Abstract
Soreanu discusses a common spectre that haunts social and psychoanalytic theories: that of the ‘mob’, the irrational crowd, the destructive or regressed collective. She approaches this spectre from the angle of a psychoanalytic theory of recognition and she proposes a trauma theory that accounts for the social life of psychic fragments. Soreanu also argues for the importance of a psychosocial ethnography that traces the precision of the creativities of the collective, in relation to its traumatic wounds. The collective discussed here is one that is able to mourn, to create symbols, and to organise complicated scenes of re-enactment. The chapter also argues that Sándor Ferenczi’s voice is important for filling some of the phenomenological gap that exists in psychoanalysis around the problem of psychic splitting.
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- 1.
In her book, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler (2015) addresses the operation of this spectre in the sphere of democratic theories.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The ‘spark’ of the ‘June 2013’ moment came from the Movimento Passe Livre [Free Transport Movement]. However, the mobilisation cannot be reduced to a single set of demands. Instead, in the following pages, the 2013/2014 uprising in Brazil will emerge as having an ample symbolic repertoire. This repertoire ranges from the specific demand of retracting the twenty-cents raise in the price of public transport (which gave the name of the uprising, ‘20 centavos ’) to more complicated and enigmatic demands that summon our interpretative powers, such as ‘Por uma vida sem catracas’ [‘For a life without turnstiles’].
- 5.
I write ‘phantasmas’, as this is on old (and out of use) Portuguese spelling of ‘fantasmas’ [phantasmata]. Through this move, I wish to preserve a lost letter and a reference to the colonial past, which is encapsulated in all the ‘ghosts’ and complicated transmissions that I discuss in this book.
- 6.
Affirming Ferenczi as a radical practitioner can be supported by a series of actions and attitudes. To recall just one instance that captures his position on difficult issues for the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century: in 1905, Ferenczi became the Budapest representative of the International Humanitarian Committee for the Defence of Homosexuals, created by the prominent Berlin sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld. He signed petitions calling for legal reforms around the criminalization of homosexuality and he published the article États sexuels intermédiaires [On the Intermediate Sex] (1905), which argued against seeing homosexuality as a degenerate disease. Freud expressed his sympathy for this Committee, but he did not wish to be associated with the initiatives for legal reform. The two men had not yet met. See Stanton (1990).
- 7.
The medical weekly Gyógyászat [Therapeutics] had an important role in popularising psychoanalytic ideas. Some of the main literary criticism journals, such as Nyugat [The West], and sociology journals, such as Huszadik Század [The Twentieth Century], also played a crucial part in articulating psychoanalytic concerns. A group set up by medical and engineering students, A Galilei Kör [The Galileo Circle], openly pursued the goal of making psychoanalysis part of the university curriculum for training medical doctors.
- 8.
While this appointment was short-lived, and it was revoked only one month after, in the heat of the political events in Hungary, it did reflect the presence of psychoanalysis in Hungarian cultural life.
- 9.
In The Basic Fault, Michael Balint spoke of the magnitude of the consequences of the split between Freud and Ferenczi: ‘The historic event of the disagreement between Freud and Ferenczi […] acted as a trauma on the psychoanalytic world’ (Balint 1968, p. 152).
- 10.
See Henri Lefebvre’s chapter ‘Seen from the Window’ in his book Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2004, pp. 27–37).
- 11.
I am referring to the psychoanalytic social clinic of the Instituto de Estudos da Complexidade, Rio de Janeiro.
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Soreanu, R. (2018). Introduction. In: Working-through Collective Wounds. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58523-3_1
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