Juan Tubert-Oklander and the Psychoanalytic Sphere1

Many authors have arrived at a convention when describing ongoing collective shifts in psychoanalytic attention; it is common to speak of the relational turn, the ethical turn, or, most recently, the turn toward the social. In considering the work of Juan Tubert-Oklander, it becomes clear that he is interested in a psychoanalysis that encompasses all potential turns. Spatially, this might be represented as a sphere. The shape of a sphere conjures a planet like the one we share, housing a range of ecosystems and zones of specialized life: sea creatures in one area, polar bears or aardvarks or finches in another — all interconnected and interdependent in ways both obvious and obscure. A spherical psychoanalysis considers individual, dyadic, triadic, group, systemic, and the multitude of interrelationships between these — dots, lines, triangles, circles, polygons, figures yet unnamed, all in intermingled dynamic relationship.

For Tubert-Oklander,2 the psychoanalysis we require includes contemplation of the entire sphere and the unconscious dimensions of its teeming life, demanding not turns but a revolution: a “radical overhaul of our theories, and the commonsense view of existence … a new paradigm of the human being.” Like the fertile sphere of the earth, this world of psychoanalysis is full of boundless creative potential, possessed of intrinsic knowledge, resilient to the core, and imperiled by human action grounded in worldviews unconcerned with the common welfare.

As Tubert-Oklander traces a psychoanalytic history beginning with Freud, a conflict immediately shows itself, one that is readily perceivable in present-day psychoanalytic life. On one side is the

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