You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What are the libidinal ties that bind human beings and what contributes to their transformation or violent disruption? Do psychopathologies derive from societal constraints or phylogenetic inheritances? How or why does one make this distinction intelligible? Is Freudian psychoanalysis guilty of eschewing the social in its theory of sexuality, or do its detractors misread Freud’s understanding of the drive? How have strands of continental philosophy and critical theory altered the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis, and to what effect on its sociality? What are the historical or material conditions of possibility for the emergence of intersubjective and relational psychoanalytic theory and practice, and how do these orientations respond to a demand from the Other to make our field more ethically capacious, if not more socially “conscious”?
I encountered these questions while reading the texts compiled below. By listing them in a dizzying manner, I hope to convey the vertiginous quality of this inquiry, at once expansive in scope and quite specialized in its areas of focus. Indeed, sociality may refer to any number of ideas pertaining to the vast sphere of human social interactions. Choosing which texts to feature brought to mind an analogy about hospitality: the host of a dinner party is not only responsible for the menu, but also for the curation of a guest list and for the seating chart. This responsibility necessitates the violence of inclusion and exclusion while aiming to establish a semblance of cohesion: the problematic of sociality par excellence.
I found it productive to organize my offering around areas of tension and dispute between competing theories of sociality or psychoanalysis, so as to keep the conversation lively if not a little contentious. A key antagonism identified itself early—between Freudian drive theory and its critics who charge it with an antiquated biological reductionism, a remnant of a “one person” psychology that is essentially atomisti