McGowan votes for the perm---can integrate K’s insights and the 1AC

DT. It seems to me that a frequent critique of psychoanalysis and politics is that in its inability, and perhaps unwillingness to propose concrete policy reforms or political projects, it falls back on a notion that everyone should just undergo analysis. Do you think that a political project that is informed by psychoanalytic teachings implies that we should all undergo analysis? You write in your book for instance that fantasy is a crucial point for facilitating a sort of un-bonding process from the larger capitalist mode of subjectivity. What do you see as the role of analysis and political emancipatory work?¶ TM. I will alienate many of my analyst friends with this response, but I have no political investment at all in psychoanalytic practice. I’ve undergone some analysis myself. However, I don’t believe that everyone undergoing psychoanalysis would change much at all politically. What is important about psychoanalysis to me is its theoretical intervention, its discovery of the death drive and the role that fantasy plays in our psyche. This is the great advance. And political struggle can integrate these theoretical insights without any help from actual psychoanalysis. What allows one to disinvest in the capitalist mode of subjectivity is not, in my view, the psychoanalytic session. Instead it is the confrontation with a mode of enjoyment that ceases to provide the satisfaction that it promises. This prompts one to think about alternatives. Obviously, not everyone can become a theorist, but in a sense, everyone already is a theorist. We theorize our enjoyment when we think through our day and plan out where we’re going to do. Even watching a television show requires an elaborate theoretical exercise. Making this theorizing evident and thus arousing an interest in theory is to me much more important than having a lot of people undergo psychoanalysis. In response to your question about the universalization of psychoanalytic practice, I have more faith in a universalization of psychoanalytic theory.