The Kiss – Patricia Ticineto Clough with Comments by Stephen Hartman        

            I was feeling strongly connected to my patient, a forty-year old, cis white, heterosexual male who often is troubled about not being able to feel close to me.  Now, perhaps, he was feeling the connection too.  As our eyes met at the screen for a moment or two, he said: “You are so close I could just kiss you.” After a momentary pause, he asked: “Could you feel that?”  Still getting over my surprise, I nevertheless responded, “Yes.” And then added: “I was imaging you might feel our connection.”  All this just as the session was ending.  

            No doubt, this moment might suggest an erotic transference and I must admit that after the session ended, I did wonder if an erotic transference had been ongoing throughout this seven-year treatment without my awareness. But my thoughts also turned back to my patient’s revelations in early sessions of the treatment so that when once again he told me midst session that he was fantasizing kissing me, I, less surprised, offered to pursue this with him.  Taking up the offer, my patient was for the very first time not only able to explore these earlier revelations of various sexual/bodily troubled acts and fantasies begun in his preteen years and continued into adulthood; he also could directly link these to his early relationship with his mother. Having been resistant to engage such exploration, now in doing so, the analysis deepened.  Recently at the end of one session, my patient spoke as if suddenly aware of something previously unknown, while, however, projecting his awareness onto me:  “I always thought you knew something about this.”  “This,” I repeated.  “Yes, that I sexualized my unmet infantile needs.”  “I think you have always known this,” I offered; “at least, you have felt it, enacted it, in your bodily/sexual troubles.” 

            Can it be that our online treatments allow for a kind of intimacy, an actual face-to-face closeness? After all our faces, analysts’ and patients,’ are closer at the screen than they can possibly be in the room.  What can we make of this screen interface? 

 From the Face to the Interface: A Brief Take on Media Studies

            While psychoanalysts often argue that digital media/technologies are disembodying,[1] media studies scholars offer a different perspective on the digital and the body, one, which goes back to the shift in media studies from the cinematic to the televisual. Along with this shift, there was a turn away from a Lacanian treatment of the screen, the gaze, language and the oedipalized heterosexualized body, all of which had dominated cinema studies. In television studies, the focus turned instead to affect and touch, a move from the Oedipal to the Pre-oedipal. In her analysis of 1980s MTV romantic videos, for example, E. Ann Kaplan proposed that they “manifest an unusual preoccupation with the human face, in constant close-ups and lap-dissolves that suggest regression to the moment when the mother’s face represented plenitude, oneness, non-Oedipal pleasure” (1987, 95).  Kaplan’s analysis was part of a feminist intervention into television studies aimed at revaluing the private or domestic domain, nurture and caring, in drawing a connection between television and the infant’s pleasurable illusion of unending merging with the mother, accompanied, however, with a shift from castration anxiety to separation anxiety. (Petro 1986; Joyrich 1988; 1990; Spigel 1992).

            This view of television still holds. In a more recent study of reality TV, Jacob Johanssen again has argued that television offers the viewer a holding embrace, both pleasurable and unpleasurable (2018).  However, drawing on Donald Winnicott and Didier Anzieu, Johanssen moves attention from the face to the skin, proposing that television offers the viewer the illusion of the infant’s sharing a common skin with the mother.[2] Putting the skin, not just the face, in relationship to the televisual, Johanssen also points to Anzieu’s understanding of the skin as medium between inside and outside, “an interface,” as Anzieu puts it (2016, 64).  While, for Johanssen, this understanding of the skin is relevant for an analysis of digital media as much as it is for television, for digital media scholars, engaging the skin as medium not only has meant moving from privileging the body image in the Lacanian treatment of the mirror/screen to focus instead on the skin and the body schema. It also has meant rethinking the body, recognizing that technology generally is not something merely added onto the body as prosthetic. Rather, it is constitutive of the body and the body’s openness to the world.

            Focusing on the body schema and drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, digital media scholar, Mark Hansen, suggests that the body schema implies a primordial intertwining of body and environment, preceding and informing “the constitution of the objective domain (including the body as object, or the body image) and the correlative demarcation of the subject” (2006, 40).  As Merleau-Ponty, himself, puts it: “My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying’ function” (1962, 140).  Giving priority to the body schema instead of the body-image of the mirror-stage does not eliminate the latter; it however situates it differently.  As Hansen explains, the body schema, functioning as it does as an exfoliation into the world, enables the body’s reach to or embrace of the mirror image, while at the same time revealing a gap or fissure in the body schema; that is, the body schema is always already open to the specular which it also supports or holds. Hansen concludes that “there is a bodily occupation of the visible, a ‘touching’ across an essential distance” (2006, 56). Although not reducible to one another, there also is no duality between the visual body and the interoceptive body in spite of the phenomenon of distance.

