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Stephanie Swales and Carol Owens’ Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence With Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch suggests that human beings are constituted by an unconscious fundamental ambivalence. Using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Swales and Owens consider the ways in which the contemporary subject negotiates this ambivalence, specifically as it pertains to our tolerance and intolerance of others. In doing so, they suggest that a recognition of this fundamental ambivalence runs contrary to current concerns in the human sciences and popular culture about cultivating empathy in order to live more harmoniously with others, and more importantly, with neoliberal capitalism’s demands of tolerating others. Carefully mediated through the use of popular culture references such as The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad and Orange is the New Black, the authors distill complicated psychoanalytic theory that makes it at once enticing to the uninitiated and provocative for those familiar with Freud and Lacan.
Swales and Owens begin by expounding upon Freud’s notion that one can be of two minds about something, and proceed to elaborate on the place of this ambivalence in contemporary culture. Following Freud’s reading of the characters of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, they suggest that attempting to resolve psychic conflict and pursue balance is at the heart of human relationships and that this pursuit has become complicated by neoliberalism’s juxtaposition of demands to love and accept others, with the assumption under neoliberalism that others stand in the way of attaining our presumed goals that would make us whole. This juxtaposition, they suggest, means that individuals grow increasingly unable to navigate and manage the tensions of ambivalence. It also means that fundamental difference or otherness has to be reduced in order for others to be interpolated into our narcissistic desires and projects.
One way in which we have come to deal with this foreclosure is through the staging