In a recent interview, Adam Phillips ventured the hypothesis that psychoanalysis was invented to address the problem of misogyny. This was a bold and unusual statement, and though we’ve long been initiated into Phillips’s refreshing, even scandalous, takes on often otherwise mundane or familiar assumptions, this seemed, at least to me, an astonishing statement, striking not because it was outlandish, but because it was utterly, perceptively true.…

in Italiano a Spazio Rosenthal [scroll down]:
Vaginal Veritas: Pensieri sulla Misoginia, sulla Psicoanalisi, e sulla Democrazia

Jennifer Fox’s new film The Tale, a harrowing, largely autobiographical account of sexual abuse and her first fictional feature, has unsurprisingly prompted nearly every critic to invoke #MeToo. True, its adult protagonist, “Jennifer Fox” (Laura Dern) is an abuse survivor and ultimately her abuser’s public accuser. But this tale isn’t so simple, as Jennifer doesn’t believe she’s “Too” anything; nor is she a “Me,”­ but rather an “Us.” She shares this story with the thirteen year old Jenny (Isabelle Nélisse) she was when events unfolded in the 1970s....

Of late we’ve been hearing the word “repudiate” a lot. It’s ever on the lips of those who deplore President Trump’s tactics, rhetoric, fiats, tweets, and lies. After Charlottesville, heard it from military leaders, corporate chieftains, and quondam Trump loyalists. Lindy West in a recent Times essay called upon Republican lawmakers to repudiate not just Trump’s platform, but finally Trump himself. Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals organized in response to a perceived rise in Trump’s volatility, have declared Trump dangerous to the public and have advocated for using the 25th Amendment to repudiate him. Meanwhile, more than a million people have signed the petition at ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org calling upon Congress to remove the president, citing multiple violations and abrogations of the Constitution to which he pledged fidelity....

This year’s International Women’s Day (March 8), which calls for a general strike in the form of a grassroots display of economic solidarity and anticapitalist feminism, should be an interesting one. It follows on the heels of the largest single-day demonstration in the history of the United States: the Women’s March of January 21. While but a single day, the march has already spawned a legacy. It not only pushed women’s voices and bodies to the foreground of public consciousness, it also opened space for male bodies, transgendered bodies, racialized bodies. And it pollinated the public imagination with images of the female body—in particular, images of female genitalia....

New Year’s resolutions are a curious ritual. Each year we promise to change, even as we can’t help but recall last year’s resolutions and measure how far we’ve fallen short. Human beings are by and large procrastinators. We typically postpone any significant change until it’s almost too late — until we’re teetering on the brink, until the fire we’re playing with verges on conflagration. Must we stand face-to-face with disaster before we have an undeniable motive to take forceful, decisive action? ...

I am intensely interested in the need, responsibilities, and possibilities for psychoanalysis to contribute to public life. This is a matter of faith for me, born of many years of struggle to sustain hope in the face of despair, courage in the face of fear, creation in the face of destruction—in my own life, in my experience with patients, and in the context of the no less daunting climb in matters facing us in public life....

Anyone passingly familiar with the history of psychoanalysis knows that the field has occupied an embattled, marginalized, often indeterminate identity, and that its survival has often seemed precarious. Yet it is from this perch on the margins of culture and community that psychoanalysis speaks. By channeling a vortex of unconscious and conscious energies, it gives voice to raw, novel, free associations. In fact, because it speaks, and because it hails listening and speaking as the medium for therapeutic action (as “the talking cure”) psychoanalysis is powerfully relevant, even essential, to our personal and collective development....