I agree with Winnicott that play is the ground, the condition of possibility for sublimation: this includes the arts as well as science, which I understand in Continental terms as knowledge, rather than as empiricism, quantification, and regulation. I also think, and this is a political as well as a philosophical claim, that work—productive, constructive, ‘effect-of ’ kind of work—is done in the margins. Thus, my use of more than 4 sets, making the topology a braid between analyst and analysand. The mathematics become increasingly complex as more sets are added: once more than 4 sets are looped together, they braid. I’m not suggesting that the psyche is structured in a Venn diagram of 7. I am arguing that, if differentiating sets leaves traces, such traces might em-braid and structure again and again and sometimes differently. The braidings manifest derivatives which can be interacted with in transference. Braided structure suggests ways thinking in terms of flows and intensities, conceptualise-able as able to interact in a transferential field; and, most importantly, as changeable and changing. Thinking in terms of derivatives suggests ways of thinking in terms of what Bion calls ‘transformations’–the different ways that whatever is unconscious plays out in fields as various as visual art, theatre, and psychoanalytic theory and history. As I said, this is a playful way of thinking; nonsense; perhaps a hint of other jouissance.
The four people who participated in Prismatic Heresy had something to say and the artworks/discourse analyses present their words to an audience. Collectively, this presents something of me: how I listen; who I am that listens. However, as it is a question of flows and intensities, how I listen will change, having made my colour-coded critique of Borromean Lacanian theory. This paper gives a sense of how my non-binary identity is partly personal, partly intellectual; and it’s also about how I think spatially, topologically, as well as in words. It’s that which attracted me to the late Lacan and which has led me to critique Borromean theory from a non-binary perspective. It’s happenstance; personal history. It’s also something to do with community: I made friends through this project. Even more, though, my argument is eccentric; a subversion, however sympathetic, of both subjective topology and Bion’s alpha function.
This way of experiencing and living identity is, nowadays, called ‘non-binary’, at least insofar as it is to do with gender identity. However, a range of psychoanalysts think in non-binary ways about identity. For example, de M’Uzan (2013), who addresses questions of representation and the body central to my psychoanalytic practice as well as to my 4 participants in Prismatic Heresy, argues for a ‘spectrum of identities’. His argument is not too far from my suggestion that psychic structure may well involve braids far more complex than the Borromean knots of 3 or 4, all of which, in any case, manifest as derivatives, transformed in many ways.
De M’Uzan remarks that witnessing, experiencing, and living are all passive. Reading that, I was astonished; and, yet, I thought, “that’s true”. As Laplanche argues, we are the analysands of texts. Passivity is difficult for me and de M’Uzan’s interpretation was mutative. I now have more of a sense of how—maybe why—work with an effect of witnessing was so important to me. It’s narcissistic, of course, making art and exhibiting it, and yet there’s also the undoing of the ego that makes the art possible.
The de M’Uzan paper that I read as analysand of the text uses an alternative term for schizophrenia, paraphrenia. He makes explicit the ways in which his argument is in dialogue with both Bion and Deleuze; he also draws on Laplanche’s seduction theory, the passivity in relation to the necessarily invasive first caregiver. To some extent, his ‘spectrum of identity’ argument is conventionally post-Kleinian, with psychosis and neurosis as extremes of a spectrum. However, in one sentence, he departs from this, saying, “but we still have to agree to separate the ‘psychotic’ from psychosis (de M’Uzan 2013: 109)”. This brings him closer to the post-Lacanian argument in which psychosis and the depersonalised and dissociative moments in a neurotic’s analysis are distinguished as different formations, different responses to something that happened or happened differently, presumably in infancy. Perhaps as a way of separating madness from psychosis, he ends with a discussion of poetry and lallation, arguing against Deleuze (and Lacan) that lallation is relational and egoic, but in a very strange, twinned and depersonalised way, examples of which he finds in his work with people at the end of life. In this way, de M’Uzan brings together Freud’s early drive theory with its notion of ‘ego-drives’ or drives of self-preservation and Freud’s late drive theory with its notion of a death drive. For Laplanche, the question is one of translation and consistency: an attempt to reserve ‘drive’ for representation and the unconscious and ‘instinct’ for the impetus that is not part of representation. De M’Uzan is one of the founders of the Paris Institute of Psychosomatics, and this notion of an instinct that is not a drive is central to his theorisation of what Freud called actual neurosis—the range of disorders in which representation either does not take place or is extremely problematic. My psychoanalytic practice includes patients with actual neurosis, and, over time, I’ve found that change does take place. Some patients for whom representation is extremely difficult begin, over time, to represent far more and to discuss the ways in which they attempt to counter the short-circuit through the body and through behaviour that is somatosis and extreme enactment.