Within Without: Dreaming New Futures of and for Psychoanalysis

How could we challenge the traditional limits of psychoanalysis in order to assess how it is actually practiced and how it might be? [...] Ankhi Mukherjee poses this question to us forcefully in her stunning contribution, Unseen City. Mukherjee argues that institutional psychoanalysis has reduced the psyche to a single note and its disharmonious complexes while compressing the modes in which we might provide the signal cure that has defined itself in the twentieth century. Moreover, its temporalities have been delimited while its diagnoses have been universalized. Mukherjee’s Unseen City offers a stark corrective. Beginning with the foundational notion of trauma—coined in 1860 in the French laboratory and exported to the world—Mukherjee, in her interdisciplinary and global investigation, offers us a new an alternative account of psychoanalysis in the present. In Unseen City, she extends her generative account of psychoanalysis via all the disciplines that might be home to its method, offering us not just three literary critical chapters on cities “visible but unseen,” itself a book, but also three additional chapters in and of the clinics carrying on what she calls “Freud’s unfulfilled dream of free psychoanalysis.”The result of these twinned accounts joined together is a wholesale reconception of the boundaries of psychoanalysis and the psyche most of its major accounts offer. “Talk therapy,” Mukherjee writes, might be “reconceptualized as an elaboration of matter, a dynamic production of space and time in the duration of the session. And such acts of traveling psychoanalysis become responsible, when … responsibility amounts to ‘facing the ghosts.” In Unseen City, Mukherjee faces the ghosts of psychoanalysis while also forcefully arguing for its expansion. To do so, she holds this history in tension with how psychoanalysis has survived itself, been born anew, and yet still demands further reconfigurations. Turning to spaces beyond the private consulting room as a container for these lines of flight from institutional psychoanalysis, Mukherjee offers a definitive study of the psychic life of not just the unseen city, but those historically unseen both within and without the consulting room, but who, nevertheless are.