Relational Doings in the Medio-Passive Register: A Discussion of Christian Sell’s “Medio-Passive Agency in Psychoanalysis: Responding to Hopelessness and Despair in the Therapeutic Relationship”

The author considers Sell’s application of medio-passivity as it is employed in his paper and in his clinical case and comments on the overlooked general relevance of the medio-passive register to psychoanalytic practice. Through a careful review of the remarkably scant psychoanalytic references to medio-passivity, to a consideration of the phenomenologist Han-Pile’s expanded view of medio-passivity as doings that can have either self-deceptive or deeply ethical implications, the author considers the silent but relevant social class implications of the case. More specifically, the author questions the lower social class-influenced sense of hopelessness as it interfaced with Sell’s ambition and then descent into hopelessness, resulting in his feeling as though concrete actions were the only potentially useful therapeutic alternative. The author finds Sell’s intellectual rigor, openness to his vulnerability, and clinical determination to bear the hopelessness of his analysand to find the metaphors beyond the concrete to be remarkable. Sell’s calling our attention to the importance of medio-passive agency and its relevance to the practice of psychoanalysis makes for an exceptionally rich contribution to the literature.