            From this perspective, the mirror image does not produce an alienating paranoia as Lacan suggests but rather shows the spatial extension of the body to the mirror/image/screen through the gap in the body schema.[3] As this gap remains open, it allows the body’s extension into the world, across the screen, a bodily capacity that Hansen refers to as “the originary technicity of the human.”  It is in this sense that the skin functions technically; it mediates inside and outside, as it is both inside and outside. The skin that touches is touched and this reversibility of the skin, Hansen argues, following Anzieu, makes it “the cusp of the biological and the psychical prior to their differentiation,” if ever they are fully differentiated. The skin, that is, is the site of the ongoing psychical break with and the anaclitic trace to the biological of every psychical function. The ongoing movement or oscillation between the biological and the psychical, its rhythms and vibrations, are a matter of mediation, of techne, a matter of the exteriorization of the skin and its operation in the world.  As the screen exteriorizes the skin, the screen, like the skin, functions to register and transmit sensibility.

            Although currently there is recognition among some analysts that so-called remote treatments allow patients more ease in approaching traumatic issues affecting the body, my few remarks about my patient’s treatment are not meant to suggest this alone (See for example: Ringel, 2020).  I am not arguing that what occurred between my patient and me only occurred because we were meeting at the screen, although this may be the case. Rather, what I want to emphasize is that there is bodily sensibility at the screen precisely because of the body’s inherent technicity, a sensibility that has been evolving with technological change from cinema, to television, to digital media/technologies. In assemblaging with the body or body parts and functions, the digital, however, has revealed, by directly engaging with the technicity inherent to the body’s openness to the world, the ongoing technological change and its general capacity to mediate the (in)differentiation of the biological and the psychical.[4] Bodies now more than ever are better understood as assemblages of human and other-than-human forces and becomings (Harris, 2009).

            Whatever our concerns are about the digital and surely there are many, they might best be engaged starting with an understanding of bodily assemblages rather than disembodiment and the loss of sensibilities at the screen. In doing so, psychoanalysts, having been thrown into online treatments, have much to offer an understanding of the technologically embodied psyche.

 

Comments   Stephen Hartman

 I join Patricia in encouraging analysts to move from imagining an analog screen (captured in the metaphor of the Lacanian mirror) to a digital screen when they think about online expressions of transference including erotic ones.  As Patricia explains, the body has an originary technicity that opens it to digital technology, its different touch, its different temporality—pointing to bodily experiences that are emergent and prone to multiple pressure points, many temporal referents all at once, suggestive of unlimited expressions of sensibility and touch – all the while cloaked and held in place by a telegenic skin.

            This is not a far reach from Lew Aron’s description of the primal scene: an explosion of visual and felt sensations that simultaneously posit both identity (the need for stability and coherence) and polymorphous identification (a boon to multiplicity and psychic freedom). Unlike the fragmented body of the classical primal scene that is indexed in the Lacanian mirror, on the ever-refreshable digital screen, the body becomes an affordance. What one might do or say or reach for is originary as a spontaneous gesture. Even if an imaginary digital kiss evokes a distal sensation in the unconscious, its “reality” quotient does not index a phantasmatic taboo but, rather, what may or may not happen next. We move from the analog discovery of a repressed wish toward digital agency such that, when Patricia comments to her patient “I think you have always known this,” she welcomes his next move without centering it as a lost opportunity.

            Earlier this week, a patient fired me by text. He’d been showing up to the Zoom sessions in many different forms: on his phone, on his tablet, on his computer, sometimes shirtless, sometimes in the car, sometimes speaking in “bro” talk, sometimes speaking in professional talk. I asked him what he was wanting me to see? The question was too much of a stretch into the digital. The patient was looking for an analog anchor in the reality of time and place. (“It is what it is. I zoomed you from the beach today”).  My question, to his ear, presumed a disciplinary intention rather than an invitation to explore the skin of the digital frame, and before we could talk about it, he ghosted me. I hope we will work it out. I missed him today. Another patient messaged me a batch of photos of a new puppy. Some are iPhone pics, others are screen shots, still others have him in his routine outfit, another shows him snuggling with the puppy undressed and in bed. I asked him what he was wanting me to see. “Joy,” he replied.

