MeetTwo: Psychoanalytic Encounters with the Hashtag

The Freudian discovery that the unconscious is sexual was occasioned by listening to hysterics speak. The Lacanian addition that the unconscious is structured like a language allows the unconscious to be read as stemming from the other, something Lacan gleaned from listening to psychotics speak. Psychoanalysis lets us examine the way we are taken up in language, spoken by it, as well as forming and formed by meanings unbeknownst to us. It permits us to examine the way what Lacan called the “discours courrant,” or the current discourse (a term that in French is homophonic with

Page 33

the “record that turns around and around”), speaks to us. These revolutions in reading, where the real of the body is able to find, through the work of analysis, a way to words or, in some cases, protection from them, is what we call the direction of a psychoanalytic cure.

While Freud’s Victorianism is often seen as responsible for the penchant of Freudian theory to “find sex everywhere,” and Lacan’s Surrealist origins are responsible for his famous “there is no sexual rapport,” both thinkers’ contributions extend far beyond the social contexts that gave rise to them. Indeed, for all the talking and theorizing about it, sex in psychoanalysis is at once everywhere (Freud) or nowhere (Lacan). Indeed, as Alenka Zupancic in What is Sex? (2017) and Lorenzo di Chiesa in The Not Two (2016) have argued, sex is the grounding of discourse as its antithesis.

How is psychoanalysis implicated in, and how does it respond to, the new social discourses that concern sexuality today? In particular, the current #MeToo movement? Does psychoanalysis have anything to say about it? How does #MeToo resonate in the analytic clinic?

It is important to emphasize that the #MeToo movement is a socio-political one; its lessons are not properly clinical, unless we hear how such a discursive position is taken up by a particular analysand. Said differently, whether a given analysand supports, denigrates, identifies, or even impugns “#MeToo,” what should concern analysts is the subject speaking, rather than the truth value of any given claim. Psychoanalysis is not ontology or an occasion for moral enjoyment; it is a practice aimed at subjective, unconscious elaboration.

The newsworthy and opprobrious scandals that occasioned the #MeToo movement continue to snowball. They are at worst unthinkably monstrous and at best monotonously banal. Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nasser, Jerry Sandusky, Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer—my aim is not to dispute, comment upon, or take issue with these stories. While the sexual abuse of women and men is doubtless rampant, and the Harvey Weinstein debacle that gave rise to the movement is iniquitous and worthy of the entire world’s condemnation, the movement, while giving solace to some, can become a way of reifying meaning. The #MeToo movement, like the biblical seduction it recalls—the entreaty to transgression and the passing of blame—promises a kind of eternity of moral meaning.

Page 34

There was an abuse, and the victim, the supposed subject of the law, is speaking out against it. Whether true or not, the comfort of being “right” is not an analytic position, but a static one. #MeToo is a signifier that evokes a scene wherein every “me” can be a “too,” finding an eternal moral truth, soulmates in the multiplying mirror of the abused. Consent is necessary for sexual relations. If there is no consent, we learn, it should not be called sex, but abuse.

When analyzing #MeToo, critics rarely discuss the symbol before it, the hashtag. The word hashtag stems from the 16^th century French word hacher, meaning to chop, or to dice. Born of social media, hashtags are a kind of hamburger or chopped meat taxonomy. Invented as a way for lay users to categorize messages, they permit no punctuation. Further, capitalization has no effect on the terms; the hashtag can be found with lower case or capitals or any mix of the two. Its function is to organize information in little bits or titles, allowing it to be easily located on social media. #MeToo functions as an instant reference for a new group identity; one participates in a global movement wherein one feels interpolated, represented, and spoken.

Spoken in what way? #MeToo concerns a complaint wherein a notion of understanding about a sexual abusive encounter reigns. One “knows” what happened and publicizes “#MeToo” in response. In this way, we could say that #MeToo is a kind of inverse of the primal scene. The primal scene can’t be remembered and must be constructed via treatment. It has to be surmised and pieced together and can only function as a kind of screen memory. The #MeToo scene, on the other hand, is familiar, knowable, identifiable, and instantly understandable; the hashtag marking it as the same for everyone. The fact that the movement itself was designated TIME’s Person of the Year 2017 shows how a group is an individual.

While #MeToo is a group identification, psychoanalysis is concerned with the individual, and it individuates; it is a practice that underlines “absolute difference,” as Lacan insisted. In this way, psychoanalysis is a subversion of both the Me and the Too. “Me” is not the subject of the unconscious, but rather the ego, and the “Too” makes a collective out of the imagined likeness, something that should give us pause today, as people are more and more isolated on their smartphones and incapable of conversing with each other meaningfully, let alone engaging in sex.

Page 35

Wearing a popular tag, while potentially politically important, can nevertheless be evidence of stalemate, a closing of the unconscious in favor of an established meaning. Like any “identity,” #MeToo is a way to make oneself known that abjures complexity, ambiguity, and nuance. An irony of the #MeToo movement, at least in terms of its global popularity, is its contemporaneity with the election of Donald Trump, the pussy-grabbing president. Both underline a failure of fantasy, what Freud believed to be at the basis of sexuality as well as neurotic symptoms. Nowadays the social discourse is not one of fantasy but of a non-metaphoric real. This radical binary between Trump and #MeToo reveals the way unconscious conflict is heard in vivo in contemporary social discourse. While some are hypnotized under the narcissistic leader to whose enjoyment they sacrifice their own, horrified others enjoy denouncing him.

What does psychoanalysis teach us about Eros? Eros is a limit on understanding; even Socrates needed the help of a priestess, Diotima, to speak of it. Eros is an insufficiency with regard to the binaries of yes and no. The confrontation with the drive is traumatic. Yet, in our culture of evaluation and optimal production where the good and goods are all too intimately ideologically enmeshed, a limit to the ego, and a limit to knowledge, is anathema. One of my patients called Elon Musk’s Tesla launched into space a “Teslacle.” “If your erection lasts for more than ten billion years,” she joked and then laughed, “That’s just it! You won’t need to call anyone! You never need anyone else. You are happy driving your car in space forever. That’s sex nowadays.”

What is Eros, and why is it anathema to knowing? In the second topology, Freud elaborates what he had begun in On Narcissism (1914), thinking through how sexuality, a desire that moves toward another, can develop out of primary narcissism. How does this initiate and why does it persist, or why does it return? How do we deal with these returns? Do we deal with these returns today, or do we say that it is the problem of the other but not my problem? Are we still the stuff that dreams are made of, or by checking our phones 24/7 keeping up with social media, do we still dream?

Page 36