Chapter Announcement by Noreen O’Connor (UK)
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality, edited by Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (Punctum Books, 2017), makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. The book concentrates on a number of concepts, namely identity, desire, pleasure, perversion, ethics, and discourse. The aim of my chapter is to elucidate ways in which analysts have responded to the challenges of queer theorists. Working with the operative distinction of analyst and queer theorist I draw out their shared vigilance of reductive classifications of foundational aesthetic, epistemic, ontological, and ethico-political specifications of subjective/intersubjective relationships.
Relational thrownness into the implicit and explicit and conscious-unconscious resourcefulness of our common language(s) draw us out of the obsessionality of our egocentricity and move us towards openness to the unexpected. I specify the originality emergent in analytic speaking/responding as the an-archic dynamism of psychoanalysis. The “face-to-face” is a saying that in being said breaks, at each moment, the definition of that which it says, thus resisting totalization.
Link to the publisher: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/clinical-encounters-in-sexuality-psychoanalytic-practice-and-queer-theory/
About the Author:
I am a relational psychoanalytic psychotherapist who has practiced in North London for thirty years. I have a PhD in Contemporary European Philosophy (NUI, Cork). I served on training committees for psychoanalytic training in London for eleven years, teaching and supervising trainees, and I supervise qualified analysts. I have lectured in universities and publicly in philosophy and psychoanalysis in Ireland and the UK. I am co-author (with Joanna Ryan) of Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2003) and (with Mary Lynne Ellis) of Questioning Identities; Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Practice (London: Karnac, 2010).
Noreen O’Connor, PhD
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