            If analog images feature the reality of loss and limit—the incredulity of the gaze and the jouissance inherent in the erotic image, digital images bring with them what online is the always already move to the next encounter, a gesture that affords “closeness” rather than prohibition. As such, embodied digital affordances are prone to overwhelm. Some people are more comfortable in analog space, some in digital, some in both. Or we might say, each make something different with the overwhelm. But just as there are some for whom an erotic image must be anchored in the original analog body part and patients for whom digital play can lead to a negative therapeutic reaction, there are others for whom joy and, like Patricia’s patient, “closeness” are enhanced online. It is important that we not rush to choose, analog vs. digital, since at least for now, we are face-to-face with both types of experience all in the same moment and, then, on to the next.

References

Anzieu, D. 2016. The Skin-Ego. A New Translation by Naomi Segal. London: Karnac Books.

Frank, Adam and Elizabeth Wilson. 2020. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hansen, Mark. 2006. Bodies in Code. New York: Routledge.

Harris, A. 2009.  Gender as Soft Assembly. New York, Routledge.

Johanssen, Jacob. 2019. Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media,  and Big Data. London: Routledge.

Joyrich, L. 1988. “All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture.” Camera Obscura 16: 129-153.

Kaplan, E. Ann. 1987. Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Metheun.

Knafo D. and Rocco Lo Bosco. 2017. The Age of Perversion. New York: Routledge.

Lemma, A and L. Caparrotta. eds. 2014. Psychoanalysis in the Technocultural Era . New York Routledge

Marzi, A. ed. 2016.  Psychoanalysis, Identity and the Internet.  London: Karnac.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge,

Petro, Patrice. 1986. “Mass Culture and the Feminine: The ‘Place’ of Television in FilmStudies.” Cinema Journal 25:5-21.

Ringel, S. “Video Communication and Transgenerational Shame in the Mother/Daughter Bond,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 3: 352-364.

Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Terranova, T. 2014. “Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common.” Inserito da Redazione.

Notes:

[1]In recent psychoanalysts’ publications about the digital, there often has been an emphasis on disembodiment. In the preferred genre of case presentations, usually of teenage patients, psychoanalysts have generalized their concern that immersion in cyberspace “denies corporality,” or  “defies the history, the transience and indeed, the very physicality of the body” (Lemma, 2014 78). See also (Marzi, 2016; Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, 2017).

[2] In discussing the work of Silvan Tomkins, one of the early theorists of affect, Adam Frank and Elizabeth Wilson not only point to Tomkins’ argument that the face is a primary site of affect, but they also remind us that it is “primarily behavior of the skin and muscles of the face” that communicate affect (2020: 25).

[3]In an essay I am completing I take up Frantz Fanon’s focus on body schema and his reliance on Merleau Ponty rather than Lacan in order to address how the body image is alienating for white persons due to their displacements onto the black body. The argument I will be making suggests that both psychoanalysis and media studies scholarship has not as yet fully dealt with its presumption of whiteness in their conceptualizations of the body. The body for the most part is usually racially unmarked in both. 

[4] Arguing for the inherent technicity of the body is different than arguing for its social construction.  More is needed than the latter as we approach the influence of the digital on our conceptualizations of the body, environment and other-than-human forces.  This is especially the case given that increasingly, mobile digital media “not only ‘stick to the skin and respond to the touch’ (as Bruce Sterling once put it), but create new ‘zones’ around bodies which now move through ‘coded spaces’ overlayed with information, able to locate other bodies and places within interactive, informational visual maps” (Terranova 2014, 394). Besides the emphasis on the skin and touch, there also is reference to surveillance, one of the concerns that also arises with digital media and needs further elaboration

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ph.D. L.P.  is a professor emerita of sociology and women studies, CUNY. Her publications focus on psychoanalysis and media studies; the most recent is The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. She is a member of the Training Committee and the Diversity Task Force of ICP, faculty at ICP and NIP and a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City..  

Stephen Hartman, PhD, is an executive editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and on the Relational Track at NYU Postdoc.  He participates in an interdisciplinary conversation on critical development studies as a member of the Collaboration for Research on Democracy, and contributes to the CORD Network Blog. Stephen is the author of several articles and book chapters that address object relations theory from the standpoint of emerging technologies, the socio-politics of a collectivist psychoanalytic frame, sexuality and gender in an intersectional matrix, and the interface of digital culture and the practice of psychoanalysis.

 

Photo Credit: Junior Texeira; Pexels.