The taming of psychoanalysis in geography

In the last decade, social and cultural geography has experienced a 'psychoanalytic turn': geographers have used insights from Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Kristeva and others to deepen and re-orient our understandings of subjectivity and socio-spatial formations. In this paper, I argue that in the process, psychoanalytic geography has tended to render psychoanalysis compatible with the imperatives currently driving social and cultural geography (such as the demand to theorize resistance and develop particular understandings of politicized subjectivities and spatialities). Many of Freud's founding insights, however, work at odds with such imperatives: Freud's formulation of the unconscious points to a realm that is not malleable in terms of cultural resignification, and that conceives the individual as subject as much to inertia and repetition as to progressive transformation. The paper demonstrates how geography has worked to tame psychoanalytic theory by downplaying its more politically unpalatable aspects. In so doing, it argues that the time is now right for those aspects to be brought to light.     

Robert Frost's ambivalence: Borders and boundaries in poetic and political discourse

Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame discussions of borders in academic and political discourse. Used by some to justify the construction of physical barriers, others have used excerpts from the poem to fundamentally question the truism it appears to project. In light of recent interest in borders, our paper returns to Frost's full poem and its contexts in order to define, theorize, and critically mobilize what we take to be a useful ambivalence regarding fences. We use Frost's formulations to address the universal difficulty of moving beyond the borders of our daily lives, whether imposed at the edges of the nation-state, inscribed in our social relations, or inferred within the formal dimensions of a poem. Working at the crossroads of political geography, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis we argue that addressing the central role of borders in our lives and Frost's deep ambivalence about fences and borders is a useful step in any political and aesthetic movement forward. We cannot be “good neighbors” in other words or even good co-inhabitants until and unless we acknowledge that we are ambivalent not only toward the Other, but also about the very concept of borders and boundaries itself. Ideas presented about ambivalence provide border scholars and political geographers with an opportunity to re-evaluate our positionality and recognize how our own humanity intersects with that of others.     

Locating physical disability in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis: Problems and prospects

In this paper, I use psychoanalytic theory to look at the meaning of disability within an ableist culture, and its relationship to issues of sexuality and death. I suggest that while disability has not been a central focus of psychoanalysis, it has been employed to stand in for something else, and this has had important implications for disability that have yet to be fully explored. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of disability as a 'symbolic substitute' for castration as conceived by Freud and Lacan, and the implications of this formulation for the cultural construction of disabled bodies as lacking. While there is cause for continued caution with respect to this theoretical tradition, psychoanalysis offers important insight into the complex origins of 'aesthetic anxieties' that surround disability within ableist culture, and the way in which these emotions are implicated in the geographic exclusion of 'different' bodies. In particular, psychoanalysis helps to demonstrate the illusory nature of the 'able-body' as a key source of oppression.     

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of “neo-Shamanism” as a “spiritual” practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of “Shamanism” to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made “neo-Shamanism” thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that “neo-Shamanisms” are rediscoveries of a primal “spirituality” write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.