bindings would have us believe. Several chapters in each volume demonstrate, extensively and explicitly, Civitarese's deep appreciation of contemporary Critical Theory, and the post-structural and deconstructive discourses in postmodern French philosophy. Each chapter in these two volumes stands on its own merits, and each is a complementary facet of an overarching aesthetici conception of psychoanalytic ontology, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the analytic process.

Civitarese's premise is that psychoanalysis in the 21st Century requires a new paradigm and that the theory of the analytic field is capable of taking up the challenge of postmodern and post-structural thought, especially in the areas of philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric, and narratology, in all of which he is deeply versed. His unique theoretical contribution to his lineage is his capacity to demonstrate the resonances and homologies between abstruse philosophical concepts and psychoanalysis. He does so in ways that are sophisticated and elegant — nothing short of dazzling.ii Thankfully, he provides abundant “illustrative” case vignettes that ground the abstractions brilliantly (IR, pp. 170-173). This already-prolix essay requires that I make some assumptions about most reader's familiarity with Bion's ideas, as well as wit