Presented by: Donnel Stern, PhD

In the interest of integrating the social and the individual in psychoanalysis, Dr. Stern examines the relation of Althusser’s concept of interpellation and the psychoanalytic idea of dissociative enactment. Interpellation is a way of conceptualizing the creation of subjectivity via individual participation in the ideological tropes of power. Dissociative enactment is a relational psychoanalytic way of referring to unconscious participation in relatedness. In interpellation, one person is “hailed” by another in a way that inducts the person so addressed, without the awareness of either party, into a relational pattern that includes both. Dr. Stern argues that we can see the same process in dissociative enactment. Clinical process is illuminated by the recognition of the continuity of the social and the individual that is modeled by the relation of these two dissociative processes. New meaning–the formulation of unformulated experience–comes about unbidden, sometimes slipping the traces of ideology. Paraphrasing an aphorism from Lacan: We think where we are not.

CE