Psychoanalytic Conversations

In this workshop, Dr. Aisenstein will discuss two very recent contributions. In “The Allergic Object Relationship,” Dr. Aisenstein will describe how with patients who collapse the distinction between themselves and their objects: “there is a total and massive identification between the allergic subject and the object: ‘The subject inhabits the object just as he is inhabited by it.’ The failure of the attempt to achieve closenes puts the subject in danger, hence the allergic crisis: asthma, eczema, skin rashes, and so on. Some subjects, during crises, experience a confused dream-like state, while others present anxieties of depersonalisation (like Zelig).” Using a close reading of Woody Allen’s movie, Zelig, as well as a detailed clinical vignette, Aisenstein sketches out the way the body becomes the site for psychic conflict and collapse.

In the second paper, “Destruction of Thought Processes,” Aisenstein begins with an account of interviews with genocidal Hutu killers, interviews notable for their lack of affect or seeming awareness of the destructiveness of the massacres. She identifies two particular forms of the destruction of thought that underlie much of our pathology today: “The first is: Thinking terrifies me; I’m afraid of suffering too much. The second is: I don’t think, I obey; if I obey, I don’t think. Thinking hurts and is dangerous for me; not thinking is comfortable.” Drawing heavily upon Freud’s papers “Negation” and “Splitting in the Process of Defense,” Aisenstein traces the profound consequences of the destruction of thought, “which leads to different forms of destruction: external, internal, social, political and even bodily.”