Issue 03:
The Wish

DECEMBER 2023

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WISH.

Dreams are the only place we can have what we wish, but both the wish and its fulfillment will be distorted. This is the Freudian notion of the dream. By 1900, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams laid out his great achievement—a theory of the unconscious at work and a method for chasing its meanings down the royal road of dreaming. Freud doesn’t think the dream sends us a message, at least not a direct one. Instead, the dream tells us, particularly when recounted in analysis, of our wishes.

Psychoanalysis, one could say, was originally a science of wishes. But as we may have been told since the morality plots of Aesop’s fables, we have to be careful what we wish for, lest it come true. It is, as it has been said, the worst thing that can happen to a neurotic, to experience true wish fulfillment. Oedipus, after all, got his wish. If the basic unit of psychoanalysis is the wish, wishing has also been crucial to understanding mass protest, utopian theory, the drive to freedom, as well as the affects central to daily life under capitalism, the wish to destroy the other, be destroyed, to merge, to possess, to be possessed.

Before we could formulate psychoanalytic theories of desire, anxiety, and drive, Freud knew we had to be careful what we wished for. Consent and its limits. Bad trips. Yearning for a radical clinic that was and wasn’t. Speaking the wish to be silenced. Death drive against ecocide. The wish for girlhood otherwise. Essays by Amber Jamilla Musser, Samo Tomšič, Eugenie Brinkema, Jyoti M. Rao, Anna Kornbluh, Grace Byron, and more.

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Wild Analysis
Claire Donato | Auto-Analysis: We Will Never Be Friends
Secondary Gain 003 | An Anti-Advice Column
Clinical Conflict I | The Collective Unconscious
Clinical Conflict II | Super Vision
Clinical Conflict III | If Only I Could Climb Walls

Sublimations
Sasha Frere-Jones | Rhythmic Listening
Nathan R. Duford | Failure to Appear
Eugenie Brinkema | Ten to Twelve Dead Brothers

In Error
Michelle Rada | Indifference, the Vital Force

Issue 02:
Repair

AUGUST 2023

Psychoanalysis, like the world, is in disrepair. Yet it has staked its cure on the possibility of reparation. Still, repair implies that we know what has gone wrong—what is bad or what is good—and once that knowledge is ventured, things, people, and the world split. The possibility of repair suggests that we might recover—that we know what we’ve lost, can locate what’s been taken, and can set about making a new whole or returning to the old. Yet, in the wake of ongoing white supremacy and colonial dispossession and subjugation, the class divide that composes and decomposes strife, and the petrifying distinctions that segregate across race and gender, the world seems irreparably riven.

In this issue we descend into the butcher’s butchered world, inside and out, to see what damage has been wrought and in whose name. The haunting of remains. Boundary and boundary violation. Feeling down and out in Berlin. The challenges of a global red clinic. Wherefore Fanon. Watching courts. Irreparable communing through ordinary psychosis. The nation, belonging, the state. An interview with Denise Da Silva. Essays by McKenzie Wark, Wayne Wapeemukwa, Kelli Moore, Francisco González, and more.

Repair is not an event, but an ongoing demand, one that is impossible to satisfy and impossible to avoid.

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The Social Link
McKenzie Wark | A Call for Reparations
Wayne Wapeemukwa | We Hear an Angel
Jaice Titus | Assistance for the Mind
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart | The Windward View

Repair
Zoé Samudzi & Noor Asif | Breath Back
Rouzbeh Shadpey | A Heart Under Attack
Francisco J González | No es fácil
Nica Siegel | Destiny To Be Set Free
Perwana Nazif | Appearance of a Djinn
Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Patricia Ekpo | We (Don’t) Want the End of the World

In Error
Alex Colston | Revolutionary Shame

Issue 01:
The Family Problem

DECEMBER 2022

The first myth Freud sought to dismantle was that of the wholesome family. Yet a hundred and some years later, Freud’s family and other figments still agitate us. We truly can’t seem to live with the family real and imagined, and equally, we can’t yet live without it. Our first issue is on this thorniest of thickets. From the clinic’s conflicts to social and political critique to literary and aesthetic criticism, we have given the family the psychoanalytic treatment, as but one step toward curing ourselves of its compromised form.

The anatomy of gender panics. The delusion of elder care. Fascist feminism. Sitcoms and sex. Psychoanalysis so interminable the analyst can’t terminate. Mothering beyond motherhood. Revisiting Juliet Mitchell and mourning Sara Suleri. An interview with Dorothy Roberts. Features by Max Fox, Joy James, Rachel Greenspan, and others.

There will, as always, be more forms and symptoms to treat. This is simply our beginning.

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