if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives
—W. H. Auden ‘In memory of Sigmund Freud’
Undead
Freud and psychoanalysis seem to be in a state resembling Schrodinger’s famous cat: alive and dead at the same time. Dead and discredited and yet alive and influential. Perhaps the better analogy here is not to the ambiguous feline but to another figure: that of the undead. For while Freud the man expired in 1939 and has been killed again and again before and after that date, still he returns, like something repressed that just won’t lie down and vanish.
In an interesting essay in the New Republic in 1995, Jonathan Lear commented on the extraordinary fervour with which Freud and psychoanalysis seemed to be killed, again and again [1]. It prompts the thought: why? Lear proposes three cultural currents that motivate Freud bashing: the development of drugs, alongside increasing knowledge and interest in how the brain works, the way cheap pharmacology seems preferable to expensive psychoanalysis, and finally a backlash against some of the grander claims about Freud and his techniques that were much touted in the earlier part of the last century. Certainly Freud got things wrong and sometimes went about his analysis in a way that seems quite mistaken. But is that it? Read more »
by Leanne Ogasawara
Built at the beginning of the 15th century on the place of sacristy of the Orvieto Cathedral.
1.
I had been in Orvieto about a week, when a young American woman came up to me in the painted chapel and said, “Excuse me, do you speak English?”
Not waiting for my answer she continued, “Do you have any idea what these paintings mean?”
Looking at her astonished face, I gestured toward the eastern wall and whispered, “Well, over there is the Antichrist.”
Her friend joined us. They turned toward the wall where I was pointing and squinted.
“But he looks like Jesus Christ,” she said.
Fresco 1500
I handed her friend my fancy bird-watching binoculars and said,“Yes, but look at his face. See how Satan is controlling his movements? Like a puppet master.”
“What is this place?” Her friend with my binoculars asked.
“It is the Last Judgement, painted by Luca Signorelli in 1500.”
Andrea Scrima: Saskia, you’ve written a book that invites us into the BDSM community to explore the complicated emotional landscape lying at the heart of its negotiations over consent and—as the title you chose for your book underscores—permission. When the book begins, Echo, the young narrator, is submerged in a fog of emotional blunting following her father’s accidental death; she trusts bodies and the language they engage in more than emotional intimacy. We’re in southern California: the milieu is wealth and privilege, Hollywood beckons, and the narrative is full of gleaming surfaces. Can aspects of Permission be read as a social commentary?
Photo: Nikolaus Kim
Saskia Vogel: Thank you for that introduction, Andrea! The book certainly came from questions I had about the society I encountered when I moved back to LA after spending most of high school in Sweden and university in London. LA, where I was born and raised, was suddenly new to me. I could legally drink, which meant access to new spaces, and I finally had a driver’s license. I was also carrying years of distance and encounters with new cultures with me. Nothing about LA life was a given anymore. I thought it would feel like free space. However, when I arrived in LA as an adult, in my early twenties, I became aware of a strong current that asked me to conform to certain norms as a woman, for instance in how I presented myself. Dating culture was oddly formal, like we were supposed to demonstrate our skill in performing a script rather than make a connection. Looking back, I might suggest that the kind of abuse of power that was happening in the upper echelons of Hollywood, and I’m thinking of Weinstein here, trickled down into parts of society, creating a dishonest economy of sex and power. Very soon I found a group of friends who were deeply involved in the kink community. Half of myself, shall we say, was in that community, and the other was trying to navigate life outside of that community. There was quite a stark contrast between the BDSM community I knew—informed by mutual respect and consent, articulated boundaries, and an awareness of power dynamics—and my life outside it, which I experienced as far more patriarchal and conventional than my imagination of life in LA had been. Those two worlds left me with questions about the roles available to women in society, about who benefits from the existing power structures, and if there was a way out. I dropped my main character Echo right into the middle of these questions. Read more »
