Autumn 2022 | The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis

First published in 2022 by:
The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis
the-site.org.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Edited, designed and produced by:
Duncan Harris, Katia Houghton, Yael Pilowsy Bankirer, Val Parks, Julie Walsh and Barry Watt.

Editorial Advisory Panel
Suzanne Adebari, Manuel Batsch, Nic Bayley, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, Julia Borossa, Bernard Burgoyne, John Fletcher, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Stephen Gee, Liz Guild, David Henderson, Derek Hook, Peter Nevins, Dany Nobus, Val Parks, Rosie Rize, Joanna Ryan, Barry Sheils, Ross Skelton, Julie Walsh, Barry Watt, Rob Weatherill, Rob Weiss, Anne Worthington.

Notes for Future Contributors
Sitegeist uses a peer-review system based around electronic submission. Authors are invited to send abstracts of not more than 200 words to the editors. Calls for Papers are made, on occasion, and are publicised on our website: the-site-org.uk and Twitter feed: @SITE_GEIST.

Editorial

Download this paper Hello and welcome to the first issue of Sitegeist since the pandemic struck in 2020. Our theme for this edition is translation, with four diverse articles and related pieces that explore the concept of translation and psychoanalysis in its widest context. In Montreal, 1979, Patrick Mahony was one of the participants amongst...

Ten Theses on the the Philosophy of Psychoanalytic Translation

Download this paper I Psychoanalysis is concerned with the desire for an impossible return – a return to a place before time began. This place offers a temporary reprieve from the pain of the world, a pain that is closely linked to the marks that time leaves on one’s body. To be human, however, involves...

Making Strange: Beckett, Laplanche, Translation

Download this paper Although Samuel Beckett didn’t publish anything between Murphy in 1938 and Molloy in 1951, he had not been idle. He had, in fact, been working feverishly on a number of texts which would make his reputation. In his first sixteen years as a writer he had written a couple of novels, some...

Lost in Translation

Download this paper In her book Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes a childhood game that encapsulates something about what is encrypted underneath the overt content of any translation. ‘I want to tell a story, every story, everything all at once’, she writes, ‘not anything in particular that might be said through the words I...

Translated Poetry: Between our Tongues (in Hebrew)

Download these poems When you asked me who I am – Ima or Mummy? Ima dripped between your lips rolling in it the salty taste of the sea and the smells of citrus fruits at the beginning of winter like the sweet drop of milk that my tongue was forcefully cut from Mummy carried an...

The Transcription of a Psychoanalytic Session: To Write Beyond the Logos

Download this paper A Textual Empiricism According to Bion, the ‘pre- or non-verbal’ manifestation of the unconscious in the cure is what makes the communication of psychoanalytic work so difficult (Bion, 1970, p. 15). The written account of a psychoanalytic session raises very peculiar difficulties. Anyone, analyst or analysand, who has tried to write down...

Re-Reading Rivière’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’: putting sex and the (trans) body back into question (extract)

Download this paper Extract (bibliography omitted) from the chapter in S. Frosh, J. Walsh, M. Vyrgioti (eds), Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies, London: Palgrave. Vignette A student arrives early for my assignment tutorial and asks whether they can sit in on the other students’ discussions, rather than talk about their own essay. Two or three...

Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural Psychological and Gendered Dimensions of the World’s Oldest Surgery

Download this paper The following is an extract from my book, Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological and Gendered Dimensions of the World’s Oldest Surgery, published in 2022 with Bloomsbury Academic Press. The book is a psychoanalytic study of the practice of male circumcision that focuses on three case studies: the significance of St...

Covid-19 and Its Implications for the Practice of Psychotherapy on Zoom during the Pandemic (extract)

Download this paper An extract from the article published in European Judaism 55:2 (2022) 127. If the origin of the word ‘patient’ was linked in Greek to the word ‘suffer-ing’, we are all patients now, regardless of whether or not we have the virus. After the publication of my latest book in 2018, I developed...

Site Associate Publications: Recent Publications by Members and Trainees

Download this page Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (Verso 2021). Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues: Love and Hate in the Time of Patriarchy (Peninsula Press 2019). Nick Blackburn, The Reactor: A Book about Grief and Repair (Faber & Faber 2022). Matt ffytche, Critical Lives: Sigmund Freud (Reaktion 2022). Matt ffytche (ed.), special section on a...

Notes on Contributors

Download this page Manuel Batsch is honorary lecturer in the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. He has published articles on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in several journals, including Psychoanalysis and History and Psychodynamic Practice. Anastasios Gaitanidis has been teaching, mentoring and supervising Counselling, Psychotherapy and Counselling Psychology students in various...

Call for Writing

Download this page Sitegeist was founded with the intention of promoting varied, lively and creative approaches in writing to the questions facing psychoanalysis today. On 9 and 10 October 2021 the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Goldsmith’s University hosted the much-needed conference on ‘White Privilege, Racism and Psychoanalysis’. As one of the next steps in...